The India Experiment

I fiddled with the hostel key in the darkness. I’d only had a few Kingfishers, but everything was magnified in India. Or maybe it was just because I was in a strange place away from home that everything seemed more extreme. I watched Wild-Eyed-Goat walk across the room to the toilet. They moved sensuously, the Indian women. They carried their centre of gravity in their pelvic region, in the womb. It was most unlike the stiff, tight walk of the English. Their slow movements were graceful and beautiful. I supposed that without money for fancy clothes and handbags and cars to create attraction, their implicit sensuality became their currency. The basic rawness of the human body. Wild-Eyed-Goat turned her back and undressed in the corner. She swayed and stumbled, affected from the two or three Kingfishers she had consumed. I turned away out of courtesy, but snuck the occasional look over my shoulder to see what was going on. I couldn’t help but feel a perverse pleasure spying on her getting undressed in my room. She tripped on the corner of the bed and fell into the mirror on the wall and cursed clumsily in Hindi. “Mr Ryan, Mr Ryan, you love the missy’s missy’s English talking no? You would be stare stare at her all night, her pale white skin, her little boobies, her straight clean clothes. Why do you not be going after her? Why don’t you not go and talk the fancy theories with her. Why you not make the karma sutra with her?” I laughed. She was more drunk than what I had thought. I went over to help her up off the floor, folds of sari caught around her head. “Come on, off to bed for you.” I stood her up as the sari fell to the floor. I tried to look over her shoulder as her bare breasts stood firm in front of me, nipples going hard in the night. Her head swayed drunkenly, her eyes ablaze, the golden flecks turning crimson as they darted around my face. Her chest was still heaving from the flight of stairs. She turned and went into the bathroom. The symphony of bells outside was at a crescendo. Bollywood music blared from standing taxis, horns screaming at each other. The mass of wires from the building fizzed and ripped as they crossed over the street, and the aromas of burnt corn and jasmine necklaces floated up through the gaps in the iron bar windows. Even though it was late, children lined the roof-top canopy flying kites, the women starched shirts, and fat men sat glued to black and white TV’s which took them to places other than their own. She came out of the shower, hair dripping down the towel which was wrapped around her body. Her skin was flawless, a coffee dream. She hopped into bed and turned the lights out, leaving the broken neon street lights to flicker the room. I made my way along the bed to the top and slid in so as not to disturb her. But in her current state I didn’t think it would matter too much. I rolled over closer to her and smelled India. A mixture of the good and the bad. The good of frangipanni, of fading honeyed incense, of hot peanut oil, of raw female. The bad was the strong garlic and cardomen infused sweat, and the inescapable smells of the lived Indian street. The ever-present bottle of Himalaya water stood by the bedside, condensing in the heat. I could hear the sound of her breathing and tried to tell whether she was asleep or not. I stared at her skin in the darkness, the tight muscle and feminine beauty. I could smell the mustiness of the mattress, the combined juices of a thousand other grimy resting bodies. I couldn’t resist tracing the lightest finger down the middle of her sleeping back, riding the peaks of her vertebrae, stopping at the base of her spine where the journey ended. I did it again because I enjoyed the feel of it so much, joining tiny beads of sweat gathering in the hot night. I continued this for a while, going lower and lower each time, tracing past the buttock and down past her thigh. I couldn’t sleep. The Indian streets were alive in my ears. I knew she was awake now, her breathing had started to quicken. I leaned over and could see the pulse of her stomach, her heart’s intensity clearly visible from the pounding. It must be loud in her ears. My next line went down her back and around in front of her thighs. She let out a guttural groan, and it was now obvious to us both what was going on. She turned over quickly and sat above me in full view, the half lights of the street illuminating her left shoulder. Her breasts reminded me of early national geographic documentaries of natives in remote villages. There was no shyness, no embarrassment. It was the uninhibited way of a beggar. She knew her place in the cosmos. What did she have to hide? I stared at her naked body, her mass of pubic hair, a woven black mat, a perfect triangle. I turned my head to the side to see the shape from a different angle, and it was indeed almost a perfect equilateral triangle. Amazing. How did the angles get so perfect? I had a protractor in my case. I would have liked to measure those angles to see if it was a true equilateral triangle, but it wasn’t the time or place. I could smell her down there, earthy and meaty. The power blacked out, with the familiar whirr of air-conditioning grinding to a halt with a shudder and a rattle. A strange silence fell momentarily as traffic slowed and shopkeepers searched for candles and back up generators, the odd horn breaking through the night air. It was jet black in the room now, and I could feel her mangled hand kneading into my chest. With vision taken away, every tactile sensation was heightened, and with her gnarled hand I wasn’t exactly sure what was being used and what wasn’t. I could feel what I thought was her forehead butting up against my shoulder like a goat against a fence, but I couldn’t be sure. She jumped off the bed and I heard some rattling sounds from the corner of the room. I thought I heard her food pans clanging around. God knows what she was doing. She surely couldn’t be eating now. She came over to the bed, and I felt things being laid out across the mattress. I smelt the warm nutty aroma of peanut oil, and the bitter aroma of garam masala and chilly powder. Through the darkness I could just make out her silhouette as she placed oil in a bowl with her good hand, and mixed in spices from other the pans. And as though she was preparing chapattis for eating, she dipped her toes in the oil and sat back and began to knead my skin with her feet. First my chest and then down across my stomach. The oil was hot and fragrant as it slid against my skin. She dipped her toe into some chilly powder and turmeric and then into the now warm oil and began to knead my penis with her foot like a knob of naan dough, round and round in figure eights. I flinched automatically, not really comprehending what was going on. She pressed harder. The chilly powder was intensely hot as she bashed and slapped it around with her feet skilfully like she was marinating a chicken thigh. I strained through the darkness to see what was going on, and caught a glimpse of the turgid meat, oily and basted, bright yellow from the turmeric. I lay back and closed my eyes, unable to look anymore. It was bizarre and freaky, best not to think. I knew it shouldn’t be happening, but it felt perversely good. Her calloused toes worn from years of chapatti making provided an extra sensation as it caught on the end each time. I tried to block the thoughts, the reason. There was none here to find. There was oil everywhere, like small rivers running across the skin. It was getting hotter and hotter and my mind began to move faster and faster. I tried to block everything out, but it wasn’t working - the senses were too alive. I tried to block out the faint buzz of a hungry mosquito buzzing around my ear, which became like an airplane’s drone as it sensed bare skin and food.