You are not a wanton woman, he said, kneading my thighs. You are not a wanton woman, you are a wanting woman. That day, with his face an inch away from mine, I shook my head, not liking the label at all. But later I saw that he had given me a line to wear for all of my life.
I grew up disfigured. I imagined people muttering and pointing at me, perhaps more than they actually did. I grew up withdrawing and watching, my hair around my face. But I had stacked up dozens of dreams in colored bottles against the glass pane, and when they did crack open I understood that I was a wanting woman.
Strange gift, though, from a man who himself refused to step out of the pages of his books. And movies and music, of course, I can hear his voice in my head, bemused.
You must learn, he told me quite firmly that day sitting cross-legged in front of me, to stop confusing sex with morality. Sex is an animal act like eating and sleeping. It is only we, the human race, who have ritualized it, glorified it, and tabooed it. It really is as simple as that, he said. He got up, and with his half-risen penis preceding him, he went to his bookshelf.
And that is how the books began to pile up around the bed.
His penis looked like him, long and lanky with a slight upward curve. “Up boy,” he said when I began to touch him with tentative strokes, and then he suddenly without a warning swung himself on top of me, and we began a greedy dance, long low strokes until our breathing became fast and ragged and I arched up against him clinging while I came, and then he came in spurts upon my thigh and fell limp on top of me. This, he told me, is called thigh-fucking.
It will be a first time for me too, he said, after we had eaten a packet of glucose biscuits and smoked a joint.
You mean you are a virgin too? I asked, surprised. He seemed so sure and practiced.
No, he said, but you will be my first virgin.
Isn’t that a trophy kind of thing, to take a virgin? Supposed to be especially sexy? I asked. I had always been certain that I would be a virgin on my wedding night. But now I wanted to know. I wanted to know if it would change the shape of my desire, to have a part of his body inside my own.
I don’t know, he said, but I will have to find out. And he got on top of me again. Just relax your thighs, he said, I’m going in. Don’t move, just let them flop. It’s the outer hip that is the key, he said, his face screwed up in concentration. It was fun, like an experiment that we were doing together. Yes, he said, I feel it. I feel the wall coming down.
I felt a sharp stab of pain, and then a tingling. And then I felt him sliding around inside me, not thrusting anymore. He rolled back down, and we both lay spent, staring at the ceiling. It had not been like making love. I did not come, and neither did he. Later we found two drops of blood on the sheet.
So did that feel just tremendous or something? I asked when he lay beside me, his head propped up.
Not really, he said. I was quite stressed. I thought I would fall down. The pressure, he said smiling ruefully, of being a man. He mopped his brow in mock relief. And you? he asked, raising his eyebrows into a castle top. Are you sorry to be deflowered?
No, I said, just stunned. It took all of five minutes. No one can tell you how it feels, because it is nothing to the body. Only to the mind.
I wish I had been a virgin too, he said. Then we would both be in the same space. We would grow together and learn about love together. Have you read Ada by Nabokov?
No, I had not.
But you must, a book of pure genius, he said, adding the fat book with a torn pink cover on top of the pile beside the bed. Later, I wondered why he did it, whether he had some sort of sinister motive.
But that night, we were still beneath the perfect sky. We stood in the balcony and smoked a joint, and when we were freshly high, I wrapped my brown shawl around us both, and we went to Kaka’s, and sat at our usual table in the ladys and familys section on the second floor.
Even the surly little waiter smiled at us in the dingy single-bulb light, so that we looked at each other knowing there was a glow around us. And then we went back to his room, we fell into each other’s arms once more. I took off all my clothes and did not put them on again until I left, two days later.
On the morning of the second day, when the light was gray and pink, he threw on the shirt left on the floor from the night before and popped his head out of the window, the rest of him dangling naked. He called down to the mali to start a sigri for him, and then get him one packet of Wills cigarettes and two packets of Charminar from the bidi stand, sandalwood paste and a packet of camphor from Panchgani Stores, and fragrant roses and jasmine.
I tugged his shirt from behind. No jasmine, I said.
Only roses, he called, but the most fragrant ones from the puja market.
Tell him to get the flowers first, or else the housewives will snap them up for their morning prayers, I said, and so he conveyed that in turn to the mali.
He then went to the kitchen, where I heard him start the tea. While the water boiled he shuffled to his desk and sat down and carefully rolled three joints and laid them out. His curly long hair fell across his face, and there was a gray-green stubble on his chin. We had spent the night curled and close, between waves of desire. But we had not made love all night.
Deep into the night, I had opened my eyes to find his face buried in my hair on his pillow. I wish it were perfumed, I said, like a princess. I told him I had read how Mughal princesses spent all day in the harem adorning themselves. How they scented their seven orifices, and how their maids held their long black hair above hot coals infused with sandalwood and roses so that they walked in a cloud of perfume all day.
Was this your fantasy? he asked.
This was my fantasy, I said, to make love with perfumed hair.
Let’s do it then, he said, and went back to sleep inside my hair.
When we were drinking his strong, sweet tea and could see the clouds rising from the morning valley, I heard the mali walk up the stairs, and I sprang up to hide in the bathroom.
It’s fine, murmured Merch, holding my hand down. I don’t allow servants in the room. I don’t allow anyone in the room, except friends. And no one over thirty-five. I clean my room myself—that explains the dust, I said—and the dhobi leaves my clothes downstairs. The locals are afraid of me, he said, raising his eyebrows, bemused. They think I am into satanic practices or something.
We carefully heated and crushed rose petals and added them to the sandalwood paste. Then we had a hot bath, sliding with soap on the bathroom floor. We washed my hair and rolled it into a towel and wrung it out till it was nearly dry. The coals in the sigri beside us glowed red and warm.
On Merch’s balcony, with the sound of the wind in the silver oaks, I still see the two of us, spreading my hair over the fragrant smoke. We put our messy rose paste in a steel dish on the coals, and when it began to smoke we knelt naked on either side of it, holding my hair between us like the girls held out Mahrukh Tunty’s bras to dry.
We tried various positions. In the end, I knelt facing away from the sigri and leaned backward into it, while Merch knelt beside me, bolstering my arched body against his, holding up my head with one hand and my hair, above the sigri, with another, so close to the fire that I could see the smoke closing in over my head. I kept my hands locked behind his neck to keep from falling into the fire. This is a job for seven maids, I said, and he bent to kiss my blot, and then we both began to cough with the smoke, and we ran into the room, and I jumped onto his bed and spread my legs, and when he was sliding so smooth and fine inside me I did feel, for the first time, the rhythm of the tide inside me. This is meant to be, I thought, dancing under him. The smoky perfume from my hair got into the pillow and sheets and was in our hands and noses and in our heads because we were nearly one that day.
We are the perfect match, he said, and my heart rose and battered against my chest in hope. We are the perfect
match, he said. I think we are the bull and the mare. He pulled out a dusty copy of the Kama Sutra—oh, let me dust your bookshelf one day, I said—and we studied the chart of sexual unions with our legs entwined together.
In his damp kitchen, Merch had one little cupboard, which contained a tin of Nescafé, Darjeeling tea, two bottles of jam, eggs and milk and butter, stale pau bread tied in a newspaper, and a few misshapen bottles of spice. I make the best omelets, he said, and expertly cracked the eggs down the center with a fork, and with the aid of two teacups, he separated the white and the yellow. He beat the whites into a froth with a fork—always forty lashes, he told me, firmly.
We sat cross-legged on the worn carpet with the frying pan between us, scooping up the cloud-light omelet with dripping pieces of bread fried in butter, as Nina Simone’s blue-black voice sealed the time in that room.
But what do you really eat all day? I asked him, prying at the little mysteries that surrounded him.
I have a dabba service, he said. Mr. Irani’s cook makes me dinner in a tiffin three or four nights a week. I pay fifty rupees a month. Good stuff, actually. He makes chops and sali boti and deviled eggs. Sometimes I only eat at night.
Yes, he said, I am true to type. A Parsi bachelor. He did his Parsi accent, but there was only a hint of Cyrus in his voice, there was no Cyrus without Freny, and there could be no Freny without Pin. I saw the ghost of her against the edges of my eyes. How could I not, when this was the very bed on which I had made love with her?
But guilt, I said to Merch out of the blue. How does this Naked Ape world deal with guilt?
Well, a certain degree of guilt is necessary when killing occurs within the tribe, he said. Maybe I turned as white as a sheet, because he stammered for a moment, and then he hastened to add, I mean, for example, of course, in the extreme case. I mean killing in battle is rewarded, but crimes within the tribe have got to be accompanied by guilt and punishment, for the survival of the tribe, he said, rubbing his beard stubble—the stubble that I had cleaned like a cat, with my tongue, that very morning.
You know, he said later when he had begun to use my hair against me as an erotic device, and I knew where his hands and then his mouth were headed, you do know that in our case, guilt is irrelevant. She was already over the edge, he said, and went on to bite my navel, so that I could pretend that I had not heard it.
After sunset, Merch put on his khaki pants, a red pullover, and thick ghati chappals, and went out to the Irani Café to get some hot gutli pau.
I found Ada on the pile beside the bed, and I curled in his bed and read random pages from the musty book, desire spreading and twitching in the pit of my stomach again. I saw how Van Veen loved only Ada, for all of his long life. He loves me, I thought, and I jumped up and did a circle in front of his mirror, my breasts bobbing, my hair flying behind me. And then I stopped and kissed my face in the mirror. He loves me, he loves me, he loves me.
It was the pure day. Of the three days I spent in Merch’s room, it was the second. The first day was the shy and awkward day, with nervous giggles and anxious looks. On the third day, our paths began to veer away from each other, because it was on the third day that I loved him the most.
“I read parts of Ada,” I said to him coyly, angling for a declaration of love. I had turned suddenly cunning in his absence.
“I always saw us in it,” he said. “From the day you walked into my room, like Venus emerged from a shell. I felt I wanted to know you all your life. I wanted to grow up with you, to watch you get your breasts, your pubic hair. Ada is the perfect love story, isn’t it?”
But this, I wanted to say, this is perfect too, as he lay inside me, limp and resting, and then, one of us would move slowly, and then I would feel him harden, and we would move faster and faster and we would look into each other’s eyes and see the worlds we would travel together, and when I came the burst of it was deep inside the center of my soul. This was the life I wanted, this room, this man, this love. And it was when he saw this in my eyes, this greedy need of him, that he began to retreat, although I did not understand this until much later.
I want you, Merch, I hugged him and said, hoarse and fierce and weeping with the strength of my feelings. He took my hair, pulled it up above my head till it almost hurt, and then he kissed me hard till my lips were bruised and I had a blue love bite on my neck. I want you, I said. I want you, Merch, I want you beside me forever. He said nothing.
I awoke the next morning to find The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll on the pillow instead of his tousled head. The room was quiet, the curtains drawn. Merch had gone out without waking me. He will be back with a newspaper and eggs, I thought, and dozed off again to awake at eleven with a heavy head. The room was still silent, and I wondered why he should be away for so long. I picked up the book and saw the poem he had written on the first page.
As birds are fitted to the boughs
That blossom on the tree
And whisper when the south wind blows—
So was my love to me,
And still she blossoms in my mind
And whispers softly, though
The clouds are fitted to the wind,
The wind is to the snow.
—LOUIS SIMPSON
I knew before I knew, as the stomach fell out of my body, as the stars fell from the sky. This was how Merch would do it. This was his way of saying he would not go out into the world as my man. I felt as a newborn might feel, thrust raw and red from a womb.
He would not return to the room until I was gone. Coward, I thought, he takes and props me up as a princess, and then he cannot come and say good-bye. He is not a mystery man, I thought with anger. He is just a common coward. Later, when I was more charitable with him, I granted that, at best, he was an aesthete. Perhaps he wanted to hold the moment forever, like a rose preserved in the pages of a book.
I too got my perfect moment, this I must admit, now that I am older.
But that morning, sobbing, I washed my hair with the shikakai soap in the scrupulous, double-layer soap dish in Merch’s dim bathroom. I do not know at what point during the bath I decided to cut it all off, because I know I did not think of it when I went in. I wound my long black hair into a tight tail till the water stopped dripping from it, and then I took a new blade from Merch’s shaving kit and hacked off the part of my body that I had always loved, with only the small square shaving mirror above his sink for company. It came off in my hands like a live limb. I wound it into a bun on Merch’s pillow, in the place of the book he had left for me there. I buried my face into my shorn hair, as I had done on so many childhood nights. On his pillow, smelling of sandalwood and roses, it became a foreign body, and so I was able to leave it there, sitting like a nest. All he wanted from me, I thought bitterly, was a perfect memory, so let him keep it. Let him miss me now, I thought spitefully as I slammed the door behind me, swearing that I would not need to see him again.
But I could not stay away from the gathering of the gang in the evenings, because that was the lodestar of all our lives. We dream-walked through the days and we came together pulled by magnets and sat stoned and laughing in Merch’s room, or wandered around on valiant whims. Merch and I were sheepish with each other for a while, and then one day when the home team, as we called ourselves in those days, parted at dawn, I stayed behind in his room and we began to sleep with each other again and I put my intensity on a shelf and loved him as he wanted to be loved, although it wasn’t always easy.
Maybe he still has my hair curled in his cupboard wrapped in a soft white cloth. My beautiful black sleek hair that was my pride; it will be as dry and dusty as our love. I miss my hair now, I miss it swinging merrily around me, I miss it gleaming on my back like an exclamation mark.
But at that time, I did not. I felt light and confident, with wisps and curls around my face. In 1974, I passed through death and dementia and deep and d
rastic loves, and began to feel that I was destined for a charmed life. I felt that I had cut my hair and stepped from the shadows into the light. Even though the sharp crackle of danger was around me, I walked jauntily along the precipice. I felt I was acting in a story that was sure to turn out right. I was twenty-one.
Thirty
The Princely Eye
After a month of lying fallow, the case was moving again, and the girls were in a stratospheric state of excitement.
The Scottish Presbyterian Mission in Scotland or wherever such kind of headquarters would be had decided to pay for a lawyer to defend Miss Nelson. Miss Wilson had worn a long navy-blue flowered skirt and closed shoes and a brooch on her white blouse and gone to Poona to meet him.
She had then taken him to Vai to talk to Miss Nelson. But we had heard through Miss Henderson, who told Sister Richards who told Nandita who told me, that Miss Nelson had refused to admit them into her room.
After they had waited for a time, she pushed a note from under her door. She would receive no visitors until the day she appeared in court. She would pray and prepare herself so that she could be an instrument of the Lord.
Thank the mission for coming to my help. The lawyer can have a free hand in conducting enquiries, and he can send me any paperwork he desires. I will meet him on the day of the court hearing. I have put myself in the hands of the Lord.
“If she is innocent, then she should take the Gandhiji route. Fast and pray. Drink only lime water for forty days.” Shobha was holding forth in the detention room on Saturday morning. “I feel so bad for her. Let’s send her an anonymous note, telling her to fast. That will get everyone to take notice.”
“Nelly knows everyone’s writing. There can be no anonymity in this school.”
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