Sarpanch's Desire

Naina’s POV

The red saree had seemed like a small rebellion when I knotted it this morning. The good ones were drying on the line and this one — thin, worn soft at the folds, bright as a bride’s — I told myself it was all that was clean. I stirred the tea and knew better.

Then the heat of him came up behind me, wide through the shoulders, and his arms closed around my waist and pulled me back against his chest like he had every right. His face found the crook of my neck, the light stubble scratching.

“Missed you,” Raghav said against my skin. “Three days of talk about canals and revenue, and all I could think of was the smell of your hair.”

My spoon knocked the rim of the pot. “You shouldn’t say such things, sarpanch.”

His palm slid up my belly, rough, warm, and cupped the weight of my breast through the cotton — one slow, heavy squeeze, his thumb dragging across the peak until my knees went soft. “And yet here I am, saying them.”

“Sarpanch—”

“Raghav. When we’re alone, it’s Raghav.”

I could feel my own heartbeat in my throat, my hands gone stupid on the ladle. “Raghav, your—”

“Raghav!” Savitri Devi’s voice came down the corridor. “The tea, boy! Vikram’s man is at the gate!”

His forehead pressed against the back of my head for one breath. Then the arms were gone and he was ducking out the far door, and I stood there with the kettle screaming and my sari all wrong.

I poured, fixed my pallu, and carried the tray to the verandah.

Raghav was back on the low bench, calm as a stone, his mother upright beside him. Karan slouched against the pillar with a neem twig between his teeth.

“—so the Marathi side took a good crop,” Karan was saying. “Ours got rust under the leaves again. Half the field, at least. Bhandari’s boy blames the seed.”

“It isn’t the seed.” Raghav lifted a glass off my tray without looking at me. “It’s the seed-bed. He sows too thick, then blames the earth for his own laziness.”

I set the tray down and stepped back into the shade, eyes low. I felt Savitri Devi’s gaze crawl over me, the silver bangle clicking once against the armrest, and I pulled my pallu straighter over my shoulder.

“And the canal water?” Karan pressed. “Am I to sit on my hands and wait for rain?”

“You’ll watch the fields the way I say. Bhandari’s plot first, then ours, then Sharma’s. It was agreed, and agreed is done.”

“Agreed by whom—”

“By me.” He sipped, then glanced toward the doorway. His eyes passed over me, half a second past my chin, and there was nothing at all in his face to show he’d had his palm on my breast a minute ago. “The tea’s good. Tell your mother I said so.”

Savitri Devi’s mouth thinned. “Whose mother? Mine’s been in the ground thirty years.”

Raghav set the glass down gently. “The girl’s, Ma.”

Her eyes came round to me slow, and I swear she smelled it on me — the whole thing, the heat, the red saree. I kept my chin down and my jaw set and my hands still at my sides.

“Take the tray,” she said. “And then come back for the wash water. There’s no idle hands in this house.”

Around the corner, where no one could see, Karan watched me go the way a dog watches the butcher.

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