I do not look at Ravi the next morning. I am awake before him, before anyone, and I lie still on my cot with my eyes on the crack in the wall and my hand held away from my body, fingers spread, as if the film on my palm might still be wet. It is not. It dried in the night. But I hold it away from me anyway, the way you hold a thing you do not want to touch yourself with.

The room wakes the way it always wakes. Cots creaking. Someone coughing. Bhavani's hair loose and wild across her pillow, her mouth open, still asleep. Suresh's radio going on low, the morning news in Tamil, the announcer's voice flat and ordinary. The tap drips. The sea grinds outside the window the way it grinds every morning, as if nothing has changed, as if the world has not turned over in the dark.

Ravi's cot is empty. Folded neat. He is already gone.

I get up. I go to the tap and I wash my hands. I wash them twice. The water is cold and it does not make them clean, and I stand there with my hands under the stream until Lakshmi says, "Kavi, the water is not free," and I step back and let her have the tap.

At the college I sit at the back. I do not go to the canteen. I do not go to Priya's bench. I sit with my bag on my lap and my eyes on the blackboard and I do not see the blackboard at all. The professor writes something about debentures. The chalk squeaks. The fan turns. The heat comes in through the window and sits on my skin like a hand.

"Kavi."

Priya. She has come to find me. She sits down beside me on the bench and her kurti smells of coconut oil and something sweet, and she tilts her head at me the way she does when she is about to make a joke.

"Why are you sitting here like a widow? Come to the canteen. Divya is buying."

"I have a headache," I say.

She looks at me. Not long. Not searching. Just a look, the kind you give a thing you have already decided not to worry about.

"Take a tablet," she says. "You look terrible. Go home and sleep."

"Yes," I say. "I will go home and sleep."

The lie is easy. That is the thing I notice. It comes out of me smooth, without a stumble, and I think: three weeks ago I could not have said that. Three weeks ago my face would have told her everything. Now my face says nothing, and my mouth says headache, and she believes me, and she goes away to the canteen to buy Divya's idli, and I sit alone with the fan turning over my head.

I leave the college at two. I walk. I do not take the bus. I walk the whole way, past the temple, past the tea stall, past the lane of tailors and the lane of goldsmiths and the lane where the women sit on the steps with their legs folded under them selling jasmine, and the jasmine smell follows me for a while and then it is a smell of drains and then it is a smell of the sea. I walk slowly because I do not want to arrive. I walk slowly because I do not know what I will do when I get there, if Ravi is there, if I have to look at him across the room with his folded cot and his thin wrists and his mouth that said good girl in the dark.

But when I reach the rooming house it is four o'clock and the door is open and the room is empty. No cots creaking. No voices. Suresh's radio is off. The fan is off. The whole room is holding its breath, and I stand in the doorway with my bag on my shoulder and I listen, and I hear it.

A wet sound. Rhythmic. Coming from the bathroom.

I should go to my cot. I should put down my bag and lie down and close my eyes and let whatever this is be someone else's. That is what I should do. But my feet carry me across the room, past the cots, past the crack in the wall that looks like the river behind my village house, and I stop at the bathroom door because it is not shut. It is cracked. An inch. Maybe two. And through the gap the wet sound comes again, and this time I hear the small break in it, the breath, the swallow.

I push the door. Just a little. Just enough.

Bhavani is on her knees on the wet floor. Her hair is down, long and loose, the way it is when she sleeps, and it spills forward over a man's thighs — over Arjun's thighs — and her head is moving, and her hands are gripping his hips, and I can see the shape of him in her mouth, the stretch of her lips around him, the wet shine of her chin. The floor is wet around her knees. The tap must have run over. Or something else. I do not know. I do not think about the floor.

Arjun's head is thrown back against the wall. His eyes are closed. His mouth is open. One hand is twisted in Bhavani's hair, holding her there, and his other hand is flat against the tile as if he is holding himself up, as if his legs have gone soft under him. He is saying something. Low. I cannot hear the words. His throat moves when he says it.

Bhavani's head comes back. Her mouth comes off him with a sound, a wet sound, the sound I heard from the doorway, and she looks up at him. Her eyes are open. She is watching his face while she does it. She is not closing her eyes, not looking away, not doing it the way you do a thing you want to be over. She is watching him the whole time, watching what she is doing to him, and there is a small silver stud in her nose that catches the light from the bathroom window, and it glints when she takes him back into her mouth.

My bag slips off my shoulder. It hits the floor. The sound is soft, cloth on concrete, and neither of them hears it. Neither of them turns. Arjun's hand tightens in her hair. Bhavani's throat moves — I can see it move — and she takes him deeper, all the way, her nose pressed into the hair at the base of him, and she stays there, and Arjun's whole body curls forward over her, his mouth opening, a sound coming out of him that is not a word.

I cannot move. My feet are on the floor of the room and my hand is on the door and I cannot move. I have never seen this. I have seen it in the dark, in the theatre, felt it in my own hand, but I have never seen it — a woman on her knees on a wet floor with a man's cock in her mouth, her hair spread over his thighs, her hands on his hips like she is holding him there on purpose, like she wants him to stay. There is a smell. I did not know there was a smell. It is salt and skin and something else, something warm, and it is in the air of the bathroom and it comes out through the cracked door and it is in my nose.

Arjun says her name. "Bhavani." Just that. His voice is broken in the middle of it.

She does not stop. She pulls back, just to the head of him, and her tongue comes out and slides up the underside of him, slow, watching his face, and then she takes him again, and her hand comes up and wraps around the part of him her mouth cannot hold, and she works it, mouth and hand together, and the wet sound gets faster, and Arjun's hips start to move, small jerks, like he cannot help it, like his body is doing it without him.

"I'm going to—" he says, and does not finish.

Bhavani does not pull away. That is the thing I will not be able to unsee. She does not pull away. She stays, her mouth on him, her eyes open and up on his face, and Arjun's hand fists in her hair and his back arches off the wall and he comes, and I see it — I see her throat move, once, twice, three times — and she swallows him, and she does not stop watching him, not once, not even at the end.

Then it is quiet. Arjun slides down the wall a little, his chest going up and down, his hand loosening in her hair. Bhavani sits back on her heels on the wet floor and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and then she looks up at him. Her eyes meet his. Not mine. His. She smiles at him — a small, private smile, the kind you give someone after — and she says something I cannot hear, and Arjun laughs, low, and puts his hand on top of her head, and she leans into it.

I step back. My foot finds the bag on the floor and I pick it up without looking at it, without looking away from the gap in the door, and I take another step back, and another, and the door swings shut on its own weight — slowly, on the hinge — and it closes with a click.

Neither of them hears it. Neither of them turns.

I cross the room. I lie down on my cot. I pull my legs up and I turn my face to the wall, to the crack that looks like the river, and I lie there with my bag still on my shoulder and my sandals still on my feet and I do not breathe. I have not breathed since I pushed the door. I know this now because my chest is burning and my head is light and I let the air out of me in one long shaking breath against the wall, and then I pull it back in, and I lie still.

The room is silent. The tap in the bathroom drips. The sea grinds outside. After a while I hear them come out — Bhavani's footsteps, then Arjun's, then the creak of a cot, then nothing. They do not speak. They do not need to. Whatever they are to each other, they already know. I am the only one in this room who has just learned something, and they do not know they taught me.

I think about the truth or dare. I think about Bhavani's truth — I told my parents I am in a hostel. I share a room with three girls. She did not say she shares a room with a boy. She did not say she kneels on the bathroom floor with her hair down and her mouth full and her eyes open, watching. She said the small true thing and kept the big one, the way we all do. I think about Arjun's truth — I have not spoken to my father in three years, since my mother died. I think about the way he said it with his jaw tight and his hands white on his knees, and I think about the way his hand was in Bhavani's hair just now, gentle, holding her, and I do not know how both of those things are the same man.

I think about Ravi. I think about his thin wrists and his folded cot and his mouth in the dark saying good girl. I think about how I let him. I think about how I did not move away. And I think about Bhavani, who did not close her eyes, who did not pull away, who watched the whole time — and I do not know if that is the same thing I did or the opposite of it. I do not know if she is being used or if she is using. I do not know which one I am. I lie on my cot with my face to the wall and I do not know, and the not-knowing sits in me like a stone.

The others come back one by one as the light goes orange and then grey. Lakshmi first, with her tuition bag and her tired face. Then Suresh, with the smell of the provision shop on him. Then Meena, chewing her thumbnail. Then Ravi.

Ravi comes in and I feel him come in. I do not turn. I keep my face to the wall and my eyes open and I feel him cross the room behind me, and I feel him stop — just for a moment, just long enough that I know he is looking at my back — and then he goes to his cot and sits down and the cot creaks, and I hear him take off his sandals, and I hear him lie down, and I do not turn around.

He does not say anything. He does not need to. He knows I know. Or he does not know. I cannot tell. That is the worst of it — I cannot tell what he knows, and I cannot ask, and so I lie with my face to the wall and I let him think whatever he thinks, and I let the silence do the work.

Bhavani comes back last. She comes in with her hair wet, tied up now, and she smells of soap, and she goes to her cot and sits down and pulls her knees up and starts to comb her hair with her fingers, slow, the way she does every night. I watch her from the corner of my eye, across the room, and she looks the same as she always looks. Long hair. Silver stud in her nose. A girl from Vellore who wants to teach English and told her parents she lives in a hostel. She looks exactly the same, and I know something about her now that I cannot give back, and she does not know I have it.

The big light goes off. The room goes blue with the half-dark from the window, the streetlight coming through the bars, the sea grinding outside. Everyone lies down. The cots creak and then stop. The tap drips. Somewhere down the lane a dog barks once and then is quiet.

I lie on my back. I look at the ceiling. Then I turn on my side, and I look at the crack in the wall that looks like the river behind my village house, and I think about the water in that river, how it never stopped, how it carried everything down to the sea without ever once asking what it was carrying. I think about Bhavani's throat moving. I think about the silver stud glinting. I think about Arjun's hand on top of her head, gentle, the way you touch a thing you are fond of.

Across the room, Arjun turns over on his cot. The frame creaks. Then quiet.

I keep my eyes open in the dark. I do not sleep. I lie there with my hand held away from my body, fingers spread, and I wait for the morning, and I know now that this room has more doors in it than I counted, and that I have just found one, and that it does not close.