The gate was black iron and old, its paint chipping in scabs the size of fingernails, and Nisha stood in front of it with the address folded in her pocket and her thumbnail already digging a crescent into her palm. Three lanes over. She had walked past this house a hundred times without knowing it, without caring, and now the number on the wall matched the number on the paper and the afternoon sun lay flat on her sindur line like a hand.

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. The gate groaned on its hinge 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.

He sat in the armchair by the window.

Middle-aged. Soft-bellied, the kind of belly that came from sitting, not working. His hands rested flat on his thighs, and they were the hands of a man who had never weighed rice or burned himself on a stove — pale, unmarked, the nails clean. He looked at her the way a man looks at water in a drought. Not grabbing. Just looking. And that was worse, somehow, than grabbing would have been.

"Nisha," he said.

Not a greeting. A question. He said it the way a man says a word in a language he has only read, testing whether it sounds right in his mouth.

She stood just inside the door and let him look. Her dupatta was pinned at her shoulder, the black salwar hung straight to her ankles, the fine gold thread at the cuffs catching what little light came through the curtains. The sindur line was bright on her forehead. She had drawn it that morning in the mirror, the way she did every morning, and she had not wiped it off, and she was not going to.

"You know my name," she said. Her voice came out low and even, and she was glad of it. "Say it again."

Something moved behind his eyes — surprise, maybe, or pleasure. "Nisha."

"Good." She stepped further into the room. "Then you know what I am. And you know what you paid for."

He gestured at the low table between the armchair and the sofa. On it sat a stack of notes, edges aligned, the way a careful man aligns things. Five thousand rupees, in five hundreds, and a glass of water beside them that he had poured for her and that she had not touched.

"Sit," he said.

She sat. The green sofa was low and soft and it swallowed her a little, so that she had to sit up straight to keep her spine, and she did, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap, her ankles crossed under the salwar. A wife's posture. Her mother's posture, from the photographs, from the one time she had watched her mother sit in a stranger's car and smile.

He did not touch her yet. He looked, and the looking had weight, it moved over her like a hand that hadn't landed. Her hair, loose down her back. The curve of her breast under the black cotton. The gold thread at her cuffs. The line of sindur. He looked longest at the sindur.

"Your husband," he said. "Does he know you're here."

"No."

"Does he know what you do."

"He knows what I am." She held his eyes. "That's not the same thing."

The fan turned. The shadow crossed the carpet and crossed back. Somewhere in the house a clock ticked, or a pipe, or something old settling into itself, and Nisha listened to it the way she listened to the lane when she walked it — as proof that the world was still ordinary, still going on, still not looking at her.

"Lift your dupatta," he said.

She did not move for a moment. She wanted to feel the moment, to hold it, the way she held the first sip of tea on a cold morning — the heat before it became ordinary. Then she reached up with her right hand, the one with the long painted nails, and she took the pinned edge of the dupatta and drew it off her shoulder.

The fabric slid. It fell across her back and hung at her elbow, and the front of her salwar was open to the light, and under it the curve of her breast — full, heavy, the way the hormones had built it, the way she had wanted it since she was fourteen and did not have a word for wanting — rose and fell with her breath. She kept her hand on the armrest. Her thumbnail pressed into the fabric, into the wood beneath it, and she did not let go.

He made a sound. Not a word. Just a sound, low in his throat, and it was the sound of a man who had been waiting a long time for something he was not sure he would ever be allowed to see.

"You're beautiful," he said.

"I know."

He laughed, a short surprised laugh, and it changed his face — softened it, made him less like a man in a chair and more like a person. "You don't say thank you."

"I don't say thank you for the truth." She tilted her head. "You paid five thousand rupees to look at me. You've looked. What else."

He leaned forward. His hand came off his thigh and crossed the small space between them and landed on her knee — flat, warm, through the black cotton of her salwar. His palm was dry and soft. It was the first time a stranger's hand had been on her since the last one, three lanes over, in a room that smelled of the same cigars, and her body remembered it before her mind did, a small hot thing turning over in her chest like a coin in a pocket.

She did not move.

His thumb began to trace a slow circle on the fabric, over her knee, the small hard bone of it, and she watched his hand the way she watched her own reflection — with attention, with a kind of patience, waiting to see what it would do next. The door behind her was closed. She had closed it herself. The afternoon light came through the gap in the curtains in one thin gold bar and lay across the carpet between them, and the fan turned, and the shadow wobbled, and the small hot thing in her chest turned over again and settled, and she stayed.

"You're shaking," he said.

"No," she said. "You are."

And he was — his hand on her knee had a fine tremor in it, the tremor of a man who had paid for something and was afraid it would be taken back. She looked at him, and for a moment she saw him clearly: not a stranger, not a client, not the man on the phone, but a soft middle-aged man in a dim room who had wanted something so badly he had paid a woman to find out her name. She knew that hunger. She had lived inside it for years.

"You can touch me," she said. "That's what the money is for. But I decide where."

He nodded. He did not speak. His thumb kept its slow circle, and she let it, and she let the silence fill the room, and she counted the turns of the fan — one, two, three — and on the fourth she reached down with her own hand and covered his, and pressed it flat against her knee, and held it there.

For a long moment neither of them moved. His hand lay under hers, palm up now, the fingers half-curled, and she could feel the heat of it coming through the cotton, the damp of it, the small nervous life of a man who had spent weeks arranging this room and this hour and had not planned past the first touch. She held him there the way she held a cup of tea she wasn't ready to drink — not letting go, not lifting it, just feeling the weight of it against her palm.

"You've done this before," he said. It wasn't a question, not quite. His voice had gone lower, rougher at the edges, and there was something in it that wanted her to say no.

She looked at him. In the dim room his eyes were the color of wet slate, and the fan turned above them and pushed the warm air across her bare collarbone, and she thought about the last one — the man three lanes over, the armchair, the five thousand folded in her waistband, the way she had walked home and bought tea and said nothing to anyone. She thought about how easy it had been, in the end. How the shame she had braced for had not come.

"I've done what I wanted," she said. "That's not the same thing either."

He smiled at that — a small, crooked smile that sat oddly on a face built for cigars and ledgers. Then he turned his hand over under hers, slowly, deliberately, and laced his fingers up through hers, and she let him, and the touch was so unexpectedly tender that something in her chest went tight and wary, the way it did when her husband said her name in the dark.

The sofa creaked as she shifted her weight. She uncrossed her ankles, let her knees fall a little apart under the black cotton, and watched his eyes drop to the movement and stay there. The glass of water on the table had begun to sweat; a thin ring of moisture gathered on the wood, and the stack of notes sat beside it, edges still aligned, still untouched, five hundred after five hundred, and she thought: that money is the only honest thing in this room. It had been counted. It had been agreed. Everything else between them was a language neither of them had learned properly.

"Where did you learn to sit like that," he said. "Straight-backed. Like a—" He stopped himself.

"Like a what."

"Like a woman who's been watched her whole life."

She almost laughed. It came up her throat and she swallowed it back down, because it was too true and too strange to give him, and because she did not want to like him. But she did, a little. That was the part no one warned her about — that the men would sometimes be people, that the hunger would sometimes have a face she recognized, that she would sit in a stranger's drawing room and feel the old familiar thing she felt in her own kitchen when her husband came in from the shop with dust on his shoulders and the day behind him.

"My mother sat like this," she said, and did not know why she said it until it was out of her mouth. "In photographs. Before she left."

He didn't ask what she meant by left. He just looked at her, and the looking had changed — less like a man at water in a drought and more like a man reading a page he had not expected to understand. On the side table by his elbow, she noticed for the first time, stood a framed photograph: an older woman in a sari, turned away from the camera, one hand raised as if to push back hair or wave something off. The glass had a hairline crack across the corner. Nisha looked at it, and at him, and did not ask.

"Tell me what you want," he said. "Not what I paid for. What you want."

The fan wobbled its shadow across the carpet. The thin gold bar of light from the curtain gap had crept a finger's width across the floor while they had been sitting, and she watched it move, and she felt the small hot thing in her chest turn over once more, unhurried, like a coin settling. She knew the answer. She had known it before she pushed the gate open. She had known it on the walk over, with the address folded in her pocket and the sun flat on her forehead.

"I want to be looked at," she said, "and not corrected." She lifted his hand off her knee, held it up between them, and turned it over, palm to the light, the way she turned her own hands to check the paint on her nails. "You've been looking at the sindur all this time. You've been trying to work out what I am. Stop trying." She set his hand back down on her knee, flat, and pressed it there with her own, hard enough that he would feel the weight of it, hard enough to be a decision. "I'm your wife for the next hour. That's all you need to know."

His breath came out of him in a slow unsteady rush. She watched his throat move. She watched his free hand grip the arm of the chair, knuckles going pale on the upholstery, and she understood, with a clarity that felt almost cruel, that he had not expected her to take the room from him. He had paid to look. He had not paid to be looked at. And she was looking at him now — his soft belly, the damp line at his collar, the clean pale hands that had never weighed anything — and she was not turning away.

"Is that what you are," he said. "A wife."

"I told you." She leaned back into the sofa, let her spine find the cushion, let her shoulders drop. "For the next hour."