Silk Saree in an Astoria Apartment at Dawn

The saree is still on. That is the first fact of the morning.

I registered it before I registered the light — the weight of the silk across my shoulder, the pleats still tucked at my waist, the pallu half-slipped and hanging from my left arm at an angle no one arranged. I had not slept. The Diwali dinner had ended the way those evenings end, with aunties and tupperware and the slow dispersal of relatives into the cold, and then I had come back to this room and sat on the bed's edge and not moved, and at some point the city had gone from dark to this: the particular grey of a November morning through the window that faces west, which means the light arrives late and diffused, no warmth in it, just the fact of it.

I am still kneeling. That happened gradually. I had been sitting and then I was not, and now the cool cotton of the sheet presses against both shins and the silk pools at my hips in a way it does not do when I am standing — the pleats fanning out, the border of the saree lying flat across the tops of my thighs, and that border is embroidered and the embroidery is slightly stiff and I can feel its edge as a thin pressure line, specific and exact, across the skin just above my knee.

I am learning something. That is how I understand what I am doing — not as wanting, exactly, though wanting is there, has been there since sometime around midnight when a cousin I do not know well leaned across me to reach the rice and I held very still and said nothing and the wanting arrived the way things arrive when you have been careful for a long time. I am studying the conditions that produce a particular result. I am being methodical about it.

The dildo is in my right hand. I have not moved it yet. My left hand is flat against my own thigh, outside the silk, and I can feel the warmth of my palm through the fabric, and I can feel the warmth of my own skin beneath that, and both temperatures are higher than I expected this early in the morning before I have done anything to deserve it.

I exhale. The sound comes out longer than I gave it — it keeps going after I thought I had finished, a slow unfolding into the grey quiet of the room.

The pallu slips another inch from my shoulder. I watch it in the window glass, the dark reflection of a woman in silk who has not slept and is kneeling on her own bed in the early morning with her thighs just beginning to part against the cool sheet, the embroidered border of the saree lifting slightly as the space between her knees widens.

I have not done anything yet. That is also a fact.

My right hand tightens. The silk is still between me and everything I am about to learn.