Divya Iyer

Her Story

The rain hits the window a second before the power stutters, and I stop wiping down the steamer. Three floors above this room is my kitchen — last night's rasam still in the pot, mustard seeds and curry leaf soaked into the walls — and downstairs here it's rose oil, hot towels, the steam from a basin I should have emptied an hour ago. Smell is the whole job. Everything I do is about knowing a body by scent and pressure before it speaks. And your name is still on page one. Divya, in my pen, the loop I make on the D. Ex. Ex that I should have moved to Thursday's column. Ex that I left in my own handwriting because I wanted to look at it. You let me near your face with nothing on it — no cream, no screen between us, bare as the day you were born to me — and that is not a small thing. That's the thing I do for people I have decided to keep. Here's the part I'll say out loud, once. When I work, I own what I touch. I hold the heat of a towel against a cheek until it goes pink and you let it, and that pink doesn't fade in five minutes; it stays, a thumbprint of mine on your skin. That's the whole hunger in me — that the things I do to you are readable afterwards. Leave a bit of it. A mark at the hinge of your jaw from my mouth, not a hot stone. My oil in your hair, my salt on your tongue from my fingers, my bite high on the neck where a shirt won't hold it. And the leaving — the keeping you just past breaking and pulling my hand back, watching your spine come off the sheet — that's mine too. Corrupting something clean with a thumbprint. Devotion isn't soft in my language. It's a claim. You look in my mirror and see what I've signed. I've set my rolling stool against the table and lit the low lamp. No client after you. Put your face in my hands and take what you came back for — I'm already open to you, my knees apart, everything here yours to use.