Chapter 2: The Field of Loose Tongues

The sun punished the fields at high noon, bleaching the world to a pale, exhausted white. The paddy stubble crackled underfoot like old bone, and the light glancing off the dry earth was so fierce it forced the eye almost closed. Rohit walked through it with a spring in his step that the heat had no right to permit, a thin sheen of sweat gleaming on his forearms, the memory of the granary still beating under his skin like a second heart. Every stride reminded him of her. The ache in his shoulders from bracing over her, the sting where her nails had scored his back through his shirt, the raw tenderness at the tip of him inside his shorts, all of it spoke of her with every step, a private sermon his body preached to him across the open field. Twice he had caught himself smiling at nothing, grinning like an idiot at a heron, at a fencepost, at the white glare of the sky, and he had not cared who saw.

He spotted Ravi at the edge of the irrigation channel, squatting on his haunches in the thin shade of a neem sapling, a cigarette burning down between his fingers. Ravi was seven years older, twenty-three, with the broad shoulders of a man who worked the land and the unhurried stillness of one who never needed to announce himself. He looked up as Rohit approached, squinting through the smoke.

“You look like a dog that found a bone,” Ravi said.

Rohit laughed, too loud, too bright, the sound cracking in the dry air. He dropped down beside his cousin, the dust puffing up around his sandals. His hands were still shaking slightly. He didn’t know how to hold the secret, didn’t know whether to swallow it or set it down between them like a live coal. The wanting to tell sat in his chest like a burrowed thing, and it grew heavier the longer he sat with it, because a thing like this, a thing this enormous, this impossible, this sweet, was not made to be carried alone.

Ravi raised an eyebrow, blew a column of smoke at the sky. “What’s got into you?”

“Nothing.” The word came out too fast. Rohit plucked a dry blade of grass and chewed it, grinning around the stem. The grin wouldn’t go away. The granary darkness was still in his nostrils, the chalky dust, the smell of her skin breaking open under his mouth. It was the heat, the adrenaline, the sudden sense that he had become a man in a single afternoon. He had taken something. He had been taken. And the thing between his legs had known exactly what to do with her.

Ravi watched him with the flat patience of a cat observing a bird. He didn’t ask again. He just let the silence sit, and the silence did what silence always did to a boy with a fire burning in his chest.

“She’s something,” Rohit blurted. The words escaped before he could cage them.

“Who?”

Rohit’s jaw worked around the grass stem. A small war inside him, pride on one side, the shredding remnant of caution on the other. Pride had always won with him. He looked at Ravi and made the decision, the words spilling out of him like seed from a torn sack.

“Auntie,” he said. “Sirisha.”

Ravi went still. The cigarette hovered an inch from his lips. “What about her?”

“She’s...” Rohit searched for the word, found only insolence. “She’s not what they think. She’s not some, she’s not cold. She’s not dried up.” He laughed, low and dirty. “She’s the opposite of that.”

Ravi exhaled smoke from his nose. His face revealed nothing. “Go on.”

And Rohit did. The boasting tumbled out of him in fragments, in the broken grammar of a boy who had never learned to hold language around a secret. He told how he’d followed her into the granary. How she’d known, the whole time, that he was there. How her hands had pushed against his chest and then held on, how her mouth had opened under his like a wound.

The words came faster, drunk on their own telling. He described the way her blouse hooks had surrendered one by one, six of them, and how he’d counted each one like a man counting money. “Her tits, Ravi. God. Heavy, you know? Soft as anything. They filled my whole hand and then some, and the nipple, when I got my mouth on it, it went hard against my tongue like a pebble, and she made this sound.” He demonstrated, a thin, breathy whimper that was crude and reverent at once. “Like she’d been waiting years for somebody to do that. Maybe she has. Her husband sure as hell doesn’t.”

Ravi’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “You know what her husband does and doesn’t do?”

“Everyone knows.” Rohit waved the grass stem dismissively. “The point is.” He leaned in, dropping his voice though there was nothing alive for a mile in any direction. “The point is I knelt down in front of her. On the floor, in the dust, like a beggar. I pulled her petticoat down and I put my mouth on her, right there. Between her legs.”

Ravi’s face did not move, but the cigarette had stopped halfway to his mouth. “You put your mouth on her.”