I added the etcetera because the folder had an etcetera — other faces the internet had sold me, other bodies I had used like tools when this house was asleep. I did not list every one. The hall already had enough women in it.
She waited for the turn she could smell coming.
The cement family on the television hugged in silence.
“Last part of the day,” I said, and my voice went flatter, uglier, more like the truth. “I would come home.”
Her fingers curled on her stomach.
“I would put you and Sonam in this hall.”
The name landed. Twenty-three. Hyderabad in the real world. Here, in the stolen day, on these tiles.
“Not the chair to watch only. That was your cruelty. Mine is different. I would get ten, maybe fifteen of my friends — school, bank, the boys who have drunk in this courtyard and called you Aunty and looked one extra second when you bent for the diya. I would put the look in their hands. Mind control so nobody plays decent. Nobody becomes a rapist in a way that breaks the rule — they want, you want, she wants, because I have turned the day into that weather. You two. Them. This hall. The grill locked. The tulsi outside like an idiot.”
The clock ticked, stupid.
“I would not always be in it,” I said. “That is the part you asked for when you asked for wild. I would sit where I am sitting now. This sofa. This cushion. This cheap lamp. And I would watch.”
Aparna’s mouth had opened a little. The nightdress was not doing any work.
“Watch them have both of you. You on the dining table where the parcel was. Her on Father’s chair. Then you together, if the day is truly mine — your mouth on her or hers on you, I don’t even know which picture I want more and that is the problem. Friends taking turns. Hands I know from cricket on your waist. A boy who borrowed my calculator in tenth standard standing between my sister’s knees. You looking at me while someone else lifts you, so I can see whether your face does the thing it did when you told me about the air.”
I breathed. The hall smelled of kadhi and winter and the inside of my own skull.
“And I would bring the ones from the collection,” I said. “Not only my friends. Johnny Sins. The other men from those videos. The bodies that don’t look like Pune. I would teleport that into this bungalow like a joke God allowed for twenty-four hours. Those men on you. Those men on Sonam. The same sofa. The same mute TV. Porn lighting on our tiles. I would watch Johnny Sins fuck my mother in the house where she packs poha, and I would watch him fuck my sister on the floor where she leaves her helmet, and I would watch you watch him, and I would watch you watch me watching.”
The minister was back, silently furious about something that was not this.
“I would come from watching before I came from touching,” I said. “That is the ugliest accurate sentence I have. Then I would join, or I would not. The day is allowed to end with me still on this sofa, wrecked from looking, while the two of you are a mess on our own tiles and the rented men and the boys from my class are a crowd this hall was never built for.”
