My shorts were an embarrassment the lamp did not care about. She glanced down, registered, continued.
“The gym,” she said. “Empty. I teleport the whole ladies’ batch out and I leave the mirrors. I put him on one side of me and you on the other and I make both of you believe, for as long as I want, that this is training. May I. Form. Hands. I get fucked standing up in front of that glass with my tights at my knees and I watch my own face. I have never watched my own face properly. For one day I would. I would watch myself come and I would not look away.”
She swallowed. The nightdress stuck, faintly, where she had told the truth earlier. She did not adjust it.
“If I am being the woman I am when I stop being decent—” she looked at the photograph-direction of my room, though the wall lay between us — “the mind control goes further than men I have already had.”
The hall tightened.
“Sonam is twenty-three. She is in Hyderabad in the real world. In the day that forgets, I bring her home for an hour I will not pretend I have not thought about since I used her picture like a dirty sentence. I do not touch her like a lover. I am not that story, not in my real stomach. I make her see. I sit her in that chair.” She pointed at Father’s chair, empty, yellow-lit. “I make her watch her brother and her mother and the boy from the society steps and I make her understand the house she lives in. Then I send her back to a hostel bed with no memory, only a strange ache she will blame on the AC. That is uglier than sex. That is the part I should not be saying. You asked for the real one.”
I did not speak.
She was not finished.
“Papa,” she said, softer, almost kind, which was worse. “Banaras. I go there only to look. I stand at the foot of his hotel bed and I see the man who used to take me with the ring on. I do not wake him. I do not punish him. I do not perform for him. I only look, so the day contains the whole map, and then I leave. The world forgets. He keeps his temple and his supplier. I keep the looking.”
She rubbed her thumb across her lower lip, thoughtful, aroused, a little afraid of her own inventory.
“Public, also. Because you gave me teleportation and I will not waste it on only bedrooms. A lift in a building on SB Road. A changing room. The back seat of the City in the bank basement with the doors locked and your colleagues walking past the boot. I would have someone in me in a place that has my son’s name on the parking sticker. Tomorrow the world forgets. Today I get the filth of almost being caught without the ruin.”
The clock ticked. The minister on mute opened his mouth like a fish.
She leaned back. One arm along the sofa, toward me, not touching. The cotton climbed her thigh. Her mouth was wet from her own talking.
“Last hour of the day,” she said. “I bring whoever I still want into this hall and I use everything until my body is stupid. Then I sit on this exact sofa in this exact nightdress and I wait for midnight like a girl waiting for exam results. When the day folds, they all go back to their lives clean. You go back to being a man who spots my bar. He goes back to Forge and landlines he will not dial. Sonam goes back to panels. Papa goes back to the ghat. And I—” she placed an open palm on her own stomach, below the nightdress’s thin cloth — “I am the only one who wakes up knowing. Wet. Sore. Alone with a whole day nobody will believe. That is the fantasy. Not a honeymoon. A theft. I steal twenty-four hours from the universe and I pay by remembering it by myself for the rest of my life.”
