Three lanes over, the sun came down on the stranger's gate like it came down on every other gate in the town — flat, gold, indifferent — and Nisha stood in front of it with her dupatta drawn low against the light and the address folded small in the waistband of her salwar. Her mother's black salwar. The sindur line on her forehead, drawn that morning in the mirror with a steady hand, the way she drew it every morning now, a red seam down the parting of her hair that told anyone who looked what she was.

She had walked past this gate a hundred times. She had never once looked at it. It was a good gate — iron, painted black, no rust at the hinges — and behind it a low house with a courtyard of cracked tiles and a jasmine creeper climbing a wall that could not have held it much longer. The creeper was flowering. The smell of it came over the wall and mixed with the smell of the gutter and the smell of somebody frying onions two doors down, and it was all so ordinary that she almost turned around.

She did not turn around.

Her hand was on the latch before she had decided anything, and the latch was warm from the afternoon, and it gave under her thumb without a sound. She pushed the gate open and stepped through and pulled it shut behind her, and the click of it was very small and very final and she did not let herself hear it.

The courtyard was empty. A pair of chappals sat by the door, soles up, worn down at the heels. A bicycle leaned against the wall with a flat back tyre. Somebody's shirt hung on the line and had been there so long the sun had bleached the shoulders white. She crossed the tiles and her sandals made no sound because she had learned, in the two years since she had begun to walk in her mother's clothes, how to walk so that her sandals made no sound.

The drawing-room door stood ajar. She put her palm flat on it and pushed.

The air inside was cool and dim and it smelled of beeswax and stale cigar smoke, and the smoke smell was old, soaked into the curtains and the sofa and the carpet, the smell of a room where a man sat alone every afternoon with a cigar he did not always light. The curtains were heavy velvet, drawn almost shut, and the light that came through them came in long dusty bars that lay across the carpet like something spilled. A fan turned overhead, slow, oiled, whispering. The room was so quiet she could hear it whispering.

He was in the high-backed armchair by the window, and he was not what she had expected and she did not know what she had expected. Middle-aged. Grey at the temples, combed back wet. A soft face with a soft jaw and a mouth that had gone slack at the corners. His hands lay on the arms of the chair and they were soft hands, pale, the nails clean and square, the hands of a man who had never done a day's work with them. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled and the shirt was very clean and pressed, and the collar was open at the throat, and he was looking at her.

He was looking at her the way a man looks at water in the last hour of a long day.

She stopped just inside the threshold. The door did not close behind her. She heard it settle against the frame and stay there, an inch open, breathing the courtyard air in behind her, and she knew she could turn and go back through it and nothing in the world would be different, and she did not turn.

"Nisha?" he said.

He said it like a question. Like a word he had practiced and was not sure he had said right. His voice was low and smooth and unhurried and it did not surprise her, and she realized she had been braced for surprise — for a voice that did not match, for a face she knew, for a mistake — and there was none of it. There was just a man in a chair saying her name.

"Yes," she said.

He let out a breath and sat back and his hands stayed on the arms of the chair. "Come in. Please. Sit."

She crossed the carpet. She was aware of her hips moving under the salwar, aware of the way the fabric caught at her thighs and let go, aware of the soft heavy weight of her breasts shifting under the kurta with each step, and she did not hurry and she did not slow down. There was a low table between the armchair and the sofa, and on the table, squared to the edge, was the money. Five notes, five hundred each, the paper soft and slightly curled at the corners, weighted down by a glass ashtray that had been cleaned and put back, and the money sat there in the dim light like a thing with no smell and no weight of its own and all the weight in the room.

She sat where he pointed. The sofa was old and the cushions had gone soft in the middle and she sank into it further than she meant to, and the small surprise of it made her hand tighten on the armrest, and then she made herself let go. She arranged herself. Back straight. Dupatta still drawn low over her hair. Hands folded in her lap. Her long painted nails caught the light from between the curtains and she watched him watch them.

"You came," he said.

"You paid me to."

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "Yes." He looked down at his own hands and turned one over and looked at the palm, and it was such a private thing to watch that she looked away from it, at the curtains, at the dust in the bars of light, at the jasmine that was not in this room and could not be seen from where she sat. "You're younger than I thought you'd be."

"Does that matter."

"No." He looked up. His eyes were dark and slightly hooded and there was a quiet hunger in them that was not the hunger she had been afraid of — it was patient, it was almost polite, it sat in him and did not jump. "No, it doesn't matter."

"Then why did you say it."

He was quiet a moment. The fan turned. Somewhere in the house a clock ticked, slow, off the beat of her heart.

"Because I wanted to hear you answer," he said.

She held his look. She had learned, from Maya, in the room above the tailor's shop, that half of being a woman is the ordinary things done as if they cost nothing — that the trick is not the body, the trick is the ease, and the ease is a decision you make every second and never let anyone see you making. So she sat still and let the silence sit, and the silence did not cost her anything, and she watched him notice that it did not.

"May I ask you something," he said.

"You've already paid. Ask."

"Why did you say yes."

She had known this question was coming. She had rehearsed an answer on the walk over — something cool, something with an edge, something a woman in a film would say. What came out of her was not that.

"Because someone looked at me and thought I was worth five thousand rupees," she said. "Nobody has ever done that. I wanted to see what it felt like."

He nodded slowly, as if she had said something he understood better than she did, and that made her angry for a moment, and then it didn't. He lifted his hand from the armrest and gestured at her, two fingers, a small unhurried curl.

"Lift your dupatta."

She heard the words and felt them land somewhere low in her belly, a small hot turning, and she did not move for a breath, and then she did. She brought her hand up and took the edge of the dupatta where it lay over her shoulder and lifted it, slow, letting the fabric slide off her hair, off her shoulder, down, so that it fell behind her along the back of the sofa and left her shoulder bare and her breast half-bared under the thin black cotton of her blouse, the curve of it rising and falling with her breath, the skin very smooth and very brown and the light from between the curtains lying across it in a bar.

He looked at her for a long time. He did not say anything. His hands stayed on the arms of the chair and his breathing changed, went shallow and slow, and she watched his chest move under the clean white shirt and she thought, with a clarity that surprised her: he is afraid of me. Not of what I am. Of the moment. He has paid for a thing and now the thing is here and it is a woman with a sindur line on her forehead and he does not know what to do with her.

"You can touch me," she said.

He got up out of the chair. He crossed the space between them and stood over her and she looked up at him and did not move, and he put one knee on the sofa beside her hip and leaned down and put his hand on her knee. Just that. His palm flat on her knee through the salwar, the soft hand, warm, and his thumb began to circle, slow, through the fabric, and she felt it all the way up her thigh and into her stomach and low, lower.

"You're trembling," he said.

She looked at his hand on her knee. The thumb circling. The clean square nail. She thought about the money on the table and the smell of the cigar smoke in the curtains and the jasmine outside and the fact that her husband was at the shop right now with his burn-scarred hand on the counter, weighing out rice for somebody's mother, and she thought about how she would never tell him this and how that was not a lie she was keeping from him but a room in herself that she was keeping for herself, and she did not answer.

The silence stretched. Thick as the velvet. The fan whispered. The clock ticked on, off her beat, indifferent.

She reached down and put her hand over his and moved it, up, off her knee, up along her own thigh, under the hem of the salwar's kurta, and pressed his palm flat against the bare skin of her belly. His breath caught. Her skin was warm and smooth there and his hand was cool and the contrast made something in her clench.

"There," she said. "That's where you wanted to put it."

His thumb moved, once, testing, and then his whole hand spread across her belly and he made a sound, low, in the back of his throat, and she watched his face change — the politeness going, the patience going, something underneath it coming up that had been waiting a long time in a room that smelled of old smoke.

"Take it off," he said. "The kurta. Take it off."

She let go of his hand and found the buttons herself, one, two, three, her long nails catching the thread, and she did not look away from his face while she did it, and she saw the hunger in him lose its patience, and that was the thing — that was the small hot thing turning over in her chest — that she had done that. She had walked in off the lane in her mother's black salwar and she had done that.

The kurta came open and she shrugged it off her shoulders and let it fall behind her on the sofa, and her breasts came free under the thin blouse, heavy, full, the nipples hard against the cotton, and he looked at them and his hand left her belly and came up and closed over one, and she felt her own breath go out of her in a rush and her back arch, just a little, just enough, before she caught herself and made herself still.

He pushed the blouse up out of the way and lowered his head and took her nipple in his mouth and sucked, hard, and she made a sound she had not meant to make, and her hand came up and gripped the back of his head, her nails in his hair, holding him there.

"There," she said, and her voice had gone rough at the edges. "There. Like that."

He worked at her breast with his mouth and his hand found the other one and squeezed, and she sat there on the worn sofa with her head back and her mother's dupatta crumpled behind her and let him, and the small hot thing in her chest turned over and over and grew, and she felt herself go wet, slick and hot between her legs, the fabric of the salwar suddenly unbearable against her, and she shifted her hips against the cushion, and he felt her shift.

He raised his head. His mouth was wet and his eyes had gone dark and there was no politeness left in his face at all.

"Get up," he said.

"No."

He blinked.

"You paid to look at me," she said. "Then look. And then I'll decide what else you get."

She stood up off the sofa herself, and she did it slowly, and she let him watch her do it. She reached down and loosened the salwar at her waist and stepped out of it, one leg and then the other, and stood in front of him in her blouse and nothing else, and the light from between the curtains lay across her hips and the smooth flat place above them, and she watched his eyes travel down her and stop, and she watched him not ask, and she was grateful for that, and she would not have been able to say why.

"Now," she said. "Sit down."

He sat. She put one knee on the sofa beside him and then the other, straddling him, the worn cushion dipping under her weight, and his hands came up onto her hips and gripped, and she felt how wide her hips were in his hands, how they filled them, and she liked it, she liked the way his fingers dug in and could not get all the way around her. She reached between them and found his belt and undid it, and the button, and the zip, and she put her hand inside and took him out, and he was hard, thick, hot in her palm, and he made a low sound and his head went back against the sofa.

"Look at me," she said.

He looked.

She raised herself up on her knees and reached down and guided him and sank down onto him, slow, one long inch at a time, and she felt every one of them — the stretch, the fullness, the way her body opened and closed around him, wet and tight and hot — and she did not stop until he was all the way in her and her hips were flush against his and she was sitting on him with her hands on his shoulders and her forehead an inch from his.

"Oh," he said. Just that. Just the one word, quiet, almost reverent.

"Yes," she said.

She began to move. Slow at first, rolling her hips, finding the angle, and the angle was there, and every time she came down on him the base of him pressed right where she needed it and a bright thread of pleasure pulled up through her belly and into her chest. The sofa creaked under them. The fan whispered. His hands went from her hips to her breasts and back to her hips, and he watched her face the whole time, watched her ride him, and she watched him watch, and there was something in his face that she had not expected, something almost like grief.

"You're beautiful," he said.

"Say my name."

"Nisha."

"Again."

"Nisha."

She rode him harder. Her breath came short and she let it, let him hear it, and his hands tightened on her hips and he began to move under her, thrusting up to meet her, and the creak of the sofa went faster and the slap of their skin came into the room and she heard it and did not care. She leaned back and put her hands behind her on his knees and gave him her whole body to look at, breasts moving, belly moving, hips moving on him, and his eyes went all over her and he said her name again, and again, like a man saying a prayer he had forgotten he knew.

"I'm close," she said.

"Don't stop."

"I'm not stopping."

She came with her eyes open, looking at him, and it rolled up through her from where they were joined and took her breath and clenched her tight around him, and she heard herself cry out, one sharp sound in the dim room, and she felt him swell inside her and then he was coming, thrusting up into her, spilling into her in long pulses, his hands hard on her hips, his mouth open, saying her name into the air between them.

She stayed on him. Both of them breathing. His softening cock still inside her, her wetness and his seed beginning to slip down the inside of her thigh. The fan turned. The clock ticked. The money sat on the table, five notes, squared to the edge, and neither of them looked at it.

His hands came up and rested on her waist, light now, and his thumbs moved once, small, over her skin, and she looked down at his face and his eyes were closed and his mouth was slack and he was, for that one moment, entirely undone, and she thought: I did that. I came in off the lane and I did that to a man who has never known my name.

She lifted herself off him and stood and felt the wetness come down her thigh and did not wipe it, and she bent and picked up her kurta from the sofa and pulled it on and did the buttons, one, two, three, and stepped back into her salwar and tied it at the waist, and drew the dupatta up off the sofa and over her shoulder and over her hair, and she did all of it slowly, and he watched her do all of it, and neither of them said anything, and that was the last thing that belonged to her.

At the door she stopped. She did not turn around.

"The money's on the table," she said.

"Take it."

"I'm taking it."

She heard him breathe, and then he said, from the chair, in a voice that had gone back to being polite and did not quite manage it, "Will you come again."

She pulled the door open. The afternoon light came in flat and gold and the jasmine smell came with it and the ordinary noise of the lane — a cycle bell, a woman calling a child, somebody's radio — and she stood in it a moment with her hand on the frame.

"Come as Nisha," she said. "You said it yourself. Come as Nisha."

And she went out into the courtyard and across the cracked tiles and through the black iron gate, and the latch clicked behind her, and she walked back down the lane toward home with five thousand rupees folded in her waistband and her husband's tea to buy at the shop on the way, and the sun on her sindur line, and no one in the lane looked at her twice.