The sheet was clean. I had washed it at the bucket on the back veranda before the light came, wrung it twice, hung it over the railing where the neighbors could see and say nothing. A clean sheet means nothing. The mattress remembers. I had turned it, pressed the heel of my hand into the place where his weight had been, and the smell came up anyway — sweat and salt and the deep animal thing underneath, the thing that does not wash out, only settles, only waits.

I stood at the window in the red saree.

Sandip bought it the week before our wedding and never saw it unwrapped. It came in a box with a gold border printed on the lid, and he had put it in the almirah with the other things he never asked about, and for seven years it had sat there folded under the winter quilts, the silk gone soft with waiting. This morning I took it out. I did not decide to. My hands went to the shelf the way they go to the tap, and then the box was open, and then the pallu was over my shoulder, and the silk lay on me so thin that the lamplight came through it and drew the shape of my breasts on the wall.

Red. The color of a bride. The color of the thing I had been once, for one night, before I learned what I had married.

The street below was empty. The paan-wallah's shutter was down. Somewhere a dog worried at something in the gutter, and the fan turned overhead with its old wobble — tik, tik, tik — the wobble Sandip had promised to fix in the second year of our marriage and had not fixed, and would not fix now, because Sandip was not here. The front room was empty. His slippers were gone from beside the door. The ledger was gone from the table. He had taken nothing else — not the shirt on the hook, not his razor, not the photograph of his mother in the tin frame — just his slippers and his feet and whatever was left of the man who had stood in my doorway with one shoe in each of two lives and could not make the last step.

I put my hand on my belly.

Low, under the navel, where the silk pulled tight. There was nothing to feel. There was never anything to feel this early — I knew that, I had listened to the women at the wedding talk, I had counted the days in my head at three in the morning like a woman counting coins. But the weight was there anyway. Not a child's weight. The weight of a question that had already been answered and would not stop being answered.

Twice. He had put it in me twice.

The sindoor was still in my part. I had not washed it out. It sat there in the lamplight, that thin red line Sandip had drawn on our wedding morning with his thumb shaking so badly he had to do it twice, and I had worn it every day for seven years without thinking about it, the way you wear your own skin. I looked at myself in the dark glass of the window and the line was there, and under it my face, and I did not know the woman looking back.

The door opened without a knock.

I did not turn. I knew the sound — the weight of the hand, the way the hinge gave all at once because he did not bother to ease it. He filled the frame the way water fills a vessel, all of him, the shoulders and the beard and the smell of him coming across the room ahead of his feet. The lamp threw his shadow up the wall and it swallowed mine.

"You are wearing red," Abdul said.

"It was in the almirah."

"Sandip's."

"Yes."

He came across the room. I heard the floorboards take him, one after another, and I kept my eyes on the glass, on the two of us in it, his shape rising behind my shoulder, and I did not move because moving would have been a kind of answer and I did not know yet which one. His hand found my wrist. Not hard. Just sure. The way a man takes hold of a thing that is already his and only needs to be reminded.

"Abdul—"

"Be quiet."

His other hand came up and his thumb found my part. I felt the pad of it, the callus on it, press down at the hairline and drag — slow, deliberate, from the parting to the temple — and the sindoor came away on his skin in a red smear. He held the thumb up between us where I could see it in the glass, and then he wiped it on the silk over my breast, leaving a red streak across the bodice like a wound.

"You have no need for these now," he said.

"That is not for you to say."

His fingers found the mangalsutra. The black beads Sandip had tied around my neck at the wedding, the gold pendant that had hung between my breasts for seven years and never once been taken off — not for bathing, not for sleep, not for the hospital when I had the fever in the third year and the nurse asked me to remove it and I had said no. Abdul gathered the strand in his fist and pulled. The string did not break at once. It bit into the back of my neck, and I made a sound, and then it gave, and the beads went everywhere — across the floor, under the bed, into the corner by the almirah, small black seeds scattering into the dark, and the pendant swung from his fist and he opened his hand and let it fall.

"No," I said.

One word. It came out of me thin.

"He is gone," Abdul said. "You saw him go. He stood in the door and he could not choose, and a man who cannot choose is already gone. You want me to say it kindly? There is no kindly. He is gone."

"He will come back."

"He will not."

"He will come back for the shop. For the ledger. For—"

"For you?" Abdul said it without cruelty, which was worse. He said it the way you tell a child the dog is dead. "Kamala. He watched me take you twice and he did not move his feet. What is he coming back for?"

His hand was already in my hair.

I felt it gather at the back of my skull, the whole weight of my head taken into his palm, and he turned me from the window with it, turned me by the hair until I faced him, and there was no glass between us now, no reflection, just his face close and his breath on my forehead and the smell of him — the beard oil, the tobacco, the deep male heat of him that my body had learned in the dark and had not forgotten. His mouth came down on my throat.

I did not say his name. I want to be honest about that. I did not say his name and I did not say stop. His tongue was on the place under my jaw where the pulse runs, and his teeth closed there, not hard enough to break, hard enough to hold, and my hands — my hands came up and they did not push. They found the front of his kurta and they held on. The silk of the saree was nothing between us. I could feel the heat of his chest through it like a hand held over a flame, and my nipples drew tight against the fabric, and he felt it, he must have felt it, because he made a low sound against my throat that was almost a laugh.

"There," he said into my skin. "You remember."

"I remember nothing."

He lifted his head and looked at me. The lamp was behind him and his face was all shadow and beard and the shine of his eyes, and he smiled the way he had smiled at the table that first night, the smile of a man who has already read the last page.

"Then I will remind you," he said.

He walked me backward to the bed. Not carried — walked, his hand still in my hair, steering me by it, and my feet went because the bed was behind me and there was nowhere else for them to go, and the backs of my knees found the mattress edge and I sat down hard and the silk slid up my thighs. He stood over me. He undid his kurta one button at a time, unhurried, watching me watch him, and when it hung open I saw his chest in the lamplight, the black hair and the muscle and the old scar under the ribs that I had never asked about, and my mouth went dry.

He knelt. He took the pallu of the red saree in both hands and drew it off my shoulder, slowly, the silk hissing across my skin, and then he wound the length of it around his fist and pulled. The saree came off me in strips. He unwound me like a man unwinding a bandage — the pleats at my waist, the fall over my hip, the last of the cloth over my breast — and he did not hurry any of it, and each yard of red silk that came away left me more bare to the lamp, and he looked at every part of me as it appeared, and I lay under his eyes and felt my skin flush from the collarbone down.

When I was naked on the clean sheet he bent and put his mouth on my belly.

Not my breasts. My belly. He bit the soft fold at my side and I jerked, and he laughed against my skin, and then his tongue found the hollow of my navel and went into it. Slow. Circling. The wet heat of it pressed into that small dip in the center of me, and my hips came up off the mattress without my permission, and he caught them with one hand and held them down and kept his tongue working there, in and around and in, and I heard myself make a sound I had not made in seven years of marriage, a sound that came from under my ribs and not from my throat.

"Sandip never did this," he said against my stomach. Not a question.

"No."

"He never put his mouth on you at all."

"No."

"Say it."

"He never put his mouth on me." My voice cracked in the middle and I hated the sound of it and I said it anyway. "Not once. Not in seven years."

Abdul lifted his head and looked up the length of my body at me, and his beard was wet with his own mouth, and he said, "Then you have been starving, and you did not even know the word for it."

He came up over me. His weight settled on the mattress and the whole bed took it, and his hand went between my legs and his fingers found me and there was nothing to find but wet — I was soaked, I had been soaked since his thumb dragged the sindoor from my part, and he felt it and made that low sound again and pushed two fingers into me without ceremony, all the way, and my cunt closed around them like a fist.

"There she is," he said.

He worked his fingers in me — slow, deep, curling, the heel of his hand grinding against my clit with every stroke — and I lay there with my hands above my head on the pillow, the way I had learned to lie last night, the way my body had been taught in one night to lie, and I did not say his name and I did not say stop and I did not say Sandip. I said nothing. I let him open me. His thumb found my clit and pressed and my thighs came together around his wrist and he pushed them apart with his shoulder without breaking his rhythm, and the wet sound of his fingers in me filled the room over the tick of the fan.

"You are going to come on my hand," he said, "and then I am going to fuck you, and you are going to keep your eyes open while I do it."

"Abdul—"

"Eyes open."

I came. It came up through me from where his fingers were and broke across my whole body, and my back arched off the sheet and my mouth opened and no sound came out at all, and he watched my face the entire time, and when the last of it shook through me and I went limp he pulled his fingers out and they were shining and he put them in his own mouth and licked them clean while I watched, which I had not expected, which I could not look away from.

Then he took his cock in his hand and put it against me.

He was thick. I had known that last night and I knew it again now, the blunt head of him pressed to my opening, and he did not push. He held there, just the tip of him in me, and waited, and looked down at my face, and I understood that he was waiting for something and I understood what it was and I gave it to him because there was nothing else left in me to give.

"Do it," I said.

He did it. One long slow stroke, all the way in, until his hips met the backs of my thighs and I felt him bottom out somewhere so deep it took the breath out of me. He held there. He let me feel the whole length of him, the stretch of it, the way my cunt had to give around him, and then he began to move — slow, deep, pulling almost all the way out and pushing back in to the root, and every stroke dragged along something inside me that made my toes curl against the sheet.

"Say it," he said.

"Say what."

"That you want it."

I looked up at him. His beard, his eyes, the sweat starting on his shoulders. The fan ticked. Somewhere below in the street the first cart of the morning went past with its bell, and the day was coming whether I liked it or not, and I was lying under a man who was not my husband with his cock buried to the hilt in me and my husband's wedding saree in strips on the floor, and I did not say his name, I did not say Abdul, I gave him the other thing instead.

"I want it," I said.

He fucked me then. Slow and deep and steady, the whole weight of him driving down, his hand flat on my belly holding me in place, and I wrapped my legs around his back and took every stroke and my cunt clenched around him and would not let him go, and he felt it and groaned through his teeth and went deeper, and the bed knocked against the wall with each thrust, and I did not say his name, and I did not say Sandip's, and the two of them were both in that room and neither of them was in that room and I was alone inside my own body with a man's cock in me and my hand came up and pressed on my own belly over where he was and I felt the pressure of him through the wall of me, and that was when he came.

He pushed in to the root and held and emptied into me. I felt it — the pulse of it, the heat of it, spurt after spurt deep inside where he was pressed, and he stayed there through all of it, his weight on his arms over me, his breath going rough in his chest, and then he came down onto his elbows and his full weight settled onto me and he did not pull out.

We lay like that. His face in my neck, his breath slowing, his cock still inside me, softening now but not gone, and his seed beginning to leak around the base of him and down the crease of me onto the clean sheet I had washed before dawn. The fan turned. His heart beat against my breast and mine beat under his and after a while they found the same rhythm, and I lay there with my eyes on the ceiling and my hand still on my belly and I did not move, because I did not know if moving would be a refusal or a surrender and I had run out of the difference.

"Sandip will come back," I said. To the ceiling. To the fan.

Abdul did not answer. His hand had found my breast and lay there, heavy, thumb resting on the nipple, and his breathing was evening out into sleep, and the light in the window was going from black to the color of old iron, and I knew — the way you know a thing in your body before your mind will say it — that he would harden again inside me before the dawn finished coming. I could feel it already, the first stirring of him in the soft wet of me, the way a sleeper's hand closes on what it holds.

I lay still.

I did not stop him.