She did not close the door all the way. That was the thing she would think about later — not the lengha, not the sindur, not the way his mouth had hung open on the question she'd left in the room — but the door, the two fingers of warm hallway light she left standing in the gap when she walked out of her own bedroom and down the corridor to his.

His room smelled like him. Cigarettes he'd quit and never quite stopped smelling of, and the folded shirt on the chair, and the fan that turned its slow head from corner to corner and never once pointed cool air at anything.

He was standing at the window with his back to her, and the streetlight through the curtain drew one long line down the middle of him. Broad shoulders. Salt-and-pepper at the temples. He did not turn around when she came in.

"Papa," she said.

The fan turned. He did not.

She crossed the room — the anklets ticking against the floor with every step, that small bright sound she'd worn since she was fourteen and had never once let anyone hear — and she stopped at his shoulder and put two fingers under his jaw and turned his face toward her. He let her. His eyes came down to her slowly, the way water finds the low side of a room.

"I'm going to my bedroom," she said. "Papa."

She let the word sit there. She did not explain which bedroom, or why.

"You can come if you want."

Her thumb moved once across the stubble along his jaw — the wrong direction of the grain, the little rasp of it — and then she took her hand back and walked out. She made herself walk it slow. Anklets. Hips. The long hair swinging low against the small of her back where it hung past her waist. She did not look behind her. She knew the sound his body made when it decided to follow: the shift of weight off the heel, the creak of the floorboard by the doorframe. She had heard it a hundred times in two years, from the other side of a locked door, and never once with the door unlocked.

In her room, the wardrobe stood open where she'd left it. The plastic sheeting was folded back. Six years of dust, and under the dust the smell of her mother's things — sandalwood, and camphor, and something older that had nowhere to be but in the cloth itself.

She laid the lengha on the bed. The skirt first: deep red, the heavy zari at the hem, the weight of it pulling the duvet into a dip when she set it down. Then the choli — the wedding blouse, the one her mother had worn once and boxed, the one with the push-up cups stitched in and the hooks down the back where a bride's hands cannot reach. Then the bangles, the full-hand set, red and gold, still strung on the ring her mother had left them on. The anklets were already on her — she had put them on before she'd gone to his room, and they had ticked all the way down the corridor, and he had heard.

She took off her blouse. In the mirror over the vanity she watched herself do it, unhurried, the way she did everything now. The hormones had done their work: the breasts hung heavy and low before the choli lifted them, the nipples dark and wide, the undersides pale where the light didn't reach. Thirty-six around the fullest part — she had measured it herself, with a tailor's tape, in front of this same mirror, on a Tuesday two years ago, and had sat down on the floor afterward and cried in a way she still couldn't explain. Thirty-eight at the hips. The waist between them narrow and long. The whole body hairless, smooth as the inside of a bangle, because she had spent two years making it so.

And low between her legs, small and soft against the smooth skin, the thing she had never once been able to make match the rest of her. She looked at it in the mirror for one second — the flat honest fact of it — and then she reached for the panty, the deep red one with the gold thread, and stepped into it, and drew it up over her hips, and the fact was gone.

The choli next. She got her arms through, settled the cups, and reached behind for the hooks.

Behind her, the floorboard creaked.

She did not turn. In the mirror she watched him come in and stop at the foot of the bed, and she watched him see the lengha skirt laid out on the duvet, and the bangles on their ring, and her — half-dressed, back bare, hair down to her waist, one hand caught behind her own shoulder on a hook she could not reach.

"Sit," she said, to the mirror.

He sat. The mattress took his weight and the springs sighed and the whole bed dipped toward him. His hands went to his own knees and stayed there. Under the seam of his trousers the shape of him was already pushing up hard against the cloth, and he did not try to hide it, and she did not pretend not to see it.

"Come here," she said. "Hook it."

He got up again. He crossed the two feet of floor between the bed and the vanity and stood behind her, close enough that she felt the heat come off his chest onto her bare back, and his hands came up and found the two hooks and did them, one, two, and the third, and his knuckles brushed the bare skin between her shoulder blades doing it, and his breathing changed — one long pull in through the nose, held, let out slow through the mouth.

"Good," she said. "Sit down."

He went back and sat on the edge of the bed. She watched him in the mirror the whole way. He did not look away from her once.

She stepped into the skirt and drew it up and settled the waistband and hooked the side. The zari at the hem struck the floor with a small heavy sound. She stood in the middle of the room in the red and the gold, and the fan turned, and the clean-laundry smell off the sheets mixed with the camphor off the cloth, and neither of them said anything for a while.

Then she sat down at the vanity.

The mirror there was old, and the silvering had gone at one corner, and it had a small crack running up from the frame that she had put there herself at fifteen with the heel of her hand. She looked at her own face in it. Eighteen. The nose ring she had pierced at sixteen with a needle and a cork, the small gold hoop, catching the vanity light when she moved her head. The dangling earrings she had not put on yet, sitting in their tray where her mother had left them.

She picked up the kajal. The little brass pot, the wick black as soot. She tilted her chin down and drew the line along the lower lid, first eye, then the other, and the kohl went on the way it always did, thick and dark, and when she looked up again her eyes in the mirror were her mother's eyes, exactly, and behind them, in the glass, her father's face.

She did the lips next. The red, the one in the small tin that had gone waxy at the edges. She filled the lower lip first and pressed them together and filled the upper and blotted once on a tissue and looked at the print of her own mouth on the paper and put it down.

Then the blush. Then the earrings — heavy, long, the gold ones with the little bells at the bottom, and they swung and struck the sides of her neck when she tilted her head, and she tilted her head twice more than she needed to just to hear it.

"Papa," she said, to the mirror. "You're staring."

"Yes," he said. His voice came out wrong — low, and used.

She picked up the brush. Long, slow strokes, the whole length of her hair, down past her waist, the way her mother used to do it in this exact chair with this exact brush, and Maya had watched her from the doorway a hundred times when she was small and had never once been allowed to touch it. She brushed it fifty strokes. A hundred. She lost count. The hair came alive under the brush, black and heavy and shining, and every stroke she watched his face in the mirror and every stroke his mouth got a little further open and his hands a little further up his own thighs.

"You used to watch her do this," she said.

He did not answer.

"You used to stand in the doorway and watch her brush her hair. Before she left."

"Maya—"

"I watched you watch her." Another stroke. The brush went all the way down to the ends and she turned the wrist at the bottom the way her mother had. "You never looked at me like that. Not once. For eighteen years."

The fan turned. He said nothing. In the mirror his eyes were wet at the corners and he did not wipe them.

She set the brush down. She took the tail of the comb and drew it down the center of her head, cold against the scalp, opening a clean straight line from her hairline back over the crown to the nape, and the hair fell away on either side of it, black on black, and the line sat there pale and waiting. Then she reached for the small brass box on the tray.

It was heavier than it looked. She lifted the lid. The sindur was the deep red of the skirt, and it smelled dry and faintly of iron, and it had been in this box for six years and had never once been opened.

She pinched a little between her thumb and forefinger, and lifted it to the parted line of her hair, and filled it. From the hairline back. The whole clean way. The red going down into the black, sitting in the part like a wound that had been waiting for a place to be.

She did it slowly. It was not a thing to be done quickly.

In the mirror, behind her, Rohan's breath came out of him all at once — a sound she had never heard him make, not once in eighteen years, not at her mother leaving, not at the funeral of his own mother, not at anything. It was the sound a man makes when something he had been holding shut with both hands comes open anyway.

She put the lid back on the box. She set it down on the tray. She looked at herself in the mirror for a long moment — the red in the part, the kohl, the bells at her ears, the heavy red cloth of her mother's wedding, the whole of it — and under the skirt, under the gold-threaded panty, the small soft fact of her sat there unchanged, and she looked at it in the glass and did not flinch and did not pretend it was not true. She had dressed over it. That was the whole of the thing. That was the choice she was making, and she had made it two years ago, and she was making it again now.

She turned on the stool. The skirt swung. The anklets ticked. She looked at him where he sat on the edge of her bed, his hands on his own thighs, his cock hard enough under the seam of his trousers to show the whole shape of it, his face open and broken and fixed on her.

"Papa," she said.

He did not answer. His mouth worked once, twice, and nothing came out of it.

"The sindur," she said. "Do you want to know whose name it's for?"

He nodded. Small. Once.

She stood up off the stool, and the whole length of her stood there in the middle of the room in the red and the gold with the line of sindur in her hair, and she looked down at him where he sat, and she said it.

"Yours."

The fan turned. The bells at her ears went still. In the mirror behind her, both their faces sat in the old glass together — his open and hers painted — and neither of them moved, and the red line in her hair did not move, and the room held it, and held it, and did not let it go.