She sat there until the light changed.

The courtyard turned from gold to a deeper amber, and then the refrigerator stopped humming — or she stopped hearing it — and Nisha became aware of the phone under her hand, the screen still dark, the address still inside it like a splinter working its way deeper. Her husband would be home in an hour. She had oil on the stove and onions in the basket and a sheet with a rust-brown stain folded under the corner, and none of it had anything to do with her.

She picked up the phone.

The address was three lanes over. She knew the lane. She had walked past it a hundred times on her way to the vegetable market — narrow, paved in broken concrete, jasmine vines climbing the walls of the old houses that had once belonged to families who had money and now belonged to families who had different money. She had never once looked at any of the doors.

She read the address twice. Then she stood up, went to the wardrobe, and took out her mother's black salwar. The one with the fine gold thread at the cuffs. The one her mother had worn the last time Nisha had seen her — walking out the door with her heels in her hand, her hair loose down her back, and the black salwar moving against her legs like water.

Nisha held it against herself. The fabric smelled faintly of her mother's perfume, still, after two years. She had never worn it. She had worn the sari, the dupatta, the blouses, the bangles, the anklets — but not this. This one had been waiting.

She laid it on the bed and pressed the creases flat with her palm.

Tomorrow at four, the woman had said. Tomorrow at four, come as Nisha.

She went to the kitchen and cooked the onions in oil, and when her husband came home and asked her what she was making, she said dal and rice, and he nodded and went to wash his hands, and she watched the back of his neck and thought: He does not know. He does not know that tomorrow I will go to a stranger's house and let a stranger look at me for money. He does not know that I have already said yes.

The thought sat in her chest all evening, and she fed him, and she lay beside him, and she did not sleep.

The next afternoon, she stood at the gate.

The lane was quiet. A dog slept in the shade of a step. Behind a screen door somewhere, a radio played a film song, tinny and old. The sun was on the back of her neck and her dupatta was pulled low over her forehead, and under the black salwar her skin was already sweating at the small of her back where the fabric clung. She could feel the folded paper in her pocket — the address, copied out in her own handwriting from the phone, because she had not wanted to bring the phone itself. The paper was soft from being held.

She looked at the gate. Brass handle, dull with age. The paint on the ironwork was flaking, and a jasmine vine had grown over the top and half-died, brown leaves mixed in with the white flowers, and the smell of it was sweet and rotten at the same time.

She put her hand on the handle. It was hot from the sun.

She pushed.

The gate opened without a sound, which surprised her, and she stepped onto the path, and the path was broken stones, and she walked up to the front door, and the front door was already open a finger's width, as he had said it would be. She stood on the worn doormat with her hand on the door and her heart going hard in her chest, and she thought about turning around. She thought about it clearly. She saw herself turning, walking back down the path, out the gate, down the lane, home, washing her face at the sink, starting the rice. She saw it all the way through.

Then she pushed the door open and went in.

The air inside was cool and dim and smelled of beeswax and stale cigar smoke. Heavy velvet curtains were drawn across the windows, and the light that came through them was a brown-gold, thick as honey, and it made the carpet — worn, patterned, the color of dried blood — look soft. There was a clock somewhere, ticking. There was a sideboard against the far wall with a small blue bowl on it, and the bowl held something pale, maybe almonds. There was a sofa, low and long and covered in a dark green fabric that had gone shiny at the arms. There was a table in front of the sofa, and on the table was a neat pile of notes, edges aligned, the top note a five hundred.

And there was a man.

He was standing by the sideboard with his back half-turned, and he was not what she had expected. She had expected — she did not know what she had expected. Someone coarse. Someone with a mustache and a wet mouth. He was middle-aged, soft in the middle, in a white shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled to the elbow. His hands were soft, the nails clean, the fingers short. His face was ordinary. He looked like a man who ran a chemist's shop, or a man who had a government job and a wife and two children and a scooter.

He turned when he heard the door.

For a moment he just looked at her. Not hungrily. Not the way she had imagined. He looked at her the way a man looks at something he has paid for and is not yet sure of — careful, quiet, taking inventory. His eyes went to the sindur line on her forehead. Then to her nose ring. Then down, slowly, to her hands, and back up to her face.

"Nisha," he said.

It came out like a question. Like he was checking the name against the thing in front of him.

"Yes," she said.

Her voice came out steady. She was surprised. Inside, her heart was going like a bird in a sack, but the voice came out steady, and she was glad of it, and she thought — Maya was right. Half of being a woman is the ordinary things done as if they cost nothing.

He gestured at the sofa. "Sit."

She sat. The sofa was lower than she had thought, and when she sat, her knees came up higher than she expected, and the salwar pulled tight across her thighs, and she felt the fabric settle against her skin. She put her hands on her knees, then moved them to the armrest, then folded them in her lap. She did not know where her hands were supposed to go.

He did not sit. He stood by the sideboard and looked at her, and the clock ticked, and the money sat on the table between them, and the small blue bowl caught a sliver of the curtained light.

"You brought the sindur," he said.

"I am married," she said.

"I know." He said it without emphasis. "That is part of it."

She did not ask what it was. She looked at the pile of notes. Five thousand rupees. Four thousand in a good week at the shop, her husband had said once, and she had heard him say it and had not thought about it, and now she was looking at more than a good week sitting on a stranger's table like a plate of sweets.

"You can count it," he said.

"I don't need to."

"Count it anyway."

She reached out and touched the top note with two fingers. Five hundred. She did not lift the pile. She just touched it, the way you touch a thing to make sure it is real, and then she took her hand back and put it in her lap.

"Why me," she said.

He smiled. It was not a nice smile and it was not an unkind one. It was the smile of a man who had been asked this before and had an answer ready.

"You are new," he said. "You are clean. You are — " he tilted his head, looking at her, " — you are what you are. Do you understand? I have seen many. Women. Girls. Boys who dress. You are not any of those. You are something I have not seen before, and I paid a woman to find out what you are, and now you are here, and I am looking."

"I don't understand what you mean."

"You don't have to." He came around the sideboard and sat down at the far end of the sofa, not close to her, and the green fabric creaked under his weight. "Lift your dupatta."

She did not move.

He waited. He did not repeat himself. He sat with his soft hands on his knees and looked at her, and the clock ticked, and the jasmine smell came in faintly through the door she had left ajar, and she thought about the gate, and the lane, and the rice she had not started.

Then she lifted her dupatta.

She took the edge of it in her fingers and drew it up and over, and let it fall behind her shoulder, and the fabric slid down her arm to her elbow and hung there, and the cool air of the room touched her neck and her chest. Her salwar blouse was cut low, and the top of her breast was bare now, the soft curve of it pale in the dim gold light, and the sindur line was bright on her forehead where the dupatta had been hiding it, and she kept her hand on the armrest, steady, and she did not look away from him.

He looked. He looked for a long time. His eyes went from her face to her throat to the curve of her breast and back up, and his breath came a little differently — she heard it — and she felt the small hot thing turn over in her chest, the thing that had been turning over since the phone call, since the roof, since the first time her father had said her name in the dark. It was the same thing. It was the thing that said: he sees me.

"Good," he said.

He reached out and put his hand on her knee.

His palm was flat and warm through the black salwar, and he did not squeeze, did not move. He just held it there, and the weight of it went through the fabric and into her skin, and she did not move. She did not pull away. She did not lean in. She sat with her hand on the armrest and her breast half-bared and his palm on her knee, and the clock ticked, and the door she had come through was closed behind her, and she knew what was coming, because she had let it come this far.

She stayed.

His fingers began to press.