The Tap

Rao did not send another boy for the page.

He sent the morning dry.

The courtyard tap gave a cough and nothing. Bucket empty. Pot empty. The stone still dark from night rain, useless. Anasuya stood in the back with yesterday’s blouse and yesterday’s paper still under the slat and understood the message without a speech.

He could not find the second sheet.

He could close water.

The street pump sat in the open, past the stall, in red mud. A line of women. A line of men who had not come for water.

She went.

Saree knotted fast. Hair open. No pallu worth the name. The walk to the pump was the stall’s whole religion in thirty steps. Breasts moving in the blouse. Ass late. Chappal in slush. She did not give them a show. The lane took one anyway.

Women opened the line because men had already made the line a theatre.

She bent to the handle.

That was what he had paid for.

Ass up. Petticoat line under the saree. The big seat high and split by the tuck, close to the faces of men who had stood too near on purpose. Her breasts hanging in the blouse, heavy, swinging with each shove of the handle. The neckline losing. Inner swell. Sweat already.

The handle fought her.

A Rao man, the same backyard mouth as the telegram boy’s uncle, said loud,

“President said private taps first. This one can wait.”

Laughs.

She shoved the handle. Water slapped the bucket and jumped. Cold on her wrists. Then on the blouse. The cotton went dark over her nipples in two ugly maps. Water ran between her breasts, down the waist, into the saree over her ass. She kept working. Dripping in the lane at eight in the morning.

Tarun shoved the Rao man.

The man shoved back.

The bucket went over.

The rest of the water found her: throat, blouse, the cloth at her hips, the runnel down the crack of her ass under wet cotton. She stood up shining. Hair stuck to her neck. Breasts plain through the shirt of the blouse. Ass wet-mapped.

The stall did not pretend to drink tea.

Ganesh’s pour missed again.

Sundaram said something about Dubai and God that she did not keep.

She picked up the bucket.

Empty.

Tarun’s lip already swelling. She put a hand on his shoulder to pull him off — not a breast on his arm this time, a wet palm — and the blouse stuck to her so the side-view was enough for the doorway men.

“Not here,” she said.

Rangaiah came at noon with a brass pot from Rao’s kitchen.

In front of everyone.

Steam. His kitchen. His water. His servant.

“From his house,” Rangaiah said, to the stone.

The lane watched her take it.

That was the second blow.

No tap.

Still look.

And now she drinks from the man who shut the pipe.

Anasuya took the pot because her throat was salt and because refusing in that crowd was another photograph: proud, dry, stupid.

She walked home dripping, pot against her hip, wet saree sucking her ass, blouse glued to her breasts, paper still under the slat, village saying she had lost water and kept the body public.

At the door she set the pot down and stood in her own courtyard and poured a little of his water over her own feet, not her face, as if even that had rules.

Ravi used to pour the tap for her when it stuck. His chest bare, her blouse off to save cloth, both of them laughing when the first burst hit her breasts and he said sorry to her nipples like a fool. That tap was this tap’s cousin. That man was not in this queue.

She shut the memory before it became a hand.

Rangaiah went back to the big house.

Rao, milk in his fist, said,

“She drank. Good. Inquiry can eat paper. Thirst eats pride faster.”

He had not needed her window.

He had put her on her knees at a public handle and sold the picture for free.

She sat inside with his water in a steel glass and the wet blouse off at last, breasts cold from evaporation, the R. V. page under the wood still dry.

He could close the tap.

He had not closed the list.

Tomorrow she would stand at that pump again if it was jammed, and she would also stand in the hall if the inquiry had a chair.

The body they had watered in the street was still the body that hid the letters.