I didn't see the lane until the man in the checked shirt turned into it.

He walked fast, faster than a man his age should, and I followed with the strap of my duffel bag cutting a groove into my shoulder, the bag thumping against my hip with every step. The lane was narrow enough that if a scooter came we'd have to press flat against the wall, and the walls were the kind of damp that left your palm wet if you touched them. I didn't touch them. The smell changed here — less exhaust, more cooking, more garbage, more something I couldn't name that was just the smell of too many people living close.

I had told him the address from the newspaper scrap. He had read it twice, turned it over, read it again, and said, "I know the place. Follow." He hadn't asked my name.

At the third doorway he stopped. The door was blue once, now mostly rust, and he pushed it with the flat of his hand and it swung in.

"This is yours," he said, and stepped aside so I could see.

I saw six cots before I saw anything else.

They were pressed along the walls like a puzzle someone had given up on — three on the left, three on the right, a narrow strip of concrete running down the middle with just enough room to walk if you turned sideways. The ceiling fan turned slow above it all, and the dust it stirred hung in the light from the one window like something alive. The room smelled of sweat and stale rice and the sourness of clothes worn too many days, and under all of it something like hair oil, thick and sweet.

Four young men sat or lay on the cots on the left. One had his phone up and didn't look at me. One had a thin mustache and looked at me the way you look at a thing that's been delivered to the wrong address. One was asleep. One sat cross-legged with a textbook open on his knee and watched me over the top of it without pretending not to.

On the far side, two girls sat on one cot together. One was braiding her hair, long black strands slipping through her fingers, and she didn't turn. The other glanced up at me for half a second — my salwar, my duffel, my face — and then went back to whatever she had been saying, and the two of them laughed at something that was not me.

The man in the checked shirt pointed. "There. Between the boys."

The cot was wedged between the mustache boy and the sleeping one. The sheet on it was thin and gray and had been folded and refolded so many times it had gone soft in the creases and rough everywhere else. I looked at it, and I looked at the boys on either side of it, and I did not move.

"It's four hundred a month," he said. "Cheap. Near the college. You won't find cheaper."

"Yes sir," I said.

My shoulder was on fire under the strap. I shifted the bag and the strap found the raw place again, and I stood there in the doorway with the heat of the lane behind me and the smell of the room in front of me, and I thought about the ladies' hostel the woman at the bus stand had told me about. Two streets away. Cheap, clean, no questions. I had not gone there. I did not know why I had not gone there. I had the paper with the address. I could still turn around.

"Inside or outside," the man said. "I have others waiting."

I stepped in.

My sandals scuffed on the concrete and the sound was very loud in a room where no one was talking. The mustache boy smirked — I saw it, the little twist at one corner of his mouth — and then he looked back at his phone as if he hadn't. The boy with the textbook turned a page and kept his eyes on me over the top of it. I walked down the strip of concrete between the cots, and I felt every one of them looking, and I did the thing I always did when I was looked at, which was to look at the floor and count my steps.

Four steps. Five. The cot was there.

I set the duffel bag down on it. The bag sagged and the cot sagged under it and the frame creaked, and the sound was so small and so final that I stood there a moment with my hand still on the strap, not knowing what to do with the rest of myself.

"The bathroom is out back," the man said from the door. "Water at six. Don't leave your things." He held out his hand, palm up, and I understood, and I opened my potli bag and counted out four hundred rupees from the fold in the lining — my fingers finding the fold by feel, the way I had practiced on the bus — and I put them in his palm and he closed his hand over them without counting.

Then he was gone, and the door swung shut, and I was alone in the room with five strangers and one sleeping boy and two girls who had not looked at me twice.

The fan turned. The dust turned with it.

I sat down on the edge of my cot because there was nothing else to do, and the frame creaked again, and I folded my hands in my lap and looked at the wall in front of me, which was the back of the girl who was braiding her hair. She had a mole on her neck. Her braid was almost finished and she was tying the end with a black rubber band, and she said something to the other girl in a voice too low for me to hear, and they both laughed again.

I took out my phone. It was a cheap one, the kind with the buttons, and there was no message from my father, and there had not been a message from my father since I left, and I put it away again.

The mustache boy said, without looking up from his phone, "New?"

"Yes," I said. "Sir."

He laughed. Not at me, exactly. At the word. The way the tea-stall man had laughed at the word college. I felt my face go hot and I looked at the wall again and I did not say anything else.

The boy with the textbook turned another page. The sleeping boy slept. The girls finished their braid and their conversation and got up and went out through the back, and the door banged behind them, and then it was just me and the boys and the fan.

I unpacked my bag slowly because I had nothing else to do with my hands. The salwar I had worn on the bus, sweat-stained at the back. A second one, folded. A comb. A small mirror with a crack in one corner. The photo of my mother wrapped in plastic, which I did not take out, which I only felt for at the bottom of the bag to make sure it was still there. I put the bag under the cot and I lay down on the thin gray sheet with my sandals still on, because I did not want to touch the floor with my feet, and I stared at the underside of the cot above me — no, not above me, the cot was against the wall, there was no cot above me, there was only the ceiling and the fan and the dust — and I lay there and I listened.

Phones. A page turning. Someone coughing in another room through the wall. The fan. The fan. The fan.

I thought about my father. I thought about the letter on my bed, and whether he had found it yet, and what his face had done when he read it, and I made myself stop thinking about it because if I started crying here, in this room, with these boys, I would never be able to stop.

I slept. I don't know when. The light through the window went orange and then gray and then gone, and the boys came and went, and the girls came back and went out again, and someone turned on a light that was just a bulb on a cord, and the bulb made everything yellower and smaller, and I kept my eyes closed through all of it and pretended to be asleep because pretending to be asleep was easier than being looked at.

At some point the light went off.

After that there was only the dark and the fan and the sounds of five people breathing in a room that was too small for five people to breathe in.

I don't know what woke me.

Something. A sound that wasn't the fan. I lay still with my eyes closed and my heart going hard against the cot, and I listened, and there it was again — a rustle, cloth on cloth, and then the creak of a cot frame, slow and careful, the creak of someone getting up without wanting to be heard.

I opened my eyes.

The room was dark, but not dark enough. There was a streetlight somewhere down the lane and it came through the window and laid a long gray shape across the floor, and in that shape I saw a man standing.

He was one of the boys. I couldn't tell which — I couldn't see his face, only his shape, his back to me, his shoulders, the way he stood very still and listened the way I was listening. He was on the far side of the room, near the girls' cots. I could see the two cots there, and one of them had a shape on it, a girl lying on her side with her back to the room, and she was asleep, I could hear her breathing, slow and even and deep.

The boy stood over her cot and did not move for a long time.

I did not move either. I did not breathe. My hand was under my cheek and I did not move it, I did not lift my head, I did not do anything at all except watch him through my lashes the way I had learned to watch my father when he was angry, which was to keep my eyes almost shut and my face soft and my breathing slow, because if you are asleep, nothing is your fault.

He knelt down beside her cot.

The floor creaked and he stopped, and the girl's breathing did not change, and after a moment he moved again, and then his hand was on her.

It was on her hip, over the sheet, and then it was under the sheet, and then it was under her dress. I saw the shape of it through the cloth, the shape of his hand moving up her side, slow, careful, the way you'd touch something that might break. She made a small sound in her sleep and turned her face into the pillow and did not wake.

He kept his hand there for a long time. I could hear him breathing now, faster than hers, not slow at all. And then he moved his other hand down to his own waist, and I heard the sound of a drawstring being pulled, and cloth sliding, and then he was kneeling there over her with his pants down around his knees and his hand on himself.

I closed my eyes.

I closed my eyes and I made my breathing slow and even and I lay there in the dark with my heart slamming so hard I was sure the whole room could hear it, and I listened. I could not not listen. The sound of his hand, the wet sound of it, fast and then slow and then fast again, and under it the girl's breathing, still deep, still even, still asleep, and the fan turning above all of it like nothing was happening at all.

I kept my eyes closed and I did not move and I did not cry, and I counted the turns of the fan, and I told myself I was asleep, I was asleep, I was asleep, and I did not open my eyes again until the sounds stopped and the floor creaked and the cot creaked and everything went quiet.

Then I lay there in the dark with my eyes open and I looked at the ceiling and I did not sleep for a very long time.

In the morning the girl was awake before me. She was sitting up on her cot with her hair loose around her shoulders, yawning, stretching her arms over her head, and she looked across the room at me and smiled a small sleepy smile, the first smile anyone in this room had given me, and I smiled back at her because I did not know what else to do with my face.

The boys were getting up. The mustache boy was pulling on his shirt. The boy with the textbook was folding his blanket. The sleeping one was still asleep. The boy who had knelt by her cot — I looked for him, I made myself look, I had to know which one he was — was standing at the window with his back to the room, drinking water from a steel tumbler, and I could not see his face, and I did not know, and I would not know, and I lay there on my thin gray sheet and looked at the crack in the wall above my cot, a long crack that ran from the ceiling down to the level of my pillow, and I thought about the letter on my bed at home and I thought about the ladies' hostel two streets away and I thought about four hundred rupees a month, and I got up and went to find the water.