Adultery Radiance of Vanitha, Daughter-in-Law and Instagram Influencer

[adams_masala]

Chapter 59: Training Data

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Morning comes pale through the curtains. The bird in the lemon tree is back. Vanitha stands under the shower for longer than she needs to. She has not slept much. She has been thinking about training data.


She gets out. She dries her hair with a towel. She stands in front of her closet in a bra and a petticoat and she looks at her blouses.

She picks the light yellow one. Sleeveless. Front hooks. Six of them, small and flat, down the middle.

She skips the bra. She puts the blouse on over her skin. She hooks it up slow, one hook at a time, and she looks at herself in the mirror while she does it. She dbangs the saree. A soft white one with a thin yellow border. She dbangs it low. Lower than yesterday. She pins the pallu loose at the shoulder so it will fall with one pull.

She picks up her phone. She opens his message again. She reads it again. She smiles at the floor.

She walks down the hall.

Ashok is in the shower. She can hear the water. Latha is downstairs, she can hear a spoon against a bowl. The door to the guest room is closed. She knocks once.

“Mama.”

“Come in, ma.”

She comes in.

Selvam is at the desk by the window. He is in a clean white t-shirt and the soft cotton pants. He has the laptop open. The pad of paper is beside it, covered in his careful handwriting, small Tamil letters and English words mixed on the lines. He looks up at her and his eyes move, once, down the yellow blouse and the low dbang and back up to her face. He catches himself doing it. He looks at the screen.

“Good morning, ma.”

“Good morning, mama.”

She comes over. She stands at his shoulder. She puts one hand flat on the desk beside his. She does not sit.

“Show me,” she said. “The app. Again. In the daylight.”

“The numbers are wrong, ma.”

“I know the numbers are wrong. Show me.”

He clicks the bookmark he has made. The white page comes up. The stick figure. The blue upload button. He opens a folder on the desktop. There are four photos in it. He has been practicing. Two of them are from her Instagram. One is a photo of a mannequin from a website.

“Mm.”

He uploads the mannequin first. The machine thinks. A number shows up beside each label. Bust forty-two. Waist thirty-six.

“The mannequin is a size four,” Vanitha says. “That is a size sixteen number.”

“I know.”

He uploads the Instagram photo. Another set of numbers. Different. Still wrong.

“Mama,” she says. “See. The machine guesses. It does not know what it is looking at.”

“It has no reference.”

“Exactly.” She leans down closer to the screen. Her braid slips forward over her shoulder. The pallu shifts an inch. She does not fix it. “Ashok said something last night. He said it just needs training data.”

“Training data.”

“Real measurements. From real bodies. With real photos. Enough of them that the machine learns.”

“Yes.”

“Not from Instagram, mama. From a tape.”

He is quiet. He looks at the screen. He does not look at her.

“Okay,” he says.

“So,” she says. She straightens up. She steps back, one step, into the middle of the small rug by the desk. She puts her hands on her hips. The yellow blouse lifts with her ribs. “You need a body.”

“What are you saying, Ma?”

“You need a body, mama. It is a research problem. You said so yourself at breakfast yesterday. You said the machine needs to see the real thing.”

“I did not say that.”

“You said something like that.” She smiles. “Close enough.”

She reaches up and slides the pin out of the pallu at her shoulder. The silk comes loose. She catches it with one hand and, with the other, she unwraps it in a slow turn away from her body, two turns, three, until the whole length of it is in her hand and her front is bare of it. The yellow blouse sits on her by itself now, the six small hooks down the middle, the bare curve of her shoulders, the bare strip of her midriff above the low petticoat, the soft hollow of her navel.

She dbangs the pallu over the back of the chair beside him.

“There,” she said. “One body.”

“Vanitha.”

“The measuring tape, mama. You had one. I saw it on the desk yesterday.”

“I was not going to.”

“You were not going to, but now you are.”

He does not answer. He reaches into the drawer. He pulls out the soft yellow tape. His hand is not steady. He can see it in front of him. He tries to make it steady. It will not.

He stands. He walks the two steps to her. He is close enough to smell the lotion on her skin, a clean vanilla, and under it something warmer.

“Breast first,” she says. “That is the hard one. Under the arms. Around the fullest part. Keep the tape flat. Two fingers under the tape.”

“ok, ma.”

“You know how. You’ve seen me before.”

He lifts the tape. He brings it around her, under her arms. His forearms come around her back. For one second his face is very close to her hair. He keeps his breath held. He brings the two ends together in front of her, at the middle of her breast, where the hooks are, and he pulls it snug.

The numbers blur. He cannot read them. His hands are shaking.

“Mama.”

“Yes.”

“You cannot read the number.”

“I can read it.”

“You cannot.”

He looks at the tape. He looks at the little red marks. They are moving. No. His hands are moving.

Vanitha lifts her own hand. She puts it over his, at the front where the tape ends meet, and she holds his hand still against the center of her chest, through the thin yellow cotton, and he can feel the soft heat of her breast against the side of his thumb.

He measures and he takes a picture of her and uploads to the app.

The results, “still.. wrong” she says under her breath… 

“Mama,” she continues. “There is only one way.”

She starts with the top hook.

She unhooks it herself. She does not take her hand off his. She works the other hand up to the hook at her chest and she flicks it open with her thumb and it gives. The fabric opens half an inch. He can see the start of her cleavage.

The second hook.

“The app is not measuring the breast, mama,” she says. Her voice is very soft. She is looking at his face. “It is measuring the choli. If the choli is not on the body, the machine has nothing to measure.”

“Vanitha.”

“The choli has to come off.”

Third hook. Fourth. The yellow blouse opens. She does not pull it apart. She lets it fall open on its own, loose now over her bare breasts, held together only by the last two hooks at her high waist.

The tape falls out of his hand.

He does not pick it up.

He lifts his hand, both hands, slow, and he cradles her breast in his palm, fair warm weight against the brown of his hand, the nipple a small firm point against the center of his palm. His other hand comes up to her jaw. He bends his head. He kisses her.

He kisses her full and slow and he says it into her mouth.

“You win, ma.”

She makes a small sound against his lips. Her hand comes up to the back of his neck.

A door opens down the hall. Footsteps. Ashok’s stride, the heavy easy one, coming out of his bedroom, into the hallway.

They break apart.

Her hand is fast. She catches the blouse, hooks the top one, the next, the next. Three hooks in four seconds. She steps back. She reaches for the pallu on the chair. Selvam bends, picks up the tape, sets it on the desk, sits down in the chair with the laptop in front of him like he has been sitting there all morning.

Vanitha wraps the pallu around herself in two quick turns. She pins it.

Ashok’s voice, from the hall. “Baby. Have you seen my blue tie.”

“In the closet, da,” she calls back. Her voice is perfectly even. “Second hook from the left.”

“Thanks.”

His footsteps go the other way.

Vanitha looks at Selvam. She does not smile. Her chest is rising and falling fast under the yellow cotton. Her eyes are very bright.

She walks out.