Chapter 10
After that night, everything changed and… nothing changed.
Daylight still belonged to practical matters.
To the narrow streets and the women peering through curtains. To the old men smoking outside the bookmakers and the rough laughter spilling from the pub. To the careful distance Asha kept between herself and everyone else. That included James… especially James.
But the nights were theirs.
James would walk her home as always, carrying Tanay when the boy fell asleep against his shoulder.
It was obvious the boy liked him but Asha knew what this was and wished she could turn back time and keep her distance, if only to stop the shine in the boy's eyes when he looked at James.
James was her silent bodyguard who stood at the bottom of the steps while she unlocked the door, his face shadowed in the dim glow from the hall light.
Then he would leave.
At least, that was the story they were selling.
He now knew which stair groaned near the turn. Which board near the top squealed beneath his weight. Somehow a man built like him could move silently when he wished to.
He would wait in the alley beside the building, an untouched cigarette between his fingers because Asha wrinkled her pretty nose at the smell. His eyes gleamed as they raptly watched the thin slit of light beneath her curtain for her signal.
Sometimes it took ten minutes.
Sometimes an hour.
Then the light would blink once. The boy was asleep.
And James would climb the stairs carefully while his heart beat with anticipation.
He would relish in the throbbing ache of his loins, could almost feel her soft, giving curves in his arms. While he worked the backbreaking hours in the mines, his mind would wander…
and wonder. Wonder why everything that was wrong in his life disappeared when he held her…
why they fit so right. Chemistry was a strange thing.
The moment the door shut behind him, they would watch each other like wary opponents before the strain would seep out of her shoulders.
He loved to bite that junction where her neck met her shoulders.
He liked to leave his marks where no one would ever see.
He loved the weight of her breasts, the fullness of her ripe lips, the olive of her skin.
He revelled in that soft place between her legs and how only he had made her sigh and choke her screams with a pillow. He loved everything about her.
It became a hunger neither of them spoke about, only expressed with their bodies.
There was neither a courtship nor a romance in the way Mavis's lady magazines described.
It was exhaustion and relief and loneliness, all tangled together with a desperate hunger for every moment they had.
James had promised himself the madness would end once he had her, once he knew what she felt like inside.
But he found himself falling deeper into that obsession that gripped him that first day when she walked into the pub.
They barely made it to bed most nights. The cold floor worked. As did the wall.
The tiny home smelled of soap and damp walls. Coal smoke drifted through the cracked window. The mattress dipped badly in the middle, springs complaining beneath their combined weight, but neither cared.
Sometimes she laughed afterwards against his chest and licked his nipple in a tease.
Sometimes she was breathless against his throat, and whispered that the bed would collapse and kill them both one day.
He told her it was a worthy death. That he wanted to take her to a cottage far away where they didn't have to muffle their groans and screams of pleasure.
Even on the nights she bled, he came.
Those nights surprised her most. Her husband had treated menstruation like a curse. Untouchable. Unclean. She used to pray for her monthly bleeds just to avoid him. She enjoyed being in isolation during those days when she was not allowed into the kitchen and could read as much as she wanted.
James simply tugged her against him and kissed the top of her head as though it changed nothing. And it didn't for him. It only meant they had to place a towel under them and he could avoid those awful French letters that he had come to hate.
One rain-soaked evening she lay sprawled over his chest afterward, listening to the steady thud of his heart beneath her ear with a smile on her face.
Outside, water rattled against the windowpane. It was so soothing.
Inside, the room was warm with sweat and shared breath. And the scent of them together.
“Why did you take your nose ring off?” he asked while touching the small stud piercing her nose.
“Mavis didn’t like it,” she replied. Silence draped over them like a warm banket while he imagined her with a diamond stud.
She spoke suddenly into the darkness.
“I was fourteen when I got married.”
James stopped playing with her hair for a moment, then continued to twirl it around his finger.
"Hmm?"
For once, she did not retreat.
“It was only a few months after my first bleeding. I was late compared to the other girls in school.”
His hand slid slowly along her back, saying nothing.
“In the morning Amma told me to fetch water from the well.” She placed a soft kiss against the crinkly hair on his chest. “There were visitors on the porch when I came back. Men drinking tea. Women in beautiful saris whispering.”
Her fingers curled against his chest.
“They all looked at me when I walked in. I remember blushing so hard I thought I would die from shame.”
James felt dread settle inside him, though he knew it was in the past..
“There was a young man there, about twenty,” she murmured. “I thought …” She gave a tiny embarrassed laugh. “I mean a few of my friends were married.”
She lifted her head slightly, enough to look at him.
“I did not understand I was being shown to his father.”
James had to stop himself from swearing under his breath.
“I am from a Brahmin family. In India, it means we are supposed to be a higher caste. And I guess we were once but not anymore. The wedding was very grand for people who had so little money.” Her voice grew distant, wandering backward through time.
“They dressed me in a red and gold silk. I had a gold chain that belonged to my grandmother and bangles on my wrists. Flowers in my hair all the way to my waist. My mother told me the groom loved my hair.”
For a moment he could almost see her like that.
A shy child enjoying being the centre of attention for the first time in her life.
“They rubbed turmeric into my skin until I glowed yellow,” she said softly burrowing into him. “Everyone kept saying how beautiful I looked. Aunties pinching my cheeks, my uncles smiling.”
He felt her mood drop though he couldn't see her face. Her words were flat, like she was narrating someone else’s story.
“I loved the attention.”
James closed his eyes briefly. Christ. He didn’t want to hear this.
“I had no idea what marriage meant.” She said it plainly. “No one tells girls these things.”
“You were a child,” he said roughly.
Asha sighed.
“It was common.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“No.” She rested her chin on his chest. “But my family was poor. There were too many daughters. We had to be practical.”
Rain hammered harder outside.
James stared up at the ceiling, jaw clenched enough to ache.
“You say it so calmly like it happened to someone else,” he muttered finally.
“Sometimes, I like to pretend that it did.”
He had no answer to that.
For a while, there was only the sound of water and the creaking pipes in the walls while she rubbed her face against his rough chest hair like a cat.
Then she continued in a whisper, “I was grateful for my periods, you know.”
His arm was tight around her, like he was barely holding onto control.
“At least while I bled, that monster stayed away from me.”
A murderous rage flashed through him so sharply it frightened even him.
“And then?”
“I got pregnant. I was seventeen.”
She was silent for a while, as if walking through quicksand to find her next words.
“And he died when I was five months along. I prayed to God not to strike me down because I was so happy he was gone. He was an evil evil man.”
James studied her face carefully in the low light. Her face held no tears now, only a weariness which was born of disappointment and acceptance of her fate.
She gave a small shrug.
“I love Tanay now.” Her fingers toyed absently with one of his shirt buttons lying on the floor nearby. “He kept me alive.”
Then, as if trying the words out in her mind before floating them into the room...
“But when he was inside me…” Her voice was barely audible, shame bleeding from the secret she had told no one else. “I hated him a little. Maybe a lot. That monster put him in there.”
James stroked her hair awkwardly, hurting for her.
“My parents would not take me back.” Her lips twisted faintly. “During the wedding ceremony, the father gives the daughter away. It means she belongs to another family after that. There is no coming back."
She laughed without humour.
“So, when my husband died, I belonged nowhere. His first wife did not wait for the fourteenth day to push me out and close the doors.”
James felt something ugly rise in his chest at the thought of her—seventeen, widowed, pregnant, abandoned.
No wonder she looked at the world like it might turn on her at any second.
“You belong here now,” he said finally.
Asha shook her head against him.
“No.”
“You do.”
Her eyes met his then, uncertain in the dimness.
James brushed damp hair away from her face with surprising gentleness for such rough hands.
“That was their failure,” he murmured, answering a question she had often asked herself. “Not yours. None of it was your fault.”
For a long moment she simply stared at him as though she did not quite know what to do with his words.
Then slowly, very slowly, her body relaxed fully against him. James held her through the night hours while the rain battered the town outside. Before first light, he crept out like a thief.