Rumour

By evening the lane had a new sentence.

Not big-seat. They already owned that.

She sat in his room and the contractor forgot his own name.

She leaned. The blouse did the rest.

Oil in her hair like a wedding night. Who was the wedding for.

Shankar’s boy said it at the stall with a laugh. Rao’s boy said it like pride. Same dirt. Two flags.

Anasuya went for milk because the house still needed milk.

The saree was plain. The looking was not.

She reached for the high tin. Her breasts lifted. A man behind the sack let her stretch, then reached too. His arm brushed the side of her breast, full, warm. He said sorry to the tin. He did not move his arm as fast as sorry.

Ganesh said, loud enough for the stools,

“President’s room has good air today. Contractor came out with his tongue out.”

Laughs.

Sundaram: “If I had to sign my land I would ask her to lean twice.”

Anasuya paid. The notes stuck to her fingers. She left.

The brush on her breast stayed. Rao’s foot from the morning stayed. The oil in her hair still smelled. The lane had turned a file into a fuck they had not seen and still believed.

Vyshnavi caught her at the bend.

“They are saying you opened the blouse for a signature.”

“I opened a file.”

“In this village that is the same photograph. You oiled your hair. That is the photograph they printed.”

Anasuya’s mouth was hard.

“Rao sent that sentence. He said Ravi asked for the oil.”

Vyshnavi looked at her friend’s braid, at the shine on the upper swell of her breasts where a drop had lived since morning.

“Ravi asked you for oil in a room with one cot. Rao asked you for oil in a lane with a hundred mouths. Don’t confuse the two men because they used the same bottle.”

They stood.

A woman passing told another woman that Rao had put his hand where a husband puts it. The story was bigger than the afternoon that had actually happened. The afternoon had been real enough.

Anasuya walked home the back way.

Empty house. Slippers. She shut the door and sat on the cot. The wood took her ass. She pulled the pallu off because the cloth was a rumour by itself.

The oil in her hair pulled the night back. Harder than in the doorway. This time she let a little of it stay.

Ravi behind her. Fingers in the braid. Oil on his palms. Those palms sliding down, over her breasts, nipples slipping under grease, his mouth at her ear again, pour. She had poured. He had taken her ass in both oily hands and pulled her onto him while she was still half standing at that same cot. The smell now was that smell. Her own body answered it in the empty room — breasts tight, heat between her legs, a stupid wet that belonged to a man who had not come.

She put her fist on the cot and stopped her own hand from going where Ravi’s would have gone.

Not because she was holy.

Because if she finished to that night now, Rao would have rented it twice: once in the office, once in her own dark.

Outside, Rangaiah heard both versions of the rumour in the backyard while he washed steel.

Rao drank milk.

“Rumour is a dog,” Rao said. “Let it run. It still comes back to my gate.”

He smiled at the smell of oil that was no longer in the yard.

“Tomorrow she will want the rest of the channel name. She can want. The lane already signed what I needed. They think she pays in blouse. Let them think. Shame sits on her. The file sits on me.”

Rangaiah scraped a plate.

He had seen the lean.

He had seen the brush at the tin.

He had not seen the empty-house memory, but he knew that house. He knew what oil in a woman’s hair can open when the cot is empty.

The rumour walked the red mud until night.

Anasuya lay on her side, braid smelling of a last night and a lie, blouse off, breasts against her own arm, ass toward the window she still had not curtained, and the village wrote a sex scene on her that she had not performed in that office.

They would come to the next part of the file anyway.

They would also come to look at the woman the rumour had already fucked for them.