Sindhuja felt her leg slip. She knew Marudhu had piled on too many broken bits of brick on her tray. She felt him strain under its weight, too, as he lifted it off the ground, his back bending and unbending, and let out a grunt as he placed it on the tightly wound cloth on her head. She would have stumbled and fallen if not for the sneer she saw in his eyes. She willed her mind to focus on anything but the weight – the beads of sweat on Marudhu's thick eyebrows, the dust on his head, as if the roots of his hair had rusted, the cement mixer behind him, turning its big belly and burping out fine grey ash, the bright orange helmets of the supervisors – two of them – as they looked intently into a white sheet that needed both pairs of hands to hold.
Sindhuja adjusted her shoulders, sucked her stomach in, and turned around to walk the ten steps to the mountain of broken bricks near the gate of the construction site. She knew Marudhu would be watching her all the way, and was acutely aware of the shirt she was wearing over her sari, drenched in sweat, sticking to her back. She felt trickles of sweat along her neck, travelling down her spine, sweat on her midriff pooling at the edges of the sari's fold at the waist, and sweat down her thighs, going down, down, down, till it petered out at her calves, tickling her. She realised she still hadn't moved. She took a step forward and felt her body lose its balance, the weight on her head pressing down on her like an immovable boulder. She was worried that it would leave its mark on her head, too – a concave crater, a forever half moon in her night sky.