Morning came gray and cold through the slatted window, and Nisha woke with her hand already on her own breast, cupping it like something she was afraid might have been taken back in the night. The room smelled of last night — of the sheet, of him, of the lemon polish he rubbed into the wood on Sundays. She lay still for a long moment and listened. The house was quiet. No kettle. No radio. Just the far-off clatter of a hand-cart in the lane and, somewhere below, the wet slap of Mrs. Sharma beating her washing against the stone.

She sat up. The sheet slid off her and she looked down at herself in the flat winter light, and something in her chest — the small hot thing that had turned over on the roof yesterday — turned over again, slower this time, deeper.

Her breasts. They had been swollen for days now, tender in a way that made her catch her breath when she turned too fast, and this morning they sat heavy and full and round on her chest, the nipples dark and tight from the cold, the undersides curving like the mangoes her mother used to bring home in June. She lifted one in her palm and weighed it. Thirty-six inches of her own flesh. Her body had been building this for two years, one small white pill at a time, and last night a man had put his mouth on it and called her his wife.

She pushed the sheet back the rest of the way and looked at her hips. Wide. Rounded. The bones had spread under the hormones until her waist pinched in above them like the neck of a pot, and she ran both hands down the flare of them, over the smooth hairless skin where a boy's body would have been all corners. There was nothing boyish left in the shape of her. Nothing soft and unfinished. She was a woman in the morning, alone with herself, and she smiled at the ceiling — a real smile, not the small market one — and the smile hurt her face a little because she had not used it in so long.

He had folded the corner of the sheet over the red stain before he left. She saw it now, the neat triangle of white cotton turned back over the sindur mark, and she touched it with two fingers, the way you touch a thing that has been done carefully for you. He had not woken her. He had gone to open the shop, and he had folded the stain away so no one in the house would see it, and that — more than anything he had said in the dark — was the thing she held.

She got up. Her thighs ached when she stood, a deep bruised ache low in her belly and behind, and she pressed her hand flat against her lower stomach and felt it and did not mind it. It was the ache of a wife. It was the ache of a body that had been used and kept.

The bathroom was cold. The bucket of water had a skin of chill on the top and she broke it with her hand and gasped, and then she took the mug and poured, and poured again, and the cold woke every inch of her. She soaped her arms, her underarms, the long stretch of her legs, and then she stood and let the cold water run down her chest and over the heavy swing of her breasts, and she watched the water bead and roll off the tight dark nipples and thought — I am washing a woman's body. That is what this is. And the thought made her pour the next mug slower, just to feel it.

She washed between her legs last, carefully, with the soft cloth, and she did not look down at what was there. She had made a rule of it. Her hand knew the shape of everything — the folds, the small soft thing tucked back and out of the way, the place behind where he had been — and her hand did not need her eyes to confirm what she already knew about herself. She rinsed, and wrung the cloth, and stepped out onto the wet floor.

The shampoo bottle was her mother's, left on the ledge two years ago, half-empty and thick with dust on the cap. She wiped the cap with her thumb and squeezed a pale rope of it into her palm and worked it into her scalp, and the smell came up — jasmine and something chemical underneath, the exact smell of her mother's hair on the mornings after she had washed it, when she would sit at the vanity and Nisha — Nidha, then — would sit on the floor behind her and watch her brush it out. Two years of dust and the smell was still the same. She worked it in slowly, all the way down the roots, and then the conditioner, cold and slick, and she combed her fingers through the wet weight of it until it hung down her back in one long shining rope to her waist.

When she came out, wrapped in the towel with her hair turbaned up, the house was still quiet. She stood in the doorway of her room a moment and looked at the vanity — her mother's vanity, the mirror with the crack in the corner, the little brass tray of bottles and tins that had sat there untouched for two years until she had begun, one careful item at a time, to open them.

She sat down in front of it and unwrapped her hair. It fell around her shoulders, dark and dripping, and she looked at the woman in the mirror and the woman looked back, and for once there was no argument in the glass. No boy's jaw. No boy's brow. Just the wet dark hair and the delicate face and the gold hoop in her nose and the two small gold bells in her ears catching the gray light. She smiled again, the real one, and it looked good on her.

The makeup took her twenty minutes. She had learned it slowly, badly at first, from videos on the phone and from watching her mother's hands when she was small. Now her hands knew. The kohl went on in one clean stroke each eye, winging out at the corners. The powder settled the shine of the cold water. A little of the rose balm on her lips — not the red, not today; today was not a day for the red. She drew the sindur line on her forehead last, dipping her finger into the box and pressing it down the part of her hair in one unbroken stroke, and when she was finished she sat back and looked at her own forehead and felt the weight of the line there like a hand on her head.

Then the bra. She opened the drawer and took out the one her mother had left — black, wired, the cups stiff with disuse — and she hooked it behind her back and bent forward and settled her breasts down into it one at a time, and the lift was immediate and startling, the way it pushed them up and together and made the line of her chest into something that announced itself. She turned sideways in the mirror. The swell above the cups was soft and full. She ran a thumb along the edge of the lace and felt the small prickle of it against her skin and thought, briefly, of the boy on the roof, and did not know yet why.

The panty was black too, thin, the kind that sat low on her hips and left her belly bare, and she pulled it up and felt the elastic settle into the crease of her and adjusted it with two fingers without looking down. Then the salwar suit — the black one, the thin one, the one that had been her mother's and that hung in the wardrobe like a held breath. She stepped into the salwar and tied the drawstring at her waist and pulled the kurta over her head and let it fall. It was thin enough that the light came through it. It was thin enough that when she turned toward the window she could see the shadow of her own body through the cloth — the line of the bra, the swell of the breasts, the dip of the waist, the flare of the hips — and she stood there in the gray light and looked at herself and did not cover anything.

She took the hairbrush — her mother's, the silver-backed one — and her slippers, and went up the back stairs to the roof.

The cold hit her at the top of the stairs, a clean winter cold with no damp in it, and the sun was out now, low and yellow, lying across the tar paper in a long bright slab. The tar was still warm from yesterday under her feet when she stepped out of her slippers onto it — they had had three days of sun, an odd gift in the middle of winter — and the grit stuck to her soles and she did not mind it. She walked to the middle of the roof and stood in the sun and closed her eyes and tipped her face up into it.

The warmth came down through her eyelids, orange, and the cold air moved along her wet hair and lifted the ends of it, and she stood there a long moment with her face tipped up and felt the sun on her forehead and her nose and the tops of her breasts above the kurta, and something in her loosened. She had not stood in the sun on her own roof since she was a child. She had been afraid of the roof. She had been afraid of everything that could see her.

Not this morning. This morning she unwrapped the towel from her hair and let it fall, and the wet weight of it came down her back in a dark curtain to her waist, and she shook her head once, slowly, and the water flew off the ends of it in a bright spray that caught the sun, and she laughed — a small, surprised laugh, out loud, alone on the roof — because it felt so good.

She picked up the brush and began to draw it through, starting at the ends and working up, the way her mother had taught her. The bristles pulled through the wet rope of it with a wet tearing sound, and she worked slowly, one section at a time, and the sun moved warm across her shoulders and the cold moved cool across her face, and she closed her eyes and let the two of them argue over her.

She did not hear the other roof at first. There was a sound — a page turning, or a book being set down on stone — and she opened her eyes and looked across the gap, and there he was.

Mrs. Sharma's son. The college one. He was sitting on the parapet of their roof with a book in his hands and his back to the morning, and he was looking at her, and the book was upside down.

He was young — two or three years older than her, maybe, with the soft unfinished jaw of a boy who had not yet decided what kind of man to be, and thick black hair that fell into his eyes, and a thin blue sweater with the elbows gone shiny. He had been away at college for two winters and she had not seen him since he was a boy with scabs on his knees. He was not a boy with scabs on his knees anymore. He had a man's shoulders under the thin sweater and he was looking at her with his mouth slightly open, and the book was upside down in his hands and he had not noticed.

She looked at him for one long beat. The small hot thing in her chest turned over again, slow and deliberate, like a hand closing.

She did not smile yet. She looked at him the way her mother had looked at men in the market — flatly, without invitation, taking his measure — and she saw him go red to the ears and look down at the upside-down book and then, helplessly, back up at her.

She turned her back on him and lifted the brush and drew it through her hair again, one slow stroke, and let the wet ends of it swing across her back and catch the sun. She could feel his eyes on her the whole time — on the back of her neck, on the wet line of her hair, on the curve of her hip where the thin black kurta pulled across it — and she felt it the way you feel a hand hovering an inch from your skin.

The winter wind lifted her hair then, a long slow gust of it off the roofs, and the whole wet curtain of it lifted off her back and hung in the air a moment, and she felt the cold rush along the bare nape of her neck and down the small of her back, and she heard him make a sound across the gap — a small sound, half a breath — and she smiled, then, with her back still to him. She could not help it.

She turned. She let the wind finish with her hair, and she turned, and she looked at him across the gap with the smile still on her mouth, the small one, the corner-of-the-mouth one, and this time she let him see it land.

His whole face changed. He straightened up off the parapet and took half a step forward and stopped, the book still upside down in his hand, and his mouth moved, and she could not hear what he said — the gap was too wide for a voice at that volume — but she saw the shape of it, and she thought it might have been hello and it might have been something else.

She did not answer. She lifted the brush and drew it through her hair one more slow stroke, and the sun was warm on her face and the cold was sharp on her neck and the boy across the gap was staring at her with his mouth open and his book upside down, and the small hot thing in her chest had settled now into something that was not quite a question anymore. It was a knowing. It was the feeling of a door that had been locked for two years and that had just, this morning, quietly, come unlocked in her hand.

She held his eyes a moment longer — long enough to see him swallow, long enough to see his hand tighten on the spine of the upside-down book — and then she turned back to the sun and went on brushing her hair, and let him watch, and did not look at him again.