Verandah

He came himself.

Night. Towel on the neck. Drink on the breath. Rangaiah behind him like a shadow that wanted to be a wall and was still a servant.

Anasuya had been about to sleep. One hook. Petticoat. Hair down. She opened because a President at the latch is a noise the lane hears if you let it knock twice.

“Inside,” Rao said.

“Verandah.”

Moths. Drip from the tiles. The brass pot gone. The tap alive in the dark behind her like a small animal.

He looked down the hook as if it were a well.

The gap showed the inner swell of one breast, the start of the nipple. He had had his palm there over cloth. He wanted skin.

Rangaiah stood in the mud off the step.

“Anna,” he said, once, a warning that had no teeth.

Rao put a hand on the doorframe beside her head.

The other hand went into the blouse.

Palm on the bare breast. Heat. Rough. Thumb on the nipple, already, as if the hall and the temple and the pump had been delays.

She went still.

Not fruit this time. A hold on a verandah, half in the lane’s air.

“You win taps,” he said into her face. “You win cans from three houses. You win a boy with a wrench. You don’t win me.”

The thumb moved. A slow circle. Her nipple hardened because bodies are stupid. He felt it and smiled with the gold.

“Push this inquiry onto my name and I spell Ravi different in this lane. Bus accident. Or he left you. Or he was never on a bus. Choose the spelling. The lane will eat any of them if I cook it.”

He squeezed once.

The hurt was clean.

Rangaiah said, “Anna.”

Rao did not take the thumb off for one extra second. The same extra second as the office. Then he took the whole hand out, slow, so the blouse dragged over the wet of her own skin.

He walked into the mud.

The towel. The drink. The back she had not bowed to.

Anasuya held the door so she would not sit on the stone.

The nipple hurt.

The sentence hurt more.

She closed the hook. It sat wrong over the sore.

Rangaiah did not climb the step.

“He is afraid,” he said.

“Good.”

“Afraid men bite.”

“I know.”

She shut the door.

Inside she stood with her back to the wood and opened the blouse again and looked at the breast he had used. Red. Wet from his palm and from her. She washed it at the tap she had won, water cold on the nipple, hissing, alone.

Ravi’s mouth had been there in a lamp with oil. Different prayer. Same flesh. She did not open the whole night. She held the difference like a knife: husband, then President, then water.

She lay down.

Palm on the slat.

R. V. under wood.

If he spelled Ravi in the lane, the letters under the slat would still be the other spelling — the children’s book, the scratch, the date that was not a birthday.

He could cook a bus accident.

He could not unwrite what he had already stolen onto a public table and what she still hid.

Sleep did not come for a long time.

The verandah smelled of drink after he was gone.

Rangaiah sat in the gap until the moths thinned, stick across his knees, not looking at the window.

In the big house Rao sat with the smell of her skin on his hand and the knowledge that she had not asked him in.

He had touched her in the open air of her own step.

That was power.

She had kept him on the verandah.

That was the other power.

Both would keep.