Pluton's Pyre

by Gyandeep Kaushal

  She added, ‘I think you’re full of sex.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ This time, I simply couldn’t help asking.

  ‘I don’t know how to put this better. I don’t want to call you a “pervert”, but I feel like you are rushing for sex all the time. I still remember how happily I’d invited you to my PG. I had noticed it the very first time you’d held my hand. But I chose to ignore it, thinking it was a random gesture of love on your part. But then you went on making me more and more uncomfortable, each time more than the last.The way you’d grabbed my arm in the theatre, when I was asking you to sit until the interval. I remember how you took advantage of the opportunity that day, in this very coffee parlour and placed your hand on my waist, pretending you were trying to help me walk me out of here. And the way you would look below the area of my neck, when we sometimes ate at the college canteen—I remember everything.There are so many examples, just like these, even uglier ones.

  ‘You disappointed me more each time and I tried harder to ignore those gross attempts of yours at touching my body each time.’ She took a breath and went on, ‘And Suraj, you talk about the kiss? It was supposed to be a thing I was supposed to cherish, that we could cherish, together. But not for a single moment could I feel happy about it the way I should have. It was as if your ever-increasing desire for sex had melted and dissolved into that sad kiss of ours, only to make it a foul experience for me.’

  In the last couple of minutes, I’d realized she wasn’t there to come back into my life. I had been invited to attend the funeral of my dignity. She wasn’t regretful or anything for what she’d done, and she hadn’t uttered a syllable by way of apology. More to the contrary.

  ‘Why would you go for the kiss that night? Was my approval to your proposal not enough for the day, or was it like all other instances, you making the best use of the occasion? I believe things would have been a little different had you not rushed the kiss that night.’

  ‘Did you never really like me then?’ Lumping together the leftovers of my strength after she’d fed on it, I tried to speak. But I could barely pull the words out of my throat. My voice was suppressed, but I’m not sure if that was the reason why she chose to ignore it.

  She was almost indifferent to my very existence. So she continued, ‘And marriage? I can’t even think of marrying someone, who works for the railways. Just imagine me telling people my husband works for the railways. It simply doesn’t have that click to it.’ She’d forgotten that I was going to be employed as an ‘engineer working for the railways’ and not as a hawker selling tea and biscuits in the coaches.

  She continued, ‘Look, Suraj, you may be a good guy and all, but I don’t think it can work between us.’ Yeah, sure, after that description of mine she’d presented to me, I sure could be a ‘good guy’ for her.

  Just then, the waiter arrived with the coffee. ‘Sir, one King Coffee for you, and one for ma’am,’ he said, unloading his tray.

  ‘Here, please have this,’ she said to the waiter, offering him two hundred-rupee notes. ‘And keep the change,’ she said. ‘I’m paying for my coffee.’

  She looked at me and said, ‘I just remembered I must leave right now. I’m getting late. I’m supposed to be somewhere in half an hour.’ She picked up her purse and rose from her chair. ‘So… bye, then?’ she said and left the place in quick steps.

  The woman had left and I looked at the coffee. I did not think drinking the coffee would undermine the gravity of the situation, so I took a sip. I found that the coffee couldn’t bring about the smallest difference to my mood. So I took a few currency notes out of my wallet and shoved them into the bill folder.I got up and walked out of the goddamn hole. I certainly felt like a loser, only a bigger one now

  It was a nauseating feeling. The organs inside me felt disoriented, disarrayed, displaced. I didn’t have the energy to move my jaws, to grind my teeth, yet I was angry, very angry and my head felt hot and crammed with an influx of thoughts and complexes. My ears were once again assailed by a giant beep that I kept hearing. I rose from my chair and walked out of that restaurant, not so much because I was supposed to leave, more so because staying there for another moment, opposite to the seat Geetika had occupied a while ago would asphyxiate me to death. And I kept walking. And thinking.

  I was beyond mortified or humiliated.A part of me still shamelessly and desperately craved for her company, may be out of habit, irrespective of what she’d said or thought about me, mindless of my bleeding ego or self-respect. The other part however struggled to make me believe that she’d left me for him. And that she’d be fucking him from now on, forgetting I even existed. She wouldn’t care what would become of me. She wouldn’t be responsible for what I endured from then on. I gave a thought to killing myself, for a second, but then I wondered if she’d even shed a tear if she came to know.

  Chapter 11.0

  After having walked for a mile or two, I felt as though I was going to have a fit. So I took an auto home.

  I was rushing to get into my room and smoke. Luckily, the only place where I felt safe and a little like myself was my safety garage, my then very home.After chain-smoking six cigarettes, I got an inner call.

  I took my phone out of my pocket, and I used the data cable to connect it to my laptop. I didn’t want to go to the cyber café again, for my room provided me with more privacy, so I resorted to domestically available resources. I initiated the internet and double-clicked on the browser. I clicked on the address bar, typed ‘watch porn’ and clicked on the first result that came in the search list. I scrolled down the homepage of the website and clicked on the category ‘Hard core’. Tens of sly little boxes, enclosing within them thumbnail previews of the porn videos, along with their titles, occupied the screen in no time. I was glad that my phone had the EDGE facility.

  Based on my preference of the girls that the preview thumbnails displayed, I selected and watched a couple of hard-core videos. Sometimes, owing to the speed of the connection, it would take the videos a while to buffer. Nonetheless, it didn’t make a difference, as the pleasure wasn’t compromised with. Then I watched a Teen video. Then, I moved on to watch a Double-Penetration video, then a Triple-Penetration and then a Gangbang.

  I discovered that it wasn’t the privates of the girls in the videos that I craved to see. Not that I’m saying it didn’t feel good, but truth was that my eyes had much more affinity for their faces than their privates. Every time those huge, muscular men would thrust their gigantic members into the girl’s privates and the girl would cry in pain, I would simply love it. Not that I didn’t know it wasn’t just pain, but a mix of pain and pleasure, but I liked those videos so much more wherein the depth of the insertion and the frequency of the thrust were more. Those girls being done would moan a thousand ‘nos’, acquiescing in the pain they endured, then a zillion ‘fuck mes’, meaning they wanted to be done so much more and then again, with another series of ‘yesses’ and ‘nos’. But the best part was when the guy would do her so fast, so brutally and so harshly, the girl would scream the hell out in pain; the more they screamed, the more pain they endured, the more I liked it. Watching those parts, I couldn’t resist touching myself and seeking pleasure by playing with my own body.

  The pleasure I extracted from seeing them screaming like that was unmatched. Unmatched!

  I closed the lid of my laptop, disconnected the wires. I rushed to the rooftop and crouched against the railing, having folded my legs at my knees such that no one could see me. I pulled out another cigarette from the pack and lit it.

  I was letting the smoke do its job. It was infecting my brain again. As it rose up high in the air, those videos, the parts I loved, started playing back in front of my eyes. Only, in these videos that my malfunctioning brain projected, the characters were replaced. I was the guy who would be doing those things; Geetika was the girl being done. I was vexed and angry.And it was clear from what I was seeing. In that projection, in that imagination of mine, I
was fucking Geetika, that bitch, that sexy bitch, like anything. Since Geetika wasn’t the girl that would reveal herself too much to me, I had to do all the imagining by myself. And that added to the whole excitement.

  It gave me pleasure …

  A perverse pleasure… I felt in power in the imagination of fucking Geetika… over and over again… and that dumb son of a whore whom I’d seen moving in on her did not matter a shit now.

  I was the aggressor… I was in control… and Geetika was crying and begging for mercy!

  And yet, I bet that bitch was enjoying every moment…

  All that she said at the coffee house was only an attempt to cover up her shameless act of cheating on me… her foolish attempt to make me look small… a sex freak, full of sex as she’d said…

  Now I knew that she was no virgin… I had seen her enjoying every sexual moment with that fucker I’d caught her with… she had enjoyed being ravaged by that wimp of a boy she called a man… or her boyfriend!

  In my vilest imagination, I was taking my revenge on her by giving back that excruciating pain that she’d slammed me with. I was making her cry like hell in pain. She was asking me not to, but the more she begged, the deeper I shoved it, the harder I fucked her, the more bestial became my thrust. That stunning, that beautiful body of hers had finally succumbed to my demonic strength.

  I felt I was someone again, someone powerful; someone who need meet with no resistance again; someone who would never again experience shame.

  ***

  After about fifteen minutes in a salivating trance, I ran down to the toilet. I touched myself more, imagined her even more vividly now, in all the worst possible ways and positions, before my hold broke. I ejaculated, cleaned myself, and came out.

  All of a sudden, my mind stopped projecting me with her; the excitement had vanished. I was thrust back into reality.And reality sucked.

  That deafening beep returned to torture my skull, cancelling all the noise outside of it, only to heighten all the noise inside.

  Having resigned myself to her words echoing in my mind, I went to the bed, pulled the quilt to my head and tried to sleep.

  Chapter 12.0

  The next day, I woke up early, with a heavy head. I didn’t feel like getting out of the quilt; the cold chilled my bones. I waited for the sun to rise. It took about fifteen minutes for the temperature of the room to increase by a margin.

  After I was done with freshening myself up, I came back to my room, returned to the bed, and sat almost in the middle of it, in the position of a yogi.With the sun mildly warming my body, I began to see the other facet of the coin.

  All this time,I’d been in wonderment as to how Geetika could say the things she had in the coffee parlour. I had presumptively assumed that she knew she had been in the wrong, that she’d said what she had in the parlour only to escape those questions of mine.

  But what if she’d said it all wholeheartedly? What if she’d actually meant every syllable she’d uttered? What if I actually fitted her definition of me? It was possible that I had never seen myself from her angle, how could I.There’s a metaphor in Hindi: chirag tale andhera. It means that even though a little lamp may light up everything around it, the ground directly beneath it is always dark.What I mean by the reference is: we can see the entire world, but rarely do we look upon ourselves, because we can’t. Geetika’s words had come to me as an outsider’s perspective.

  Possibilities said that maybe all this time I’d been running after Geetika only because I was ‘full of sex’, maybe because I was attracted to her so much that I’d been blind to see the difference between love and lust. In my mind now, her words gained in amplitude and I was confused as to whether what I felt for her all this time was love at all? However, you wouldn’t find me turning on my internet to browse through the many definitions of ‘love’ given by celebrated philosophers and gurus. Now, I only wanted to know if Geetika’s words held any truth.

  And if they had, so thought my virgin brain, and if I was after Geetika only because I was driven by unquenched sexual desire, I might as well use another channel to direct it to, and be done with the entire fucking thing. It was nowhere written in the rulebooks of law or religion that one is supposed to satiate his thirst for sex only for free. I wondered – if I was only being manned by my desire for sex, why go after winning the love of a girl and only then make out with her?

  Why couldn’t I simply pay a whore for a night and satisfy myself?

  So I opened my wardrobe, picked up a simple shirt and trousers to go hunting the streets in, for the idea seemed perfect to me. I was to go to a whorehouse, to an in-yourface brothel.

  Chapter 13.0

  After all the years that I’d spent in that city, I certainly knew some locations. In college days, I’d been a passive listener to many of those lurid conversations my friends would have when they discussed male interests. So I knew exactly where to go.

  I patiently waited at the square of the colony for an auto-rickshaw, found one, and gave the driver directions. The place was about 35 kilometres by road, from my locality. That would be almost the other end of the city. Prepared for the journey, I sat comfortably in the vehicle.

  While I was still mobile, memories crowded past me.All that time we’d spent together, Geetika and I, it blinded me, captured my vision and then that nightmarish experience I had to swallow outside her apartment.Then the final meet-up with her at the coffee parlour—it was all coupled with a bad feeling in my gut, and my throat had begun to tighten. But a produce of my brain—that self-ignited effect that intended to plunder my heart away from those thoughts that were attacking it, kicked in with a jolt. Perhaps I was the only one who loved me.And yet, I didn’t want to let her wreck the life and diminish the ecstasies I wanted to live. I deemed I had a right to lead a happy life and I was going to buy what seemed a necessary cut of it.

  When I arrived, I doubted if I was in the right place, even though I’d visited the locality quite a few times before. The traffic wasn’t as dense as compared to the rest of the city. There weren’t many people on foot.A few public buses and a handful of cars and that was it. I was in the suburbs.

  As I moved forward, I could see more heads. Oh, there was the mall! I could see it from a distance. I took a right, disconnecting myself off the main road, heading into a colony. But I’m not sure if I could call it a colony. There weren’t many houses, unlike the locality I lived in. There were a few and they looked like old, uncared-for residential buildings with empty plots separating them. I kept walking, expecting to see what was supposed to fit the description that Venkat, a friend from the locality, had once provided to some of my group mates. I tried to recall the description again and again, but with each step, I lost more hope of finding it.Then, suddenly, there it was.

  Yes! It seemed like it.After prowling the alley in search of the right building, I found a compound on the left, surrounded by boundaries on all sides and a gate at the front. The compound held three constructions,making a ‘C’shape altogether. Each of the three buildings was four-storied and each floor had no less than six rooms on each side. In the centre they had a mini-garden, occupied by a few flowerpots randomly placed. It reminded me of those typical Mumbai chawls. But unlike them, where next to every kholi, the front railing of the porch is usually found laden with clothes hung for drying in the sun, here they were loaded with something else—lights.

  Thing about these lights—they were strung up everywhere, along the railings and coiled around the pillars, arching from one end to the other. The ceilings in the verandahs were further charged with giant bulbs. Though the bulbs weren’t lit up, some of those series lights in the porches were still blinking at that time of the morning. It was only a little after 11 in the morning. Damn, this had to be it!

  I saw a good number of motorcycles and a couple of cars parked adjacent to a pond, on the other side of the street. Considering the overall setting, clearly these vehicles were not owned by the neighbours and couldn’
t be of the occupants of the chawl. I knew I was in the right place.

  I walked through the gate, my pace moderate. I could only see a couple of men on the ground floor. I continued advancing, knowing not where to go. I was trying to figure out something that could be an office or reception area, when I was approached by a man.

  ‘Yes? What do you want?’ he asked. He wore a yellow shirt and black pants and had a lit cigarette fixed between his fingers. He was stout, had a belly and a little cowboy moustache.

  ‘I’m here for the business,’ I said.

  ‘What business?’ he asked, tilting his head, as if studying me, looking at me cynically from the corner of his eyes.

  I wondered how to answer that, but realized that being anything but clear could lead me into trouble. ‘Girls,’ I said. He looked at me in a way that made me wonder if I’d said something wrong.

  ‘You a cop?’ he asked, his voice grave and heavy.

  ‘No,’ I said, without showing signs of worry.

  He said nothing and looked at me from head to toe. ‘Come,’ he said and started walking.

  ‘That was a piece of cake,’ I said to myself. I was actually expecting some serious checking. Perhaps they’d seize my phone, may be ask me to empty my pockets, or something. But nothing of that sort happened. I wondered how that man could be so confident that I posed no threat to him—or his ‘business’.Then I thought of his age. He must’ve been in his late forties. ‘Experience’, that should be it.

  I followed him into one of the chawls.The house looked ordinary. In the guest room, an old man in his pajamas was reading a newspaper with his specs on. I could smell food being cooked in the kitchen,probably some chicken;I could see an old woman doing the cooking and could hear a few young boys playing cards in another room.

  I followed the man into one of the rooms. He closed the door; didn’t latch it, though. He sat behind a table and gestured me to sit on the chair next to it.The table had a baize cover on it, blood-red in colour, which in turn was topped by a moderately thick glass sheet, exactly the size of the surface. A couple of newspapers, perhaps yesterday’s and the day before, a flower vase with artificial flowers, a notebook, a few pens, and that was it.