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 pushed the gate 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. A question he was asking the room, and the room was her. She heard the way he put the name down in the middle of the carpet and stepped back from it, the way a man sets a heavy thing down and waits to see if it stays up.

"You said come as Nisha," she said. "I came as Nisha."

He nodded, slow, as if she had answered something else entirely. His eyes went to the low table between them — teak, scarred, a ring of old water stain on the top like a moon — and on the table was the money. Five thousand, in notes, weighted under a glass paperweight with a green marble inside it. He had put it out before she arrived. He had counted it and set it out and then sat down to wait, and that told her more about him than anything he had said on the phone.

"Sit," he said, and pointed — not at the sofa, but at the floor cushion by the table, the low one with the faded embroidery. The sofa was behind her, the green one, and he had not offered it.

She looked at the cushion. She looked at the sofa. She thought about the money and the paperweight and the way his hands would not stop opening and closing, and she thought about her husband at the shop weighing rice with his scarred hand, and she thought about the woman on the phone who had known her body before she had ever spoken to her, and she did not sit on the cushion.

She sat on the sofa. She crossed her ankles the way her mother used to, and she let the dupatta slide off her shoulder on its own, without touching it, so that it pooled on the green cushion behind her and left the line of her throat bare under the fan.

His hands stopped moving.

"You're not going to tell me what to do," she said. Not a question.

"I paid," he said.

"Yes." She looked at the notes under the paperweight. "You paid to look at me. So look."

The fan turned. The shadow crossed his face and left it and crossed it again. He was not a handsome man and he was not an ugly man; he was the kind of man the lane was full of, the kind who sat on verandas in the evening with a glass of water and watched the street go by and said nothing to anyone. But his eyes had a hunger in them that he had not put there for her benefit, a hunger that had been sitting in this dim room for years, waiting for someone to walk through the door and match it.

"Lift your dupatta," he said.

"Ask me properly."

A muscle moved in his jaw. He understood what she was doing and he did not like it and he wanted it anyway, and that wanting was the leash she had just put on him. He shifted in the armchair, and the leather sighed under him.

"Please," he said. "Lift your dupatta."

She lifted it. Not the way he had meant — not a slow reveal, not a tease. She took the edge of the black fabric in two fingers and drew it up and over her shoulder and let it fall behind her onto the sofa, and the front of her salwar came open with it, the hooks she had loosened on the walk over giving way, and her breast came out into the dim air — heavy, full, the nipple already drawn tight from the heat of the lane and the cool of the room, and the gold chain she wore lying across the top of it.

He made a sound. Low, in his throat, not quite a word. His hand came off the armrest and stopped halfway, fingers spread, as if he had forgotten he was not allowed to touch.

"You can look," she said. "That's what you paid for."

She sat back against the green cushion and let him. The fan moved the air across her skin and the sweat on her throat cooled, and she watched his face the way she had watched the boy's face on the stairs — for the moment when the hunger stopped being a thing he was hiding and became a thing he was doing. It came. His breath went shallow, and his eyes stopped moving, and he looked at her the way men looked at her when they had decided there was nothing else in the room.

"Take off your kurta," she said.

"That's not—"

"You want to see me. I want to see what I'm sitting opposite." She tilted her head. "Take it off."

He took it off. His chest was soft and pale and there was hair on it gone grey at the middle, and his belly folded over his waistband, and he sat there with the kurta in his lap and did not know what to do with his hands, and Nisha felt the small hot thing in her chest turn over once, slow, like a coin on a table.

She stood up. She walked to him across the worn carpet, and she did not hurry, and when she reached the armchair she did not sit in his lap — she stood over him, close enough that her knee brushed his, and she looked down at the top of his head until he lifted his face to her.

"What's your name," she said.

He blinked. "Why."

"Because I'm going to be your wife for the next hour, and a wife knows her husband's name."

He stared at her. Something moved behind his eyes — the same thing that had moved when she had said come as Nisha on the phone, some old machinery starting up in a room he had locked. "Ramesh," he said.

"Ramesh." She said it once, flat, testing the weight of it. Then she put one hand on his shoulder, and with the other she took his right hand off the armrest and turned it over and looked at the palm — soft, uncalloused, the palm of a man who had never carried anything heavier than a ledger — and she laid it flat against the outside of her knee, over the black fabric of the salwar, and she pressed it there with her own hand on top of his.

His fingers curled. His thumb found the cloth and gripped it.

"There," she said. "That's what you wanted."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I wanted to touch you."

"Then touch me." She let go of his hand and stepped back one step, and she watched his hand stay where she had put it, hovering in the air a moment, and then come down again — on his own, without her pressing it — and settle on her knee, and begin to move, slowly, up the outside of her thigh over the thin black cloth.

She did not move. She stood there with her breast still bare and the fan turning above her and his hand climbing her leg, and the small hot thing in her chest turned over again and settled, and she thought, distantly, of the money on the table, of the paperweight with the green marble, of her husband's tea still to buy at the shop on the way home, of the boy's book face-down on the parapet three lanes away.

His fingers reached the hem of her salwar and stopped there, waiting, and he looked up at her face with a question he did not have the words for.

She looked down at him. She thought about the woman on the phone and the five thousand rupees and how the lane had not looked at her twice, and how she had walked past this house a hundred times without knowing it, and how the door had been unlocked, and how she had pushed it open before she could think.

"Go on," she said. "You paid for an hour. Don't waste it looking at me like a boy."

His hand slid under the hem.

The cloth went up over her knee, and then his palm was on the bare inside of her thigh, and it was warm — warmer than she had expected, warmer than the room, the heat of a man who had been sitting still with his hands folded for an hour. His fingers spread and took the measure of her leg, and the softness of his palm against the smooth skin there made a small sound in his throat again, that low not-quite-word, and she felt it travel up through her knee into her hip and settle somewhere behind her navel, low and heavy.

"Higher," she said.

He looked up at her — a flick of the eyes, quick, checking, the way a man checks a road before he crosses it — and then his hand obeyed, sliding up the inside of her thigh, and the fabric of the salwar rode up with it, gathering in folds across her hip, and the air of the room moved over the newly bare skin and she felt the sweat there go cool and the fine hair on her arms lift, though there was no hair on her arms, only the gooseflesh that came whether she wanted it or not.

His thumb found the crease where her leg met her body and pressed there, gentle, and stopped.

"Is this—" he began, and did not finish it, because there was no finish for it, because he did not know what he was asking, and she did not help him.

"You've done this before," she said.

"Not like this."

"No," she said. "Not like this." She put her hand on the back of the armchair, beside his shoulder, and leaned her weight into it, so that she stood over him with one hip cocked and the open front of her salwar falling away from her breast, and she let him have the whole of it — the curve of her belly above the waistband, the gold chain, the sindur line that had not smudged once in the heat. "What have you done before."

He swallowed. His throat moved. "I go to the cinema alone. On Tuesdays. The afternoon show."

She almost laughed, and did not, because the thing in his voice was too naked to laugh at. "And what happens at the cinema."

"Nothing happens," he said. "That's the point. Nothing happens, and no one knows I'm there, and I sit in the dark and I watch, and for two hours I am a man who is watching a film and nothing else." His hand had not stopped; it moved while he talked, a slow circling of the thumb against the crease of her thigh, and she understood that he did not know he was doing it. "And then the lights come up and I go home."

"And your wife."

His hand stopped. Just for a breath. Then it moved again, and his face did not change, but the fan crossed it and she saw the thing behind his eyes go still, the way water goes still when you put a stone in it.

"There's no wife," he said. "There was. She went back to her people eight years ago. There's no one."

The clock on the mantel ticked. She had not heard it before — the fan had covered it, the groan of the gate, the sound of her own blood — but now she heard it, a thin dry tick, and she counted three of them before she spoke again, and in those three ticks she thought about the house, and how a man could live in a room this dim for eight years, and how the beeswax on the furniture was fresh, which meant someone still polished it, which meant he still cared about something being clean.

"Then you have nothing to lose," she said, "and neither do I."

She took his wrist and pulled his hand up, all the way up, and pressed it flat against the damp heat between her legs through the last thin layer of cloth, and she held it there, and she watched his face while she did it. His mouth came open. His chest went still. The soft pale belly above his waistband rose once and did not fall, and she felt his fingers curl against her through the fabric, not a grip but a spasm, the hand doing what a hand does when the mind has left the room.

"That's what you paid for," she said. "Not the looking. This."

"Yes."

"Say what it is."

He tried. She watched him try — the words forming and dying behind his teeth, the shame and the want fighting it out in the small muscles around his mouth — and she did not let him off, she stood there with his hand trapped against her and waited, because the waiting was the thing, because a man who could not say it was a man who would do anything she told him to.

"It's your cunt," he said, finally, low, the word coming out of him like something he'd been holding under water. "It's your cunt and it's wet and I can feel it through the cloth and I have not felt anything like it in eight years."

"Good," she said. She let his hand go. She stepped back from the armchair and stood in the middle of the worn carpet with her breast bare and the salwar hanging open at her hip, and she looked at the money on the table, the five thousand under the green marble, and then at him, soft and pale and undone in his chair with his hand still raised where she had left it.

"Now get up," she said, "and take off the rest, and lie down on that sofa, and I'll show you what a wife does for her husband."

He got up. He got up so fast the armchair rocked back on its legs and the leather sighed, and his hands went to the knot of his waistband, and they were shaking, and he did not look away from her face once while he undressed, not once, and the clock on the mantel went on ticking, and the fan went on turning, and somewhere out in the lane a dog barked twice and gave up, and Nisha stood in the middle of the room and let him look, and the small hot thing in her chest was not turning over anymore. It had gone still. It had settled. It was hers.