The water ran cold before she stepped out of it, and she did not care. She stood on the wet cement of the bathroom floor with her hair streaming down her back and looked at herself in the small mirror above the tap, the one her mother had left, the one with the crack down the left side like a river on a map. Her breasts hung heavy, fuller than they had been a month ago, the nipples dark and wide, and below them her waist curved in and then out again to the flare of her hips. She turned sideways. The swell of her belly was soft, the way a woman's belly is soft, and her thighs touched when she stood with her feet together. She put her palm flat on her stomach and pressed, and felt the muscle under the softness, and smiled at herself in the cracked mirror with her wet hair stuck to her neck.

"Look at you," she said, out loud, to the woman in the glass. Her voice came out low and pleased. "Look at what you did."

She had done it. Two years of pills swallowed in secret, of watching her shoulders narrow and her chest ache and her hips spread under her father's old kurtas until the kurtas stopped fitting right, until she had to steal one of her mother's blouses and pin it at the back. Two years of hiding the foil strips in the hollow of the wardrobe behind the shoes, of counting the days between doses like a woman counting her cycle. And now her body was a woman's body, and last night her husband had put his mouth on her breast and his hand on her hip and said my wife into the dark, and she had felt it land somewhere deep and permanent, like a stamp on wet wax.

She dried herself with the towel her mother had left, the good one, the one with the embroidered border. She dried her hair first, squeezing the water out in handfuls, then wrapped the towel around her head and dried her body slowly, patting under her breasts where the skin was damp and warm, down her stomach, between her thighs. She was still a little sore from last night. Not badly. Just enough to remember. She touched herself there, once, with two fingers, and felt the tenderness and the small ache of it, and her breath caught, and she took her hand away and smiled at the mirror again.

She had work to do.

The bedroom smelled of last night. The lamp was off now, the morning light coming in grey and flat through the window, and the sheet was still on the bed with the red stain under where her hip had been. Her husband was gone. She had heard him leave before the light, heard the front door click, heard his sandals on the steps. He had not woken her. He had not said goodbye. But he had folded the corner of the sheet over the stain before he went, which was a kind of goodbye, and she had lain still and listened to him do it and kept her eyes closed so he would not have to know she had seen.

She pulled the sheet off the bed and bundled it into the corner by the door. She would wash it later. She would wash the sari too, the ruined one in the bathroom, before the light got strong and the neighbours started moving. But first, this.

She sat down at her mother's vanity.

It was a small thing, three feet wide, with a mirror in a wooden frame and a single drawer that stuck. Her mother had left it when she left, along with the wardrobe and the jewellery and the bangles and the shoes. She had left everything except her heels, which she had carried in her hand, and her handbag, and whatever she had been wearing. She had left the sindur box too, the lacquered one, which was still tipped over on the floor by the bed with the red powder spilled out of it onto the boards. Nisha looked at it for a moment. Then she looked away, and opened the drawer of the vanity, and took out what she needed.

The foundation first. She had learned it from YouTube, in the early days, before she had learned it from her own face. She dotted it on her forehead and both cheeks and her chin and the bridge of her nose, and then she blended it with the sponge, working it in until her skin was even and smooth and slightly matte, the way her mother's skin had always looked. Her mother had never gone out without foundation. Her mother had said once, in the kitchen, that a woman's face was her shopfront, and you did not open a shopfront with the shutters half down. Nisha had been twelve. She had not understood then. She understood now.

Concealer under the eyes. Her husband had not slept much, and neither had she, and there were shadows under her eyes the colour of old tea. She patted them out. Powder next, pressed in with the puff, so the shine went away. Then the eyebrows, filled in with a pencil, arched and dark. Then the kohl, drawn along the lower lash line and flicked up at the outer corner, which was her mother's trick, and which made her eyes look larger and older and a little cruel. Then the liner, black and wet, steady, because she had practised this a hundred times and her hand did not shake.

Her nose ring was already in. She had not taken it out since the night she put it in. She touched it now with the tip of her finger, the small gold hoop, and felt the weight of it, and the slight pinch of the piercing that had not quite healed. She had done it herself with a needle and ice, sitting on this same floor, and she had not cried, and the next morning she had looked in the mirror and seen a girl.

The earrings next. Gold, dangling, her mother's, with a small red stone at the bottom of each. She hooked them in and shook her head a little to feel them swing. The lipstick last. A deep red, darker than her mother's usual, because she was a wife now and not a girl, and a wife's mouth should be a statement. She painted it on carefully, pressing her lips together, blotting with a tissue, painting again. When she was done she leaned back and looked at herself in the mirror and did not smile, because smiling would have ruined it, and because she did not need to smile to know.

She was beautiful. She was a woman. She was somebody's wife.

She stood up and went to the wardrobe and opened it and looked at her mother's clothes hanging in a row, and chose the black one. A thin salwar suit, the fabric almost transparent, the kind of thing her mother had worn on hot evenings when the electricity was out and the men in the lane had looked at her and looked away. The top was long, to the knee, with a deep neckline and small gold buttons down the front. The salwar was wide and loose. She laid them on the bed and then went to the drawer and took out the black push-up bra, the one with the lace along the cups, and the matching panty, black and thin and cut high on the hip.

She put the panty on first, sliding it up her legs, feeling the elastic settle against her hips. Then the bra. She leaned forward to get her breasts into the cups, one at a time, and then she stood up and hooked it at the back and adjusted the straps and looked down at herself. The cups pushed her breasts up and together and made a deep line between them, and the lace was dark against her skin, and she could see her own nipples through the fabric, small and hard, because the room was cold and because she was thinking about her husband's mouth.

Then the salwar. Then the top. The top was loose enough to hide the shape of her body when she stood straight, but when she moved, when she turned, the fabric pulled across her breasts and clung to her waist, and the line of the bra showed through. She buttoned it up to the third button and left the top two open, so that the hollow of her throat and the top of her breasts were bare. She looked at herself in the vanity mirror one more time and turned a little, side to side, and watched the black fabric move over her hips.

The towel was still wrapped around her head, damp and heavy. She had been wearing it since the bathroom. She needed to dry her hair, properly, in the sun, and the sun was out now, and the roof was empty this time of morning, and she had not been up there in weeks, not since before.

She went up.

The stairs were narrow and dark, and the door at the top was warped and stuck, and she had to put her shoulder into it, and when it gave the sunlight hit her all at once, white and cold and bright. She stepped out onto the tar paper and the grit bit into the soles of her feet, warm from the sun even in winter, and she stood there a moment and breathed in. The air was sharp and dry and smelled of cooling asphalt and, far off, of somebody's cooking, somebody's onions frying in oil. Below, the lane was quiet. A dog lay in the middle of the road, and a boy went past on a bicycle, and the traffic hummed somewhere beyond, on the main road, a low continuous sound like a held note. She could see the water tank on the Sharmas' roof, and the washing line strung across it, and a few shirts hanging limp in the still air.

She walked to the middle of the roof, where the sun was strongest, and stood with her back to the parapet. Then she reached up and unwrapped the towel from her head and let her hair fall.

It came down in a heavy wet curtain, all the way to her waist, and the weight of it pulled at her scalp and sent a small cold trickle of water down the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades. She shook her head, slowly at first, then harder, and the wet strands swung out and slapped against her arms and her back and the sides of her face, and the water flew off them in fine drops that caught the light. She shook again, and again, until the hair was loose and separated, and then she stood still and let it hang, and felt the cold of it against her shoulders, and the sun on her face.

She had brought the brush up with her. She picked it up off the parapet where she had set it and began to brush, starting at the ends and working up, the way her mother had taught her, long slow strokes, one section at a time. The bristles dragged through the wet strands and straightened them and the water ran down the handle and onto her wrist. She brushed and brushed and the hair got smoother and heavier and began to shine in the sun, and she turned her head a little to one side and then the other, watching the length of it swing.

She was so busy with her hair that she did not see him at first.

When she did, it was because she had turned to brush the back, and her eyes came up, and there he was, on the Sharmas' roof, across the narrow gap between the two buildings, standing at the parapet with a book in his hand.

He was young. Eighteen, maybe, or nineteen. Mrs. Sharma's son, the one who had been away at college and come back for the winter, the one she had seen once or twice in the lane and never spoken to. He was tall and thin and his hair was too long and fell into his eyes, and he was wearing a grey sweater with the sleeves pushed up and a pair of old jeans, and he was standing very still, and he was looking at her.

Their eyes met.

She did not look away. She had planned this, in a way. She had known she might be seen up here. She had put on the black suit and the push-up bra and the red lipstick, and she had come up to the roof in the sun, and if she had not exactly planned for the neighbour's son to be standing there with a book in his hand, she had planned for something.

He did not look away either.

She turned back to her hair and kept brushing, but slower now, and she was aware of every movement she made, aware of the way her arm lifted, aware of the way her breasts moved under the thin black fabric, aware of the line of her back and the curve of her hip and the wet weight of her hair falling down past her waist. She brushed the same section three times without meaning to. She could feel him watching her, the way you can feel the sun on the back of your neck, and her skin went warm in a way that had nothing to do with the winter light.

She glanced over. He was still there. Still looking. And now, as she watched, he lifted the book a little, as if he were reading it, and she saw — and something in her chest turned over, small and sharp — that the book was upside down.

He was not reading. He was pretending to read, so that he would have an excuse to keep standing there.

She felt her mouth want to smile and she did not let it, not yet. She turned back to her hair and brushed it out and then, slowly, she gathered it up off her neck with both hands and lifted it, and held it up, and let the cool air get to the damp skin at the nape of her neck. It was a small thing. It was nothing. It was the kind of thing a woman did when her hair was heavy and the sun was warm and she was not thinking about who might be watching.

She was thinking about who was watching.

She let the hair fall and turned, unhurried, and looked at him again, and this time she did not look away, and neither did he, and the silence between the two roofs went tight and bright, and the traffic hummed somewhere far off, and the dog in the lane did not bark, and the washing on the Sharmas' line hung without moving in the still air.

He said something, then. She could not hear it — the gap between the roofs was too wide for a voice at that volume — but she saw his lips move, and she saw the shape of it, and it might have been hello and it might have been something else.

She smiled.

It was not a big smile. It was a small one, just the corner of her mouth, the way her mother used to smile at men in the market when she wanted them to look and did not want them to think she had asked them to. And she saw it land on him, saw the way his whole face changed, saw him straighten up off the parapet and take half a step forward and then stop, the book still upside down in his hand, and she felt the small hot thing in her chest turn over again and settle, and she knew, with a certainty that went all the way down to her feet on the warm tar, that something had just begun.

She looked at him a moment longer. Then she turned back to the sun and lifted the brush and drew it through her hair again, one slow stroke, and let him watch.