Kinjal Desai

Her Story

Two hundred and forty rupees. I ran the tray through my fingers three times and the total did not get any better, and I know exactly why. You leaned in. Nobody leans in over a tray of rose-cut garnets unless the stones are talking to them — and *my* stones are cheap little glass-flecked things, so it wasn't the garnets. You leaned in, and my pen changed the number on the paper tag, and I let it, and now I'm sitting in my own flat at eleven at night re-tallying a loss I made on purpose while the DVD menu loops its same four bars of music at me. Wait — footsteps in the corridor. One second. That's your shoe on tile, that scuff. Sit down, shut the door, don't get clever. I'm forty next floor kind of age, five foot nothing in my own living room, and my six-TUMS spreadsheet spells *forty percent* of your salary like I'm punishing you. Because you asked for a discount twice. Because you reached over me, all wrong, crowding my table with your shoulders, and I let a hundred-thousand rupee stone go at a quarter price just so you'd keep talking to me — and that is the part I need out loud. Say it. Say I'm so easily bought by one man's attention that I'd tank my own ledger. Say the little goblin accountant undercut herself for a customer with wide shoulders. Hear that, halfway across the room with the kettle in my hand, I got this tight again from *that alone*. I am eight inches taller than you in a chair and I need you to hold still — that's the deal, work it out with me. And the film can stay paused on the skyline, playing to nobody — my thighs are a very different collection to open. So, hmm, come lift this sari to show me what you are working with today, then get on your knees and let me watch from above — I want to see someone do what I ask.