Pretty Vile Girl

by Rickie Khosla

  Like a unique key sliding into its own lock.

  The pleasure fest continued wordlessly for over two hours. Arty attained orgasm three times and Jazmeen even more. In the interim, the lovers would lie quietly, trying to come up for air.

  At some point during the night, sleep finally took over from the fatigue of having too much pleasure.

  Jazmeen woke with a start at around 5:30 AM. The room was hued with the grey-blue of brand new daylight seeping through the white, sheer window curtains. The sun was not up yet, just the promise that it would be, soon. It took a few moments for her to place her surroundings. Her mind was empty, except for the warm radiance that lingers after a long embrace of someone close. Elsewhere on her body, there were goosebumps—the reaction of naked skin to air-conditioning. Reflexively, she pulled the crumpled bedsheet to cover her bare breasts. There was no Arty lying next to her. She looked beyond the bed and saw him sitting on the lounge armchair facing her, around ten feet away. All he wore was his naked skin. Her eyes dropped down to his penis. Jazmeen looked up to Arty’s eyes and the two held the stare for a few quiet moments. She let the bedsheet drop to the side.

  It was time to finally lay bare her feelings about being in Arty’s bed. Her instincts told her that the man, whose gaze had not once strayed from her eyes despite her complete nakedness, hadn’t anything to hide either.

  ‘Why am I here?’

  Arty’s eyes expanded at her question, but only slightly—and briefly—before returning to their usual sardonic stance.

  ‘You still have to ask?’ he said. ‘After last night?’

  ‘Neither of us could have known about—about last night,’ she said, with only a minor tremor over the last word when her body was overrun by a sprinkling of fresh goosebumps.

  ‘You are wrong. I knew. I knew all along about you,’ he said, his lips curling to match the smart-alecky twinkle of his eyes.

  Jazmeen gave Arty an admonishing look.

  ‘We spoke barely ten words to each other that day,’ she said, thinking back to her first and only previous meeting with him.

  ‘But not once did you take your eyes away from me,’ he said quite nonchalantly. ‘Not one single time.’

  Jazmeen flushed. Thankfully, the room was not bright enough to reveal the change of colour on her face. ‘He’s right.’

  ‘Even when I kept staring right at you, not once did you look away. Or down. Or anywhere else. You kept staring right back at me. I wonder what you were trying to see. Maybe peeling away my clothes with your eyes…?’ Then, after a brief pause he added, ‘You know, good girls are supposed to look away when they are stared at! Hasn’t your mother taught you that?’

  ‘My mother taught me to be wary of the likes of you,’ Jazmeen said, shaking her head softly. ‘That’s what she taught me!’

  ‘And yet, here you are.’

  Jazmeen was suddenly conscious of her bareness, but found it beyond her willpower to shield herself from her new lover’s intent eyes. She wondered again why she was there. Surely, the answer to that question lay within her more than it did with Arty?

  At the beginning, when she had first heard of Arty Rathore, Jazmeen had smelled opportunity, a future awash with possibilities simply by association with a big and important man. A powerful name with connections—that is what Arty Rathore was. Jazmeen’s entire focus—right up to the second when she had first set foot inside his office with Toby a few days ago—had been on forging a professional association with Arty Sir. And nothing more. And even in that association, she had only envisaged her role as that of Toby’s ally. In short, Toby and she were going to be partners who, under Arty Sir’s guardianship, would grow bigger, have more clout, make oodles of money, and, God willing, someday, diversify into enterprises outside the nebulous world of Mumbai’s underbelly. In Jazmeen’s vivid imagination of her life’s Motion Picture, she was its writer, director and star; Toby, its main supporting lead; and Arty, no more than the financial benefactor.

  But that script had flipped the moment she’d seen Arty.

  It was the first time that someone had taken her breath away and made her mouth dry simply by their sheer presence. Seated across from him in his plush office in South Mumbai, Jazmeen had not once been able to pull her eyes away from his face. As if looking away for even a second was going to rob her of something precious.

  Throughout the half-hour that she sat muted in Arty Rathore’s audience, being continuously stared at by his piercing eyes, she had feasted on the man’s masculine jawline, his sharp nose angled to perfection, his broad forehead shored by two almost straight eyebrows. His hair was close-cropped, a style that suits only very fit men. Each time Arty moved his arms and shoulders, once to reach out for his phone and another time when he bent down to pick up a pen that had toppled to the floor, Jazmeen could have counted individual muscles jabbing at the fabric of his skin-hugging shirt. The two occasions when he had risen from his chair, it had felt as if he had done so only to flaunt his 6-foot frame and his firm torso covered by the translucent fabric of a plain shirt, its pure white tinted from within by his bare, wheatish skin. Even the man’s nipples were mildly visible, as was the light patch of hair between them. Jazmeen couldn’t help it when her eyes involuntarily brushed past the man’s stylish Gucci belt buckle to the front of his crisp straight-fit Levi’s… Her gaze lingered there, but no more than an intrusive, fleeting second.

  Arty Rathore may not have been a movie star, but Jazmeen was certain that she had never seen a more exquisite entity in her entire life.

  The meeting had been a revelation in more ways than one. Most of the talking had been done by Toby and, by the time their half-an-hour was over, Jazmeen’s grand vision of a future with her lover–partner–supporting-actor had crumbled spectacularly. Toby was no hero. In fact, he was no more than the scum of the earth who had just passed off his own woman to his benefactor! As they were leaving Arty’s office, Jazmeen had vowed that this was going to be the final betrayal that Toby was ever going to enact on her. In fact, he was going to have to pay for his treachery, and only she was going to decide when the time was right for her to seek her revenge.

  She had not said a word at the time, just quietly gulped her scorn for the pathetic puppet of a man. And his puppeteer, who sat in their home like a snake.

  But what about the crime of the benefactor? Why had she not been able to say no to Arty’s proposition, Jazmeen wondered. Hadn’t she pledged to herself years ago that she was never going to be used by another human being for as long as she lived? So, why had she given in to Arty’s advances without as much as a whimper?

  ‘Why am I here?’

  The answer that Jazmeen was not willing to confess to herself was sitting right in front of her. The answer was Arty Rathore himself. His looks, his charisma, his masculinity. His power, his reach, his influence. And the sheer sexual magnetism of the man that had drawn her to his crumpled bed in Gorakhpur. All the way from Mumbai.

  The cigarette had finished and Arty moved slightly to dispose of the dead butt. Jazmeen’s eyes fell on the man’s brand new swell between his legs. The sight caused a sudden rush of desire between her own. She heard a loud and incessant pounding of drums in her ears. She quickly realised it was her own heart.

  ‘I know why I’m here.’

  Presently, Arty rose from the couch and walked up to the bed. The two did not leave the bedroom for another twelve hours.

  Four days later, Arty was having breakfast with his mother in the rich ambience of her home in the exclusive Doon Hills area. The table had enough food to feed a small country, though there were just two people eating. The mother was wearing her customary off-white silk saree. Her salt and pepper hair was straight and shoulder-length. A single string of Mikimoto pearls graced the long, though, lined neck. Even at eight in the morning, she looked ready to receive the Queen of England. By contrast, the son was wearing the same sleeveless T-shirt and boxing shorts he had worn to the in-house gym that morning.


  Subhadra Laxmi Rathore had never seen herself as a tiresome, meddling mother, though her sons may have disagreed with her self-analysis. Especially her younger one. Every syllable the lady uttered about the goings-on in Arty’s personal life usually met with a blunt response from him. Over time, she had grown wary of approaching the topic altogether, but since she was a mother she would always look for ways to make oblique references to the matter.

  ‘It was good to see your friend at the party again,’ Subhadra said as she dropped two sugar cubes into her tea cup. ‘A third time in two months now. Sorry, what was her name again?’

  ‘You know her name, Ma,’ Arty responded inattentively. He was reading the finance pages of The Times of India.

  Of course Subhadra knew the name of that bimbette. Chanchala Joshi had been the latest in a string of unworthy girls put solely on earth to sully the Rathore family name; Arty seemed to have a penchant for finding them with amazing regularity. More grave, however, was the latest news that Subhadra’s spies had broken to her a week ago. She was determined to confront Arty about that today. Why couldn’t the boy see the damage he was causing to his family’s reputation, she wondered.

  ‘What about the other girl you’ve got tucked away at the farmhouse? You seem to be spending a lot of time with her too,’ she asked coolly, sipping from the Waterford china teacup. Her eyes were on her son whose own eyes did not leave the newspaper, though his ears did perk up.

  ‘She’s a friend,’ he said, matching his mother’s coolness.

  ‘I’m quite certain that I don’t know the name of your new friend.’

  ‘You don’t? Couldn’t your informers dig up such a simple thing for you?’ Arty turned to the sports section.

  Subhadra let the jab pass. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce your “new” friend to me?’ she asked instead. ‘I wonder what your “old” friend thinks about your “new” friend. Wicked of you to have put both of them together at the same place. Have the two ladies met at the farmhouse?’

  ‘‘She’s of no interest to Chanchala and vice-versa—so what’s the point of them meeting?’ Arty replied, as he put away the newspaper to the side. Casually, he picked up a toast from the toast-rack and started to butter it. He could feel his mother’s eyes bore into him.

  The truth was that Arty had not spent a single minute with Chanchala since the second day of their arrival in Gorakhpur together, when she had attended the family party as his arm candy. They had not slept together in days. Chanchala had noticed Arty’s Mercedes at the farmhouse, but since it hadn’t culminated in their meeting, it was clear to her who he was more interested in seeing instead. Riled that her guy was now bedding someone else, and that too, brazenly in her presence, she’d left the farmhouse and checked herself into Grand Hotel in the heart of Gorakhpur two days later.

  Chanchala was pissed when the two talked on the phone for the last time. A lot of angry sentences containing cruel phrases and foul words about Arty’s shamelessness were mouthed loudly. He, on the other hand, had been unfazed in delivering his simple message to her.

  ‘The next flight out leaves at 12:30 tomorrow,’ he said. ‘My driver, Kartik, will organise everything for you.’

  ‘So, is this how it’s going to be, Arty?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. And then, quite gravely, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Such simple words—‘I am sorry’. As soon as they are uttered, the giver and the receiver must both rise above the immaturity of false pretentions, and have a real conversation. Chanchala was caught off-guard by them. She may have been empty-headed, but was not so stupid as to have not already realised that it was over between Arty and her. It was only Arty’s callousness, his impunity, that had made her livid. Yet, when Arty offered her his uncharacteristic and unexpected apology, it sapped all the bitterness out of her instantly.

  She sighed loudly, acknowledging the reality.

  ‘I did see her, you know, from a distance. Just hanging about the farmhouse,’ she said. ‘Saw her in the pool, too. She looks hot, yet… different. Almost not your type. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anyway, what you do in your bloody life is of no damn concern to me now, is it? Goodbye, Arty.’

  Chanchala had disconnected without waiting for a response.

  Arty took a bite of the perfectly buttered slice as his ex’s last words rang in his ears. ‘Frankly,’ he spoke after a minute, finally matching his mother’s gaze, ‘‘she’s really no one else’s damn concern but mine.’ The crunch of the crisp warm toast filled the cold silence of the room.

  With that dismissive comment, Subhadra knew that the conversation was over. ‘She is really no one’s concern.’ This ‘new’ girl sounded like Arty’s new toy, just another girl willing to open her legs to get ahead in life. Mumbai seemed to produce such sluts by the thousands, Subhadra thought angrily. ‘Well, hopefully, this is the last I will see or hear of this gold-digger. Like day follows night, there will be another to replace this one too.’

  Subhadra put aside her tea. It had been a perfect brew but she had not enjoyed it. Despite her best efforts to ignore the feeling, everything around her seemed laced with the slight bitterness of impending doom these days.

  ‘Jazmeen. Like my favourite white flower. Well, that’s one name I am not likely to forget in a hurry,’ she thought.

  It was Jazmeen’s last day in Gorakhpur. Arty and she had been together for twenty four hours straight, pleasuring their minds and bodies—mainly bodies—in remarkable ways. They had kept Kartik on his toes, getting him to deliver the best Indian and continental food in town—and also snacks, vodka and cigarettes—straight to their room.

  Jazmeen was seated by a giant mirror in her birthday suit blow-drying her hair. Arty sat on the big sofa in front of a 56-inch television watching NDTV Profit. He was wearing a pair of Gucci boxer briefs. His hair was damp too, after the long shower the two had finished taking together only minutes ago.

  Jazmeen looked over at her new lover in the mirror. His eyes were fixated on the rally on Dalal Street. He looked even better with a two-day stubble than he did the first time she had seen him. Momentarily, Jazmeen’s phone sitting on the dresser vibrated, almost angrily. It was an unknown Mumbai number that she did not recognise. ‘That bastard is now trying to call me from some other number so I take the call,’ Jazmeen thought She ignored the phone and lifted her gaze back at the mirror where she caught Arty’s eyes. He nodded, gesturing her to come over. She relented, putting away the hair-dryer.

  ‘That was Toby, again,’ she said as she planted her naked body under his right arm.

  ‘You never need to see him again, you know that.’

  Jazmeen didn’t want to think about Arty’s open invitation he had made to her two nights ago. The offer to move into his ‘spare’ flat in Bandra was tempting. But not tempting enough to accept along with the label of ‘rich playboy’s kept woman’ that it came with.

  ‘Any other girl would have jumped at the opportunity,’ he mocked, playfully stroking her bare back all the way down to her buttocks. They had already had this conversation seriously when the offer had first been made.

  ‘And you know that because you have met every girl on the planet?’ she mocked.

  ‘Clearly, none like you. You even made me say sorry to Chanchala for fucking you instead of her!’

  Jazmeen laughed. It produced the joyous tinkling sound that Arty had begun to love the most about the enigmatic shrew that lay by him.

  ‘Haven’t you humiliated enough women for one lifetime? You’ll never find a place in Heaven this way,’ she said.

  ‘Who says I’m not in Heaven already?’ he whispered softly in her ear, as his hand moved from the back of her pelvis to the front. She turned to kiss his open mouth.

  Then, after a few minutes, Arty said, ‘Let’s chuck Mumbai. I’ll take you some place special.’

  ‘But what about my job? And that moron Toby? Look, it may not be as fancy as yours but I do have a
life in Mumbai—or did you forget about all of that?’

  ‘Can’t you take a break from your shit life for some time? Or are you really having such a terrible time with me?’ he smiled, causing crinkles around the corners of his eyes.

  Jazmeen returned to Mumbai three weeks later. After spending a few extra days in the Gorakhpur farmhouse, Arty and she had taken off to—first, the Lake Palace in Udaipur, and then Wildflower Hall near Shimla.

  The sum-total of the entire holiday was her realisation that she had fallen, badly, for her new lover.

  As Jazmeen sat in heavy traffic in the blue-and-white Cool Cab, she wondered how Toby was going to react to the news that she had decided to move into Arty’s ‘spare’ flat in Bandra.

  ‘But why should that bother him?’ she thought. ‘I’m giving the bastard exactly what he deserves!’

  The phone vibrated right that instant. It was that same unknown number again, the one that had called her unsuccessfully six times in the past three weeks. Jazmeen sighed. There was no point in avoiding Toby any longer.

  ‘Hello?’ she said as she took the call.

  ‘Hello? Hello?’ It was not Toby.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hello, Miss Jazmeen?’ the man’s deep, uneducated voice resonated through the earpiece.

  ‘Yes, this is Jazmeen. Who is this?’

  ‘Oh! I have been trying to call you for many days now, Madam! This was going to be my last try!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was not in Mumbai.’

  ‘Oh, actually, it is my fault for not calling you earlier, Madam. You see, I was asked to call you by Master Brandy, but, as you know, he…’ the man paused.

  Jazmeen snapped into total attention. She said nothing, allowing her silence to urge the man to continue.

  ‘Master Brandy had asked me to consider you for a screen test for a film I’m producing.’