The boy's hand was still on her knuckles when the phone in her waistband buzzed — not the thin electric pulse of a message but the long grinding shudder of a call, and the sound went through the fabric of her salwar and into her hip like a small animal trying to get out.

She looked down at him. He looked up at her. Neither of them moved.

"You should—" he started, and stopped, because the phone buzzed again, and the buzzing was louder than his voice, and he pulled his hand back and put it in his pocket as if he had been caught doing something and had decided to pretend he hadn't.

"I should," Nisha said.

She went up the stairs past him. She did not look back. She heard him stand at the bottom for a moment, and then she heard his sandals on the lane outside, going away, and then she was inside her own door with her back against it and the phone out of her waistband and the screen bright and strange in the dim of the hallway.

UNKNOWN NUMBER.

She looked at it for a long time. The screen dimmed. She tapped it awake. UNKNOWN NUMBER, and a green button, and a red one, and the small white arrow of a missed call. She had missed it. She had missed a call from a number she did not know, and she stood in her own hallway with her mother's black salwar clinging to her hip from the morning's warmth and did not know whether she was relieved or sorry.

The phone buzzed again.

She answered it. She did not know why. She put it to her ear and said nothing, and the hallway was quiet around her, and somewhere in the house the refrigerator hummed, and a woman's voice on the other end said, very softly, as if she were speaking to someone already lying down beside her:

"Nisha."

The word went into her ear and down her neck. She had not told anyone that name. Not the boy. Not Mrs. Sharma. Only her husband, and only in the dark of their own room, and only with his mouth against her ear.

"Who is this."

"You are beautiful," the woman said. "I have seen you. I know everything about you."

Nisha's hand went flat against the wall beside her. The cool plaster under her palm, the long pink nail of her index finger touching a hairline crack she had never noticed before. She looked at her own hand as if it belonged to someone else.

"I don't know you."

"No. But I know you. I know how you changed your body. I know how old you were when you started. I know what your mother left behind in that wardrobe, and I know what you do with it when nobody's watching."

Nisha's mouth was dry. Her tongue found the roof of it and stayed there.

"What do you want."

"I want to offer you something. Something honest. You're beautiful, Nisha. You're the kind of beautiful men pay for. And right now you're spending it on one man in one room in a small town, and he can't afford you, and you know it."

"I'm married."

"I know." The woman laughed, low, unhurried, the sound of someone who had heard that word before and had never once been stopped by it. "So am I. What's your point."

Nisha slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor of her own hallway, her knees up, the salwar tight across her thighs, the phone pressed to her ear with both hands now. She was aware, in a distant way, of the shape of herself against the plaster — the weight of her breasts settling onto her folded arms, the way her hip spread on the cool tile. She had never sat like this before. She had never heard her own body described as a thing that could be spent.

"You don't know anything about me," she said.

"I know your father is your husband and the neighbours think you're the second wife. I know you wear the sindur but you don't go to the temple because you're afraid the priest will look too long at your throat. I know you keep a plug hidden in the hollow of your mother's wardrobe behind her shoes —"

Nisha's breath came in through her nose and did not leave.

" — and I know your husband cried the first time he took you, and you held his head against your chest and told him it was all right. I know all of it. I don't need to explain how. The point is I know, and I'm not disgusted, and I'm not going to tell anyone, and I have a job for you."

"What kind of job."

"The kind that pays five thousand a day."

Nisha looked at the floor between her feet. The tile was old, grey with a chip near the threshold where something heavy had been dropped years ago, and she stared at that chip and let the number sit in the hallway with her. Five thousand. Her husband's shop brought in four in a good week. The sweets for Mrs. Sharma had cost three hundred and were still spilled on the bedroom floor because neither of them had bent to pick them up.

"Five thousand for what."

"For being what you already are." The woman's voice softened, and the softness was worse than the knowing, because it sounded almost like kindness. "For letting someone look at you the way you want to be looked at. For letting someone touch you the way you're already letting that boy on the stairs touch you. You think I didn't see that too."

Nisha's hand tightened on the phone.

"You're watching me."

"I'm watching the lane. I watch the lane every day. You're the most interesting thing that's happened to it in years."

Nisha stood up. She did not remember deciding to stand. Her knees were stiff and the salwar clung to her thighs and she walked down the hallway into the kitchen because she needed to be somewhere with a window, somewhere she could see out of, and she stood at the sink with her back to the room and looked at the courtyard wall and the line of grey light above it.

"What do you want me to do," she said. "Exactly."

"Good girl." The woman said it the way her husband said it, the way Maya used to say it above the tailor's shop — approving, patient, in no hurry at all. "You'll come to my house. You'll wear makeup. Proper makeup, not the little bit you do for the roof. You'll do your hair. You'll wear something of your mother's — she had good taste, that woman — and you'll sit in my drawing room with a cup of tea and you'll let a man look at you for an hour. That's all. An hour of being looked at. Five thousand rupees. If he wants more, that's a different number, and it's your number to set, not mine."

"A man."

"A man. Clean. Tested. Known to me for years. He won't hurt you and he won't follow you home. You'll walk out of my door with cash in your purse and go buy your husband a shirt."

Nisha's fingers found the edge of the sink and held it. She could feel her heart in her throat and the strange flat calm under it, the calm that had been there since the boy's fingers on her knuckles, since the smile on the roof, since the first pill at three in the morning two years ago. The calm that said: this is the next door, and you knew a door was coming.

"Why me."

"Because you're not a boy playing dress-up and you're not a woman who was born to it, and that combination is worth money. Men are bored, Nisha. They've had every kind of woman. They have not had you."

Nisha was quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, the light above the courtyard wall was going from grey to silver, and a mynah bird was complaining about something in the neem tree, and somewhere down the lane a woman was calling a child home in a voice that sounded exactly like Mrs. Sharma's.

"How did you get this number."

"That's a boring question. Don't ask boring questions."

"How did you get this number."

The woman on the other end was silent for the first time. When she spoke again, the softness was gone, and what was left was flat and businesslike and somehow more honest than anything she had said yet.

"Because I asked the right person. And before you ask who, I'll tell you: it doesn't matter. What matters is that I have it, and I have your name, and I have your face, and I have a house with a drawing room and a man who will be there at four o'clock tomorrow. If you want the money, come. If you don't, don't. I won't call again."

"And if I come —"

"Then you'll be a woman who earns. That's all. That's the whole offer."

Nisha closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids she saw the roof, the boy, the upside-down book; she saw her husband's burn-scarred hand on the shop counter; she saw the spilled sweets on the bedroom floor. She saw the red sindur stain under her own hip on the ruined sheet, the signature she had signed without ever signing anything. She opened her eyes. The kitchen was exactly as it had been. The mynah was still complaining. The light was still going silver.

"Text me the address," she said.

"Good girl."

The line went dead.

Nisha stood at the sink with the phone in her hand and the dead black screen of it, and she did not move for a long time. The refrigerator hummed. The mynah stopped complaining. The light above the courtyard wall turned from silver to a thin bright gold, and she watched it happen, and she thought about the number five thousand and the number four and the number three hundred and the way her husband had laughed into her skin last night, and she thought about the boy's hand on her knuckles and the word he had not found, and she thought about the small round plug hidden in the hollow of her mother's wardrobe behind her mother's shoes, and how the woman on the phone had known about it, and how that knowing had not made her feel exposed but seen — which was worse, and which was better, and which she could not decide.

The phone buzzed once in her hand. A message.

She looked at the screen. An address, three lanes over, a house number she half-knew. A time. 4 p.m. Tomorrow. Come as Nisha.

She put the phone face-down on the counter and looked at her own reflection in the dark kitchen window. Nose ring. Long black hair spilling over her shoulders from the morning's brushing. The curve of her mother's salwar over her chest, the way the fabric caught on the shape of her breasts and then let go. Her own face, delicate and strange in the glass, her mother's face and not her mother's face, the face of a woman the world had not yet been introduced to.

She had spent two years making this face. She had spent two years making this body out of the boy the world had handed her. And now a stranger's voice on the telephone had offered to pay for it, and the offer had not felt like an insult. It had felt like a door.

Her husband would be home in an hour. He would come in with the shop's smell on him, sandalwood and dust and the particular sourness of money handled all day, and he would put his hand on her hip and ask what she had made for dinner, and she would not tell him about the phone call. Not tonight. Perhaps not ever. She turned the thought over and found no guilt in it, only the flat calm, and under the calm something else — a small hot thing turning over, the same one that had closed like a fist on the stairs.

She picked the phone back up. She did not open the message. She carried it into the bedroom, past the tipped-over sindur box and the folded corner of the sheet and the spilled sweets still scattered on the floor, and she sat down on the edge of the bed in the dim room with the phone in both hands.

The bed creaked under her. The sheet was cool where her husband had not slept. She looked at the phone screen — the unknown number still there at the top of the message, the address below it, the time below that — and she read the words again, and the woman's voice came back to her in pieces. You are beautiful. I know everything about you. Men are bored. They have not had you.

She looked down at her own body. Her breasts, heavy under the salwar, resting on the curve of her folded arm. Her hips, spreading wide and soft on the mattress. Her long painted nails, the pink chipped at the tip of the thumb where she had gripped the sink. She had spent two years making these things. She had spent two years making herself into something a woman on the telephone could describe as a thing men paid for, and she had done it without anyone's permission, and no one had ever offered her money for it before, and she did not know whether to be ashamed or proud or neither, and she suspected the answer was simply: both, and also neither, and also — yes.

She set the phone face-down on the bed beside her. The screen went dark against the sheet. The address was still in it, unread in the darkness, and she did not pick it up again.

She let out a slow breath. It came out shakier than she had meant it to, and it landed in the silence of the empty kitchen next door, and the refrigerator hummed on, and the light in the courtyard went on going gold, and Nisha sat on the edge of the bed she shared with her husband and did not decide anything, and did not stand up, and did not lie down, and did not pick up the phone.

She just sat there.