The Bund

The eastern channel was a half-dug wound.

Mud banks. Standing water that smelled. A jeep track. Sun after the rain, hard enough to pull sweat out of cotton.

Anasuya walked the bund with a file.

The blouse went dark between her breasts first. Then the dark spread. Wet cloth on full breasts is not a cover. It is a map. Nipples showed. The weight showed. When she took a high step on the broken edge, her breasts jumped inside the wet and a farmer lost the sentence he had practised.

The saree stuck to her ass.

Each step on uneven mud worked her. The late shake. The tuck cutting a line. Sun on the round of both cheeks until the cotton might as well have been smoke.

Men had come to talk about water.

They talked late.

After they had taken the look.

Tarun walked behind her.

He had given her a labourer’s name. He also gave himself the view he had been told not to take from behind. Sweat running down the line of her back into the tuck. The big seat working. The wet blouse from the rear — the sides of her breasts when she turned her head to ask a question. He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood.

His lungi was a problem in open daylight.

He walked anyway.

Rangaiah came with Rao’s umbrella like a flag. The umbrella put a moving shadow on her chest that made the wet cloth look darker. Farmers followed the shadow.

A man spat.

“President’s people built this.”

She stopped.

Stopping was worse than walking.

Breasts under wet cotton, breathing, nipples plain. Ass settled. Sweat at her waist. File against her hip.

“Then President’s people can answer.”

Small sentence.

The bund heard it.

A labourer — Tarun’s name — looked at her mouth and at her breasts and nodded as if both were orders.

“They paid before we dug. Then they changed the board. I can say it if someone sits with me after.”

“In the hall,” she said.

“Hall has his dogs.”

“My house has a window.” She did not smile. “Hall.”

On the walk back the jeep of Rao’s contractor sat on the track. The man inside rubbed his jaw and watched her come. Watched the wet blouse. Watched the ass in the stuck saree. When she passed the jeep his window was down on purpose. His eyes were at the height of her chest. He could have put his mouth on the cotton if the world were a different crime.

He did not.

He looked until her body had gone past, then looked at the back of her until the bund bent.

Tarun said, without turning,

“He will tell Rao you walked.”

“Rao knows when I spit.”

At the end of the bund she stopped in the last of the shade and pulled the pallu over her breasts. The pallu went wet too and stuck. Pointless. She left it.

For a second the sun and the stick of the cloth on her nipples pulled Ravi up — a walk back from their field years ago, his hand under the pallu from behind, palm on her wet breast, thumb lazy, walk, I have you. She had walked. She had let him. That hand was dead or in Dubai or in Rao’s drawer. This sun was now.

She shut it.

Evening. Rao already knew.

Office almost shut. He did not feel her up this time. He looked at the memory of the nipples in wet cloth as if the cloth were still in the room.

“You want to be a man of files. Fine. Tomorrow the contractor sits here. You sit here. That boy does not walk behind you.”

His eyes on her blouse, which had dried into shape. Her breasts still sat in the shape of the bund.

“He walked in front,” she said.

Rao’s tongue ran his tooth.

“Feet. Eyes. I know the order. You said my people’s name on a pile of mud. Tomorrow you say it in my chair’s air. We will see which name survives.”

Under the table his hand was a fist on his own thigh.

Rangaiah clicked the jug on purpose.

Rao laughed.

“Even the furniture is jealous.”

Anasuya put the file on the table.

Mud on the corner from the bund.

Mud on her hem.

Sweat-salt still on her breasts under dry cotton.

The channel was no longer only water.

It was a walk fifty men had taken with their eyes, and a sentence Rao could not wash off the bank