The Second Sheet

She did not go to the field.

She sat on the cot with the list and the lamp and the blouse not done, because heat in that house sat on the skin. One breast bare to the light. The other half in cotton. Saree a rope at her waist. Ass on the cot edge. Ravi’s name on the paper in her lap.

She was reading the date again.

That was the picture the gap received.

The contractor came like Srinivas. Same drain. Same lime. A second sheet in his fist. He had told himself he was bringing paper. Then he saw the lamp and the bare breast and the big seat on the wood and the paper became an excuse.

He stopped breathing right.

Anasuya’s head came up.

Too late to cover in a way that mattered. She pulled the blouse across one nipple. The other still showed. The list slid. She held it over her thigh.

“Office,” she said.

“Your office is his mouth.” His eyes were not on her mouth. “Take this and I go.”

He did not go. He stepped into the courtyard stone as if a sheet of paper were a ticket to her floor.

Rangaiah’s stick hit the wall before the man’s second foot landed.

The contractor flinched. The second sheet jumped from his hand into the mud.

Anasuya on the cot, breasts not honest, ass still hanging off the edge, saw the white paper go red-brown.

“Stay there,” Rangaiah said to the man.

The contractor ran anyway. Want and fear. The front of him still ugly with the lamp picture.

Rangaiah picked the sheet out of the slush. Did not look at the cot. Held the paper through the door at the height of a servant’s duty, eyes on stone.

More names. Red marks. One line beaten with ink until only two letters lived under it.

R. V.

Anasuya stood. The blouse fell open again. She took the muddy sheet. Her breasts were in the doorway for a second, lamp behind her, Rangaiah’s gaze down. She held both papers to herself, against skin, and pulled cloth over them.

“Not the gap,” he said.

“I didn’t call him.”

“He came because this house is a window and a rumour and a lean. Paper is what he said. That is not what he came for.”

She shut the door to a crack.

Inside she sat on the floor with both sheets. Mud on her fingers. Mud on the side of one breast where the wet paper had kissed her. Ravi on one list. R. V. under the scratch on the other. Same heat in her skin as the oil night, wrong-flavoured — fear and lust and a name that might be a child-mark or a man-mark or a corpse-mark.

She wiped the mud off her breast with the pallu. The cloth on her nipple made her hiss. She hated that her body still did that.

Rangaiah stayed in the gap until the insects were loud.

Srinivas did not come. Even thieves smell when a stick has already been used.

In Rao’s backyard later, Rangaiah washed mud off his own palm.

He did not tell Rao about the letters.

He told Rao the contractor had walked the wrong side of the house.

Rao, drink in hand, smiled.

“Of course he did. They all will. Put a rope on that gap. If she has paper, the paper will come to me. If she has a body, the body already did.”

Rangaiah lay on the mat.

He had not looked at her breasts in the doorway.

He had still seen them, because some things hit the side of the eye and stay: lamp, bare, muddy paper on skin, ass leaving the cot to take a thief’s leftover sheet.

Two pages now.

One clean enough. One wearing the lane.

Ravi. R. V.

And a woman in an empty house who could not tell whether the wet on her skin was mud, sweat, or the fact that men kept bringing her husband back as a list and a look.