The final session of the conference was cancelled at four o'clock, and the conference house emptied like a held breath let go. Saan stood in the corridor outside the lecture hall with his lanyard still around his neck, watching delegates drift toward the exits in twos and threes, their voices bouncing off the cold marble in a way that made the whole building sound larger than it was. A notice had been taped to the door — a family emergency, the keynote speaker recalled to the city — and someone had already peeled one corner of it loose, so it curled like a tongue. He checked his phone. Nothing from Tarannum. Nothing from Aliya either, though he had seen her that morning across the hall, deep in conversation with a man in a grey suit, her hand on his forearm in that way she had, as if she were testing the weight of him.

He went back to the guest room. It was a narrow room at the end of the corridor, with a bed too soft and a window that looked onto the back of another building, and he sat on the edge of the mattress with his shoes still on, listening to the house settle. The radiator clicked. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed. He thought about the drive home, about the house on the other side of the city, about Tarannum in the kitchen with her hair tied back and her eyes going to the doorway every time he entered it. He thought about Nazir's car in the driveway and Nazir's hand on the chain, checking it, and the way his uncle had said be careful, and the way the words had sat in Saan's chest like a swallowed stone ever since.

Then the door opened without a knock.

Aliya came in with her saree already loosened at the shoulder, the pallu hanging down her arm instead of pinned, and her hair let out of the knot she had worn all day so that it fell in a dark wave against her neck. She had taken off her shoes somewhere — he had not heard her in the corridor — and her bare feet made no sound on the floorboards. She closed the door behind her with the flat of her hand and stood there looking at him, and there was something in her face that he had seen at the conference and in the corridor and on the stairs, something patient and amused and entirely without doubt.

"The session's cancelled," Saan said, because it was the only thing he could think to say.

"I know. I cancelled it." She walked toward him, and the loosened saree slipped a little further down her shoulder, showing the strap of her blouse beneath, and the skin there, and the small silver scar at her temple catching the last of the afternoon light from the window. "The keynote speaker is a very nervous man. It took one phone call and a suggestion that his mother was unwell. He was on the train within the hour."

"You — why?"

"Because I wanted the house empty," Aliya said. "And I have never been good at waiting for things I want."

She put her hand flat on his chest and pushed. It was not a hard push — it was the push of someone who expected him to move, and he moved, the backs of his knees hitting the mattress, and then he was on his back on the too-soft bed with the ceiling above him and Aliya standing over him with her saree slipping off her arm in a slow fall of silk. She caught it at her waist and let it drop. Underneath she wore the blouse and the petticoat, and the blouse was thin enough that he could see the shape of her, the dark points of her nipples pressed against the fabric, and the curve of her waist where the petticoat sat low on her hips.

"You're shaking," she said.

"I'm not."

"You are. Your hands." She caught one of them, turned it over, and pressed her thumb into the centre of his palm. "That's all right. I like it. It means you know what's happening." She knelt on the bed beside him and reached for the button of his jeans, and her fingers were quick and certain, and the zip came down with a sound that seemed to fill the whole narrow room. "Lift," she said, and he lifted his hips and she pulled the jeans down over his thighs, over his knees, and off, and his boxers went with them, and then he was lying there with his cock already hard and standing up against his stomach, and Aliya looked at it for a long moment without touching it.

"Well," she said, and her voice had gone low and pleased. "You're bigger than I imagined."

She closed her hand around him then, and her palm was warm and dry and she stroked him slowly, root to tip, her thumb dragging over the head each time, and Saan's breath came out of him in a sound he did not mean to make. She did it again. And again. Slow, unhurried, as if she had all evening and meant to use it, and her eyes stayed on his face the whole time, watching what it did to him.

"Long and thick," she murmured, almost to herself, and she leaned down and put her mouth against his ear so that he felt the words as much as heard them. "Just right. Do you know how rare that is? I've been looking at you all day and thinking about this, and now I have you on my sister's guest bed with your trousers round your ankles, and you're exactly the size I hoped you'd be."

"Aliya—"

"Say my name again." She stroked him faster, and her grip tightened, and the wet sound of her hand on him was the loudest thing in the room. "No — don't. I'll finish you before I've had you, and I've waited too long for that." She let go of him and stood up, and she pushed the petticoat down over her hips and stepped out of it, and beneath it she wore nothing at all. Her cunt was dark with hair and wet, visibly wet, and she put her fingers there and drew them up through it and held them out to him, glistening. "Look at that. That's what a day of watching you has done."

Saan reached for her and she caught his wrist and pushed it back down against the bed.

"No," she said. "Not yet. You'll get your turn." She climbed onto the bed and straddled him, and her knees came down on either side of his hips, and she reached back and took his cock in her hand and guided it. The head of him pressed against her and she rocked, just an inch, just enough to smear the wetness of her over him, and Saan's hips jerked up off the bed and she laughed, low and warm, and pushed him back down with the flat of her hand on his chest. "Patience. I'm going to take my time with you."

And then she sank down onto him.

The heat of her closed around him all at once, wet and tight, and Saan's hands came up and gripped her thighs without his telling them to, and Aliya let out a long, shuddering breath and held still for a moment with her eyes closed, her palms flat on his chest, her hair falling forward over her face. "Oh," she said. "Oh, that's — yes. That's what I wanted." She began to move, slow at first, rocking her hips, and every time she came down onto him the whole length of him went into her and she made a small sound in her throat, and the sound got louder each time.

"Fuck," Saan said, and it came out of him broken.

"Yes." Aliya's voice was not steady anymore. "Yes — say it again."

"Fuck — Aliya—"

She set a rhythm then, hard and fast, her hips slamming down onto him, and the bed creaked beneath them and the headboard knocked against the wall with every thrust, and her moans climbed out of her throat and kept climbing. She leaned back and put her hands behind her on his thighs, and the angle changed and she cried out, a sharp high sound, and her cunt clenched around him so hard that Saan saw white at the edges of his vision and had to grip the sheets to keep from finishing right there.

"Not yet," she gasped. "Not yet, not yet — wait for me—"

"I can't — Aliya, I can't—"

"You can." She rode him harder, and her voice broke apart into a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a sob, and her thighs were shaking against his hips. "You can, you can, you can — oh — oh, Saan —"

She came with a scream. It was not a polite sound; it was a long, ragged, open-mouthed cry that tore out of her and echoed off the walls of the narrow room and out into the corridor beyond, and her whole body went rigid and then shuddered, and her cunt gripped him in waves, clenching and releasing and clenching again, and Saan held onto her hips and rode it out with her, his teeth gritted, his whole body trembling with the effort of not following her over.

"Aliya," he said, and his voice was raw. "Aliya, I'm going to—"

She did not answer with words. She came down off her high with her chest heaving and her hair stuck to her forehead, and she looked at him with eyes that were still glassy and not quite focused, and then she moved.

Her hand closed on his hip and she pushed him off her, and before he understood what was happening she had rolled him onto his stomach and was pulling him up onto his knees, her palm flat between his shoulder blades, her breath hot against the back of his neck.

"Now," she said, and her voice was still wrecked, still shaking, but it was a command. "Now you fuck me. Hard. From behind, and don't you dare be gentle about it."

His knees found the mattress, the sheets still hot where she'd been, and the whole of him was shaking now — not the fine tremor of before, but something deeper, a shudder that started in his thighs and climbed. The room had gone strange. The afternoon light had thinned to a grey-gold and the radiator had stopped its clicking and the only sound was Aliya behind him, her breath still ragged, the wet sound of her hand moving between her own legs.

"You're going to have to guide it," she said. "I can't — my hands are shaking too much." She laughed, and it came out breathless and cracked, and she pressed her forehead briefly against the back of his shoulder. "Look at me. Thirty-nine years old and I can't hold my own hand steady."

He reached back and found her thigh first, the damp inside of it, and then higher, the wet heat of her cunt, and she made a sound against his shoulder blade that he felt in his spine. He fitted himself to her, the head of his cock sliding through the slick of her, and she reached back and put her hand over his and pushed, and he went into her in one long push, and her breath left her in a rush.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's deep. That's — stay there. Don't move. Just — stay there a moment." Her hand was flat on his lower back, holding him still inside her, and her cunt was squeezing him in slow pulses, adjusting, and he could feel every fold of her gripping the length of him. "Do you feel that? Do you feel what you're doing to me?"

"Yes," he said, and his voice didn't sound like his own.

"Then move."

He pulled back until only the head of him was still inside her, and the wet drag of it made her gasp, and then he pushed back in and she made a sound that was almost a sob, and her hips pushed back to meet him. He did it again. Again. And the rhythm came to him fast, rough, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks, and the bed knocked against the wall and the headboard struck it, and Aliya's moans were coming out of her in time with his thrusts, one for each, and then they stopped being separate sounds and became one long broken cry.

"Harder," she gasped. "I said harder — don't you dare — oh—"

He gave her harder. His hips slammed into her and her whole body jolted forward on the bed and she caught herself on her forearms and pushed back into him, and the sound of their bodies meeting was loud and wet and shameless, and somewhere beneath the noise he heard her laughing, a wild broken laugh, as if she could not believe what was happening in her sister's guest room.

"The house," she said, and her voice was thick. "The whole house — there's no one — the whole house can hear us and there is no one to hear—" She broke off into a moan that climbed and cracked. "Do you know how long it's been since I've been loud? Since I've been allowed to be loud?"

Her cunt clenched around him as she said it, a long slow grip that nearly undid him, and he had to stop, had to hold still inside her with his eyes shut and his hands trembling on her hips, and she felt him stop and pushed back hard against him, impatient.

"No — don't you stop. Don't you dare stop now."

"I'm — Aliya, if I keep—"

"Then come." She turned her head to look back at him over her shoulder, and her face was flushed and her hair was across her mouth and her eyes were bright and fierce. "Come inside me. Right now. I want to feel it."

He moved again, and this time it was different — no rhythm left in it, just a desperate driving, and Aliya braced herself against the headboard and pushed back into every thrust and her cries came faster and higher, and he felt her start to clench again, felt her whole body tighten, and she came a second time with a sound that went up into the ceiling and stayed there, and her cunt gripped him in wave after wave, and he drove into her once, twice, and then he was done.

He came with his hands locked on her hips and his forehead against her spine, and it went through him in long shuddering pulses, and he could feel himself spilling into her, could feel her cunt taking it and holding it, and Aliya made a small satisfied sound and pushed back once more, slow, as if she wanted all of it.

For a long moment neither of them moved. The radiator clicked back to life somewhere in the room. The light from the window had gone the colour of weak tea. Aliya's breathing evened out first, and then she reached back and found his hand on her hip and laced her fingers through his, and her palm was damp and warm and she held on.

"Well," she said at last, and her voice was hoarse and entirely pleased. "The keynote speaker's mother is going to make a remarkable recovery."

Saan laughed — a real one, surprised out of him, his forehead still damp against her spine. Then the phone on the nightstand lit up and buzzed against the wood, and the laugh died in his throat.

Aliya felt him go still. She lifted her head.

The screen glowed in the grey tea-light of the room. Tarannum. The name sat there, bright and patient, and the phone buzzed a second time, a third, walking itself toward the edge of the nightstand with the force of it.

"Don't answer it," Aliya said.

Saan pulled out of her slowly — the wet drag of it made her draw a sharp breath through her teeth — and sat back on his heels, and the cool of the room came up around him all at once. He reached for the phone. Aliya caught his wrist before he could, her fingers still trembling faintly, and turned his hand over and looked at the screen with him.

"She'll know," she said. "Listen to me. If you pick that up right now, with your voice the way it is, she'll know before you've said three words."

"It's the fourth time she's called."

"I know how many times she's called. I'm holding the phone."

He looked at her. Her hair was in her face and her mouth was still swollen from his, and there was a red mark on her hip where his hand had been, and she was watching him with that flat patient look she'd had in the corridor all day, the one that said she had already done the arithmetic and was waiting for him to catch up.

The phone stopped buzzing. The screen went dark. In the silence Saan heard his own breathing, and beneath it the radiator, and beneath that the distant tick of the corridor clock.

"Get dressed," Aliya said, and swung her legs off the bed. "Quickly. And when you call her back, you call her from the corridor where the echo is, and you tell her the session ran long."

He found his boxers where they'd been kicked under the bed. His jeans were a heap by the door. He pulled them on and the zip went up wrong and he had to start again, and his hands would not do what he told them.

"Saan." Aliya had her petticoat back on and was winding the saree around her waist with quick, sure turns, the way she must have done it ten thousand times. "Breathe. You're not a liar, I know, but you're going to have to be one for about ninety seconds, and then you can go back to being an honest man."

The phone lit again.

He answered it.

"Hello?"

"Saan." Tarannum's voice came down the line small and close, and there was something in it he could not place — not anger, not fear, something quieter than both. "Where are you?"

"The conference house. The last session ran long." He heard himself say it and hated the sound. "They cancelled the keynote and then everyone wanted to talk about it anyway. I'm just — I'm in the corridor now. It's drafty."

A pause. He could hear the house behind her — the low murmur of the television, or maybe the fridge, or maybe nothing at all and only the shape of the room in her silence.

"Aliya's not answering her phone either," Tarannum said.

Saan's eyes went to Aliya. She had stopped winding the saree and was standing very still with the silk half-pinned in her hand, listening to one side of it, and her face had changed — the amusement gone out of it, something careful coming in.

"She's probably still in with the panel," Saan said. "There were a lot of people."

"Mm." Tarannum let the sound sit. "You sound strange."

"It's cold out here. I told you, the corridor—"

"Not cold. Strange." Another pause, and then, softer, almost as if she were speaking to herself and had forgotten he could hear: "I've been sitting in this house all day, Saan. All day. I cooked. I cleaned a kitchen that was already clean. I watched the clock go round." Her voice thinned. "I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I keep thinking — I keep thinking about what I said to Nazir, and what he said back, and I sit here and I can't tell if I meant any of it or if I was just tired and it came out of me like a cough."

Saan closed his eyes. The corridor was empty and cold and smelled of floor polish, and somewhere far down it a door was propped open onto the dark, and he could hear the wind in it.

"Tarannum—"

"Don't." Her voice caught itself, steadied. "Don't say my name like that on a phone. It's indecent." A small sound that might have been a laugh, might have been the other thing. "Come home. Whatever the session is doing, let it do it without you. Come home and sit with me and eat something and tell me about the clever people and their clever talks, and I'll stop talking like a woman in a play."

"I'll be back by seven," he said.

"You'll be back by seven," she repeated. Then, quieter: "Saan. Is Aliya with you?"

The question came so plainly, so gently, that it took him a moment to understand it was the whole reason for the call.

"No," he said. "Why would she be?"

The silence on the line went on a beat too long.

"No reason," Tarannum said. "Hurry home."

She hung up. Saan stood with the phone against his ear for a moment after the line had gone dead, listening to nothing, and then lowered it and looked at Aliya.

She had finished pinning her saree. She looked composed now, entirely, the professor again, except for the flush still high on her cheeks and the small smear of him drying on her thigh where the petticoat had not quite covered it.

"She knows," Aliya said.

"She doesn't know anything. She asked a question and I answered it."

"She asked the question." Aliya picked up her shoes from beside the door and did not put them on. "My sister has never in her life asked a question she didn't already know the answer to. That's how she got through our mother's funeral without crying — she'd asked herself beforehand how it would go." She looked at him steadily. "She knows something is wrong. She doesn't know what. That's the gap you have, and it's a narrow one, and you should not stand in it very long."

She opened the door and looked out into the corridor, and the cold air of it came in past her. Then she stepped back and let him through first.

They went down the stairs separately. Aliya stopped at the bottom to speak to a man in a grey coat about a paper he had given her, and her voice was smooth and unhurried and had nothing in it of the room upstairs, and Saan walked on alone through the foyer and out into the November evening.

The city had gone dark early. The streetlamps along the avenue were lit and their light lay in long yellow pools on the wet pavement, and the cold came up through the soles of his shoes. He walked to the corner and stood there with his hands in his pockets and his collar up, and he took out the things that lived in his pocket — Tarannum's hair tie with its strand of hair wound through it, Shabana's handkerchief folded small — and looked at them in the lamplight and put them back.

When he turned, Aliya was there, her saree pinned and her coat over her arm and her bag on her shoulder, and she fell into step beside him without a word.

They walked two blocks before she spoke.

"You'll go home and she'll be in the kitchen and she'll have made something, and she'll ask you about the conference, and you'll tell her about the panel on urban water systems, and you'll be very careful, and she'll watch you the whole time and say nothing." Aliya's breath came out white in the cold. "And then at some point she'll find a way to ask you about me that doesn't sound like she's asking about me, and you'll have to decide what kind of man you are."

"What would you tell her?"

"The truth," Aliya said, and he turned his head sharply, and she smiled at him — that flat, patient, amused smile. "Not that truth. The other one. That her sister came to see you and was kind to you and told you not to be a fool. Which is all true." She stopped walking and turned to face him under the lamp, and the light came down on her through the bare branches and made a pattern on her face. "Saan. When she asks — and she will ask — do not lie to her about me. Lie to her about everything else if you must. But not about me. She'll forgive you a great deal, that woman, more than she should. She won't forgive you making her a fool about her own sister."

He looked at her. "You're not going to tell me what to do."

"I just did." She started walking again. "You weren't listening."

The bus came and they got on it, and it was nearly empty, and they sat apart, Aliya by the window with her bag on her knees and her face turned out to the wet streets going by, and Saan two seats behind her with his hands loose in his lap and his heart going like a fist against his ribs. The bus stopped and started and the lights of the city slid over the windows, and he thought about the kitchen, and the clock on the wall, and Tarannum sitting in the house all day with the television murmuring and the clock going round, and her voice on the phone saying I don't know what I'm doing anymore.

At their stop they got off and walked the last street in silence. The Ali house stood at the end of it with one window lit — the kitchen, yellow and warm — and the gate was open the way it always was, and the front step had been swept.

Aliya stopped at the gate and put her hand on his arm.

"One thing," she said. "Whatever happens in that kitchen tonight — remember that she called you. Not to accuse you. Not to catch you. She called you because she was alone in that house all day and she wanted to hear your voice." Her fingers tightened once and let go. "That's not nothing. Don't treat it like nothing."

She went up the path ahead of him and opened the door and called out, bright and easy, "We're back, and we're starving, and the conference was a waste of everyone's afternoon," and Tarannum's voice came from the kitchen, warm, saying something about the food being kept warm, and Saan stood on the step a moment longer in the cold with the light falling out of the doorway onto his shoes.

Then he went in.

The house took him in with its heat first — that closed, cooked smell of onions and ghee and something sweet underneath, the radiator in the hall ticking like it had been at it all day. His shoes came off at the mat. Down the corridor the kitchen door stood half open and the light came through the gap in a long yellow wedge across the floorboards, and inside it he could hear Aliya's voice going on about a man on the panel who had said the word "synergy" eleven times, and Tarannum laughing at the right places.

He went down the corridor and put his head round the door.

The kitchen was small and bright and full of steam. Tarannum stood at the counter with her back half to him, her hair pinned up off her neck, a green salwar loose on her, and she was lifting lids and setting them down again and stirring one pot and then another in a rhythm that looked like it had been going on for hours. Aliya sat at the table with her coat still on her shoulders and her bag at her feet, one shoe off and one shoe on, and she was saying something about the man in the grey coat and his paper, and her hands were moving in the air the way they did when she was enjoying herself.

Neither of them looked up at once. Then Tarannum did.

"There he is," she said, and her voice was warm and ordinary and gave nothing away. "Sit. Both of you sit. It's been on the stove so long it'll be mush if we don't eat it now."

Saan sat. The chair was still warm from where someone had been — no, it was just the kitchen, the whole room had the heat of the cooking in it — and he put his hands flat on the table and found the wood scrubbed and dry under his palms.

Tarannum opened the cupboard and took down a plate.

He watched her do it. She reached past the stack of three she had set out earlier — he could see them, three plates, one at her place, one at Nazir's empty chair, one at his own — and she took down a fourth and set it on the counter and wiped it once with the cloth over her shoulder and carried it to the table and set it down in front of Aliya.

"There," she said. "Now you're eating with us."

Aliya's hands stopped in the air. Her one bare foot settled flat on the floor and she looked at the plate, and then up at her sister, and her face did something Saan had not seen it do all day — something that was not the flat patient professor's look and not the amusement either. It went still and careful, the way a face goes when it is being offered something it did not ask for and cannot yet tell the weight of.

"Tara," she said. "I've got a room at the guest house. I paid for it."

"You paid for it. It'll keep." Tarannum turned back to the stove and lifted the big pot with both hands and brought it to the table and set it down on the trivet in the middle, and the steam came up off it in a white rush. "You came to my city for three days and I've fed you once, and that was a biscuit. Sit. Eat. The guest house won't run off."

"I don't have anything to—"

"You've got a mouth," Tarannum said, and she was smiling now, and it was the smile she used on the telephone with Nazir's patients' wives, the one that closed a conversation like a door. "You've been talking for twenty minutes about a man who said synergy eleven times. Now you can talk with food in it."

She went back for the other pot — the dal, by the smell of it, yellow and thick with a slick of red oil on top — and set that down too, and then the small dish of the sweet thing he had smelled from the doorway, and she moved around the table setting out spoons and the water jug and a folded napkin at Aliya's plate that she had not put at the others, and she did all of it without hurrying, without a single thing out of place.

Saan sat with his hands on the table and his heart going too hard for a kitchen.

"Saan," Tarannum said, and she did not look at him. She was ladling dal into Aliya's plate, slow and generous, the steam curling up past her wrist. "Tell me again what time the session ran long."

The room was very quiet. The dal went on steaming. Aliya had picked up her spoon and set it down again without using it.

"What?" Saan said.

"The session." Tarannum set the ladle down in the pot and picked up the second pot and began to spoon rice onto the plate, and her voice was as pleasant as it had been all evening, as pleasant as a woman asking about the weather. "You said on the phone it ran long. I want to hear it again. What time did it run long till?"

He heard himself swallow. "It was supposed to finish at four. It went on past that."

"Past four." She spooned more rice. "How far past?"

"Until — I don't know. Six, near enough. People kept talking."

"People kept talking." She set the second pot down and picked up the little dish of sweet and put a spoonful at the edge of Aliya's plate, and then she straightened and looked at him at last, and her dark eyes were calm and steady and gave him nothing at all to hold on to. "And you were in the corridor the whole time? In the cold?"

"Not the whole time. Off and on."

"Off and on." She said it slowly, as if she were tasting it. "And Aliya's phone was off. In all that talking, in all that corridor, her phone was off."

Aliya picked up her spoon. "My phone was in my bag," she said, and her voice was easy, the professor's voice, unhurried. "In a room full of people who wanted to tell me about their papers, I don't answer it. You know how I am about that."

"I know how you are about that," Tarannum agreed. She carried the rice pot back to the stove and set it down and turned and leaned against the counter with her arms folded, and the salwar hung loose on her and her hair was coming down out of its pin at one side, and she looked at the two of them — at Aliya with her spoon, at Saan with his hands flat on the table — and she smiled again, and this time the smile had something under it that was not warm at all.

"Eat," she said. "Both of you. It's getting cold."

Saan picked up his spoon. His hand was not quite steady, and he set it down again and reached for the water jug instead and poured himself a glass and drank half of it, and the water was cold and it did nothing.

He ate. The dal was good — better than good, it had the sour edge of lemon at the back of it and the rice underneath was loose and separate the way only rice cooked by someone who had cooked it ten thousand times comes out — and he ate it too fast because eating was something to do with his hands.

Aliya ate too. She had taken off her other shoe under the table and her bare feet were flat on the tiles and she had folded her coat over the back of her chair, and she was talking again, about the man in the grey coat, about how he had read his own abstract out loud twice without noticing, and she was doing the voice of him, and Saan laughed before he could stop himself.

Tarannum did not laugh. She ate with her spoon and watched the two of them over the rim of it.

"You know what I keep thinking about," she said, when Aliya had run down. She set her spoon down. "The two of you in that hall all day. All those clever people. And not one of them noticed you were wearing the wrong shoes."

Aliya's mouth closed. She looked down at her own bare feet, then at Saan, and then at her sister, and something passed between the two women that Saan could not read — the sisters' language, the old one, the one spoken with the eyes.

"I didn't spill anything on him," Aliya said. "If that's what you're asking."

"I wasn't asking that." Tarannum picked up her spoon again. "I was asking what you thought of him. Among the clever people. You've been showing him off all day. I'd like to hear the verdict."

The kitchen clock ticked. The radiator clanked once, deep in the wall, and settled. Saan kept his eyes on his plate, on the last of the dal, on the wet shine of it, and he felt the heat climb the back of his neck and go up into his ears where anyone could see it.

Aliya wiped her mouth with the napkin. She did it slowly, folding it, setting it down, taking her time — the way she had taken her time all day, as though there were nothing in the world that could be hurried into happening before she was ready for it.

"He's quiet," she said. "Quiet's not the same as slow. He listens before he answers, which is rarer than you'd think in my line of work. He doesn't perform. He holds his own with people who have three degrees to his one, and he doesn't do it by talking louder." She picked up her water and drank. "And he's got a good face. The sort of face that makes the women on a panel forget what they were going to say. One of them asked me for his number. I told her he was spoken for."

Saan's spoon scraped the plate. He set it down.

"Spoken for," Tarannum said. Her voice had gone very light. "And what did you tell her he was spoken for by?"

"I didn't tell her anything. I said the word and let her guess." Aliya's eyes came round to Saan and rested on him, and there was no apology in them, only the flat calm of a woman who had done a thing deliberately and would do it again. "She guessed wrong, if that's any comfort. She thought I meant myself."

Tarannum laughed. It came out of her sudden and real, that laugh, the one that belonged to the woman who burned rotis and swore at the pan, and it filled the small kitchen and bounced off the bright walls and was gone. "Well," she said. "There it is."

And then she was up, and clearing, and the talk turned to the guest house and its cold water and the breakfast that would have been included, and Aliya said the room was already paid for and Tarannum said that was very nice and the room could keep itself warm, and it was all said in the easy swinging way of sisters who had been doing this since they were girls, and Saan sat between them with his empty plate and felt the room warm around him and dangerous as a lit stove.

He carried his plate to the sink. Tarannum was there before him, her hand out for it, and he gave it to her and their fingers touched along the rim of it — one second, no more — and her face did not change at all, and that was worse than if it had.

"Go and sit down," she said. "You've eaten. You're a guest at my table, you don't wash up."

"I'm not a guest," he said. "I live here."

She looked at him then. The sink was running and the steam was coming up off the hot water and she was holding his plate in both hands and there was something in her face he had not seen before, a tiredness that had gone past tiredness, the way the sea goes past the shore.

"Yes," she said. "You do." She turned to the sink. "Now go and sit with my sister before she starts telling you about her paper."

He went. Aliya had moved to the chair by the radiator with her coat around her shoulders again and her bag open on her knees, and she was doing something with a pen and a folded sheet of paper, and when he sat down she did not look up.

"She's angry," Aliya said, quietly, not lifting her eyes from the paper. "Not at you. Don't sit there working out what you did. She's angry at the whole day and she's got nowhere to put it, so she's putting it on the plates." She drew a line. "If she wanted you gone, she'd have said so at the door."

Across the kitchen, Tarannum set the last pot in the rack and dried her hands and came and stood at the head of the table, and she looked at the two of them — at her sister with her pen, at Saan with his hands in his lap — and she did not sit down.

"Aliya," she said. "You'll stay. The guest house has no one in it who loves you."

Aliya's pen stopped. She looked up.

Aliya put the pen down on the folded paper and folded the paper over it, and she looked at her sister standing at the head of the table with the dishcloth still in her hand, and her bare foot found the floor and pressed flat.

"You're serious," Aliya said. Not a question, but she said it like one, giving Tarannum the chance to take it back.

"I'm standing here with the dal going cold in the pot and you asking me if I'm serious." Tarannum pulled the chair out from the table — the one at Aliya's elbow, the one with the good cushion — and set it square. "There's a bed in the back room and a lock on the door and I'll have your tea in the morning before you go and be clever at your conference. What's the guest house got that I haven't?"

"A bill," Aliya said. "Which I've paid."

"Then it's got your money and nothing else. It's got no one to put a hot plate in front of you." Tarannum turned and went to the cupboard again, and this time she took down a glass and set it by Aliya's hand. "It's got a cold tap and a man at the desk who doesn't know your name. I know your name."

Saan watched Aliya's face. It was the careful face again, the professor's face, the one she had worn in the corridor all day when she was weighing a thing before she said it. She looked at the plate in front of her, and then at the bed-shaped dark of the corridor beyond the kitchen door, and then at Saan, and her eyes rested on him a moment longer than the question needed.

"Fine," she said. "One night. My bag's still at the guest house."

"Your bag can wait till morning. You've got a toothbrush in that handbag of yours; I've seen the size of it." Tarannum was already moving, the dishcloth back over her shoulder, her bare heel knocking soft on the tiles. "Saan, shift your chair in. Make room."

He shifted his chair. The legs scraped and he lifted it the last inch so it wouldn't, and set it down close to Aliya's so the two of them sat shoulder to shoulder at the corner of the table, and Aliya's coat sleeve brushed his arm and stayed there.

Tarannum took the lid off the small pot she had not yet served and the smell came up — mutton, slow-cooked until it gave, with the dark shine of the bones showing through — and she carried it to the table and set it between them and stood back with her hands on her hips.

"Now," she said. "Eat that. Both of you. I've been at it since four."

Aliya reached for the serving spoon and Saan reached at the same moment and their hands met on the handle and stopped, and Aliya laughed — a short, surprised thing, not the professor's laugh at all — and let him take it.

"You first," she said. "You're the guest at my sister's table. I'm family. We don't get served first."

He served her. He put the spoon in the pot and lifted out a piece and set it on her rice and then another, and the gravy ran dark into the white of the rice, and he did it carefully, the way he did things when he was being watched, and he could feel Tarannum watching him do it.

"The two of you," Tarannum said, and she sat down at last — not at the head this time, but at the free side of the table where she could see them both — "you've got the same manners. It's the strangest thing. My sister comes in here with her degrees and her papers and she waits her turn at the pot like a girl at a wedding."

"Manners are what you've got when you've got nothing else," Aliya said, and put the first bite in her mouth, and her eyes closed for a moment. "God. Tara. This is—" She chewed. Swallowed. "Why don't you cook like this when I'm not here?"

"I cook like this every night. You're just never here to eat it."

Saan ate. The mutton came apart under the spoon and the gravy was hot with something under the heat of it, black pepper maybe, or the smoked red chili he had seen in the jar by the stove, and it went through him warm and steady and he found he was hungrier than he had thought, hungrier than the day had let him be.

"There's a woman in the front row of the morning session," Aliya said, when she had eaten enough to talk again, "who asked me three times what your name was. Not your full name. Just your name. As though I'd been keeping it from her."

Tarannum's spoon paused on the way to her mouth and then went on. "And what did you tell her?"

"I told her his name and nothing else. She can ask him herself if she's so curious."

"She won't ask him," Tarannum said. "Women like that never ask. They wait to be introduced." She ate. "Was she pretty?"

The question came out light and quick, a knife going in, and Saan kept his eyes on his plate and felt the heat come up his neck again, and Aliya, beside him, took her time with her water before she answered.

"She was handsome," Aliya said. "In the way a good suit is handsome. She'll be somebody's chief of department in ten years and she'll still be waiting to be introduced."

Tarannum laughed — the real laugh again, the one with the pan in it — and set her spoon down and leaned back in her chair. "There. That's why I kept you. You've got a wicked eye and you don't use it on me."

"I use it on you constantly," Aliya said. "You just don't notice because you're too busy watching the door."

The kitchen went quiet. The rice pot ticked as it cooled on the rack. Tarannum's face did not move, but her hand came up and found the pin in her hair and pulled it out, and her hair came down past her shoulders in a black wave, and she set the pin on the table and did not look at either of them.

"Eat your dinner," she said. "Both of you. Then Saan will walk you down to the guest house for your bag, and you'll come back and I'll have the bed made."

"I'll walk her," Saan said. His voice came out steadier than he expected, and both women looked at him — Aliya sideways, Tarannum straight on across the table. "It's dark out. The lane's got no light at the end of it."

Tarannum held his eyes a moment. Then she picked up her spoon again and stirred the gravy in her plate without eating it. "Yes," she said. "You'll walk her. And you'll come straight back and not go wandering off into the cold."

"I won't wander."

"No," she said. "You won't." And she ate, and the three of them ate, and the kitchen settled into the small sounds of spoons on plates and the radiator ticking and the wind finding the loose pane at the window and rattling it once and giving up.

Aliya talked. She talked about the conference and the man from the ministry and a woman who had presented a paper on something so narrow that even she had not been able to make it sound worth the trip, and she did it in the flat dry way that made Saan laugh twice and Tarannum smile down into her plate. And Saan sat between them with his shoulder against his aunt's sister's shoulder and his belly full and the kitchen warm around him, and he thought, in the small animal part of his mind that did not lie, that this was the most dangerous hour of the whole day — not the corridor, not the panel, not the woman who had asked his name. This. The three of them at the table, eating, easy, as though the house had always been like this and could go on being like this.

When the plates were empty Tarannum stood and gathered them before anyone could help, and she carried them to the sink and set them down and filled the basin, and she said, without turning round, "Saan. Go and fetch the quilt off my bed and put it on the back-room bed. The blue one. It's folded at the foot."

He got up. His chair scraped and this time he let it. At the kitchen door he stopped and looked back — at Aliya with her elbows on the table and her coat slipping off one shoulder, at Tarannum's back at the sink with the steam coming up and her hair down over it — and neither of them was looking at him, and both of them knew he had stopped, and neither turned.

"Go on," Tarannum said. "The blue one."

He went.

The corridor was dark at the far end, and he went down it with his hand out to the wall, letting his fingers find the switches. The bedroom door stood open. He had been past it a hundred times and never once gone in, and now he did, and the room took him in and closed behind him in a way he did not like.

It smelled of her. Not perfume — the plain warm smell of a woman's skin and hair and the soap she used, and under it the camphor from the trunk at the foot of the bed, and the cold clean smell of the quilt she had aired. The bed was made. Nazir's side was flat and military, the sheet tucked in a hard line; her side was softer, a dent in the pillow, the sheet pulled loose and smoothed over by a hand that had not cared to do it properly. The blue quilt lay folded at the foot of the bed, and he reached for it.

The door shut behind him.

He turned. Tarannum had come in without a sound and put her back against the door and her hand on the bolt, and she did not slide it. She just stood there with her palm flat on the wood, and her hair was down now, all of it, a black weight of it past her shoulders and her face framed in it, and she had taken off the cloth she wore over her blouse and her arms were bare and her hands were still damp from the sink.

"The quilt," he said. His voice came out too loud in the small room. He lifted the folded blue of it.

"Put it down."

He put it down. The quilt settled on the bed and the corner of it slid off and hung, and neither of them looked at it.

She crossed the room. She did not hurry and she did not stop, and he stood where he was with the backs of his knees against the bed and nowhere to go, and she came to within an arm's length of him and stopped and looked up into his face. Her eyes were dark and steady, and the lamplight from the nightstand made a small gold ring in each of them, and she smelled of the kitchen — of onions and ghee and the sweet thing she had put out — and under it of her.

"I'm going to ask you something," she said. "And you're going to look at me while I ask it. Not at the bed, not at the door, not at your hands. At me."

"Tarannum—"

"Look at me."

He looked at her. He had to bend his head a little; she was close enough that he could see the fine hairs at her temple and the small silver mark beside them, and the place on her lower lip where her teeth had worried it.

"At the conference," she said. "In that hall, with those clever people. Was my sister the only one who wanted you?"

The question went into him like a hand into cold water. He opened his mouth.

"Don't." Her voice was quiet and it did not rise. "Don't do what you did on the phone. I heard it, Saan. I heard you pick your words up and set them down in a row like a man laying bricks. I've been listening to that voice all evening and I've been polite about it, and I'm done being polite." She reached up and put her hand flat on his chest, over his heart, and left it there. "I'm asking you plainly. Did something happen today."

The radiator in the corridor ticked. Out beyond the door the kitchen was quiet, and Aliya was out there in the warm light with her pen and her folded paper, and the whole house held its breath around the two of them.

"Yes," he said.

Her hand did not move off his chest. Her face did not move at all. She went on looking at him, and the gold rings in her eyes did not waver, and she said, "Say it properly."

"Aliya came to my room. After the session was cancelled." He heard his own voice, low and flat, and it did not sound like a confession so much as a man reading out a list. "She'd cancelled the session herself to empty the house. She — we — I lay down and she came in and she was on me before I could think, and I let her. I didn't stop her. That's the truth of it. I didn't want to stop her."

Tarannum took her hand off his chest.

She stepped back, one step, and then another, and her heel found the edge of the trunk and she sat down on it, slowly, the way a woman sits when her legs have decided for her. She put her hands on her knees and looked at the floor between her feet, and her hair swung forward and hid her face from him.

The silence went on so long that he could hear the wind at the loose pane in the kitchen, two rooms away.

"I knew," she said at last. Her voice came out of the hair, muffled and strange. "I sat in that kitchen all day and I knew. I've known since the moment she said she'd go to the conference and take you with her. I thought — I don't know what I thought." She lifted her head. Her face was dry; her eyes were dry; and that was somehow worse than tears. "I thought she'd have more sense. I thought I'd have more sense. It seems we're a family that's short of sense."

"It's not her fault."

"No." She stood up off the trunk. "No, it's mine. I put you in her path and I told her to leave you be and I might as well have told the river to leave the bank be. She's been taking what she wanted since she was six years old and I've been letting her." She smoothed her salwar down over her hips with both hands, once, hard. "But I didn't ask you to be honest about my sister. I asked you to look at me while you lied to me on the telephone, and you couldn't even do that."

"You told me to lie."

"I told you nothing of the kind."

"On the phone. You said don't say my name like that, it's indecent. You said come home and eat and tell me about the clever people. You didn't want the truth, Tarannum. You wanted me to come home and be easy."

She struck him. Not hard — the flat of her hand against his cheek, and it landed with a sound like a folded cloth, and the surprise of it was worse than the sting. He stood very still. She stood very still with her hand still up and her fingers spread and her breath coming quick.

Then her hand came down and her face crumpled, and she caught it before it could, and she pressed the heel of her palm against her mouth and turned her back to him.

"Don't look at me," she said, thickly.

He looked at her back. The blouse was thin and damp between her shoulder blades where the steam had got to it, and the salwar was loose and old and the string of it had come half untied at her waist, and her shoulders were up around her ears and shaking.

"I'm not looking," he said.

"You are. I can feel you looking."

"All right. I'm looking."

She laughed — a wet, broken thing — and pressed her hand harder against her mouth. Then she took it away and her shoulders came down and she turned round again, and her eyes were red now, red at the rims, though her cheeks were still dry.

"Why did you tell me?" she said. "You could have held it. You held it all evening. One more lie and I'd have eaten my dinner and gone to bed and never known the difference."

"Because you asked me to look at you."

That stopped her. She stood with her mouth a little open and her hair down and her hand still half raised, and she looked at him as though she were seeing him for the first time in the room, and something in her face went soft and then went hard again, and she crossed the space between them and put both her hands flat on his chest and pushed him back onto the bed.

He went down on his back and the quilt came up around him and she came down over him with her knees on either side of his hips and her hair falling all around his face, and she was heavy and warm and her hands were on his chest and her breath was on his mouth.

"You want to be honest," she said. "Be honest now. Did you like it."

"Tarannum—"

"Did you like it."

"Yes."

Her eyes closed. Her whole weight came down on him then, pressing him into the mattress, and she put her forehead against his and stayed there, breathing, and he could feel the small hard point of her nipple through the blouse against his chest and the heat of her through the salwar on his thighs and the wet of her, already, where she pressed down on him.

"I hate that," she whispered. "God help me, I hate that I'm glad you told me. I've had a whole day of not knowing and it's been like chewing glass." She lifted her head and looked down at him. "And now I know, and it's worse, and I'm still glad."

She kissed him. It was not a gentle kiss. She took his lower lip between her teeth and pulled it and then her tongue was in his mouth and her hands were in his hair, holding his head still, and she kissed him the way a woman kisses a thing she means to keep. He got his hands up under the loose salwar and found the warm skin of her waist and she made a sound into his mouth and pressed down harder.

Then she broke off, and her hand came up and caught his jaw and turned his face aside.

"No," she said, breathing hard. "Not yet. There's a house full of people and my sister is sitting in my kitchen with my pen." She climbed off him, and her hair dragged across his face as she went, and she stood at the side of the bed looking down at him with her chest going up and down. "Get up. Get the quilt."

He sat up. His hands were shaking and he did not try to hide it. He reached for the blue quilt where it had fallen and gathered it into his arms and stood, and she was there in front of him with her hair down and her blouse pulled crooked and the mark of his mouth coming up red on her lip, and she put her hand on the quilt over his arms and held it there.

"Tomorrow," she said, low. "Nazir's on the night shift tomorrow. Aliya goes back to her conference in the morning and then she's gone, and it'll be you and me in this house and no one else, and then we're going to talk about what my sister is to you. Properly. With the door shut."

"All right."

"Not all right." Her fingers tightened on the quilt. "I'm not finished with this. I'm putting it down for an hour because there's food on the table and a guest in the house. But I'm not finished."

She let go of the quilt and opened the door and stood back for him to pass, and her face was smooth again, or smooth enough, and her voice when she called down the corridor was warm and ordinary. "Aliya — the quilt's coming. Put the kettle on for the tea."

He went out past her with the quilt in his arms. At the threshold her hand found his back, flat between his shoulder blades, and stayed there one long second, and then she took it away.