Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

The Brahmans could explain away such complaints; she was well acquainted with their explanations, and, furthermore, she believed that they were right; she just wasn't in the market for theological justifications, not anymore. She was a sinner now, and her options were these: she could repent and pay the certain price, or she could cast her lot with this handsome heretic and see where it might lead. Oh, did she call him “handsome"? She didn't mean to say that, although he wasn't bad to look at, now that she'd mentioned it. It didn't bother her that he was over sixty, he was fit and youthful, and besides, Hindu women customarily were paired with older men. Not that she had any notion of being paired with him, you understand.

Perhaps the gods were sympathetic to Alobar's demands. Perhaps they were considering alterations in the divine order of things. Perhaps it was a mistake, an oversight, that human beings had been granted short, unhappy lives, only the error had never been corrected because no one had ever openly complained before. No thunderbolt, in any case, had struck Alobar down. Another thought occurred to her, then, and it stacked goose bumps upon her goose bumps. Had Alobar been spared out of indifference? What if the gods had not even noticed his rebellion?

For the moment, it didn't matter. What mattered was that she was caught up in something large and important, or so it seemed. She felt that she had embarked on an adventure far greater than the merchandising trip that she'd taken with her father, that wondrous journey that had erected a towered city on the scrubby plane of her brain and spoiled her for a life of normal, sedentary wifehood for all time.

Pale moonlight was seeping over the stable eaves and puddling on the surface of the pony trough. Alobar's arrival was imminent. Good, she could inquire further about those Bandaloopers, the magic that they practiced, and the secrets that they knew. That was why she had invited him back, for that and for no other reason. Let it be known.

Suddenly, he walked through the door, catching her unaware, not even dressed yet. Kudra recalled later that he had rushed up to her, although the ponies, the moon, and the trough water remembered it another way. At any rate, there was no denying that she was in his arms, that her tongue was sliding about in his mouth, and that her hand was groping for something perpendicular — praise Kali — in the general vicinity of his groin.

Something was wrong. Instead of an elephant prod, Kudra found a braid of hemp. Was rope to be her destiny? Alobar was limp enough to knot, and even now he was pulling away from her embrace.

Bewildered and embarrassed, she grabbed a shredded old pony blanket and tried to cover her nakedness. “Is it my color?” she asked.

“What about your color?”

“A horse cannot mate with a cow. Is it possible that a fair-skinned man is incapable of intercourse with a dark-skinned woman?” Kudra had slept with only one man in her life and had experience neither with impotence nor rejection.

“No,” said Alobar. The idea made him snort. “I had a reputation, in fact, as a man who relishes dark meat.”

Kudra thought, You also had a reputation as a warrior, to hear you tell it, but you did not fare too well against the Bandaloop . She asked, “Is it my nose, then? Perhaps its size offends you.”

“You are lucky to own such a fine large nose. It will serve you as a rudder and steer you through the troubled waters of life.”

Was he sincere? She had never considered her proboscis in that regard. “Well, I must have been too forward: my kiss, my tongue. .”

“A new experience for me, I do admit.”

“Truly?" You need only open your mouth not your mind, she thought. But she said, “Then why do you spurn me?” She adjusted the worn-out blanket in an attempt to protect a larger area of her body from the evening's chill and Alobar's gaze.

“Yes, this 'kizz' as you call it is unknown in the west. A rather odd sensation, but one I would not object to repeating. I have an open mind.”

“To be absolutely frank, it is your smell.”

“My smell?!” She was incredulous. “But I have just bathed and rubbed myself with fragrant oils. You were willing enough to take me in the grass, when I was caked with grime and sweat; I saw the bulge in your robes; yet, here on the soft, private straw, when I am clean and perfumed. .”

“You smelled fine up there on the hill, you smelled like a woman. Right now you smell like one of those little piles of powder they burned in the caves; you smell like a — like a fruit bush !”

They worked it out. It was back to the trough for Kudra, to scrub the jasmine and patchouli scents from her skin, whereupon, Alobar, whose wives and concubines had known little of the science of the bath and nothing of the art of perfumery (save for the rare spices they sewed in their harem cushions), sniffed her from head to heel, pronouncing her, if not arousing, at least inoffensive. With a little help from her rope-yard-deft fingers, he commenced to wax. And wax. And wax. Until she squealed.

“Did not I explain that I was once a king?”

A king you are still , she thought, vowing never again to doubt his various reputations.

Within the hour, the molecules reaching his nose were more to his liking, although the sounds in his ears — dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, sparrow, flamingo, duck, and quail — destroyed any illusions he might harbor that he was on familiar ground.

Later, by what little moonlight that remained, she cataloged five types of scratch marks on his shoulders and back. To him, they each stung the same.

“I would like to read this Kama Sutra ,” said Alobar. “Except that I cannot read.”

“Nor can I. But I can teach you those of its contents that might benefit you most. Unless you object, I will demonstrate rather than recite.” She had had four orgasms and was feeling assured. “For now, however, you must tell me more of the Bandaloop doctors.”

“There is nothing left to tell.”

“You mean that you never heard of them again?”

“Oh, stories about them abound, but their veracity. . Actually, something happened once. .”

“What happened, Alobar?”

“One spring, on the pass south of here, there was a snow slide. Travelers were buried. Some of us from Samye went to help dig them out. We removed several bodies, frozen stiff, which we laid on the side of the road. After a bit, one of them stirred. It was a female. She stood and stretched, and thanked us and walked away. Just walked away. Fosco must have noticed that I was stunned, for he put a hand on me and whispered, 'She was a Bandaloop woman.' That was all that was ever said about it. The rest of the victims behaved the way corpses ought to.”

Kudra, propped on her elbows, shaking her head in amazement, said, “And she was merely one of their women.”

“Yes.”

“Hmmm.” She lowered herself into the straw, her rump in the air. The last moonbeam of the evening was snagged in the tangle of her pubic moraine. Alobar reached in from the rear, as if to free it. Like a careless animal on the lip of a tar pit, his middle finger slipped and sank quickly from view. Kudra writhed automatically, then lay still. Her mind was off somewhere. Her body and Alobar waited patiently for its return. He fell asleep with his hand still in place. When the lamas awoke him, well after sunrise, his finger was waterlogged. But Kudra was gone.

One thing about moving out of a Tibetan Buddhist lamasery, you don't have to hire a cart. Alobar's worldly possessions — a tea bowl, a change of clothing, and a knife that in twenty years had been used only for shaving — were packed in a flash. He bid farewell solely to Fosco. Fosco put down his brush, folded his inky hands upon his belly, and regarded Alobar affectionately. The little lama did not seem surprised by the departure, but rather hurried him to the gate, where, looking into the only blue eyes the Himalayas had ever known, he said something so incomprehensible that Alobar was ready to delay his leave to get to the bottom of it. Fosco withheld any explanation, however, and soon Alobar was winding down the mountainside, pausing every few hundred yards to glance back at the placid walls of Samye. Stone remains, water goes , he thought. For once, at least, he knew where he was going.