She turned her head on the sofa and looked at me fully.
The mood in the hall was thick enough to drink. Kadhi in the walls. Winter at the grill. A nightdress that had given up. A son in a stretched grey T-shirt who had asked for the real one and received a map that included his mouth, his friend, his sister’s eyes, his father’s sleep, and a midnight that left only her.
“Your turn,” she whispered. “But not yet. Sit with mine first. Let it be in the room. If I imagine even a piece of it now—”
She did not finish.
She did not need to.
The unfinished sentence and the nightdress and the mute cricket score did the rest of the work, and the cushion between us looked suddenly like a joke the house was too tired to tell.
She had left her day in the hall like a smell.
The mute minister gave way to a silent advertisement for cement. White dust. A smiling family that was not us. The lamp still made a cheap gold of her nightdress, of the faded flower, of the open palm she had forgotten on her own stomach. My T-shirt collar felt like a hand.
“Your turn,” she had said.
I took it because leaving hers alone in the room would have been another kind of cowardice.
“Same rules,” I said. “One day. Tomorrow only I remember. Mind control. Teleport. The world wipes.”
She nodded. Waited. The cushion had stopped pretending.
“I would waste the morning on people who don’t live in this house,” I said. “That is the easy filth. I would take it first so the rest has somewhere to stand.”
The names came out like a folder opening.
“Anushka Sen.” I saw Aparna’s eyebrow move and I did not stop. “Not the cute posters. The grown one. I would drop into a room that looks like a hotel she has never booked and I would make her mind stay on the wanting so she doesn’t do the polite actress smile. I want that face when it is only a face. Clothes off like a decision, not a dance. I would go down on her until she forgets she has a public.”
The news ticker crawled under my sentence.
“Ulka Gupta. Smaller. Sharper mouth. I have had that face in the folder longer than I will admit on a sofa with my mother. In the day I would not make her sweet. I would have her on her knees on a bathroom counter with the mirror fogged and I would make her watch herself take it. Tomorrow she goes back to whatever shoot. Today I get the look.”
Aparna did not tell me to focus. She listened the way she had listened to Sneha’s helmet.
“Tamannaah.” The name filled more of the hall. “That body is already an event. I would not invent a personality for her. I would teleport us to a place with space — a hall, a rehearsal floor, somewhere her dancing has already been — and I would use the waist and the chest and that mouth the way the camera is not allowed to. From behind. Then her on top. Then I would stop being original and just stare. The day is also for staring.”
“Sonarika.” I swallowed. “I don’t even have a clever scene. I have the idea of her voice going. I would make her talk and then I would make her stop talking. That is the whole fantasy and it is not sophisticated and I don’t care.”
