Chapter 6: The Third Perspective

Three months had passed, and Rohit had learned the shape of his own starvation the way a man learns the face of a disease he will carry for life. He ate at the same table as her. He sat across from her in the lamplight while his uncle pushed food around his plate and spoke of Hyderabad, and she nodded at the right moments with the same small smile she had always worn, and not once in all those evenings did she meet his eyes. Not once did her gaze catch his across the rice and the brass plates and offer him anything but the blank courtesy a woman owes a boy who is a guest in her house. She had become perfect at it. That was the wound that would not close: she had learned to erase him with the same diligence she had once used to hide their meetings, and he understood, with the cold clarity of a boy who has stopped lying to himself, that erasure was not concealment. It was preference.

He had watched her change by degrees, the way a field changes when the rains fail. In the first weeks after Ravi had taken her, she had been thin and restless, her hands never still, her eyes quick with fear. But by the second month the fear had settled into something else, something that made the servants whisper and the older women of the compound remark that the young wife had grown a woman’s confidence at last, that marriage was finally agreeing with her. Only Rohit knew the truth of it. He had seen the way she walked now, hips moving with a lazy, knowing roll that had nothing to do with the shy aunt who had once let him fumble at the buttons of her blouse in the grain-scented dark. He had seen the new shine in her hair, the way her skin glowed with a fullness that looked, to anyone who did not know, like health. He knew it for what it was. She was being fed. Not by her husband, who was in Hyderabad more nights of the month than he was under his own roof, and who slept in the other room on the nights he was home. She was being fed by Ravi, and the knowledge sat in Rohit’s chest like a stone swallowed whole.

He had followed them before. Twice, three times, a dozen times, he had tracked Ravi’s unhurried walk through the fields at the hour when the compound settled into its evening torpor, and each time he had lost the trail at the grove’s edge, or lost his nerve, or stood so long in the heat that the light failed and the chance was gone. He told himself he was looking for proof. He told himself that when he found it, he would know what to do with it, that a man with proof is a man with a weapon. But he was nineteen, and the truth was simpler and more shameful: he could not stop watching the two of them move through the world with the secret between them. It was the only thing that made him feel alive, and it was killing him by inches.

The night it happened, the moon was a day past full, fat and yellow over the tamarind trees, and the compound lay in the deep hush that comes after the last lamp is put out. Rohit had not been able to sleep. He had lain on his cot with the fan stirring the heavy air and his blood moving with a restlessness he knew too well, and when he heard the soft scrape of a latch in the servants’ wing, he was already on his feet. He knew the sound. It was the sound of his cousin leaving the house, and it was the sound of his own ruin, and he followed it anyway, barefoot, silent, his heart a dull drum that seemed loud enough to wake the dead.

Ravi did not take the path through the courtyard. He went out by the well gate, a shadow among shadows, and crossed the moonlit field at a walk that was unhurried but purposeful, the walk of a man who knows exactly where he is going and exactly what waits for him there. Rohit kept to the irrigation ditch, crouched low, the dry grass whispering against his shoulders. The mango grove rose ahead, black against the yellow sky, and he expected Ravi to vanish into it as he always did, expected to lose him again in the tangle of roots and shadow. But Ravi did not enter the grove. He skirted its edge, following the line of the old stone wall, and he stopped at the wellhouse.

The wellhouse was a squat ruin of mud and plank, older than the compound itself, built when the grove had been a working orchard and the well had watered it. The roof had fallen in on one side years ago, and the well shaft had been dry since before Rohit was born, and the place was used now only by nesting birds and, on hot nights, by boys who wanted to smoke without their mothers knowing. A faint light showed through the gaps in the plank wall. Not the white glare of a bulb. A low, amber, wavering light, the light of a lantern or a lamp, and Rohit’s blood went cold and then hot, because he understood in that instant that Ravi had not come here to meet anyone. The light was already burning. She was already here. She had come ahead of him, and she was waiting.

Ravi pushed the plank door open and went in without knocking, and the door swung half shut behind him, and Rohit stood in the shadow of the wall with his heart slamming and his mouth gone dry as dust. He should leave. Every sane instinct in him screamed it. Whatever was in that room was not his to see, and seeing it would be a wound that would never close, and he knew that, and he crept forward anyway, because he had been starving for three months and this was the food.

The far wall of the wellhouse had a gap where the planks had rotted and pulled apart, a finger’s width of darkness at eye level, and Rohit pressed his face to it and looked in.

The light was a hurricane lantern hung from a nail in the roof beam, and it threw a circle of amber over the packed-earth floor. In the center of that circle, on a faded durry that had been spread over a layer of clean straw, Sirisha knelt. She was naked. Rohit’s mind did not know where to put the sight of it, and for a long moment he simply stared, his breath stopped, his hands pressed flat against the rough wood. She was naked the way a woman is naked when she has taken her clothes off for a man, not the accidental nakedness of a bath or a changing room, but the deliberate, offering nakedness of a body arranged to be seen. Her hair was loose, black and heavy, falling past her shoulders and brushing the tops of her breasts, and her skin gleamed in the lamplight with a slickness that he understood after a moment was oil. She had oiled herself. The thought of it, of her hands moving over her own body with the oil, preparing herself for this, for him, undid something in Rohit’s chest that he had been holding together with will and silence.

She knelt with her thighs apart and her hands resting on them, her back straight, her chin lifted, and she was looking at the door with an expression that Rohit had never seen on her face in all the months he had watched her. It was not shy. It was not modest. It was hungry, and patient, and utterly without shame, and when Ravi stepped into the circle of light she smiled at him, a slow, knowing smile that showed her teeth, and she said, in a voice Rohit had never heard her use, low and rough and pleased, “There you are. I was starting to think you’d forgotten your whore.”

The word hit Rohit like a physical blow. His aunt. His quiet, modest, respectable aunt, kneeling naked in the lamplight of a ruined wellhouse, calling herself that word, saying it with a smile. He heard it again in his mind, your whore, and his knees went weak, and he gripped the wall to keep from falling.

Ravi crossed to her slowly. He did not touch her. He stood over her, looking down at her body with the unhurried appraisal of a man examining something he owns, and he let the silence stretch until she shifted under it, until the smile flickered on her mouth. “Forget you?” he said at last. His voice was low and easy, the voice of a man who has never once had to hurry. “I thought about you all day. Standing at the well with the other women. Carrying your water. Looking like a wife.” He reached down and took a handful of her hair, winding it around his fist, tilting her face up to him. “But you’re not a wife, are you?”