Sides

By night the lane had two kinds of door.

Some sent a girl with a can and looked at the mud. Some sent nothing and looked at her verandah as if water might be a ticket to the blouse that had gone transparent at the pump.

Anasuya sat on her own step with Rao’s brass pot empty beside her. The wet of the morning had dried into salt. The blouse was a different one and still too honest. Heat after rain. Cotton on her breasts. When she leaned for the empty glass, they sat forward. The step took her ass the way the pump had taken her bend: public wood.

Karthik came with a can.

Shankar’s son. Clean shirt. Eyes that tried to be decent and fell to the salt-marks of the day anyway — the memory of nipples under water, even if this blouse was dry.

“My father said you should not stand at that pump again.”

“I will stand.”

Meera was on the bicycle behind him.

Rao’s daughter. She looked at Anasuya’s breasts the way a girl looks at a problem she has been told is dirty. Then she looked at Karthik looking. The wheel cut mud.

“Appa says she is using you,” Meera said.

“She needs water,” Karthik said.

Anasuya took the can. Their fingers met on the steel. Warm. Too long by a breath. Karthik’s ears went hot. Meera saw the breath.

The bicycle left skin on the pedal.

After they were gone the can sat between Anasuya’s feet. Shankar’s water. Not Rao’s. A second kitchen entering the house.

Vyshnavi dropped onto the step without asking.

She wrung nothing. She looked at the can, at the brass pot, at her friend’s mouth.

“Half this lane is with you because they hate him. Half is with him because they want your ass and he sells the tickets. Don’t call either half love.”

“I didn’t.”

“You sat on a bench and said a name. You bent at a pump and gave them a photograph. You took his pot at noon and Shankar’s can at night. They will say you drink from every house that has a man.”

Anasuya’s laugh was small and ugly.

“Then I will be thirsty in all the stories.”

Vyshnavi’s eyes went to the blouse, to the weight, to the way Anasuya sat with her knees not careful because the day had used her care up.

“Hook it when Meera is in the road. That girl is a knife. She will cut Karthik first, then you, then her own father when she understands what his hands do. Not yet. Now she only sees your breasts and her boy’s face.”

They sat.

A boy across the lane watched the step as if it were the pump. Anasuya let the pallu stay on her thigh. Not a performance. Tired. The tired still read as offer in Vellamuru.

Rangaiah passed with no sack. Off duty and still on duty. He saw two waters at her feet. He saw Meera’s bicycle dust. He did not stop.

At the big house Rao would hear: Shankar’s son at her step. Rao’s daughter watching. A can that was not his.

Anasuya took the can inside.

Empty house. Slippers. She poured Shankar’s water into her own pot so the brass of Rao and the steel of Shankar sat on the same stone.

She took the blouse off because salt itched.

Breasts bare to the lamp. Not a window show — she had learned the lamp — she stood to the side wall and washed the pump-day off with a cloth: throat, under the breasts, the line, the nipples still remembering cold water in front of a stall. The cloth was slow because the body was sore from bending and from Rao’s yesterday and from holding a page in sleep.

She did not finish to anyone.

She put the blouse on. Hooked it.

Unhooked it.

Sleep.

Under the slat the letters waited.

Outside, sides had been chosen with cans and bicycles and a woman’s mouth on a step.

The looking had not chosen a side.

The looking was still one village.