She looks at her watch and says she has to. She is late in any case—I have spent too much time talking. She has more business to attend to.

I stifle a pang of jealousy.

Can you give me some money for the auto? She is standing at the door, ready to leave.

I gave some to that fellow who came with you.

But that was for him.

I feel she is trying to rip me off, just like an auto guy.

She asks if I’m going to call for her again. I say maybe but I have no money. She mumbles something about the price being anyway quite low. I ask if thirty rupees will be sufficient for the ride back but hand her a crisp fifty. She wants to know where she can find an auto. An emotion, akin to raw fear, overwhelms me and makes me wobbly at the knees. I give her directions to the auto stand: turn left out of the gate, go straight down, hit the nala, turn left again, take the first right, down the bridge, over the nala, all the way to the flyover—you should find some rickshaws there. I think she wants me to walk her there. But she’s not your lover, I tell myself. Besides, her clothes advertise the fact she is a whore; I shouldn’t be seen with her. Especially at night, when car headlights capture you at your most vulnerable, and wallop you with their beams.

The Wrist

It all began with a late night phone conversation when she told him she liked Abhishek Bachchan’s shoulders. That was just the beginning. She also told him about other parts of a man’s body that she had found sexy in the past—Salman Khan’s back, a South American tennis player’s fit thigh, a labourer’s sweaty arms as he laid tiles on a sloping roof. But it was the wrist that really got to Ravi. The dark, sweaty, muscular wrist and veiny hand clutching a bus handrail in Bangalore. She had found that sexy. When she said this Ravi couldn’t help but look at his own instinctively—they were pretty and slender and bony, like his first girlfriend’s.