I watched the wet ring on her thigh dry at the edges.
“What do you want me to do with that.”
She thought. The clock thought with her.
“Nothing, for a minute,” she said. “Sit. Keep the cushion if it helps you. Let the picture be in the room without us running to the bench or to your bed to kill it. I said I would go wet. I have gone. That is information. You told me four women and a storeroom. That is information. Tonight we are two people on a sofa in an empty bungalow, dressed like we are nobody, and the information is sitting between us like a third glass.”
The nightdress moved with her breathing.
My T-shirt felt too tight at the throat.
The muted television threw another colour across her bare feet and up the faded blue flower at her shoulder, and the mood held — not kind, not cruel, a thick unfinished intimacy that smelled of kadhi and winter and the name she had not needed to say again for the wet to be true.
The cushion between us had given up being furniture. It was only a square of foam the lamp made gold at the edges. The mute cook had been replaced by a silent news ticker crawling under a minister’s face. Neither of us read it. December pressed its face to the grill and stayed outside.
I heard the question leave me as if someone else had borrowed my mouth.
“If you got one entire day.”
She turned her cheek on the sofa-back. The off-white nightdress shifted; the faded blue flower at her shoulder disappeared into shadow and came back.
“One day to do anything erotic,” I said. “Anything. Next morning only you remember. The world forgets. You have… mind control. Teleportation. No school. No peon. No Papa. No consequences that stick to anyone else. What would you do.”
For a long time she watched the ticker as if the minister might offer a syllabus.
Then she laughed, once, quietly, the laugh of a woman who has been given a dangerous toy and has decided not to pretend it is a rolling pin.
“You want the respectable wild or the real one.”
“The real one.”
She sat forward. Elbows on her knees. Hair falling either side of her face. The thin cotton dropped away from her chest and she let it. Bare feet side by side on the cold tile. The wet ring on her thigh had dried; a new one would not have been a surprise.
“Morning,” she said, and her voice found the slow register of someone watching a film inside their own skull. “I wake up in this house and I already have the day in my pocket. I don’t even put a saree on. I teleport the way you change a channel. First I go to Baner. His flat. He is asleep. I don’t knock. I am on him before his eyes open, and I make his mind stay in that first second — the lift, the air, the entering — on a loop, so he is hard before he knows his own name. I use him the way he used me on the counter, only I am the one who decides when the floor exists. I take that hour. I take it properly. When I leave he is still asleep and the day has not started for him.”
The news ticker crawled. A cricket score. A city name.
“Then I come back here,” she said. “You are on this sofa, or in your room, or brushing your teeth like a good bank boy. I don’t ask. For one day I don’t say beta focus. I put my hand on the back of your neck and I tell your mind to stop making ledgers. You remember everything while it is happening and tomorrow you remember nothing, that is the rule, so I can be disgusting without orphaning you. I would have your mouth again. I would have the back again. I would sit on your face in this hall with the grill locked and the tulsi outside and I would not be quiet. I would make you look at me while I say Vivek’s name, and look at you while I say yours, and I would not choose, because the gift of the day is that I do not have to choose.”
