"There," she whispered. "There you are. That is what I was missing."
I did not move at first. I stayed buried in her and let her feel it, and she felt every inch, I know she did, because I could feel my own cock throbbing inside her, a slow heavy pulse, and each time it throbbed her pussy answered it with a soft squeeze, and I could feel her getting wetter around me, feel a fresh warmth of her drip down over my shaft and my balls.
"Feel that?" I said. "Feel how much you missed it?"
"Haan. Every day. Every single day since he died I lay downstairs and listened to you walk up here alone and I wanted this so badly I could not breathe."
I started to move. Slow, long strokes, all the way out to the tip and all the way back in, and each time I sank in she made a small sound and her nails dug into my back. I lowered myself down flat onto her, chest to chest, her full breasts crushed warm against me and those thick nipples dragging on my skin, and she wrapped her legs around me and locked her heels behind my thighs and pulled me deeper. Her mouth found my ear.
"This is not one night," she said, moving under me. "Tell me it is not."
"It is not."
"Tell me I am not going back down those stairs to sleep."
"You are going back down tonight, because of Guddu. But this is yours now. This bed is yours. Every night I am in this house, you are in it."
"Haan. Haan. Say it again."
I put my lips to her ear. "Who am I to you, Anjali."
Her whole body shivered around my cock.
"Mine," she breathed. "You are mine. You are my man."
"Whose man am I."
"Mine. And I am yours."
I fucked her slow and deep and steady while the rain came down on the roof and the lamp burned low, and I felt her build again, felt her get wetter and tighter, felt the sweat come up between us so our bellies slid, and when she went over the second time she buried her face in my neck and held on and shook, and she squeezed me so hard as she came that it dragged me over the edge with her. I pushed in as deep as I could go and held there and emptied into her in long hard pulses, and she felt every one of them and gasped at each one, her heels locked behind me, her mouth on my jaw whispering yes and Dev and yours until we were both wrung out and shaking and still.
* * * * *
Afterward she lay on my chest in the lamplight. One heavy leg thrown over mine, her palm flat over my heart, her breath slowing. Our sweat cooled. Below us the rain finally began to ease.
For a long while neither of us spoke. Then she lifted her head and looked at the mess we had made of the white sheet she had pressed that very morning, and clicked her tongue.
"Three months of good behaviour," she said, "and now I have to clean these before Guddu sees them. Was it worth it, Dev?"
"Ask me again in an hour," I said, "when I make you ruin the other side."
She swatted my chest, and laughed, and then she stopped laughing, because she saw I meant it. But first she had to go down.
"Before Guddu wakes," she said quietly. "She cannot find my side of the bed empty."
I did not argue. Not that night. I watched her get up in the lamplight, wince a little, gather her saree off the red floor and wind it back on with the quick unthinking hands of a woman who has dressed in a hurry before. She bent over me and kissed me once, soft, and slipped out barefoot, and I heard her go down the dark stairs to lie beside her daughter and pretend the night had not happened.
And for a few nights, that is how we did it. She would wait until Mansi's breathing was deep and slow, then climb the stairs in the dark. I would have her, quietly, on the bed with a hand over her own mouth, and before the first grey light she would slip back down and be there when her daughter woke.
But you cannot fold a fire back into a matchbox. One night, near the end of that visit, we forgot to be careful. One time became two, two became more, and somewhere in there the sky went from black to grey to gold, the morning coming in through the window and falling right across the bed and across her bare back while she lay sleeping on my chest, and neither of us had gone anywhere. She woke with the sun on her, saw the light, and did not run. She only pulled the sheet up and put her head back down.
There were a few mornings like that. And after a few mornings like that, I stopped hearing her make excuses downstairs, and Mansi stopped meeting my eyes, and I understood, without a single word being said, that the girl knew.
* * * * *
Mansi was 22. She was not a fool. And she was her mother's daughter, which meant she saw everything and said nothing, until she could not stop herself.
She turned polite with me. Too polite. The careful politeness you give a stranger you have decided not to like. She would set my tea down and leave. "Yes, Sir." "No, Sir." Nothing more. And she watched her mother. That was what I noticed most. Wherever Anjali moved in that house, Mansi's eyes went with her, and in them was something older than jealousy and younger than hate.
There was a reason under the anger that her mother could not see. It was not only that Anjali had a man. It was that Anjali, 45 and widowed, had a man, a younger one, a house, a bed she was wanted in. And Mansi, 22, had nobody, could not picture who she ever would have, and had started to be afraid of her own future.
A frightened girl in that state does not choose well.
She chose Ravi.
* * * * *
I heard the name from the contractor, the same man who had brought Anjali to me all those years ago. He had a hundred labourers across three villages and he heard everything that moved in that town, and one afternoon in the factory yard he took off his cap, turned it in his hands, and told me.
"Sahib. It is not my place. But the girl, Mansi baby. She has been standing at the corner near the bus stand in the evenings. With Ravi."
"Who is Ravi?"
He told me. No work, or none he kept. A little land from his father and a lot of bad habits. Known at every thekha in three villages. Known to the police also, in the small tiresome way of men who are not dangerous enough to lock up and not decent enough to leave alone. And known, most of all, for his hands. For a temper that came out of the bottle and landed on whoever was nearest.
"His own mother, his sister," the contractor said quietly, looking at his cap. "Everyone has seen the marks on them. It is that kind of house, Sahib."
I did not say anything. But my jaw set, and it stayed set the whole drive home.
* * * * *
It came to a head on a Thursday.
I got back from the factory earlier than usual, and I heard them from the gate. Anjali and Mansi, in the hall, going at each other. Anjali trying to keep her voice down and failing. Mansi not trying at all. And outside, leaning on my compound wall in the last orange light with a cigarette cupped in his hand and a scooter tilted on its stand, was a young man I had never seen but knew at once.
He did not stand up straight when I came through my own gate. He looked at me the way that type always looks at a man in good clothes stepping out of a good car. Measuring. Insolent. Already telling himself a story where he was the one being wronged.
I went inside.
"...I am only saying wait," Anjali was pleading. "One year. Finish your course. Then if you still..."
"You waited for nothing and got nothing," Mansi threw back. "Why should I..."
They both stopped when they saw me.
I set my bag down. I kept my voice level.
"Who is that mawali standing outside my wall?"
Wrong match, wrong fuse. I knew it the second it left my mouth. But I did not take it back.
Mansi turned on me. All the heat she had been throwing at her mother swung around and found a bigger target, and she was almost glad of it.
"His name is Ravi, and he is not standing outside your wall, he is standing outside waiting for me, and you have no right. You are not my father. You are not anybody's father in this house. You are just the man my mother..."
"Guddu."
Anjali said it like a whip coming down. The whole room stopped.
I have gone back to this moment many times since, so let me give it to you exactly, because everything after it turns on this one hinge.
Until that second, Anjali had been fighting like a mother fights. Worried. Pleading. Hurt. But the moment Mansi turned her tongue on me, something in Anjali changed from mother into something else completely. She stepped forward. She put herself half in front of me. And her voice, when it came, had a thing in it I had never heard in six years, not in the kitchen, not in my bed, nowhere.
"Guddu. He is like your father." Her chest was heaving. "In this house he is like your father, and you will not talk to him in that tone."
And Mansi, 22, quick, cruel the way only a frightened child can be cruel, laughed one short ugly laugh.
"Just because he is your man does not make him my father."
Then she turned and walked out. The scooter kicked and caught on the second try, and they were gone down the lane in a rip of noise and dust, the open gate swinging behind them.
Anjali stood in the middle of the hall with her hand over her mouth, shivering.
But I was not thinking about the girl, or the scooter, or the open gate. I was thinking about the words her mother had just said out loud, in front of her daughter, without meaning to.
He is like your father.
Guddu ke papa.
* * * * *
I took her by the wrist and walked her up the stairs.
"Dev. Dev, wait, Guddu, I have to go after her..."
"Guddu is with Ravi, and Guddu is 22, and Guddu will come back when she is hungry." I did not stop walking. "You are coming with me."
I took her into my bedroom and shut the door. The evening light was going red in the two windows. She stood in the middle of the floor in her saree, wet-eyed, thrown, and I stood in front of her.
"Say it again," I said.
"Dev, what..."
"What you called me. Just now. In front of her. Say it again."
The colour climbed her throat and into her face. She understood. She looked at the floor.
"I only meant... I meant you are the elder, that you deserve respect, I did not..."
"Look at me."
She looked at me.
"You did not say I am the elder. You said he is like your father. To her face." I stepped closer, until she had to tip her head back to hold my eyes. "Is that how you think of me?"
The silence stretched. Outside a dog started barking and stopped.
"Haan," she whispered.
"Say the whole thing."
Her lip was shaking. Her hands came up and held each other in front of her.
"When I think of you, in my heart, in my head, I do not think Sir. I have not for a long time. And I do not only think Dev."
She shut her eyes and said it.
"I think Guddu ke papa. Not that you are her father. It is what a woman calls the man who is hers, the man of her house."
She pressed her fist flat to her chest.
"In here, you are my husband. And you are the closest thing to a father that girl has ever had. This home is ours. That is the shameful, sinful truth, and now you have made me say it out loud."
I do not have a clean word for what went through me when she said it.
It was not only lust, though God knows there was lust. It was bigger than that. It was a low, dark, certain thing, because in six years I had owned her body but never this. She had just handed me her place in the world. She had made me her husband out loud, in her own voice, and there is no giving a thing like that back.
I did not tell her to undress. I did not say a word. I reached down and unbuckled my belt, opened my trousers, and let everything drop to the floor and stepped out of it. My cock was already hard and heavy and standing. Then I walked to her, put both my hands up under her saree and along her warm thighs, hooked my fingers in her underwear and dragged it down her legs, and she stepped out of it without a sound, still fully dressed above, the saree still wound around her.
I did not undress her. I lifted the saree up out of the way, took her by the waist, and sat her back on the edge of the writing table under the window. I stepped between her knees, pushed them apart, and put myself against her. She was already wet again, wet from the fight, wet from the confession, and I pushed up into her in one stroke, both of us still in our clothes, and she cried out and grabbed the edge of the table.
"Dev."
I did not move fast. I stayed deep inside her and let her feel me, and I felt myself throb and swell in her, felt myself keep growing, harder and thicker with every second, until she gasped at the size of it.
"Who am I to you," I said.
"Guddu ke... ah... Guddu ke papa."
"Louder."
"Guddu ke papa. You are Guddu ke papa."
"Whose man am I."
"Mine. You are my man."
"And whose is this house. This bed. This everything."
"Yours." She was sobbing it and rocking on me at the same time.
"Everything in this house is yours. Everyone in this house is yours. I am yours, Dev, take me, I am yours."
"Say it again! And don't stop saying it!"
"Guddu ke papa... Guddu ke papa."
"Guddu ke... ah... Guddu ke papa."
"Main aapki...dasi" [I am your servant.]
"Main aapki...aurat..." [I am your woman.]
"Main...aapki...rakhail!" [I am your kept woman.]
"Guddduu ke...paapa"
I took her. On the table first, still half dressed, her saree rucked up around her waist and her blouse still hooked and her bare thighs gripping me, until the table knocked the wall. Then I carried her to the bed and finished undressing her and had her there, slower, with the last red light and then the lamp. I had her on her back with her ankles on my shoulders. I had her on her hands and knees with her face in the pillow. I had her slow and soft with my forehead on hers, making her whisper it, and hard with her own hand clamped over her mouth so the whole lane would not hear.
Round after round, that night, until we lost count of them. My body simply did whatever the new thing that had woken in me told it to do.
Somewhere past midnight she lay draped over me, boneless, salt-streaked, wearing nothing but the lamplight. She drew a slow circle on my chest.
"Dev," she said, and then, smiling against my skin, "Guddu ke papa. What have you done to me."
"Nothing you did not hand me yourself."
She was quiet a while. Then, "There is no more pretending now. My bed downstairs will stay empty and she will see it, every morning."
"Good," I said. "The pretending is finished. From tonight you sleep here. In my bed. Every night I am in this house, and you tell her that to her face, the way a wife tells a daughter a true thing." I turned her chin up. "Are you afraid?"
She thought about it honestly. In the end, Anjali always told the truth.
"No," she said. "I am not afraid of a single thing." Then, because she was Anjali, she added, "Except of Kamla auntie's face when she works this out. That, I am going to enjoy."
I laughed, and pulled her in, and she was asleep on my chest before the lamp burned out.
But there was a bruise coming. In the downstairs room, on a girl's cheek. And none of us knew it yet. And it was going to ask a question of all three of us that no amount of Guddu ke papa could answer alone.
To be continued.....