Daylight

Morning after she had given the night back to Ravi. The house still had him in it. Not a ghost. Skin. The place on her breast his mouth had used. The ache between her legs that walking would hide and sitting would not. She washed her face. She hooked the blouse. In the small mirror she looked long enough to see last night — Ravi’s teeth on the cloth, then off the cloth, the laugh when she told him the lane could wait. Rangaiah at the door. Eyes on stone. He had heard the cot. He was old. He was not deaf. He had stood in the yard with the rope and the bottle and he had understood which man the oil was for. “He said come,” Rangaiah said. “He said the call can happen again. He said oil.” The sentence tried to enter the house the way it had entered for four years. This time the bottle was already used up on the right man. “Tell him I heard the mouth,” she said. “It was not his. No oil.” Rangaiah did not argue. He carried the refusal back through red mud. Same feet. Different message. Karthik was already at the bend with the bicycle. Not the pump boy. The clerk-face. The one who waited outside rooms with a bag that had paper in it. “The hall will sit on the channel today,” he said. He did not look at her breasts first. He looked at her mouth, then failed, then looked. “If you stay home they will say the wife is tired from the night. If you come they will say the wife is showing. Come anyway. I have the date that is not a birthday.” She took the paper because his hands were shaking and shaking paper is still paper. Tarun came with the wrench while the stall was pouring. “Now,” Tarun said. “Daylight. If we do it in the dark they jam it again and you give them a lamp picture.” She went. The walk was the old walk. Breasts in cotton. Ass late. Mud. Eyes. Ravi was still on the inside of her thighs and the lane did not get to know that. They took the outside anyway. Rangaiah walked the side. At the pump she held the handle because Tarun needed her weight on it. Bending in daylight. Ass up. Petticoat line. The big seat high. Men too close on purpose. Her breasts hanging in the blouse, swinging when he turned the bolt under her hip. Tarun’s head at that height. He looked. He also worked. His knuckle brushed the saree over her hip and he pulled it back as if the cloth were fire. The handle gave. Water slammed the bucket and burst up her wrists, across the front of the blouse, over the cloth at her thighs. Cold. She did not jump away. The first spray mapped her breasts — two dark circles, nipples showing to anyone who had come to see if yesterday could be reprinted. A woman laughed into her pot. Karthik had followed on the bicycle. He stood too far to help and too close to miss. He saw the wet blouse. He saw Rangaiah’s jaw. He looked at the wrench instead of the nipples and still saw the nipples. Anasuya stood up with the bucket. Water ran down the line between her breasts into the tuck. For one second the daylight went away and the cot came back — Ravi’s mouth following that same line, saying from the other side I will write. She closed the thought before the stall could have it. “Go,” she told Tarun. He went with the wrench like a man escaping his own hands. Karthik said, low, “Rao will not answer this at the pump.” “I know.” “He will answer in the hall. He will put your blouse in the minutes.” “Then you put the date in first.” She gave him back his paper. Her fingers left a wet mark on the corner. He held the mark as if it were a signature. Rangaiah took the bucket from her because the lane was counting how long she would stand with her breasts printed. “The night is still on you,” he said, only for her. “Let it stay. It is the only night that is mine.” They walked. Behind them the pump ran like a mouth that had been slapped. In Vellamuru that is a slap. Rao would not answer a slap with a bottle. He would answer with a hall.