Temple Steps

Festival leftover. Flowers going brown. Oil lamps dead in the sun. The temple steps still held last night’s grease and this morning’s men.

Anasuya went because the inquiry in the hall had become his theatre. Outside, a name has to stand on stone.

She wore the better cotton. In Vellamuru better means thinner. Breasts high in it. Pallu a suggestion. The climb up the steps was a second hall: below her, faces, the blouse, the swing. Behind her, the ass the laugh had already named.

She did not wait for a mic. There was no mic.

“He closed my tap and sold the picture,” she said. “He changed a board on a channel and sat smiling in the inquiry. Water is not his gift. Paper is not his wife.”

The words were tap and channel.

Not Ravi.

Not dead.

Rao laughed for the crowd from the lower step, gold in the sun.

“Anger,” he said. “We will give water. We will inquire. Don’t dirty the temple with office talk.”

A shove from the side.

Not a political shove. A body shove. She went back into stone. The edge took her ass, hard, the big seat hitting temple rock, the saree climbing. Breath out. Breasts thrown against the thin cotton. A gasp from someone who had come to pray and stayed to see.

Then a hand.

Nobody’s hand. Everybody’s.

It came from the pack at her hip and pinched her ass — full flesh, thumb and fingers, a steal through cloth — and vanished into the crowd like a fish.

She turned.

No face.

Tarun found no one to hit. Hitting the pack is hitting the village.

Shankar’s palm went up, late, making the pinch into politics.

Anasuya’s voice carried anyway.

“Inquiry in the hall. Water in the lane. Paper in the open. Not in his drawer. Not on my clothes.”

The last two words made the pack quieter. They had heard the pinch named without the pincher named.

Rao’s smile thinned.

His eyes went to the place on her saree where the five fingers had been. The cloth still had a small dragged fold. He wanted that print to have been his. That want was uglier than the pinch.

Rangaiah at the back saw the fold. He saw Rao see it. He did not raise the stick. A stick on temple steps becomes a different war.

Meera was on the road, not on the steps. Karthik was on the steps and looked at Anasuya against the stone the way the pack looked. Meera, if she had seen, would have slammed another door.

Anasuya came down the steps with her hip stinging and her mouth still her own.

The stall would say she showed her ass to God.

The inquiry would say she spoke.

Both sentences would walk.

At home she shut the door, pulled the saree off her hip, and looked at the faint mark of someone else’s hunger on her skin. Not Rao’s full palm. A coward’s pinch. She washed it the way she washed his fingers off her breast.

She did not cry.

She sat on the cot, ass sore from stone, breasts still high from the climb, and put her hand on the slat.

Public water. Public paper. Public body.

He had the hall.

She had taken the steps.

The pinch was the price the village charged at the door.

Tomorrow the price would be something with a name attached — not a vanished hand.