The cigarette burn on the boy’s collarbone was the shape of a small, angry moon.

Harsha kept the camera low, framing only the throat and the shoulder, blurring the rest. The boy, who had asked to be called Chinna on air, tugged the collar of his black T- shirt back over the scar and laughed the way people laugh when there is no laughter left inside them.

“Madam did it Tuesday last, sir. Whisky bottle in one hand, Gold Flake in the other. Said she’d pay double if I didn’t scream. Abbaa! I screamed. She still paid double.” He shrugged. “Rent this month, cleared.”

The tube light above them buzzed like a trapped housefly. Somewhere on Kondapur main road a lorry laid on its horn, and the whole one-room lodge trembled a little, the way cheap rooms do when a heavier world passes by. Harsha checked the audio levels on his phone, nodded, and let the boy speak.

Six months ago, Harsha would not have known such rooms existed in the city he had lived in all his life. Six months ago he was walking into a glass building in HITEC City with a laminated badge and a wife who ironed his shirts with the seriousness of a temple priest folding a silk dhoti.

Then the email came. Role redundant. AI integration. Severance attached.

He had read it three times in the lift going down, and by the time the doors opened at the ground floor, something in his mind had quietly clicked out of place.

~*~

Usha did not shout. Usha never shouted. She had a way of going still, the way a lizard on a wall goes still when the light changes, and it was worse than shouting. She served him rice and sambar that night without looking at him. The tamarind was sharp enough to sting a small cut on his lip he had not known was there.

“So?” she said.

“So, I’ll find something. Give me two months.”

“Two months of what? Two months of you sitting here watching cricket and my mother asking why I’m not pregnant yet?”

She stopped. Something crossed her face then—not anger but a tiredness. Her shoulders dropped a quarter inch. She looked, for that one breath, like a woman carrying a question she had not chosen and could not put down. Then the stillness came back, and when she spoke again her voice had re-set itself to its colder register.

“You know what I brought to this marriage, Harsha.”

He knew. She had said it before, in softer days. She had said it in the first month, half laughing, half warning, sitting on the edge of their bed in her wedding night nightie, the mehendi still dark on her palms. I’ve given you the one thing that can’t be given twice. At the time he had thought it was a young bride’s shy way of speaking about her virginity, the sort of line girls learn from their aunts. Now, four years on, he understood she had meant it as an accountant means a figure written into a ledger.

“You’ve given me you,” he tried. “I’ve given you me. Isn’t that—”

“Given me you? What’s you, Harsha? You are what you earn. You are what you provide. That’s what a husband is. My body I gave. What did you give that can be seen, that can be worn, that my sister’s husband can be jealous of? A flat in Gachibowli? A Creta? Even a bloody dishwasher?”

He looked at her. Really looked. She was beautiful in the particular way Telugu women are beautiful in their mid-twenties, when the girlishness has gone but the softness has not, when they wear their gold like armour. He had loved that beauty. He had also, until this moment, believed it had loved him back.

“Usha,” he said quietly, “you talk about your body like it’s a plot of land in Shamshabad.”

She laughed then, one dry syllable. “Isn’t it? Every acre appreciates or depreciates. Mine’s still prime.”

He did not answer. He got up and washed his plate himself, and the water ran cold over his knuckles for a long time.

~*~

The YouTube channel was born out of that cold water.

He called it Nagaram Nijalu, City Truths, and its thumbnail was a red neon heart with a rupee symbol bleeding out of it. He had a decent DSLR left over from a college hobby and a laptop the office had let him keep. His first video was on sugar daddies in Jubilee Hills, filmed in cafés where the coffee cost more than a labourer’s day wage. His second was on the WhatsApp escort rings that ran out of Ameerpet lodges. His third, on the Russian women who arrived at farmhouse raves as decoration and left as purchases.

The views came fast. Hyderabad, it turned out, was hungry to see itself in the mirror, provided the mirror was tilted just enough to be deniable. Ad revenue trickled in. Then it flowed. In the fourth month he made forty two thousand rupees. Usha counted the notes twice and put them in her almirah without a word, which was her version of a garland.

But something had begun to itch inside him. In every episode, the pattern was the same. A woman’s body was the merchandise. A man’s wallet was the counter. The transaction ran only one way, like the Musi in monsoon.

Where, he began to wonder, were the men who sold?

They existed. He found them through a friend of a friend of a driver of a friend. A Telegram group. A code word, malli—jasmine. A rate card with initials and abbreviations he had to look up.

The first call boy he interviewed called himself Raju on camera, though later, over a beer at the permit room attached to a wine shop in Uppal, he told Harsha his real name was Nagaraju and his mother in Nalgonda thought he worked night shifts at an Amazon warehouse.

“How much a night?” Harsha asked, camera off, notebook open.

“Depends. Aunty clients, fifteen thousand. Younger madam, ten. Foreign madam making video film, twenty five, sometimes thirty. Escorting madam on a trip, fifty, sometimes sixty. Bad clients, extra. Very bad clients, extra extra.”

“What’s bad?”

Nagaraju took a long pull of his Kingfisher. The chain of lights on the tank behind him doubled itself on the black water. “Bad is when madam wants you to be the husband she hates. She’ll make you sit and listen for three hours how the fellow beat her, how his mother is a witch, how her horoscope was matched wrong by a crooked purohit. Then she’ll want you to do things and cry things and be things. By 4 a.m. you’re not a man, sir. You’re a doll in a temple that nobody prays to properly.”

“Very bad?”

Nagaraju did not answer for a while. Then he opened the top two buttons of his shirt. In the dim light of the permit room, Harsha saw three small circular scars on the boy’s chest, evenly spaced, like the marks left by a pujari’s fingertips after vibhuti, except these were pinker and older and made by something that had glowed.

“Madam liked to see the skin turn red first, then black,” Nagaraju said, buttoning back up. She paid triple. She said the sound of a boy’s skin under a Gold Flake was better than music, needle on a record. I stayed one night. Some boys stay ten. There is one madam in Banjara Hills, we call her Rakta Pisachi among ourselves. Nobody wants her, but nobody says no. Bad rating means no work for a month. No work means no rent, no healthy food, no remittance home.”

Harsha wrote nothing. His pen sat on the page like a small dead thing.

~*~

The interviews multiplied. He met them in dhabas off the ORR, in the back rooms of gyms in Kukatpally, in one case in the parking lot of a maternity hospital where a boy called Suri sat sipping Bovonto because his last client, a paediatrician, had refused to let him use the flat’s bathroom afterwards. Servants use downstairs, na, she had said, gesturing towards the door.

He learnt the vocabulary of that world the way a foreign correspondent learns a war.

He learnt that the six pack was a mortgage. The boys ate boiled egg whites like penance and injected things they could not pronounce. He learnt that the little blue tablet was a friend till it was an enemy and that some boys’ hearts gave out at thirty two.

He learnt that the police station in a certain area had a rate too, and it was collected on the first of every month, and the boy who forgot paid with his teeth. He learnt that a client’s husband coming home early was called pidugu—a thunderbolt—and that a boy called Kiran had jumped from a third floor balcony in Kompally to avoid one and now walked with a limp and worked as a food delivery agent because his knee could no longer perform.

He learnt that they lied to their mothers. Every one of them. I’m with TCS. Night shift.  US client. And their mothers cooked chicken soup for them on Sundays and asked when they would marry a nice girl from the same caste, and the boys enjoyed the chicken soup and said Soon, amma, soon, and went back to their rented rooms to shave their chests smooth as a river stone.

~*~

That week, the ninth episode crossed five lakh views. Harsha sat on the bed at two in the morning with the laptop balanced on his knees and the YouTube Studio dashboard open, its little graph climbing like a fever chart. Five lakh views. Fifteen thousand watch hours. He clicked through to the revenue tab. Forty-two thousand, his best month—the number Usha had counted twice and locked in her almirah like a small victory. He opened the calculator on his phone. A Creta cost twelve lakhs on-road. At forty-two thousand a month, saving every paisa, touching nothing for rent or rice or electricity, it would take two years and five months. But they did touch it. Rent was fourteen thousand. Groceries, gas, Wi-Fi, the EMI on the television she had settled bitterly for—by the time the month was eaten, what remained was six or seven thousand. At seven thousand a month, a Creta would take fourteen years. He would be forty-one. Usha would have stopped asking by then, not because she had forgiven but because she had fossilised. The figures sat on the screen like a verdict. He closed the laptop and went to the bathroom. He turned on the geyser and waited, watching himself in the mirror.

He looked at himself the way a butcher looks at meat on a hook.

He was, objectively, handsome. He had known this since he was fourteen, when a maths tutor’s wife had held his face too long between her palms and said his mother must have prayed to Venkateswara Swamy a hundred times to get such a son. He was six feet, wheat coloured, with the sort of jaw a director of photography would light from the left. Usha’s own cousins had told her at the wedding, Nee mogudu cinema hero laaga unnade, Ushakka—your husband looks like a cinema hero.

Like a film star.

The rate, he calculated, would not be bad. Fifteen a night, twenty on Fridays. Two nights a week, taxfree. He could pay off Usha’s craved dishwasher in three months. In six, the down payment on a car she could show her sister. In a year, a small flat beyond her mother’s easy reach.

A different kind of maths. The kind that worked. It would silence the silence—Usha’s.

The thought sat in him for exactly as long as it took the geyser to heat one bucket of water. Then he thought of Nagaraju’s collarbone, and Suri’s Bovonto, and the boy whose knee no longer bent, and something in him, some small clay lamp he had not known was still burning, flickered hard and steadied.

The body, he understood then, was not an asset. The body was the wick. Whatever burned in it, burned it also. You could sell the light for a while. You could not sell the wick.

He rinsed his face. The water tasted faintly of Manjeera. He stood there dripping and thought, with a clarity that felt almost cold, If I sell it, I lose it. If I sell it, I lose her. If I sell it, I lose the boy I used to be who thought he was marrying a girl and not a landholder.

~*~

He waited three weeks. He edited the interviews carefully. He blurred the faces, changed the voices, cut out anything that could identify a client or a police station. He assembled six of them into a single ninety minute cut and titled it, in stark white on black, Bodyspeak.

He did not upload it. Not yet.

He waited till a Sunday. Usha had come back from her mother’s place in Malkajgiri with a new set of gold jhumkas and an expression that told him she had been drip fed grievances for two days. She sat on the sofa, phone in one hand, remote in the other, dividing her attention between an Instagram reel and a Star Maa serial in which a woman was crying beautifully into a plate of biryani.

“Usha,” he said. “I want you to watch something with me.”

“What?”

“My work.”

She sighed, the sigh of a woman doing a great favour to a small man, and set the remote down.

He plugged the laptop into their television, the one she had wanted to be sixty five inches and had settled, bitterly, for fifty.

For ninety minutes she did not speak.

At the twelve minute mark, when Nagaraju opened his shirt on screen, she made a small sound in her throat, like a person swallowing a fish bone. At the forty minute mark, when Suri described the doctor and the bathroom, her hand went to her own mouth and stayed there. At the seventy fifth minute, when a boy called Anji, whose face was a pixelated smear but whose voice was the voice of a village she recognised, said, “Madam, I have not seen my mother in six months because if she looks at my eyes she will know,” Usha’s eyes filled and she did not wipe them.

When the black screen came at the end and the little white text A Film by Harsha ‘Hyderabadi’ faded up, she still did not speak.

He snapped the laptop shut. The room went the deep blue of a Hyderabad flat at 9 p.m. when only the street light through the balcony grille is on.

“Usha,” he said. “I could do it. I’ve been offered. I’ve done the maths. I’ve been to their rooms. I know the app, I know the rates, I know the police constable in Madhapur who takes his cut on the first of the month. I could do it and I could buy you the Creta by Ugadi.”

She did not look at him.

“But I want to ask you one thing.”

Still she did not look.

“You told me on our wedding night that you had given me the one thing that can’t be given twice.” He paused. “Were you selling it to me, Usha?”

Silence.

“I thought you meant something sweet. Later I understood you meant a receipt. Usha, if what you gave me was a receipt, then I owe you money. If what you gave me was you, then I owe you a life, and I am trying, and I have lost a job, and I am trying again. There is a difference. I need you to tell me which one it was.”

Her jhumkas caught the blue light and threw a small tremor of gold onto the wall.

“If a body is a thing that can be sold, Usha, then it can be sold by anyone. Man, woman. Husband, wife. And once it is sold, it is not the same body anymore. Nagaraju’s collarbone is not his collarbone. It is a client’s ashtray. Suri’s back is not his back. It is a paediatrician’s bathroom downstairs. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

A different serial was playing on Star Maa. Still on mute. A middle-aged woman with a blank face had been joined by a man whose moustache was doing the acting for him. Their mouths opened and closed like fish behind glass.

Usha’s hand moved, at last, from her mouth to her lap. She looked down at her own palms, at the mehendi that was no longer there, at the rings she had chosen herself.

“I don’t know, Harsha,” she said. Her voice was so small he almost did not catch it. “I really don’t know.”

“That’s alright,” he said, and he found, to his own surprise, that he meant it. “You don’t have to know tonight.”

He got up. He unplugged the laptop. He carried it to the study, and he sat down and, without any drama, he uploaded Bodyspeak. It would not make him a fortune. It would probably get age-gated and demonetised inside a week. But it would exist, and Nagaraju and Suri and Anji would exist inside it, and some boy in Warangal thinking about coming to Hyderabad to work in the line might see it and stay home and become instead a bad clerk in a good office, which is a kind of salvation.

Then he went back to the living room. Usha had not moved. He sat down next to her, not touching her, leaving a hand’s width of sofa between them. On the television, the middle-aged woman now bristled with an indignation visible even on mute, her mouth outpacing the moustachioed man’s by two syllables to one.

“Amma called,” Usha said finally. “She wants to know when we’re coming for Bathukamma.”

“Tell her we’ll come,” Harsha said.

“Both of us?”

“Both of us.”

She nodded. Her jhumkas trembled. Out on the street, a lorry laid on its horn, and the whole flat trembled a little, the way cheap flats do when a heavier world passes by. But this time, in the small blue room, neither of them was for sale.

Outside the balcony grille, a single jasmine, malli, that Usha had planted in a broken paint tin two Ugadis ago, had put out one late bloom nobody had asked it to. It sat there in the dark, giving itself away for nothing, the way a body was meant to.