We indulged in sex during her period although we did contemplate avoiding it. But how long would kissing and embracing satisfy us? When intercourse itself crossed one hour and finished in the middle of the next, where was the time for foreplay? Most of the time, we would fall upon each other like famished beasts. A few cuddles and caresses would end in intercourse. When I withdrew my organ from her slot, it looked like a blood-soaked knife that had been thrust into a body.
Whenever I masturbate, I am grateful for the advancement of technology. During my boyhood, the only risqué books I got to read were soft porn magazines with erotic names such as “Youthful Escapades” and “Honeyed Moments” among others. The stories in these magazines were pathetic, except for the hardcore porn “Sarojadevi stories” written by hundreds of porn writers plying their craft anonymously. The stories were replete with spelling errors, courtesy of the printers’ devils, and they were printed on substandard paper owing to which the pictures appeared as black squares. You could barely make out the breasts, but between the stomach and the thighs, all that could be seen was pitch blackness. Despite these printing defects, the boys derived great entertainment from the books. One boy would say, “This is the thigh,” and another would argue, “No, it’s the tit,” and other boys would mock them for being unable to tell thighs from tits. These books ended up following us into college as well.
When my friends squinted and fought over body parts in those magazines, I would theatrically exclaim, “How wonderful would it be if scientists could gift us a device that would play out our fantasies!” It was a sheer nuisance to thumb through those Sarojadevi magazines with their fuzzy pictures. When we were youth, the Internet hadn’t been conceived yet. My only consolation is that it was discovered during my lifetime rather than a century later.
In my youth, actresses did not expose themselves as much as they do now. A woman’s body was like the gods – mysterious. I was a schoolboy with ten girls in my class when puberty hit. When it came to girls, I never spoke a single word during my whole 11 years of schooling and got no closer than five feet. If a word passed between me and a girl, the other boys would advertise our love – which was unknown even to us – with much fanfare, news headlines on the walls accompanied by hearts pierced with Cupid-arrows. The toilet walls were already canvases for Sarojadevi’s budding writers and illustrators. The watchman took it upon himself to erase the nude studies of the teachers that popped up every now and then, but probably not before jerking off himself.
If little birds carried the news of a “love affair” beyond the walls, the girl’s education came to an abrupt end. The sequestered life of a cloistered nun was imposed on her until her parents married her off.
It would be an understatement to say that the Internet changed the face of the world and the way of things in general. Mention must be made of the countless porn films that are generated with a few taps and clicks. It is also interesting to note that the popularity of incest, in all its permutations and combinations, has not waned. It was a fad among porn aficionados of the Sarojadevi era and remains so in the present era of XXXVideos and PornTube. Indians really score like Nadia Comaneci at the Olympics with their radical incest stories featuring mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and even family orgies. Strangely, stories of father-daughter incest were rare. Being a writer, I could infer that the contributors to the websites were men, by taking into consideration their style, tone and staple characters (they had no inhibitions when it came to writing about the mother, but they were dithery when it came to the daughter).
The Tamil stories alone amounted to a whopping one hundred thousand. I would select anything between ten and fifty of these stories to turn me on when I wanted to masturbate.
Sunny Leone and Belladona, in my opinion, were the two porn actresses whose performances outstripped those of their counterparts in the industry. It is also my personal opinion that I have much in common with Ron Jeremy – except the paunch. Despite that enormous beach-ball of a stomach and the fact that he’s almost pushing sixty, how well he fucks!
I know this sounds like a pipe dream, but if I manage to drag myself through another couple of decades, how I would love to become another Ron Jeremy! Vladimir Nabokov was both a writer and a lepidopterist so why shouldn’t I be a writer as well as an adult-film actor? What hinders me when Tamil films feature oldsters, with a legacy of two generations at least, running around trees with sixteen-year-old girls? But that’s all an act. What you see in porn is the real deal. Your dick has to do the fucking for real. It’s not all mock eye-rolling, toe curling, name screaming and lip-locking. In a movie, if you need to jump from the Burj Khalifa because it’s cleverer than using an elevator, if you have to punch a hole in a glass door because knocking is too conventional, or if you have to lift a car off the ground because that’s the kind of pointless shit your character enjoy doing, you can always hire a stuntman, whereas in porn, you have to fuck a woman who is lying before you with her thighs open – for real. You can’t just rock back and forth with your ass to the camera and pretend the job is done. I think I’d make a pretty good porn actor, maybe even a better one than Ron Jeremy.
In the West, I would be known as an adult-film actor, but in India, I would be described as a sex-crazed old psycho. My picture would be splashed all over the place and my reputation would be torn to shreds.
I also admit to having a fetish for watching films of groping in public. Something else that impresses me on a whole other level is Japan’s free-fucking competition that draws thousands of participants. And what about India? Duh, don’t even ask. Just like Indian roads, Indian politicians and Indian life, the Indian porn industry too is very substandard.
Sometimes I wonder: what if Salman Rushdie had become a porn actor?
Good heavens! I forgot all about Anjali! The girl is going to chop off my dick.
But Anjali can bear with my absence just a little longer. I fancy a picture with my erect little soldier.
* * *
Our domestic help Kaveri’s husband, an auto driver, would come home drunk daily and beat her up. One day he came to my house and hammered on the gate. “Send that wretch out!” he shouted. It was only eight in the morning and he was liquored up. Perundevi cajoled him somehow and sent him on his way – and what cajoling! “I’ll fall at your feet, thambi. Don’t hurt Kaveri now.” Her words sobered him up slightly and he went along. He never came knocking again at our house but we could see from Kaveri’s swollen and bruised face that the abuse hadn’t stopped. Kaveri was only one among the dozen maids who had worked with us. The astonishing thing is that every maid who worked with us suffered domestic abuse. Their husband would beat them up so severely that they’d come to work all bruised and bloody. Poor women endure brutality from their husbands silently without lifting a finger in protest, let alone complaining to the police. “Shall I make a complaint to the police?” I asked Kaveri once. “Please don’t do that, saar!” she said and began to weep. She often used to say, “I want him to die soon. Only then can I live in peace with my children.” The gods half-heard her prayers as one day, her husband began to vomit blood, but even then, he didn’t stop drinking. Kaveri would often wonder how he managed to stay alive after losing so much blood.
Eventually, he stopped drinking, overcome by the fear of death. Six months later, he ran into Perundevi and told her about his having turned over a new leaf and she repeated this to me with great amazement. She could have stopped at that, but she went on to say, “For a moment, I thought of how nice it would be if, like Kaveri’s husband, you too could stop drinking.”
“What? How can you compare me to that wife-battering auto driver? He drinks cheap hooch whereas I drink Rémy Martin. We cannot be the same!”
“Hooch or Rémy Martin, liquor is liquor,” she said. “And your drinking disturbs me.”
I quoted Thirumoolar to her. “In nurturing my body,
I nurtured my life. If the doctor autopsies my body, Perundevi, he will see that I am not sixty, but twenty-five.”
One day, I was lying spread-eagled on the bed after a very satisfying sexual joust with Anjali. She’d gone to have a drink of water. When she came back, she sat on the floor and took my foot in her mouth. She bit my toes one by one and this sensation reminded me of the nibbling of the fish in the pond where I used to bathe as a boy. My fish-eyed beauty continued to nibble at my body, progressing upwards from my toes. My feet are as soft as rose petals or the lips of a child. How I wished for a woman who would caress them and delight in the way they feel! After Anjali’s delightful nibbling, I didn’t have to worry about dying without my wish being fulfilled.
I have lamented enough about idlis already, but bear with me a little longer.
In all parts of India (except Vellore), the idlis you get are very flaky and it saddens me to see them. These flaky things are being eaten by the poor folks of Karnataka, Kerala and Delhi. In the good old days, idli batter was ground manually with a grinding stone, but with the advent of the grinder and the clarion call for women’s freedom, the grinding stone vanished into the mists of time. A few years later, when women’s freedom expanded, even the grinders disappeared and readymade batter became available in shops. If you make idlis with this batter, you will either get a mound of mush or a white rock.
My mother gave birth to six children and not once did she go to a hospital for her delivery. Only my grandmother was with her to assist her in labor and there was no doctor, nurse or midwife in attendance. Also, my mother didn’t have the luxury of taking even a quarter-year of rest after each of her births. In those days, six children wasn’t much as there were women who’d had as many as twelve, and they were surprisingly healthy and fit even after so many pregnancies and deliveries. The uluthankali was what gave them their strength. This was a porridge made with urad dal, sesame oil and raw rice.
These days, thirty-year-old women are weak or overweight. Their lifestyles don’t allow them to breathe outdoor air or slip in a half-hour of exercise. Most women cannot deliver normally and have to have C-sections.
When I visited a brothel in Pattaya, I was amazed to see that it looked like a corporate office. (In fact, all brothels are like this.) A bus stopped at the brothel and around fifty men, all of them Tamils – middle-aged, paunchy and attired in checked shirts – alighted and entered the building.
The sex worker who was talking to me knew only fifty words of English, but she managed to communicate with them aided by some facial expressions and hand gestures.
“Do you know why your men come here in busloads? It’s because Indian women are so fat. Why are they so fat? How do you do ‘boom-boom’ to them?”
“How do you know that they’re fat?”
“I see them on TV.”
She made a barrel-wide circle with her arms.
Most Indian women are like Thanjavur nodding dolls. I too wonder how the Indian man can have sex with a nodding doll. He cannot. Not for long. That’s why, every weekend, the Chennai-Bangkok flights are all booked. You only need 20K for a five-day Bangkok-Pattaya tour. Accommodation and food are free. You only need to pay for “boom-boom.” But of course, they won’t tell you that in any advertisement.
Well, let’s leave women’s lib for now and get back to idli. Coming back to the idli, I would say that it is the most wonderful delicacy in the entire world though Tamils don’t seem to think so. Their food preferences have changed drastically – they prefer pizza. Every urban youngster craves pizza. You will find pizza shops on every third street in India, you will find pizzas being made in Indian homes, but will you find idlis in Italy? I am not talking about South Indian restaurants owned and operated by Tamils in Italy. Does the Italian make idlis? Does he eat them? Here in Chennai, pizza shops are a dime a dozen and they are run by Tamils, not Italians. Idlis are being replaced with pizza due to the foreign-culture-worshipping mentality of the Tamils. (If you start associating the Italian pizza with politics, I am not responsible for it.)
Today, the idli has lost its original nature and has assumed a phony avatar. In another ten years, the true idli will be long forgotten and nobody will complain. Everybody will forget the idli and move on. For now, they will be content to spoon mush into their mouths in blissful ignorance.
* * *
Anjali and I made love in every room in the house. One day, we made love on the couch in the living room; the next day, we were on the dining table; we did it once on an armless chair and a few times in the kitchen.
Nowadays I don’t wear jeans; I’ve switched to linen trousers. This is because jeans are unsuitable for quick and illicit sex. If you have sex without removing your jeans, the metal zipper will poke and the hard metal buttons will irritate your sensitive stuff. Sometimes, Anjali and I would be having a quickie, and if someone turned up suddenly, it would be difficult to zip up quickly, whereas, when you’re in linen trousers, you can zip up in the blink of an eye. Linen trousers are easier to pull down to your knees. Linen trousers are the greatest things in the world if you have a thing for groping.
I witnessed groping for the first time on the buses – 220 and 240 – that took me from the Central Secretariat to my office at Civil Lines in Delhi. Gropers used to have a field day on the bus with the hordes of female students traveling to Delhi University and Indraprastha College. However much I wanted to join these gropers, I didn’t have the guts. In Tamil Nadu, where two hundred people squeeze themselves into a bus for fifty, I couldn’t even think of moving my foot an inch or getting my nose out of someone’s armpit, let alone grope. But astonishingly, even in that ridiculous crowd, there are fellows who manage to rub their dicks against women’s bottoms.
The higher the price of liquor, the finer it is. Similarly, the more expensive your jocks, the finer they are. Calvin Klein jocks are soft and gentle on the dick and the balls. When Anjali was busy cooking, I’d stand behind her and rub myself against her sexy hips. I cannot describe the ecstasy those moments gave me. I’d trap her, placing both my hands on either side of her on the kitchen counter, and I’d make sure she turned off the stove first to avoid any mishaps. Anjali is the perfect example of a samudrika lakshanam. She is wasp-waisted with hips to make men swoon; when she walks, those graceful hips sway from side to side. I would rub my dick against her hips for a while before turning her around and going down on my haunches to lick her cunt.
A nightgown is the garment for sex. The saree is good too, but churidars and salwars are not suitable. Once, we went to Chennai’s Alliance Française to watch a movie. We slipped away in the middle and went into a room on the same floor as the hall that not many people are aware of. The door was ajar. I surmised it was a small powder room. I pulled Anjali in and covered her tits with my mouth. What followed was some unforgettable sex during which I lost all sense of place and time. Truly, there is nothing that beats the thrill of illicit sex, that too in a public place.
After reading the novel to this point, Anjali said, “No more sex, please!” So I told her of a news article that appeared in a Tamil daily. There was a government officer in Tirunelveli who had a wife and a son. A young woman approached him for a certificate and the officer ended up getting into an affair with her, but was unable to keep it a secret. When his wife came to know of it, she rebuked him, but he told her that it was nothing but a nasty rumor being circulated by his enemies. One day, he took his son to his mistress’ house. The woman gave him some sweets and when the boy returned home, he told his mother what had happened. The officer left for the woman’s house the next morning, telling his wife he was heading off to work. His wife waited for him to leave and then told her son to take her to the mistress’ house. The wife took two locks with her – one for the front door and another for the back door and locked the pair inside. When the officer realized that he’d been locked inside the house, he called the police and a panchayat was held.
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br /> “As this matter came to light, the newspapers published it. If a journalist picks up a story like this – where an officer goes and sleeps around with a woman who is not his wife – and writes about it, should he be branded as porn writer? I’ll let you ponder that.”
Once, after reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, I visited the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. While in the Dominican Republic, I met a Tamil salsa dancer called Prakash in a salsa club. I was also delighted to hear that he’d read my books.
Prakash told me he’d learned salsa in the US, Venezuela and Italy. When I met him, he was teaching salsa in Zurich. He had come to the Dominican Republic for a holiday.
He’d learned the dance with great difficulty. He did not learn from a teacher, but from the troupe of dancers he lived with.
Though Latin music has been around for many years, it reached its height of popularity during the ‘30s. Salsa achieved prominence in the ‘60s.
Prakash told me two important things. The first was about the parallels between salsa and male-female relationships within the Latin American community. The second was about the difference between salsa and the Argentinean tango.
Latin America has a rigidly patriarchal society. Latin dance reflects this attitude for it is the male dancer who leads throughout. A woman must wait for a man to invite her to dance, but the woman has the right to refuse the man who invites her, but this hurts his ego which is why he becomes insistent and tries to persuade her. Sometimes, this leads to scraps.
Latin American life is pretty much the same. A man tries to sweet talk a woman into submission. He has but one aim in life – to possess her completely – and he will stop at nothing until he gets what he wants. Once the conquest is made, he finds another target and the first woman has the arduous task of keeping him from straying. These kinds of relationships are short-lived and if they last, they are rarely ever happy. Salsa conveys this reality beautifully.
Marginal Man Page 45