The lane had emptied the way lanes do at four in the afternoon, when the heat sits on the tin roofs and even the dogs have given up. Nisha stood at the black iron gate with her thumbnail already digging a crescent into her palm, and her mother's black salwar clung to the small of her back where the sun had found it through the dupatta. Three lanes from home. She had walked past this house a hundred times — the chipped paint, the dead jasmine creeper over the lintel, the number on the wall she had never once read — and now the number on the paper in her pocket matched the number on the wall, and the afternoon light lay flat across her sindur line like a hand pressing her forehead down.

She read the paper once more. A time, an address, and two words in a woman's handwriting she had never seen: Come as Nisha. The paper had gone soft at the creases from her fingers, and she folded it along the same lines and put it back in her pocket, and she looked at the gate.

She pushed it open before she could think. That was the trick. Maya had taught her that, in the room above the tailor's shop, the afternoon her hands shook so badly she couldn't thread a needle — do the thing before the thinking catches up, because the thinking is always slower and always afraid. The hinge groaned and swung, and her rubber sandals slapped the short walk to the door, and the door was unlocked, the way he had said it would be.

The drawing room was dim and cool after the lane. Heavy velvet curtains, the color of old wine, held the heat outside, and the air smelled of beeswax and stale cigar smoke, layered one over the other like two different men had lived here. A ceiling fan turned above her, slow, and its shadow wobbled across the worn carpet — back and forth, back and forth, like something breathing. She stopped just inside the threshold and let the door click shut behind her, and the click was louder than it should have been, and she felt it in her teeth.

He sat in the armchair by the window. Middle-aged, soft in the shoulders, in a cream kurta that had been ironed that morning and would not be ironed again before evening. His hands were folded in his lap, and they were the only part of him that moved — the fingers opening, closing, opening, like he was doing sums. He did not get up. He did not reach for her. He only looked, and the looking had a weight to it, a slow inventory that started at her sandals and climbed and stopped at her sindur line and stayed there.

"Nisha," he said. Not a greeting. He said it the way you taste something to find out what it is.

"Yes," she said. Her voice came out level. She was glad of that.

He nodded slowly, as if she had confirmed a fact he had paid to confirm twice already. On the low table between them lay a folded stack of notes — five thousand, she could see the edges — set down neat, squared off against the corner of the table like he had measured it. She did not look at it long. She had learned, in the room above the tailor's shop, not to look at the money long.

"Sit," he said, and pointed with two fingers at the sofa.

She sat where he pointed. The sofa was old and low, the cushion gone soft in the middle, and the fabric had a pattern on it — small gold flowers faded almost to nothing, worn thin where a hundred backs had leaned. She put her hand on the armrest, and her palm left a print in the dust, and she wiped it off with her thumb and thought about nothing at all. The clock on the mantel ticked. Once. Then again. She counted three before he spoke.

"You came as I asked," he said.

"You paid for me to come as I am."

"I paid to look." His eyes moved to her forehead, to the red line he had not seen in person before, only in the photograph he had bought. "The sindur. You wear it."

"Every morning."

"And your husband knows where you are?"

She let that sit. The fan turned. The shadow crossed her hands and left them. "My husband is at his shop," she said, "weighing rice."

Something moved in his face — not a smile, but the place where a smile would have gone. He leaned back in the armchair and put his hands on his knees, and she saw the nails were clean and cut square, the hands of a man who had never done a day's work that marked him. "Good," he said. "I like that it's true. I don't like lies in this room."

"Then don't tell me any."

He laughed, one short breath through the nose. "Lift your dupatta."

She did not move at once. She sat with her hand on the armrest and looked at him — at the softness under his chin, at the small veins in his nose, at the way his fingers had gone still now that he had asked for something. There was a power in the waiting. She had learned that too, though not from Maya. She had learned it from every man who had ever looked at her and wanted her to move first, so that afterward he could tell himself she had chosen it.

Fine, she thought. I'll choose it.

She lifted her hand and took the edge of the dupatta where it lay pinned at her shoulder, and she pulled the pin loose and let the fabric down. It slid, cool and light, over her collarbone and down her arm, and came to rest at her elbow, and the black salwar beneath was cut low the way her mother's clothes were cut, and the top of her breast came bare into the dim air — the pale brown curve of it, the weight of it sitting in the cloth, the thin gold thread at the neckline catching what little light the curtains let through. She kept her chin up. She kept her eyes on him. She did not cover herself.

His breath changed. Just that — a small catch, then slower, deeper, like a man who has been holding something and finally sets it down. His eyes went to the bare skin and stayed, and his tongue came out and touched his lower lip, once, and went back.

"The hormones," he said. His voice had gone rough at the edges. "They did that."

"Two years."

"Two years." He said it as if testing the weight of it. "And no one in the lane looks at you twice."

"No one in the lane looks at me at all."

"Except the boy on the roof."

Her hand went still on the armrest. She had not told anyone about the boy. The woman on the phone had known things she should not have known, and now this man knew a thing she had told no one, and the small hot thing in her chest turned over once, slow, and closed again. She kept her face flat. "You've had me watched."

"I've had you found," he said, and there was no apology in it. "I wanted to know what I was buying. I don't like surprises in my own house."

"And what did you find out."

"That you were born a boy named Nidha. That you take pills a doctor never gave you. That you married the man who fathered you, and the lane believes a story about a second wife." He said all of it slowly, without heat, the way a man reads a bill. "That you have a cock between your legs that does not stand."

The words landed in the quiet room and sat there. The fan turned. The clock ticked. She looked at him, and she felt the old cold thing rise in her throat — the thing that came when a stranger said the name Nidha, the thing she had spent two years learning to swallow — and she swallowed it. Her jaw was tight. She made it loose.

"You paid five thousand rupees to say that to my face," she said. "You could have said it to the woman on the phone for free."

He smiled then, a real one, and it made his face younger and worse. "I paid five thousand rupees to see whether it was true that you'd sit there and let me say it. The rest is the rest." He lifted his hand from his knee and held it out toward her, palm up, and stopped it in the air between them. "Your knee."

She looked at the hand. Soft palm, square nails, the small clean lines of it. She thought, briefly, of her husband's hand — the burn scar across the back of it, the callus at the base of the thumb from the scale, the way he held a fistful of rice and let it run through his fingers to weigh it. She thought of the five thousand folded in her waistband at home, under the tin in the kitchen, that she had not decided about. She thought of nothing else. Then she moved her knee toward him, an inch, and set it under his hand.

His palm came down. Warm, dry, heavier than it looked. It rested on the black cloth over her kneecap, and his thumb began a slow circle there, and neither of them said anything, and the weight of it went up through her thigh and settled somewhere low in her belly, and she did not move.

"There," he said softly, almost to himself. "That's what I wanted. Not the money. The staying."

"Then stop talking about the money."

"You want me to talk about something else."

"I want you to do something else," she said. "You've looked. You've said your piece. You've had your hour and it isn't up."

His thumb stopped. He looked at her a long moment, and she watched him decide — she had seen men decide before, and she knew the shape of it, the way the eyes went quiet and the mouth went firm and the whole body leaned one way. He leaned forward in the chair, and his other hand came up, and he found the button at the throat of her salwar with two fingers and turned it, and it slipped free.

"You'll do it yourself," he said. "I want to watch you do it."

She stood up. Her dupatta fell the rest of the way to the sofa and lay there in a black pool, and she stood in front of him and undid the second button, and the third, and the cloth opened down her chest and her breasts came free of it, heavy, round, the nipples gone tight in the cool air of the curtained room. She pulled the salwar down off her shoulders and let it fall to her waist, and she stood there with her arms at her sides and let him look at all of it, the mango weight of them, the narrow waist, the wide flare of her hips in the black cloth.

He made a sound she had not heard from him yet. Low. Almost pained. His hand left her knee and he reached for her waist and pulled her one step closer, and his mouth came up to her breast, and he took the nipple between his lips and sucked, hard, and she gasped and her hand went to the back of his head before she could stop it, and the small hot thing in her chest turned over and opened.

"Wait," she said. Her voice had gone thick. She pushed his head back with her palm, not hard, and he let her. "Not like this. On the sofa. You paid for it on the sofa."

"You're telling me how I bought you."

"I'm telling you how I'm giving it." She stepped back, and she pushed the salwar the rest of the way down her legs and stepped out of it, and she stood in her petticoat and her blouse open on her chest, and she looked at the sofa, and then at him. "Sit down. Take off your kurta. The money stays on the table."

He stood. He undid the kurta himself, unhurried, and folded it over the back of the chair — folded it, she noticed, the way a man folds a shirt he means to wear again — and under it he was soft and pale and middle-aged, the belly gone loose, the chest hair grey at the center. He sat down on the low sofa where she had sat, and the cushion sighed under him, and he looked up at her with the quiet hunger back in his face and both hands open on his knees.

She came to him. She put one knee on the sofa beside his thigh, then the other, and straddled him, and the petticoat rode up and her bare thighs came down on either side of his hips, and she felt him through the cloth — already hard, pressed up against the soft inside of her thigh — and she did not flinch. She reached down between them and found the drawstring of his pajama and pulled it loose, and he lifted his hips and she worked the cloth down far enough, and his cock came out into her hand, thick and hot and standing straight up against his belly, the head of it wet at the tip.

"There," she said. She stroked it once, root to tip, and watched his jaw tighten. "You wanted to look. Look at me."

"I'm looking," he said. His voice had gone thin. "God, I'm looking."

She rose up on her knees and held him with one hand and guided the head of his cock to the wet fold of her cunt, and she was wet — she had been wet since his hand came down on her knee, since the first word of the list of her sins in the quiet room — and she rubbed the head of him along the seam of her once, twice, slicking him, and then she came down on him.

He went into her in one slow stroke. She felt every inch of it — the stretch of it, the burn at the entrance giving way to the deep full ache of him seated inside her, the head of him pressing somewhere that made her breath stop. She held still on him a moment with her hands braced on his shoulders, and his hands came up and gripped her hips, hard, the fingers digging into the wide flesh of them, and he groaned like a man who had been holding his breath all afternoon.

"Fuck," he said. "You're—"

"Say it."

"You're tight. You're so tight."

"Then hold on," she said, and she began to move.

She rode him slow at first, a long roll of the hips, lifting until he was almost out of her and sinking back down until her thighs met his, and each time she came down she took him to the root and let him feel the whole weight of her on top of him. The sofa creaked under them. The fan turned above. She watched his face the whole time — the way his eyes went half shut and then snapped open again, the way his mouth hung loose, the sweat coming up on his forehead in the cool room — and she kept her own face still, giving him nothing, and inside she was counting, the way she counted everything, the way she had counted the clock ticks when she first sat down.

"Harder," he said.

"Ask me."

"Harder, Nisha."

She liked her name in his mouth. She had not expected to. She came down on him harder, faster, and the creak of the sofa picked up a rhythm, and his hands slid from her hips around to her ass and gripped it and pulled her down onto him, and she let him pull, and she met him every time, and the wet sound of it filled the dim room and mixed with the sound of the clock and the fan and his breathing going ragged.

"The money's still on the table," she said, breathless, working him. "You can still see it. Look at it."

He turned his head, obedient, and looked at the folded notes squared off on the corner of the table beside them, and something went through his face — she could not name it, but she saw it, the way a man looks at a thing he has bought and finds it worth more than he paid. He looked back at her. "Come for me," he said. "I want to feel it."

"I'm not doing it for you."

"Then do it for yourself. I'll hold on."

She closed her eyes. She had not meant to, but she did, and behind her eyelids she thought of nothing — not her husband, not the boy on the roof, not the woman on the phone — and she moved on him the way she moved when she was alone, the angle that found the spot, and she found it, and the small hot thing in her chest broke open all the way and ran down through her belly and her thighs, and she came on his cock with her head tipped back and her nails in his shoulders, and she made a sound she did not recognize.

"That's it," he said, low and urgent under her. "That's it, keep going, I'm—"

"Inside," she said. "Stay inside."

He bucked up into her once, twice, and then he was coming, his hands clamping down on her ass, his whole body going rigid under her, and she felt it — the hot spill of him deep inside her, pulse after pulse, and his mouth open on a word that was not her name and not anyone's, just breath. She rode him through it, slow now, until his hands loosened and his head fell back against the cushion and his breath came back to him in pieces.

For a while neither of them moved. The fan turned. The clock ticked. Her thighs were shaking, a fine tremor she could not stop, and his softening cock was still inside her, and she stayed on it, not because he wanted her to, but because she found she did not want to get up yet — she wanted to sit in the warm wreck of it a moment longer, in the dim room that smelled of beeswax and cigar smoke and now of them.

"You'll come again," he said. It was not quite a question.

She lifted herself off him and stood, and the wet of him ran down the inside of her thigh, and she did not wipe it. She found her salwar on the floor and stepped into it and pulled it up and did the buttons one by one, and she picked up her dupatta and shook the dust out of it and pinned it at her shoulder, and she looked at the money on the table, and then at him, slumped on the sofa with his pajama still open and his skin going cool in the curtained air.

"You asked me to come as Nisha," she said, and she bent and took the notes and folded them into her waistband, and she went to the door, and she put her hand on the frame and stopped, and did not turn around. "I'm still Nisha when I leave."

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.

Behind her, from the sofa, in a voice that had gone back to being polite and did not quite manage it, he said, "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.