She had changed the sheet.

That was the first thing she had done, before the saree, before the window — she had stripped the ruined one from the mattress and carried it through the dark flat to the bucket on the back veranda, the way she had carried it a thousand times in seven years, except that her hands had shaken on the cotton and she had stood over the bucket for a long time without putting it in the water. In the end she had folded it, wet corner to dry corner, and left it on the veranda rail where the pigeons would not go. She could not wash it. She did not know yet what it was. It was evidence, or it was a relic, or it was nothing — a rag for the sweeper — and whichever it was, she was not ready to put her hands in the water with it.

So there was a clean sheet on the bed now, white, drawn tight at the corners, and the mattress underneath still held the smell. She had pressed her palm flat on it and felt the cold of the cotton and the heat of the memory underneath, the two of them layered like that, and she had lifted her hand and gone to the cupboard.

The red saree was at the bottom, in the plastic the shop had wrapped it in, the fold still crisp. Sandip had bought it the week before their wedding. She remembered the shop — the man had unrolled it on the counter and the silk had caught the tube light and gone the colour of a coal at the bottom of a fire, and Sandip, who never spent, had counted out the notes without asking the price. She had worn it once. The wedding sari had been her mother's, and the red one had gone back into the plastic because it was too fine for a Tuesday, too fine for a rice-and-dal evening, too fine for anything they had ever been. Seven years in plastic. The folds had taken a shine.

She had put it on in the dark with the lamp off, which was ridiculous, because the room was empty and there was no one to see her and no one to hide from, and she had done it anyway — slid the blouse over her shoulders, wrapped the silk at her waist an inch below her navel the way she always wore it, tucked the pallu over her left arm. Then she had turned the lamp on.

It was not a sari for a room with a lamp in it. The silk was thin — she had not remembered it being thin, but it was, thin as a rupee note, and the light went through it and came out the other side with her skin on it. Her arms showed through the sleeves. The line of her belly showed through the waist, the little hollow of her navel a shadow under the weave. Her breasts, heavier than they had been when the sari was bought, pulled the blouse into a shape the tailor had never intended, and the light sat on the slope of them like water on a stone. The nipples stood dark through both layers, the way they did when the room was cold, and the room was not cold.

She stood at the window with her arms crossed under her breasts and looked out at the city.

It was late. Two in the morning, maybe later — she had stopped counting. The street below was empty except for a dog asleep against the tyre of a parked Ambassador, and beyond the roofs the sodium lights of the main road lay in a long orange wound across the dark. Somewhere a radio was playing, too far to hear the words. Somewhere a tap was dripping, not hers. The city was full of people sleeping beside people, and none of them were in this room.

Her hand went to her belly.

She did it without deciding to. The palm lay flat below her navel, over the silk, over the skin, over the place where Abdul had put his seed twice in one night, and she stood there with her hand on it and hated it. Hated the weight — which was not a weight, not yet, probably nothing at all, probably just the heaviness that comes after a night like that, the body still swollen and full of what had been done to it — and hated that her hand had gone there by itself, the way a tongue goes to a broken tooth. Twice. He had finished inside her twice, and the second time she had lifted her hips to meet him, and she had not asked him to stop, and she had not wanted him to stop. If there was a child, it had been made in the second hour of that night, and she had made it with her hips as much as he had made it with his cock, and there was no version of the story in which she was a woman who had been taken.

She pressed harder. Under the silk, under the flesh, something that would not answer. She had wanted this. That was the thing she could not get out from under. She had said it out loud, in front of both of them, with her thighs still open — I choose the child — and the words had come out of her mouth the way the wedding sari had gone back into the plastic, easily, as if she had known all along which one to keep. She had spent seven years being a wife the way you spend seven years on a veranda, and now she was standing in a red saree at two in the morning with her hand on a belly that might already be a stranger's, and she could not tell whether she was mourning or waiting.

Her other hand went to her throat.

The mangalsutra was still there. The black beads, the gold pendant, the thin string that had been tied at her neck when she was eighteen and had not come off since — not for a bath, not for a fever, not for the two nights Abdul had had her. Her fingers found the pendant and turned it. The gold was warm, the way gold is, which meant nothing; it had been against her skin for seven years and had taken the temperature of her like everything else in this flat. She held it and looked at the window and saw her own reflection in the glass, thin and red and doubled by the dark behind it, and thought, with a clarity that felt like nausea, that she had not taken it off because taking it off would have meant deciding, and she had spent the whole of last night deciding, and she was tired of it.

The sindoor was gone. She had noticed that in the bathroom, an hour ago — the part in her hair, the red line Sandip had drawn there every morning of their marriage with the tip of his little finger, the one ritual he never forgot, and it was smeared now and half-rubbed and there was a rust-coloured stain on the pillow where her head had lain. She had looked at it in the mirror and had not washed it clean and had not drawn it again. She had come out of the bathroom with her hair parted the way a widow parts it, and she had put on the red saree, and she understood, dimly, that she had dressed herself for something and had not yet decided what.

The dog in the street lifted its head, looked at nothing, and put it down again.

She heard the door.

Not the knock — there was no knock. The front door of the flat had a bolt that stuck, and she heard the bolt go, the particular scrape it made when someone put weight on it, and then the hinge, and then the door closing, and then, in the front room, the sound of a big man breathing after a flight of stairs.

She did not turn from the window. She stood with her hand on the mangalsutra and her palm still warm on her belly and watched his reflection come into the glass behind her, small at first, a bulk in the doorway of the bedroom, then larger, until he filled the frame the way he had filled it last night and the night before that and every night since the first evening he had sat at their table with a bottle of beer and looked at her over the rim.

Abdul did not say anything.

He had changed his shirt. That was the only thing she could read in the glass — a clean white kurta, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the fabric stretched across his shoulders, and the beard freshly combed, and he smelled of soap and cigarettes and the outside air, and he was looking at her back the way a man looks at a door he has already decided to open. She watched his reflection take her in — the red silk, the light through it, the line of her spine, the pallu over her arm, the hand at her throat — and she saw his jaw move once, and she knew, with the flat certainty of a woman who has been looked at this way her whole life, exactly what was about to happen, and did nothing to stop it.

"The light is on," he said.

"Yes."

"You left it on for me."

She turned around then. It was the wrong thing to do — she knew it as soon as the silk moved on her breasts and his eyes followed it down and stopped at her waist and then went lower, to the hollow of her navel showing through the weave, and stayed there — but she turned, and she faced him, and she let him look, because she had put the saree on in the dark and turned the lamp on, and there was no lie she could tell about that.

"I left it on because I could not sleep," she said. "Not for you."

Abdul came into the room. He did it slowly, the way he did everything, one step and then another, his weight settling on the floorboards so that she felt them through her bare feet, and he stopped when he was close enough that she had to lift her chin to keep his face, and he looked down at her with the same expression he had worn at the table the first night — patient, amused, and underneath the amusement something that had not been amused at all.

"You are wearing your wedding sari," he said.

"It was in the cupboard."

"It is very thin."

"It is old."

"It is thin," he said again, "and you have put it on at two in the morning, and you are standing at the window in it, and you have not gone to your mother's house, and you have not bolted the door, and you have not put out the light." He tilted his head. "So we will not waste the night pretending, Kamala. You knew I would come. You left the door for me."

Her mouth was dry. She said, "Sandip will come back."

Abdul's hand came up and caught her wrist.

It was not rough — that was the thing she would remember later, it was not rough at all. His fingers closed around her wrist the way you close a hand around a bird you do not intend to hurt, and he lifted her arm away from her throat, and her hand came up with it, and the mangalsutra swung free in the lamplight between them, black beads and gold, seven years of it, and Abdul looked at it the way a man looks at a bill he has already paid.

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

His thumb found the part in her hair.

She felt it — the broad pad of it, warm and slightly rough, tracing the line from her forehead back over her crown where Sandip had drawn the sindoor every morning with the tip of his little finger, and she stood very still while he did it, and when he took his hand away she knew without looking that the last of it was gone, that whatever had been left of the red was on his thumb now, and that he would wipe it on something and it would not come back. She had not drawn it herself in seven years. It had always been his hand, Sandip's hand, and now it was on Abdul's thumb, and her scalp was cold where the line had been.

"Don't," she said.

He took the mangalsutra in his fist.

She felt the string bite into the back of her neck, and she heard it — a small sound, cotton giving, the sound a thread makes when it is asked for more than it has — and then the beads were falling, black and gold and black, pattering on the floorboards around her feet, rolling into the corners, under the bed, one of them stopping against the toe of his shoe. The pendant hung in his fist. He opened his fingers and let it drop, and it landed among the rest with a flat click and lay there in the lamplight, a small gold thing on the floor of her bedroom, and it looked exactly like what it was, which was a piece of metal.

"There," Abdul said. "Now you are dressed for me."

Her hand went to her throat, where the string had been, and found nothing. The skin was bare and slightly sore and she pressed it and felt her own pulse under her fingers, fast, and she said, "Sandip will come back."

It came out smaller the second time.

Abdul's hand went into her hair.

He gathered it at the back of her head, not hard, and tilted her face up, and her scalp pulled, and she made a sound that was not a word, and then his mouth was on her throat.

Her body remembered before she did.

That was the truth of it — she would think about it afterward, in the grey time before the light, and she would not be able to find the moment where she had decided — because there was no moment. His mouth opened on the side of her neck, on the place below her ear that had gone untouched for seven years and had been touched twice last night, and her body answered the way a lock answers a key it has already been turned with. Her head fell back into his hand. Her shoulders came down. The breath she had been holding since the front door opened went out of her in a long sound, and her hands, which had been hanging at her sides, came up and found the front of his kurta and held it, and she did not push him away and she did not pull him in and she stood there gripping his shirt while his beard scraped her jaw and his teeth closed on the tendon in her neck, and she heard herself say his name.

Not Sandip's.

"Abdul—"

He lifted his head. His eyes were very close and very dark and there was something in them that had nothing to do with patience now.

"Say it again," he said.

She did not. She held his shirt and breathed and looked at the place where his beard had been on her throat and said nothing, and he smiled, and it was not a kind smile, and he took the pallu of her saree in his free hand and pulled it off her shoulder and let it fall.

The silk went down her arm and landed on the broken beads. The blouse underneath was the wedding blouse, the one that matched the saree, low at the neck and short at the waist and so thin that the light went through it the way it had gone through the sari, and her breasts moved under it when she breathed, and Abdul looked at them the way a man looks at water after a long walk.

"Bed," he said.

She walked backward to it because his hand was still in her hair and he was walking forward, and the backs of her knees found the mattress and she sat down on the clean white sheet with her arms at her sides, and Abdul stood over her and undid his kurta from the bottom up, one button at a time, not hurrying, and she watched his chest come out of the cotton — the breadth of it, the hair, the old scar under his left nipple that she had never asked about and never would — and she understood that she was going to let him, that she had known it at the window with her hand on her belly, and that the only thing left was to find out what she would be on the other side of it.

He knelt on the bed and put her on her back.

He took the saree off her in strips.

Not all at once — he unwound it, the way you unwind a bandage, a turn at a time, and every turn of silk that came off her hips he laid aside on the bed and looked at what it had been covering. When the last of it was gone he hooked his thumb in the waist of her blouse and pulled it up over her ribs and over her breasts and over her head, and then she was lying on the clean sheet in only her petticoat with the lamp on and the fan turning above her and a man who was not her husband kneeling over her, and she crossed her arms over her breasts by reflex and he took her wrists and moved them away and held them above her head in one hand, and looked down at her the way he had looked at her at the table, and she lay there and let him.

"Last night," he said, "you were shy. Tonight you put on a saree and left the light on."

"I told you why."

"You told me a lie." He lowered his head and put his mouth on the top of her breast, on the white slope above the areola, and she felt his beard and his breath and the wet of his tongue, and her back arched off the sheet before she could stop it. "You can lie to your husband, Kamala. He has no ear for it. I have an ear for it."

He took her nipple in his mouth and sucked.

She had fed no children. Her breasts were the breasts of a woman who had been married seven years and touched by one man, and Sandip had touched them the way he touched everything — carefully, briefly, as if they might break — and no one had ever put a mouth on them and pulled, and Abdul pulled, and something went down from her nipple to her cunt like a wire pulled taut. She heard herself make a long sound and she felt her hips come up off the mattress and she felt the wet of her own cunt against the inside of her thighs, and she turned her face away and pressed it into her own raised arm and let him do it.

He did it for a long time.

First the left, then the right, wet and rough and patient, and between them he kissed the underside of each breast and the dip at the bottom of her ribs, and she lay with her wrists in his hand above her head and her legs moving on the sheet and her breath coming in pieces, and she thought, once, of the wedding night, of Sandip's hand hovering over her in the dark and asking, and she pushed the thought away and it came back and she pushed it away again.

He let go of her wrists and put his mouth on her belly.

He bit her above the navel — not hard enough to break the skin, hard enough to leave the mark, and she gasped and her hands came down and found his head and did not push it away. Then his tongue found her navel.

She had never known.

No one had ever put a tongue in the hollow of her navel, and she had not known it was a place that could be done to, and Abdul did it slowly, the point of his tongue tracing the rim and then dipping in and then pulling at the little knot of skin at the bottom, and her hips came up off the bed in a slow roll and her heels dug into the sheet and she heard a sound come out of her that she had never made in this room, a thin high sound like the beginning of a word, and he did it again, and again, until she was holding his head with both hands and her thighs were shaking and the wet had gone through the petticoat and onto the clean white sheet.

He sat up and pulled the petticoat down her legs and off.

Then he looked at her — all of her, spread on the wedding sheet in the wedding room under the wedding fan — and she lay there with her knees together and her arms at her sides and let him, and his eyes went from her face to her breasts to the mark he had left above her navel to the dark between her thighs, and he said, in a voice that had gone low and rough, "You are a beautiful woman, Kamala. Your husband is a fool."

"He is not," she said.

"He is a fool," Abdul said, "and I am not going to be one."

He put his knee between hers and opened her.

She felt the head of his cock against her — blunt, hot, sliding in her own wet — and she looked up at the ceiling and at the wobbling fan and at the shadow of it turning on the wall, and she said, quietly, "No."

Abdul pushed in.

She had known the stretch from last night. She had not known that it would be like this the second time, with the lamp on and the sheet clean and her wedding sari in a heap on the floor and her mangalsutra scattered under the bed, and she felt him go into her an inch at a time, the whole length of him, until the hair at the base of him was against her and she was full in a way that made her want to cry and made her want to laugh, and her cunt closed around him and held him, and she did not say his name and her body said it for her.

"There," Abdul said. "You see."

He began to move.

Slow, deep, all the way out and all the way back, the way he had done it last night, except that last night there had been Sandip in the other room and her own voice in her ears saying the bargain out loud, and tonight there was nothing but the two of them and the lamp and the clean sheet, and she found herself meeting him, her hips coming up to take him, and she hated it and did it anyway. He put his hand flat on her belly, over the place where her own hand had lain at the window, and pressed down, and she felt the pressure of him inside her from the outside as well, and she made a sound and turned her face into the pillow.

"No," he said, and caught her chin and turned her back. "You look at me."

She looked at him.

He fucked her like that, slow and deep with his hand on her belly and his eyes on her face, for a long time — longer than she wanted, longer than she could stand, until the slow had built something in her that had nowhere to go and she was gripping the sheet on either side of her hips and her breath was coming out of her in time with him. Then he moved his hand down, his thumb found her clit, wet and swollen and slick from everything he had already done to her, and he rubbed it in a slow circle while he fucked her, and it took very little.

Her cunt clenched around him.

She came with her teeth in her own lip and her eyes open and her hands full of the clean sheet, and she did not say his name — she did not say any name, she made a sound that was not a word, and her thighs closed around his hips and her heels locked behind his back, and Abdul watched her do it with his thumb still moving, and when she was finished and shaking he took his hand away and put both hands under her hips and pulled her up onto him and finished.

He did it with his head thrown back and his jaw tight and no sound at all, and she felt him come — the pulse of it, deep, against the place where he had pressed his hand, again and again, and the heat of it spreading inside her — and she lay under him with her legs around him and let him, and when he was done he did not pull out.

He lowered his weight onto her.

He was heavy. She could barely breathe under him, his chest on her breasts and his beard in her neck and his cock still inside her, softening now but not gone, and his breathing slowed against her ear, and the fan turned, and the lamp burned on, and the beads of her mangalsutra lay scattered on the floor where no one would see them until morning.

She lifted one hand and put it on his back.

She did not know why. She did it anyway, and lay there under him with her hand on his back and her belly full of him and her throat bare, and looked past his shoulder at the window, at the dark glass, at the city out there sleeping beside itself, and waited for something to come — grief, or shame, or the clean hot anger she had felt at the table when she read the ledger — and nothing came. There was only the weight of him and the smell of him and the small, unfamiliar, unbearable quiet of a room in which she had done exactly what she wanted.

After a while, he moved inside her.

She felt it begin — the slow return of him, the thickening, the press against the walls of her cunt where he was still buried to the root — and she understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with the lamp or the window or the hour, that he was not finished with her, and that he would not be finished with her, and that the night had a long way left to run.

Abdul lifted his head and looked at her.

"Again," he said.

It was not a question. He pulled back until only the head of him was still inside her, and then pushed back in, slow, and her body opened for him the way it had opened for him the first time and the second time and would open for him now, and she felt her own hips tilt to take him deeper before she had decided anything, and she closed her eyes and put her arms around his neck and held on.

Outside, the dog in the street got up and shook itself and lay down again in the dark.