The fan turned above her, three blades and a wobble, and somewhere past it the smell arrived — cardamom, milk going sweet on the stove, the burnt thread of a chili left too long in oil. Maya surfaced into it with her mouth dry and her tongue thick and her mother's voice already in the room, not loud, just the shape of her name laid down twice, the way you set a cup on a table you don't want to wake.

"Maya. Maya, beta."

She was on the thin mattress in the upstairs bedroom, not the sofa. She didn't remember the stairs. The sheet under her had gone warm and damp at the back of her neck and her cheek was creased from the ticking of the pillow. The jute rug scratched where her heel had slid off the edge of the bed in the night, one shoe still hooked on her foot, the other somewhere on the floor with the strap bent.

The dress had dried on her. That was the first thing, before the hangover, before the hip. The silk had gone stiff as paper over her ribs and it moved with her when she moved, a shell, a casing, tacky in the seams where the come had soaked in and set. She sat up and the fabric cracked faintly across her chest and the smell came off it — old sweat, old sex, the studio's synthetic air — and her stomach turned over once and settled back down.

The ache in her hip was a small bright knot, low and forward, the kind of sore that only showed itself when she moved wrong. She pressed it with two fingers without deciding to. Under the skin the knot rolled and complained and she pressed it again, harder, and the pain was clean and hers and it steadied her the way the bruise on her thigh did, like a hand on the back of her neck.

"Car's here in forty," her mother said from the doorway.

Sunita stood in the frame with her robe loose at the throat, dark green silk, hair still down and unbrushed past her shoulder blades, and two cups of chai in her hands, one held out already, waiting for Maya to be the kind of person who could take it. The ceiling fan stirred the humid air and lifted a strand of her mother's hair and dropped it.

Maya took the cup. It was too hot through the clay and she held it anyway, both hands, letting it burn the pads of her fingers because the burn was somewhere to be.

Behind Sunita, past the doorway, past the rail of the landing, the kitchen counter was visible in a slice — the kettle, the fruit bowl, and the phone. Her phone. Screen dark, lying flat on the counter where she had left it, face down or face up she couldn't tell from here, but there, in her mother's house, two days after she had walked away from it on the studio mattress and let the door close behind her.

"You brought it up," Maya said.

"It was on the counter. I didn't touch it." Sunita drank, watching her over the rim. "You've been out since nine last night. You missed two calls from the agency and one from Nisha and I told them you were asleep, because you were."

"What did Nisha want."

"To confirm the call time. I confirmed it." Her mother's voice was easy, unhurried, the voice she used on the phone with clients when she was already spending the money. "You're expected at eleven. Bride. Marco's new girl does the makeup now, Deja's gone to a wedding shoot in Ojai, so it's the new one, whatever her name is. Doesn't matter."

Maya looked at the tea. The surface had a skin on it already. "I need to shower."

"There's no hot water. The pilot's out again. I called the man, he comes Tuesday." Sunita pushed off the doorframe and came in and set her cup on the nightstand and stood over the bed with her arms folded, looking down at her daughter the way you look at a garment you've already paid for and are deciding whether to keep. "You can wash in cold. It's a warm morning. It'll wake you up."

"I smell like the studio."

"You smell like a woman who worked." Her mother reached down and hooked a finger under the strap of the ruined dress at Maya's shoulder, lifted it, let it fall back against the skin with a soft slap. "The dress is finished. Don't mourn it. I have the red one laid out."

Maya stood. The room tilted and for one long second the floor was a boat and she was standing on the water, and then it righted itself and the jute dug into the sole of her one bare foot and the heel on the other made her stand at a slant, taller on one side, like a table with a short leg. She walked out of the bedroom and down the hall and the stiffness in her moved with her, the dried come cracking in the seam of the dress, and she could feel it — not the come, the stiffness, the way the fabric had taken the shape of her and gone rigid around it, the way a thing that has been wet and dried keeps the mark of what it held.

The bathroom was small and tiled in a green that had been fashionable when the building went up and had never been fashionable since. The mirror over the sink had a chip in the corner and a hairline crack that ran from the chip to the frame, and Maya looked at herself in it before she turned on the water, because she always did, because the looking was a habit she had built the way other people built muscle.

Her hair had come loose from the pins and hung in a heavy black tangle past her hips, and the eyeliner from last night had travelled down under her eyes and pooled there, and her lips were dry and pale at the edges and her nose ring had a crust of something on it she didn't want to identify. She looked like a woman at the end of a long night. She looked, she thought, like her mother after a bad booking, and the thought sat in her chest like a swallowed stone and she turned the water on and didn't look anymore.

The cold came out of the pipe with a shudder and a knock and then it came out steady, and she stepped under it still in the dress because she couldn't work the ties with her nails wet and long, and the water hit the dried silk and the silk went dark and soft again and slid off her shoulders and down, and she stood in the falling water and let it take the dress off her body like a second skin going.

The cold was a shock and then it was just cold, and the cold did what her mother said it would, it woke her, it pulled the ache in her hip up to the surface where she could feel it properly, a dull low throb timed to her pulse. She braced one hand on the tile and bent her head under the stream and the water ran down the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades and over the curve of her breasts, and she watched it run and felt it run and for a while there was nothing in her head at all, which was the most she had been able to say for two days.

Then, because her hands were there and because the water had made her skin slick and because she wanted to know, she reached down between her legs.

It was there. Small, soft, drawn up against her the way it went when she was cold, the head of it no bigger than the pad of her thumb, and she palmed it once, cupped, the way you'd cup something to keep it warm, and felt it stir and not rise. She did it again, slower, her fingers closing around the whole of it, and it moved in her hand and stayed soft, and the wet from the shower and the wet from her own body were the same wet and she couldn't tell them apart.

She wasn't trying to come. She knew that. She had come more in the last week than in the whole year before it and the coming had stopped meaning anything particular, it was just something her body did now when it was worked, like a bell that rang when you pulled the rope. What she was doing was checking. Making sure the thing was still there. Making sure she was still the person she had built out of the boy, that the small soft piece of him she'd kept had not been quietly taken away while she slept, that somewhere under the breasts and the hips and the hair and the nails there was still this, this little remainder, this last thing that was neither.

It was there. She let it go.

She washed her hair with the cold water and the cheap shampoo that smelled of coconut and nothing else, and she worked her fingers through the tangles from the ends up the way her mother had taught her, and when she stepped out and reached for the towel, her mother was there in the doorway with the towel already in her hands, and Maya did not jump, because a woman who flinches is a woman who can be made to flinch.

Sunita wrapped her in the towel and rubbed her shoulders and her back with it, brisk, businesslike, the way she dried a dog after rain, and then she held the towel closed at Maya's chest with both hands and looked at her face up close, and whatever she saw there made her mouth do something small and private.

"Come," she said. "The red's on the bed."

The bedroom had changed while Maya was in the water. The thin mattress was stripped to the ticking and the jute rug was swept and the fan was off, and in its place the room had been arranged the way her mother arranged a set. The red lengha was laid open on the bed, the skirt fanned, the choli folded small at the top, and beside it on the ticking, laid out in a line like instruments, was the gold — the necklace, the earrings heavier than the ones she had on, the maang tikka with its chain, and the bangles, a whole sleeve of them, red and gold, stacked in a coil. The dupatta lay across the foot of the bed, red with a gold border worked so densely it looked wet.

"Sit," her mother said, and pointed at the edge of the bed, and Maya sat, wrapped in the towel, and the ticking was rough under her thighs and the room smelled of jute and dust and the coconut shampoo and, faintly, of the chai cooling on the nightstand where her mother had left it.

Sunita picked up the choli first, the little red blouse, and held it up and turned it and checked the hooks, and then she came and stood over Maya and said, "Arms," and Maya lifted her arms and her mother pulled the choli down over them and settled it on her breasts and reached behind her to work the hooks, one, two, three, the backs of her knuckles brushing Maya's spine, and the red cotton was cool and then warm where it took her heat.

"It's tight," Maya said.

"It's supposed to be tight. A bride's blouse is tight. It holds you up for the camera and it makes you breathe small, and a woman who breathes small looks like she's holding something back, and a man will spend all night trying to find out what." Her mother's fingers found the last hook and closed it and smoothed the fabric flat over Maya's shoulder blades, both palms, pressing. "There. Now the skirt."

Maya stood and stepped into the skirt and her mother drew it up over her hips and the waistband settled at her waist and the weight of the heavy embroidery pulled it down and the drawstring had to be cinched and knotted and tucked, and Sunita did all of it from behind, her hands at Maya's waist, her breath warm at the back of her neck, and Maya stood with her arms a little away from her body and let herself be dressed.

The ache in her hip had settled into the skirt's cinch, a low pressure she could lean into when she stood still. The cold shower had woken her all the way up and underneath the waking there was something else, something that had been there since the night before and that she was only now able to look at sideways — the shape of a morning she had felt coming in the dark of the sofa, a room full of lights, a call sheet with her name on it, a red and a gold and a part she was to play.

"Now the jewelry," her mother said, "and then I'll do your face, and then the car." She reached for the coiled bangles and lifted them, and the whole sleeve of them rang softly against itself, and she took Maya's left wrist and began to work them on, one at a time, over the hand, each one a small resistance and a small give, and they clacked and settled at Maya's forearm and stayed there, cool and heavy and loud.

Halfway through the left arm, on the sixth or seventh bangle, Sunita's hands stopped.

Maya felt it before she saw it — the small tremor that came up through the gold into her own wrist, the way her mother's fingers had to try twice to get the bangle past the widest part of her hand. Sunita did not say anything. She got the bangle on and picked up the next one and her hands were steady again, or steady enough, and Maya looked at her mother's face and her mother's face was doing what it always did, which was nothing, and the one thing Maya had seen she was not going to be allowed to see twice.

She looked down at her own wrist instead, at the gold stacked there, at the small blue vein under the skin, at the long lacquered nail of her own thumb, the chipped one. The bangles clacked when she breathed. They would clack on the set too, she thought, every time she moved her hands, and Marco would either want it or hate it, and she would find out which when the red light came on.

"Other arm," her mother said.

Maya gave her the other arm and the bangles went on and the weight of them on both wrists made her hold her hands a little away from her body, the way you hold a full cup, and her mother turned her by the shoulders and looked at her, up and down, and then reached for the earrings and the necklace and the tikka, and the dressing went on, and past the bedroom door, down the stairs, the phone lay dark on the kitchen counter with two days of nothing on its screen, and the car was coming, and the part was written, and Maya stood very still with the gold clacking against her wrists and let her mother finish making the bride.