The lecture hall smelled of chalk dust and the wet wool of monsoon-damp uniforms. I found the last row because the last row was empty and I could sit with my back to the wall and watch everyone come in. My notebook was open on my lap, a fresh one I had bought at the stationery shop near the rooming house, the spine unbroken, the pages still smelling of glue. I had sharpened my pencil the night before with the mustache boy's knife because I did not have a sharpener, and I held it now in my fist like a small stick I might need to defend myself with. The professor had not come yet. The ceiling fan turned slowly, its blades heavy with damp, and the boys in the front row were copying something from a friend's notebook, passing it back and forth, and the girls sat in clusters of three and four with their bags on the seats beside them so no one would sit too close.

I did not know where to put my eyes. In my village the classroom was one room with a blackboard and a thatch roof and the girls sat on one side and the boys on the other and everyone knew whose daughter I was. Here the room was long and white and the seats were bolted to the floor in rows that went up and up, and no one looked at me, and I did not know if that was good or if it meant I was invisible.

The professor came in. He was a thin man with spectacles and a shirt tucked too tight, and he began to talk about accounts, about debits and credits, about the balance sheet, and I wrote the words down in my notebook even though I did not understand them, because writing them down made me feel like I was a student and not a girl who had run away from home. My pencil made a small scratching sound. The fan turned. The rain had stopped outside and the light through the high windows was the color of weak tea.

Then a bangle tapped my shoulder.

I turned so fast my pencil rolled off my lap and under the seat in front of me. A girl was leaning over the back of my row, her chin almost on my shoulder, and she was smiling. She had a round face and a bob of black hair that curved under her ears, and her eyes were the light brown of filter coffee with too much milk, and her kurti was a bright printed thing with a phone peeking out of the pocket. Her bangles were glass, green and gold, and they clinked when she moved her wrist.

"You're new," she said. Not a question.

"Yes," I said. "Sorry. Yes."

"Sorry for what?" She laughed, and her laugh was quick and loud and made two girls in the row ahead turn around. "What's your name?"

"Kavitha," I said. "Kavi."

"Kavi." She said it slowly, tasting it. "I'm Priya. Priya Menon. Come, sit with us, why are you sitting here alone like a widow?"

She did not wait for me to answer. She took my wrist — her fingers were cool from the fan — and pulled me up out of my seat, and my bag slid off my lap and I had to bend and grab it and my pencil was still under the seat in front of me and I left it there because she was already pulling me down the row, past the knees of strangers, and I said "Sorry, sorry," to a boy whose foot I stepped on, and he looked at me the way the tea-stall man had looked at me, and then I was sitting in the middle of the hall with Priya on one side and two other girls on the other, and my heart was going too fast and my face was hot and I did not know what had just happened.

"This is Kavitha," Priya said to the other two. "She's from — where are you from?"

"Near Madurai," I said. "A village. A small village."

"Madurai!" The girl on my left said it, a plump girl with a mole on her chin and a dupatta wrapped twice around her neck. "So you're a Madurai girl. No wonder you're sitting in the back like a scared rabbit."

The other girl laughed. She was thin and fair and had a long braid down her back like mine, and she laughed with her hand over her mouth, and I did not know if they were laughing at me or with me, and I smiled because I did not know what else to do with my face.

"Don't mind them," Priya said. "They're horrible. I'm the only nice one here."

"You're the worst one," the plump girl said.

"That's Divya," Priya said, pointing. "And that's Meena. And this is accounts, which is the most boring subject in the world, so we mostly talk."

The professor was still talking about balance sheets. I opened my notebook on my lap again, but I did not write anything. Priya leaned over and looked at my page.

"You wrote 'debit' and 'credit' and nothing else," she said. "Do you know what they mean?"

"No," I said. "I am learning."

"You're learning," she repeated, and something in her voice softened, just a little, and she stopped smiling for a second. "Okay. I'll teach you. Debit is what comes in, credit is what goes out. Or the other way. I always forget. But you'll get it."

"Thank you," I said. "Thank you, sister."

"Sister!" She laughed again, and this time Divya and Meena laughed too, and I felt my face go hot because I had said something wrong, but I did not know what. "Don't call me sister, Kavi. We're not in the village now. Call me Priya."

"Priya," I said. The name felt strange in my mouth, too familiar, like calling an aunty by her first name. But I said it, and she nodded, and she turned back to her phone and started showing Divya something on the screen, and I sat between them with my blank notebook and my heart still going too fast, and I thought: I have a group. I have a group now. I have people.

The class ended. The professor left. The hall filled with the sound of bags closing and chairs scraping and everyone talking at once, and Priya stood up and stretched and said, "Canteen. I'm starving. Come."

The canteen was on the ground floor, a long room with a low ceiling and ceiling fans that did not reach the corners, and it smelled of oil and spice and wet floor, and the noise was like a wall. Trays clattered. Boys shouted across tables. A woman behind a counter was slapping dosa batter onto a hot stone with a sound like a wet hand on skin. Priya led us to a table near the window and put her bag down on a chair to save it and said, "Sit, sit, I'll get the food," and she was gone before I could say I did not have money.

I sat. Divya sat across from me and Meena beside her, and they started talking about a boy in their economics class who had failed and was going to have to repeat the year, and they talked fast and in English and in Tamil all mixed together, and I understood maybe half of it, and I kept my hands in my lap and looked at the table, which was scored with old knife marks and stained with rings of tea.

Priya came back with a tray of four plates of idli and sambar and a steel tumbler of tea for each of us, and she put one plate in front of me and said, "Eat."

"I did not bring money," I said. "I am sorry, I will pay you back—"

"It's fifty rupees," she said. "Eat. You're too thin. Are they not feeding you at that rooming house?"

"They are feeding me," I said, which was not true, because I had eaten only a banana and a packet of biscuits since yesterday morning, and I picked up the idli and dipped it in the sambar and put it in my mouth, and the sambar was hot and sour and tasted of tamarind and I had not realized how hungry I was until the first bite, and I ate too fast and burned my tongue.

"Slow down," Priya said. "Nobody's going to take it from you."

Divya was laughing at something on her phone. Meena was telling a story about her cousin's wedding and a fight over the dowry, and I listened and ate and the noise of the canteen went on around us like weather, and for a few minutes I felt almost like a normal girl, a college girl, a girl with friends and a plate of idli and nowhere else to be.

Then a boy came to the table.

He was tall, taller than anyone in the room, and he had a gold chain around his neck that caught the fluorescent light and threw it back in small bright coins. His shirt was ironed and his hair was combed back with oil and his smile was easy, the smile of a boy who had never had to ask for anything twice. He put his hand on the back of Priya's chair and leaned down and said something to her in English that I did not catch, and she laughed and tilted her head up and he kissed her cheek, quick, and she swatted him away.

"This is Arun," Priya said. "My boyfriend. Arun, this is Kavitha. Kavi. She's new. From Madurai."

"Madurai," Arun said. He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down, and the gold chain swung forward and settled against his chest, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a thing he is thinking of buying. "Madurai is a good place. Good temples. Good food. What are you studying?"

"Commerce," I said. "First year."

"Commerce." He nodded slowly. "And where are you staying? Hostel?"

"No," I said. "A rooming house. Near the college. On the lane behind the temple."

His eyebrows went up. "The lane behind the temple," he said. "I know that lane." He said it slowly, and he smiled, and there was something in the smile I did not understand. "That's a cheap place. Four hundred a month?"

"Yes," I said. "How did you know?"

"I know that lane," he said again. And then his hand was on my knee.

It happened under the table, where no one could see. His palm was warm and dry and it landed on my knee just above the hem of my kameez, and it stayed there for one second, two, and then it was gone, sliding away under the table, and he was leaning back in his chair and laughing at something Divya had said, and no one at the table had seen, and I sat with my hand frozen around my tumbler of tea and my knee still warm where his palm had been, and I did not know what to do with my face.

"Kavi?" Priya was looking at me. "You okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I am fine," I said. "The tea is hot. I burned my tongue."

"Told you to slow down," she said, and she turned back to Arun, and Arun was telling a story about a party he had gone to, and his hand was on the table now, in plain sight, holding his tumbler of tea, and it was the same hand, the same warm dry palm, and I could not stop looking at it.

The canteen went on around us. The fans turned. The woman at the counter slapped another dosa onto the stone. Divya and Meena got up to go to their next class and said goodbye and Priya said she would see them tomorrow and Arun said he had to go too, he had a class, and he stood up and stretched and his shirt pulled tight across his shoulders and he looked down at me and said, "Nice to meet you, Kavitha. I'll see you around."

"Yes sir," I said. The word came out of me before I could stop it, the way it always did, and Arun laughed.

"Sir," he said, to Priya. "She called me sir."

"She's from the village," Priya said. "Leave her alone."

He left. I watched him go — the gold chain, the ironed shirt, the easy walk — and my knee was still warm where his hand had been, and I put my own hand on it under the table, pressing down, as if I could press the warmth away, as if I could press the moment out of my skin.

Priya was looking at me. She had her phone in her hand and she was turning it over and over, and her face was not smiling now.

"Don't mind Arun," she said. "He's like that with everyone. He's just friendly."

"Yes," I said. "Friendly."

She looked at me for another second, and I thought she was going to say something else, but then she shook her head and stood up and said, "Come on, we have economics. Sit with me. I'll explain the balance sheet properly this time."

I got up and followed her out of the canteen, and the afternoon light outside was white and hot and the corridor was empty except for us, our footsteps loud on the concrete, and I walked beside her with my bag against my chest and my knee still warm and my notebook still blank, and I thought: I have a group. I have a friend. I have a place to sit at lunch. And I did not know why that thought made my stomach feel the way it did, tight and small, like a fist closing.

"Priya," I said, in the corridor, before I could stop myself.

"Hm?"

"Where do you live? Do you live with your parents?"

She stopped walking. She looked at me, and for a second her face did something I could not read — something that was almost sad, or almost tired, and then it was gone and she was smiling again.

"I have a room," she said. "Near the beach. My parents are in Coimbatore. I live alone."

"Alone," I said. The word felt enormous.

"Alone," she said. "It's the best thing in the world, Kavi. No one to tell you what to do. No one to ask where you've been." She started walking again, and her bangles clinked, and she said over her shoulder, "You should come over sometime. Tonight, even. I'll show you my room."

"Tonight," I said.

"Tonight," she said. "After class. I'll give you the address."

We walked into the economics hall together, and she found us two seats in the middle, and she pulled out her notebook and opened it, and this time she did not talk to anyone else, she sat beside me and explained the balance sheet in a low voice, and I wrote down what she said, and my pencil moved across the page, and the page was not blank anymore, and I thought about her room near the beach, and the word alone, and the way she had said it — like it was a door, and she was holding it open.

The economics hall emptied at four, and Priya walked me out through the gate and stood with me on the road while the buses went past, breathing their black smoke over us, and she tore a page from the back of her notebook and wrote her address on it in blue ink and folded it twice and pressed it into my palm.

"Beach Road," she said. "Second building after the fish market, the one with the blue gate. Third floor. Come at six. I'll make tea."

"I don't know how to come," I said. "Which bus—"

"Take an auto. Tell him Beach Road, near the fish market. Don't let him charge you more than eighty." She looked at my face and laughed. "You don't know how to do that either. Okay. Take the 21C. Ask the conductor. He'll drop you."

She went one way and I went the other, and I walked back to the rooming house through the wet streets with the folded paper in my fist, and the whole way I was thinking about the word alone, how she had said it, like a thing she owned. The lane behind the temple was full of water and the smell of it, and the mustache boy was sitting on the steps with his phone, and he looked up when I came and looked back down.

I climbed to the room and the six cots were all empty and the window was open and the sea was somewhere past the buildings, a smell I had not learned yet, salt and rot and something sweet under it. I opened my duffel and took out the salwar I had not worn, the good one, the one my mother's sister had stitched for my school function two years ago, blue with small white flowers, and I held it up against myself in the window light and put it back. It was too much. It was a village dress. I wore the one I had on and washed my face at the tap and combed my braid out and braided it again, tighter, and sat on the edge of the cot with my feet not touching the floor, and waited for five o'clock, then for half past, and then I went out and found the bus.

The 21C was crowded and I stood pressed against the door with my bag against my chest and watched the city slide past — the temple, the long white bridge, the sea opening up on the left like a floor of beaten metal, and the fish market with its crates and its cats and its women in wet saris, and then the blue gate, and I got down and my legs were shaking aunty-shaking, and I stood on the road and looked up at the building and the third floor had a light on.

She was waiting at the top of the stairs. Her hair was down and wet, and she was in a long t-shirt that came to her knees, no kurti, no bangles, her feet bare on the concrete, and she looked younger like that, and smaller, and she said, "You came," and pulled me in by the wrist the way she had pulled me down the row in the lecture hall.

The room was one room. A bed against the wall with a sheet printed with sunflowers, a plastic chair, a table with a laptop and a steel plate with two banana skins on it, a mirror nailed to the wall with a photo of a man and a woman in a frame tucked into the corner of it, and a window with the sea in it, black now and moving. It was small and it was hers and there was no one else in it.

"Sit," she said. "Sit on the bed, the chair is broken." She poured tea from a steel pot into two tumblers and gave me one and sat on the floor with her back against the bed and her knees up, and the tea was sweet and too hot and I held it in both hands.

"Your parents," I said. "In Coimbatore."

"Yes." She blew on her tea. "My father is a bank manager. My mother is a housewife. They wanted me to stay there and do B.Com in the local college and live at home and marry the boy they pick. So I came here instead." She looked up at me over the tumbler. "They don't know about this room. They think I'm in the hostel."

"You lied to them."

"I didn't lie. I just didn't tell them." She shrugged. "It's the same thing, but it sounds better."

I sat on her bed with the tea in my hands and looked at the sea in the window and thought about the letter I had left on my own bed, two hundred kilometres away, and my father's hands, and how he would have come home from the field and found it, and I did not say any of that, and she did not ask. She talked instead. She talked about the college and the professors and which ones took bribes and which ones were actually good, and about Divya, who was engaged already to a boy in Bangalore and pretended she wasn't, and about Meena, whose family was in debt, and about Arun, who was doing his MBA and whose father owned three textile shops on T. Nagar and who had a car, an actual car, a white Swift with a dent in the back door.

"He's good," she said. "He's just — he's a boy. You know? He's a boy." She said it like it was a whole sentence, like it explained something, and I nodded because I did not know what else to do, and my knee was warm again where his hand had been, and I pressed my palm down on it under the tea.

"How did you meet him?" I said.

"At a party. Divya's cousin's birthday. I was drunk and I fell down the stairs and he caught me." She laughed, and then she stopped laughing and looked at the tea. "He's the first boy who ever caught me."

The tea went cold in my hands. Outside a ship's horn sounded, long and low, and the sea moved in the window, and she got up and put on a kurti over the t-shirt and said, "Come, I'll walk you to the bus," and we went down the stairs and out through the blue gate and stood at the stop and she said, "Come every day. After class. You don't have to ask. Just come."

"Every day," I said.

"Every day." She hugged me then, quick, one arm around my shoulders, her hair wet against my cheek, and then the bus came and I got on and she stood at the stop and waved, and I watched her get smaller and smaller through the window until the fish market swallowed her.

I got back to the rooming house at half past eight. The lane was dark and the door was open and the mustache boy was asleep on his cot with his phone still glowing on his chest. I climbed to the room and the six cots were full. The boys were back. One of them was snoring, a wet rattling snore, and one of them was lying on his side with his face to the wall, and the girl from the other morning — the one who had smiled at me — was on her cot with a thin sheet pulled up to her chin, already asleep, her mouth open a little. The light was off. The window was open. The sea was a sound now, a low grinding under everything, like something breathing.

I sat on my cot and took off my chappals and put my potli bag under the pillow and lay down in my clothes because I did not know yet whether it was safe to undress in that room. The cot creaked. The fan turned. I could see the crack in the wall above me, the same crack, running from the ceiling down behind the pipe, and I lay and looked at it and thought about Priya's room, the sunflowers on the sheet, the sea in the window, the way she had said alone like a door she was holding open for me.

Then the phone light came on.

It was the cot on the far side, near the window, and the girl on it had her phone up over her face and the screen lit her from below, her chin and her nose and the whites of her eyes, and she was scrolling something, and she must have seen me move because she turned her head and looked at me across the room, over the sleeping bodies, and her face did something — a small smile, quick, like a hand waved from a long way off.

She sat up. She had a thin blanket around her shoulders like a shawl and her hair was loose and short, cut to her jaw, and she held the phone up and tilted the screen toward me, and I could not see what was on it from that distance, and she whispered, loud enough to cross the room but not loud enough to wake anyone, "You're the new one."

"Yes," I whispered back.

"Kavitha."

"Yes."

"I'm Lakshmi." She said it the way you say a thing you have said a hundred times, no shyness in it at all. "You're from Madurai. The mustache boy told me."

"Near Madurai."

"Same thing." She patted the cot beside her, the narrow strip of mattress between her hip and the wall. "Come. I can't sleep either. Come sit."

I looked at the room. The snoring boy. The boy with his face to the wall. The girl asleep with her mouth open. Nobody moved. I got up and crossed the floor on the balls of my feet, stepping over the bag at the foot of the mustache boy's cot, and sat down on the edge of her mattress with my knees pulled up, and she moved over to make room and pulled the blanket so it covered both our legs.

"What are you looking at?" I said.

She turned the phone toward me. It was a video, a woman in a small room with a ring light, talking into the camera about a boy, about what he had said and what she had said back, and there were little hearts floating up the side of the screen, hundreds of them, and numbers under the video, thousands of numbers.

"She's from Kerala," Lakshmi said. "She just talks about her life. People send her money."

"Money?"

"Gifts. You can send gifts. That's the hearts." She scrolled and showed me another one, a girl dancing in a kitchen, and another one, a girl putting on makeup and telling the camera what she had eaten that day. "You could do this," she said. "You have the face for it."

"What face?"

"That face." She looked at me sideways and grinned. "The village face. People like the village face. It looks honest."

I did not know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and she kept scrolling, and the light from the phone moved over both our faces, and the sea ground on outside, and after a while she said, quieter, "How much are you paying?"

"Four hundred."

"Me too." She put the phone face-down on her stomach and looked up at the ceiling, at the same crack. "The boys pay two hundred. Did you know that?"

"No."

"They pay two hundred and they get the cots by the door and we pay four hundred and we get the cots by the wall. That's the rule." She said it without anger, the way you say the price of rice. "The wall is safer. That's what the four hundred is for."

I looked at the wall behind my own cot, the crack, the pipe. The wall was safer. I had not known that I had bought anything with the extra two hundred, and now I did, and it made the room look different, the way a room looks when you find out what the rent is really for.

"Do you work?" I said.

"I do tuitions. Three houses, in the evenings. Class five to class eight. I get four thousand a month and I give two thousand to my mother and I keep the rest." She turned her head on the pillow and looked at me. "What about you?"

"Nothing yet," I said. "I only came."

"You'll find something." She yawned, wide, and did not cover her mouth. "Everyone finds something."

She picked up the phone again and put it on the floor beside the cot, screen down, and the room went dark except for the streetlight coming in the window, orange and thin, lying across the floor in a bar. The snoring boy turned over and stopped snoring. Somewhere below, a dog barked twice and gave up.

"You can sleep here if you want," she said. "There's room. The cot's not mine, it's the room's, we all just take one."

"I have my own," I said.

"Then go to your own." She said it kindly, and she pulled the blanket up to her chin and closed her eyes, and I sat there a moment longer, in the dark, with the orange bar of light across my feet, and then I got up and crossed back to my cot and lay down.

The sheet smelled of dust and of the sea. I pulled it up over my shoulders and turned on my side to face the wall, and the crack ran down the plaster in front of my eyes, and I could hear Lakshmi's breathing going slow and even across the room, and the girl with her mouth open, and the boys, all of them breathing, all of them asleep, and the sea under all of it, grinding, patient, like the city itself lying down for the night around me.

I thought about Priya's room with the sunflowers and the sea in the window, and the way she had said come every day, and the folded paper with her address on it that was still in my fist, damp now from my palm. I thought about the four hundred rupees and the wall and what it was for. I thought about the video girls with their hearts floating up the side of the screen, and the village face, and the money you could be sent just for talking about your day.

Then I stopped thinking, and my body got heavy, and the cot stopped creaking, and I slept — the first night in the city that I slept all the way through, without waking, without listening for the door.