Not His Mouth

Night. Rao’s inner room.

Lamp. Phone on the table. Two glasses. Door almost shut on Rangaiah and the jug.

Anasuya sat where he pointed. The chair was low. Sitting put her breasts high and her knees together. The blouse was hooked. The hook was a joke after the morning. He looked at her chest while he dialled as if the numbers were written there.

“Listen,” he said. “Then you stop writing children’s stories.”

He held the phone out.

Dead tone. Click. A man’s voice far away, thin, wrong.

Line is bad.

House okay?

I come.

Three sentences.

Then dead.

Anasuya’s eyes went wet and sharp together.

The voice wanted to be a husband. It had the shape of Ravi the way a cheap statue has the shape of a god. The I come was slow. Ravi was not slow when he promised. Ravi was a laugh and a forehead on hers.

Rao knelt.

It looked like kindness.

It put his face at her breasts.

He held her knees with both hands, thumbs on the inner cloth, and looked up as if he had given her a miracle.

“You heard.”

She had heard a mouth wearing her man’s clothes.

Rao’s hands opened her knees a finger. The saree fell in. He looked at the dark between her thighs as if it were part of the call, as if Ravi had signed for this view with those three lines.

“He comes. You keep your ass in this village and your papers in my drawer.”

She closed her knees.

His thumbs were caught a second, then slid to the outer cloth of her thighs, still kneeling, still at the height of her sex, breath on the cotton over her breasts.

“Say thank you,” he said, soft.

“That was not his mouth.”

The lamp ticked.

Rangaiah’s jug ticked in the strip.

Rao’s face changed. Not loud. A small death of the smile.

He stayed on his knees. That was the insult and the heat. A President kneeling between a woman’s legs, denied the thank you, still taking the picture: the line of her thighs, the saree fallen in and pushed out, the breasts above him rising too fast, oil-smell gone but memory of oil in the room.

“Line is bad,” he said. “Men sound different.”

“He doesn’t sound like a man reading.”

Rao stood. The stand put the front of his dhoti in her face for a second on purpose. He turned as if it were nothing.

“You heard what you needed. Tomorrow the inquiry eats channel. Not husbands. You bring the sheets or I tell the lane your Ravi was never on a bus. He was on a list. Let them choose which shame they like on you.”

She stood.

He was still close. Standing up from that chair meant her breasts passed his chest, her ass passed his hand. He did not grab. He let her pass through his heat like a woman walking through a doorway he owned.

Outside the almost-door she told Rangaiah, not looking at him,

“That was not his mouth.”

Rangaiah said nothing.

The phone was already in Rao’s pocket, warm from the lie.

She walked the mud home.

Empty house. Slippers. She sat on the cot and put her own hands on her knees where his thumbs had been, and then she took her hands off as if they were his.

The voice played again.

I come.

Ravi, the real one, would have said her name. He would have said the house. He would have said the green saree or the oil or a filthy sweet thing that belonged only to their lamp. This voice had been a broom. Sweep, sweep, gone.

She lay down dressed.

Breasts tight from the kneel. Heat still between her thighs from thumbs that had opened her one finger for a ghost.

She did not finish to it.

She finished to nothing.

She stared at the dark window and kept the two sheets under the slat and kept the sentence in her mouth for morning:

Not his mouth.

Rao, in the inner room, sat with the dead phone and his own hand and the picture of her knees opening one finger. He did not like that she had not thanked him. He liked the rest.

Rangaiah washed two glasses.

He had heard the three lines.

He had heard her verdict.

He lay on the mat knowing the rope of Dubai had frayed in public, in a room with a jug for a witness, and that a man who kneels and still lies will use his feet next.