Three Houses

Morning after the temple.

The pinch still lived on her hip as a dull point. The speech still lived in the lane as two sentences: she spoke; she was touched.

Then water came from three doors in open daylight.

Not Rao’s brass pot.

A widow-aunt from the pump line, eyes on the mud. A farmer whose channel was the half-dug wound, eyes on her face for one second and then on her breasts because he was made of this village. A girl from Vyshnavi’s street, looking at the stone.

Three cans on the verandah.

A small government.

Rao sent the pump man anyway.

“Fix it proper,” the man said to her courtyard tap, as if last night’s death of the pipe had been weather.

She stood over him because if she went inside he would take an hour and a look through every door.

His face was at the height of her breasts. He worked slowly. Washer. Spanner. Breath on the cotton. When she shifted her weight his eyes followed the shift, not the pipe. The blouse was hooked. Gravity still did the work. Full. Close. He could have put his mouth on the cloth.

“Done,” he said to her chest.

The tap ran.

A thin stream. Enough to spit in Rao’s story that she lived only on other men’s cans.

Sundaram, passing, said she had won a pipe and lost her name.

Ganesh said he would lose a name for that ass.

Anasuya let the tap run into the bucket until her wrists were wet. She did not bend like Part 21. She stood. Standing was a different photograph: breasts above a man’s working head, ass toward the courtyard, water living again in her own stone.

Rangaiah saw the three cans and the running tap and carried the count to no one. He already knew Rao would hear.

Evening. A boy at her door. Not the telegram thief. A different backyard mouth.

“Anna says inner room. Call.”

“Tell anna I heard the mouth,” she said. “It was not his. No call.”

The boy looked at her blouse as payment for walking. She shut the door on his eyes.

Empty house. She washed at her own tap. Blouse off in the side angle. Water she had won running over her breasts, over the temple-sore hip, over the ass a pack had pinched. She kept her back off the low wall. She finished the wash before the water could become Ravi’s pour. Last night’s bottle was still in her body. She did not open it again. She let the tap be only a tap.

Karthik and Meera did not come.

That absence walked louder than a can.

Shankar would smell three houses and a working pipe and a daughter who had slammed a door.

Rao would smell a woman who had said no to oil and no to a second performance of a dead line.

Anasuya hooked the blouse.

Sat on the cot.

Palm on the slat.

Water in the courtyard like a small insult that was actually a win.

He could still inquire her.

He could not say she drank only from his kitchen.

The pinch on the steps and the pump man’s breath on her chest sat in the same body as Ravi’s mouth on her shoulder in Part 23.

She slept on her side, facing the wall, ass toward the room, page toward her heart.

The tap dripped once, like a clock that had started again.