Night Plate

Rao drank in the inner room.

Lamp. Steel plate. Mutton gone. Only grease and a glass. The door almost shut on the backyard, where Rangaiah scraped leftovers into a pail.

Anasuya was not in the room.

Her body was.

Rao stared at the doorway as if the bund would walk in — wet blouse, nipples showing, ass working in stuck cotton. He rubbed his thumb on the glass the way he had rubbed her nipple through cloth two days ago.

Rangaiah came for the plate.

Rao did not hide the other hand at first. It was under the table, on himself, over the dhoti, slow. Then he saw the servant and stopped, angry.

“Sit.”

Rangaiah did not sit. Servants do not sit in that room. He stood with the plate.

“I put rice in that mouth,” Rao said. “I put a roof. I put a man on a bus.” He laughed into the glass. No joy. “The village stands in a line to look at her ass. I am expected to stand in the same line. In my own village.”

He drank.

“You saw the window.”

“I sent him away.”

“Good. Other men don’t get a free bath. You also don’t.”

“I am not a man that way.”

Rao looked at him as if checking teeth on a cow.

“Good. Then you watch. Watching is your work.”

He poured again. The gold ring clicked the glass.

“Tomorrow she sits with the contractor. She leans, he talks. I want her leaning. You keep the door the way I like it. Almost.”

Rangaiah held the plate. Grease.

Rao’s voice dropped. Almost alone, even with the servant there, because furniture is not a person.

“Bring her in the morning. Before the contractor. Tell her Ravi said he wants her to oil her hair the way she did the night before he left. Use that sentence. Word for word. She will come. That night is a rope.”

The lie had grown a body.

Not only he said your name.

Hair. Oil. The last night. A bed Rao had never been in and still wanted to rent with someone else’s mouth.

Rangaiah’s face did not move.

He had not been in that room either. He still knew what night meant in a house with two young bodies and a bus in the morning. The whole village knew, the way a village knows a couple’s lamp.

Rao put his hand under the table again. This time he did not stop. He looked at the doorway while he did it. He spoke to the doorway.

“Best ass in the village, he said. I said it for him. Maybe he would have said it. A man would be a fool not to. Four years. If he is alive he is a fool. If he is not—”

He cut himself.

The glass hit the table too hard.

Rangaiah had heard the cut.

If he is not.

Rao wiped his mouth with the towel.

“You didn’t hear that. You heard Dubai. Line is bad. He comes. You tell her the oil. You tell her morning. You watch her face when I say the night. If she melts, tell me. If she hardens, tell me. I will decide which one I like on her.”

He finished under the table with his jaw tight and his eyes on the empty door, on a woman who was not there, on breasts in wet cloth and an ass in a lamp and a handful from an almost-shut afternoon.

Then he was only a President with a dirty plate and a phone in the next room that could make a dead man say line is bad.

Rangaiah took the plate to the yard.

Ash. Drain. Night insects.

He washed grease off steel.

He lay on the mat.

Mud outside. Rain ticking on tiles.

He had Rao’s back ten feet away through a wall.

He had her in his head from the steps, the office hands, the bund, the cot, the wet breasts in a yard with a wall too low.

He still did not know a chair would change.

He knew the morning message he would have to carry:

Oil your hair the way you did the night before he left.

That sentence would walk into her empty house and put Ravi’s mouth on her and Rao’s leash on her in the same breath.

Lust and a lie, braided.

Tomorrow the contractor would watch her lean.

Tomorrow she would hear a husband used like oil.

And the night plate would already be clean, as if nothing in that room had been done.