The heat is not air but a substance, a thing that settles on Parveen's back as she bends to lift the raw brick from the row and that does not lift when she straightens, because in these days there is no above and below in the heat, no shade that is truly shade nor any hour less hot than another: there is the kiln's fire burning on one side, the white sky burning on the other, and between them her, and the bricks, and the child under the keekar tree that casts a shade of branches and not of leaves.

She counts as she stacks. Not because she wants to count, but because the number is the wage: a thousand raw bricks set out to dry are a figure, and below that figure one does not go, because there is the winter advance to repay to the kiln's owner, and the advance is a thread that runs out of her hands and back into her spine. Four hundred and twelve. She bends, takes, sets down, aligns. Four hundred and thirteen. The sweat no longer runs from her, because there is nothing left to run, and this she knows and it is the thing that frightens her most, more than the number, more than the owner: the body that at a certain point stops sweating and turns dry and hot as the brick she holds in her hand.

She looks at the child. Salman is four years old and is sitting badly, his head lolling to one side, his eyes half closed, he has not played with the stone for a while now. Parveen knows that way of sitting. She saw it on the others, last summer, on Nasreen's son, who was then taken away on a motorbike toward the dispensary an hour down the road and who came back walking after three days, but who might not have come back. She sets down the brick. Four hundred and thirteen stays four hundred and thirteen. She goes toward the tree.

She has her ration of water in the faded plastic bottle, the one she fills at the hand pump in the morning and that has to last her until evening, and that today is already half gone because today is the day the water runs out sooner, the day everything runs out sooner. She kneels before Salman. She looks at him. She could give him a sip to drink, two, and keep the rest for herself, to hold the count until evening, because if she does not hold the count there is no wage and if there is no wage the thread tightens. It is the reckoning a mother makes a hundred times a day without calling it a reckoning.

She opens the bottle. She does not give him any to drink. She pours the water over his head, all of it, that half bottle that was hers for the rest of the day, she pours it over his hair and the nape of his neck and behind his ears where the blood passes close to the skin, and with her hand she wets his chest under his shirt, and she holds him, and she tells him quietly to breathe, breathe, beta, breathe, my son, breathe, and she feels under her palm the child's chest moving, small, quick, but moving. The earth beneath them drinks the water in a second, as if it had never fallen. Her mouth is pasty, her tongue thick, and she does not drink, because until evening she will have no other water but what she manages to draw at the hand pump when the owner stops the work, and at this hour the pump gives only a tepid trickle that tastes of iron. On the far side of the yard is her husband, near the mouth of the kiln, where the heat of the sky adds to the heat of the fire and the men relieve one another without pause because no one withstands a whole shift at the kiln on a day like this. She sees him from behind, bent, a black shape against the orange, and for a moment she cannot tell whether it is him or any one of the others, because the heat takes this too, takes the outlines, takes the names.

She stays there. She does not go back to the bricks at once. She holds her wet son against her in the shade of branches, and for the first time all day she does not count the bricks, she counts the child's breaths, and she counts them not because they are a figure but because they are breaths. On the far side of the yard the kiln's owner sees her standing still and says nothing, because today he too keeps to the shade and he too knows what this day is. Four hundred and thirteen bricks dry in the sun. The wage will be less. The thread will tighten a little.

Toward six, on the horizon, above the low line of the burnt fields, a strip of cloud rises. It is not yet anything, it is not rain, it is only a different color in the white, but the women at the pump look at it and one says the word, monsoon, she says it quietly the way one says a thing one does not want to believe in too soon. Parveen looks at the clouds with her son asleep on her arm, the empty bottle in her other hand, and does not go back to the bricks. She waits. For tonight, she can wait.