The water ran brown for the first few seconds, then cleared. Nisha sat on the rim of the tub with her heels still on and let it fill, watching steam climb the tiled wall, the smell of chlorine from the pool outside threading through the open window with the cut grass and the lawnmower's drone. She had walked in through the side gate, been shown to the guest bath by a houseboy who didn't look at her face twice, and left alone with a towel folded like a hotel's and a bottle of water she hadn't opened.

One lakh. The number sat in her like a stone she'd swallowed, warm and heavy. Two men. She had done the arithmetic on the drive over — the farmhouse deed, the last payment on the barn roof, the money she would put away so that a month from now she could go a whole week without a cock if she wanted to. That was the point of the number. That was what it bought. A week of being nobody's anything.

She reached down and unbuckled the heels, one then the other, and set them side by side on the tile, toes aligned. Her feet ached in the good way, the arch sore from the walk. Six inches. She had worn them from the car to the gate and the houseboy's eyes had gone to her legs and stayed there, and she had thought, good, that's the job, and then thought nothing else about him at all.

The tub was full. She stood, unzipped the mini dress, and let it fall. It was the black one, cut high on the thigh, thin straps, the fabric so light it was almost nothing — she had bought it for the farmhouse camera and never worn it, and tonight it would do what it was made for. She stepped out of it, folded it over the back of the chair, and stood in front of the mirror in nothing but her earrings and the nose ring and the sindur line she had drawn on her forehead that morning with her own hand.

The woman in the mirror had a swollen belly. Not fat — she had never been fat — but full, low, the way she had been full for two days now, the horse's seed and the dog's seed and the pig's before them, and no matter how many times she sat on the toilet and pushed and washed, something of it stayed. She put her palm flat on the swell of it. It was soft. It was hers. She hated it and she pressed it and she climbed into the water.

The heat went through her like a hand. She sank until the water reached her chin, her knees up, her hair gathered and pinned with a plastic clip from her bag so it wouldn't soak, and she closed her eyes and let the lawnmower and the chlorine and the ticking of the tub's overflow fill her head until there was no room in it for anything else.

This was the part nobody paid for. The hour before. The bath, the shampoo, the straightening — the making of the woman who would walk out of that door. She had learned to love it and she had learned to dread it, and the two had gotten so tangled over the years that she couldn't tell them apart anymore. She reached for the shampoo.

The lather was cold and clean and smelled of green apples. She worked it into her scalp with her long nails, slow circles, the way her mother used to do it when she was small and there was still a mother in the house and still a boy in the mirror — she stopped the thought there, the way she had learned to stop it, and rinsed, and did it again, and the second lather was thicker and she let it sit while she soaped her arms and her breasts and the flat of her stomach and the inside of her thighs.

Her hand went lower without asking. Two fingers, slick with soap, between her legs, over the place that was still raw from the horse. It didn't hurt. That was the thing she could not say to anyone — that the stallion had split her open and she had screamed and come and begged for more, and two days later there was no pain at all, only a softness, an ache like a muscle well used. She pressed and felt the give of it and her breath caught and she took her hand away and reached for the conditioner.

"Two men," she said to the water. Her voice came back off the tile, flat and small. "One lakh. Two men who think they're going to ruin me."

She laughed, and it was not a nice laugh. It was the laugh she used on the phone with the woman who sent her clients, the one that said I have been ruined by better than you and walked home afterward. She worked the conditioner down the length of her hair, section by section, and her mind went where it always went when her hands were busy: to the men on the porch, to her husband's hand on her back, to the camera's red light blinking steady while a horse came inside her and she said again.

She pulled the plug with her toes and stood up. The water went out of the tub with a sound like the end of something. She wrapped the towel around herself and sat on the closed lid of the toilet, and she took her handbag onto her knees and opened it.

The straightener was a small ceramic one, cheap, the plates nicked from use. She plugged it into the socket by the mirror and set it on the counter to heat while she toweled her hair, and then she began.

Section by section. She clipped the top half up and started at the nape, the hair waist-length and heavy and wet, and the straightener hissed as it went through and the smell of heated keratin rose up around her face, sharp and animal, the smell of her own hair cooking under the plates. She drew each section down slow and even, and the wet weight of it turned to silk in her hand, black and shining, and she kept going.

Her arms ached by the time she reached the crown. She let them ache. There was something in the ache she needed — the same thing she needed when a man's hand closed on the back of her neck — the knowledge that she was being made, deliberately, by her own hand, and that the woman in the mirror was not an accident but a decision she kept making, over and over, every day, with a straightener and a bottle of polish and a thin black dress.

She finished the last section and let it fall. It hung past her waist, straight and glossy and black as ink, and she turned her head side to side and watched it swing.

"There she is," she said softly. "There's my girl."

The polish was in the bag, a deep red, the same red as the sindur on her forehead. She shook the bottle and sat back down and painted her nails — left hand first, each long oval coated in three careful strokes, and she held it up to the bathroom light and blew on them and watched the shine come up. Then the right hand, slower, because her right hand had never been as steady, and she rested it on the edge of the counter and worked the brush to the very edge of each nail and tried not to think about the men waiting.

The bathroom had a small window, high up, and through it she could see the sky going the color of a peach. Water still beaded on the concrete outside, drying in the last of the heat, and somewhere beyond the wall the lawnmower stopped and the world got very quiet.

She painted the last nail and capped the bottle and held both hands out in front of her, fingers spread, and looked at them. Ten red nails. Her mother's color. Her mother's hands, almost, the hands she had been given and had spent two years turning into these.

Then the makeup. The compact, the brush, the little pot of shadow the color of a bruise. She worked fast now, because the fast part was the part she loved — the powder settling over the shine of her skin, the kohl drawn along the lash line, the way her eyes came up dark and enormous and knowing, the lipstick last, red, painted over the shape of her mouth until her mouth was the reddest thing in the room.

She looked at herself and the emptiness looked back. It was always there, under the paint, the thing she could not cover — the flat place between her legs, the hollow where a child would have been, the silence in the house when her husband was at the shop and the camera was off. She had filled it with men and money and animals and the lakhs climbing in her account, and it stayed empty. She pressed her lips together and blotted them on a tissue and stood up.

The dress went on over her head and settled on her hips like it had been made for her, which it had, more or less. She zipped it and adjusted the straps and turned to the mirror and the woman there was a stranger in a short black dress with a waist-length fall of black silk and red nails and a red mouth and a red line on her forehead, and Nisha looked at her and felt nothing at all.

"One lakh," she said to the stranger. "Two of them. You'll take them both and you'll walk out on your own feet."

She stepped into the heels. Six inches, and the tile made her taller than the mirror, taller than the room, and she bent and picked up her handbag and put the polish and the compact back inside and snapped it shut. The clasp clicked. She took a breath and let it out and opened the door.

The hallway was dim and long, and he was already there.

The first businessman stood a few feet from the bathroom door with his hands in his pockets and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, and he did not say a word. He was older than she had expected, fifty perhaps, with a heavy jaw and a soft belly and a watch that cost more than the farmhouse. He looked at her from the heels up — the shoes, the legs, the dress, the hair, the face — and his eyes stopped at the sindur line and stayed there a moment, and then came back to her mouth, and he said nothing, and the silence went on and on and filled the hallway like water.

Nisha closed the bathroom door behind her. The latch clicked. She stood with her handbag in both hands and her chin up and let him look, because the looking was part of it, the first part, the part she had been preparing for an hour in a room that smelled of green apples and heated hair, and she had learned long ago that the woman who could stand still under a man's silence owned the room.

"You're the one they sent," he said at last. Not a question.

"I'm the one you paid for," she said.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. He turned and walked down the hallway without looking back, and his shoes were loud on the tile, and Nisha followed him toward the light at the end of it, where the second man was waiting.