I pulled out slowly. The wet drag of it, then the sudden cool of the room on my skin, and then the warmth spreading down the inside of my thigh, thick and unhurried, finding the crease of my leg and pooling there. I did not move. My thighs stayed parted on the sheet, knees fallen open, one arm flung above my head where his hand had pinned it. The fan turned. The light through the curtain was the color of old iron, and it lay across my belly in a band, and I watched the band move as I breathed.

Abdul stood at the side of the bed with his back to me, and I watched the muscles move under the dark skin of his shoulders, the long groove of his spine, the way his ribs lifted and fell. He was breathing hard. I could hear it. He bent and picked up his lungi from the floor where he had dropped it, and the cloth made a soft sound as he shook it out, and then another sound, a single clean snap, as he wound it around his waist and tucked the end. One motion. He did not look at me while he did it.

The seed had reached my knee. I felt it there, a thin warm line, and I did not reach to wipe it. My hand stayed where it was, above my head, fingers curled loose against the pillow. Somewhere in the front room the tap was dripping. I counted four drops before Abdul moved again.

He walked to the almirah. Sandip's almirah. The big dark wooden one in the corner by the window, the one with the brass handles worn bright in the middle where Sandip's hands had gone for seven years, the one Abdul had never once touched in all the months he had come to this flat, and I watched him cross to it and understood what was about to happen before it happened, the way you understand a thing you have already decided not to stop.

His hand went to the handle. He stopped.

"Whose clothes are these?"

He did not turn around. The question came out flat, not curious, the way a man asks a thing he already knows the shape of and wants confirmed.

"Sandip's," I said.

He opened the door. The brass handle clicked, a small hard sound in the quiet, and the door swung out, and I lifted my head from the pillow to see what he was seeing. The top shelf first: the folded shirts, the good ones, the cream one and the pale blue one he wore to weddings, gone. The empty hangers where they had hung, three of them, swinging slightly on the rod, the only things that moved in the still air. The middle shelf: the tin box where Sandip kept his papers, gone. The passport, which had lived under the tin box in its blue plastic cover since the year we married, gone. The bottom shelf: his slippers were not there. His razor was not on the sill where he always left it after shaving, the wet ring it made on the wood already dried to nothing.

Abdul stood in front of the open door for a long time. Long enough that I saw his shoulders settle, the breath go out of him and not come back in the same way. He put one hand flat on the empty shelf and left it there.

"The passport's gone," he said. Still not turning. His voice had changed. It had gone down into his chest somewhere, and it came out slower than before.

"Yes."

"His clothes. The good ones. The papers." He lifted his hand off the shelf and let it fall to his side. "He took the passport, Kamala."

I said nothing. There was nothing in my mouth to say. I lay with my head half-raised off the pillow, my hair stuck to my neck on one side, the seed cooling on my thigh, and I looked at the back of the man who had been inside me four times since the sun went down, and I watched him understand something I had already understood in the dark, alone, with the tap dripping.

He shut the door. He did not take anything out of it. He did not take the cream shirt, or the tin box, or the razor, or anything at all. He just closed the almirah, and the click of it was the same small hard sound as before, and then he turned around, and I saw him full in the iron light.

His cock was still out of his lungi. Half-hard and shining, wet from me, hanging against his thigh where he had not bothered to tuck it away. His chest was slick. His beard was wet at the corners of his mouth from where he had been. He looked at me lying on the sheet with my legs still open and my arm still above my head, and he did not look away from me, and his face was doing something I had not seen it do before.

"He's gone," Abdul said.

"Yes."

"Not coming back." He said it slowly, tasting the words. "Not just this flat. The country."

I turned my face toward the window. The curtain moved a little in the fan's wind, the red silk I had worn and dropped on the floor, and past it the sky was going grey at the edges now, the first thin wash of morning coming up over the roofs. I thought about the passport in its blue plastic cover. I thought about the tin box. I thought about the slippers, which had been by the door for seven years, and the ring of water on the sill from the razor, and how a man could take a passport and a tin box and a pair of slippers and a ledger and leave everything else, his shirts and his photograph and his wife, and be gone in the dark before the tap had finished dripping.

I said nothing.

Abdul walked back to the bed. I heard his feet on the floor, the small give of the old boards, and then the mattress sank at the foot of it, and he sat down on the edge with his back to me, his elbows on his knees. His hand found my ankle. He rested it there, warm and heavy, the fingers wrapping around the bone the way they had wrapped around it all night, and he did not squeeze or move it. He just held it, and looked down at the floor.

The beads were still there. The mangalsutra beads, scattered where he had broken the string off my neck, black and gold, spread across the floor between the bed and the almirah in a wide uneven arc, some of them under the edge of the bed, one of them against the wall, one of them in the thin grey line of light coming under the curtain. I had not picked them up. I had stood over them in the bathwater and looked at them and not picked them up. I was looking at them now, from the bed, with the man's hand on my ankle, and I counted them, or tried to, and lost the count somewhere past twenty.

Abdul looked at them too. I could tell by the angle of his head, the way he had gone still, the way his thumb had stopped moving on my ankle. The fan turned. The tap dripped, four, five drops, and neither of us moved. The seed had dried on my thigh to a thin stiff line. I could feel it pull at the skin when I breathed.

"He signed the ledger," Abdul said at last. Not a question. He was still looking at the beads.

"Yes."

"And he took it with him."

I did not answer that. I had not known he had taken the ledger until this moment, until the words were in the room, and now that they were I lay still and let them sit. The ledger was Abdul's, had always been Abdul's, and Sandip had signed it, and now Sandip had it, and the two facts could not both be true in the same room for long. I watched the back of Abdul's neck, the muscle there, the way it had gone tight.

"He called me a pathetic ugly Muslim," Abdul said. His voice was very quiet. "In my own house. In your house. In front of you." His thumb moved on my ankle, one slow stroke, and stopped. "And then he took the passport and the ledger and walked out the door in his slippers."

I turned my head on the pillow and looked at him. He was not looking at me. He was looking at the floor, at the beads, at the place where the string had broken, and his jaw was working the way it worked when he was thinking, and I saw for the first time since I had known him that he did not know what to do next. The big man. The man with the strong body and the easy women and the ledger that was always his. Sitting on the edge of my marriage bed with his cock still wet from me and his hand on my ankle and his face turned away, not knowing what to do next.

The thought did something to me that I did not expect. It was not triumph. It was not even pleasure, though my body was still loose and warm and open on the sheet, still answering to the shape of him. It was something smaller and stranger, a kind of recognition, the way you recognize your own face in a window at night when you had forgotten you were there.

I pulled my ankle out of his hand. Slowly, without hurry. I drew my knees together and rolled onto my side, away from him, and the sheet came up with me and bunched at my hip, and I lay with my back to him and my hand under my cheek and looked at the wall.

Behind me, Abdul did not move. I heard him breathe. I heard the fan. I heard the tap, and I counted the drips without meaning to, the way I had counted them in the kitchen in the dark, seven, eight, nine, and somewhere past ten I stopped counting and just listened to the sound and let it fill the room.

"Kamala."

I did not turn.

"He's not coming back."

"I know," I said, to the wall.

The word came out of me without weight, and I heard it land in the room and lie there, and I felt Abdul's silence gather behind me, thick and waiting, the way a man's silence gathers when he wants you to say more and you have decided not to. My hand lay flat on the sheet under my cheek. My other hand had found my belly, low, where the band of light had lain across it, and I pressed it there without thinking, the way I had pressed it in the bathwater, and felt nothing under my palm but my own warmth and the slow steady nothing of my body going on being my body.

Three days. I had counted it wrong by three days, and the child was already there before he ever came up the stairs, and I had let him believe he had made it, had said you did it with his seed still running out of me, and I was not sorry. I lay with my hand on my belly and my eyes open in the grey light and I was not sorry, and I was not sure what I was, and the fan turned and the tap dripped and the beads lay scattered on the floor where neither of us had picked them up.

Abdul's hand came back to my ankle. He did not pull me toward him. He just rested it there again, the same warm heavy weight, and I let it stay, and neither of us said anything, and the morning came up slowly through the red silk at the window and made the room the color of old iron, and the question neither of us had asked hung in the air between us, and waited.

Abdul's hand came back to her ankle. He did not pull her toward him. He just rested it there again, the same warm heavy weight, and she let it stay, and neither of them said anything, and the morning came up slowly through the red silk at the window and made the room the color of old iron, and the question neither of them had asked hung in the air between them, and waited.