The Name on the Paper

The contractor came back without Rao.

Fear makes some men talk. It does not make them stop looking.

Outer room. Daylight. Door open on purpose this time. Rangaiah at the frame. Anasuya standing because sitting in this room with this man would print another rumour.

He had sweat in his collar. His eyes still fell to her breasts as if fear and want were the same water. The blouse was hooked. It did not matter. Full. Heavy. He spoke to her face and lost the face.

“They told me to move papers. Not only money. Birth papers. Children’s names. Village to village.”

He took a folded sheet from his shirt, against his stomach, warm from his skin. When she reached for it, her fingers touched the cloth over his belly. He looked down her neckline as if that touch had bought the view. He held the paper a second too long so she had to come closer. Her breast almost brushed his wrist.

She took the sheet.

Lists. Dates. Marks. Village names. Children’s names that were not always children anymore.

Halfway down, in a column that did not belong to husbands or buses:

Ravi.

Not his birthday.

Not the day he was supposed to take the Guntur bus.

A date four years old and wrong.

Her thumb went white on the paper.

The contractor watched her mouth and the rise of her breasts as her breath changed. He licked his lower lip without knowing.

“I can find the rest,” he said. “If you meet me where this does not go into his ear. After dark. Field side.”

His gaze sat on the weight in her blouse. On her mouth. On the place the rumour had already sold.

“The office,” she said.

“The office has his door.”

She folded the paper. She put it into the pallu, then, because the pallu slips, into the blouse. The sheet lay flat against her breast, warm from him, warmer from her. Paper and skin. Ravi’s name on a children’s list riding against her nipple when she breathed.

“The office,” she said again.

He left angry and hard and useful. The front of his trousers did not hide the useful.

Rangaiah had seen the name upside down.

He did not say it.

Ravi.

In a list for children who were moved like grain.

Anasuya sat on the outer bench when the man was gone. The bench took her ass. She pressed her palm to the paper over her breast as if she could read it through cloth. The date burned.

Four years.

Dubai.

A voice on a phone that was not his mouth.

A line in a book where people get erased.

Rangaiah said, to the frame,

“Not the field.”

“I said office.”

“He will come to the gap anyway. They all come to the gap.”

She stood. The paper shifted on her breast. The sensation was stupid and sexual and sick together — a dead or missing husband’s name rubbing her as she walked.

She walked the red lane with it there.

The stall looked at her as it always looked. They did not know she was carrying Ravi on her skin. They only saw breasts, ass, oil-rumour still hanging from yesterday.

At home she shut the door, took the sheet out, and her nipple was damp from sweat where the paper had sat. She laid the list on the cot. Sat beside it. Ass on wood. Blouse open because she could not stand the cloth. Her bare breast next to his name.

She did not touch herself.

She looked at the letters until they blurred.

Rangaiah, in the backyard of the other house, washed a glass and kept the name behind his teeth.

Rao would smell this paper the way he smelled oil.

Tomorrow or tonight he would send a hand for it.

The contractor would send his body to the gap.

And Ravi was no longer only a bus and a lie.

He was a mark in a children’s book, lying on a cot next to the breast of the woman who still said he would come.