Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

They almost made it to the sofa in the drawing room. He walked behind her, and he watched the sheer cloth of her skirt flap faintly against her legs, and her neck under the pinned hair, and the straight back under the expensive white cloth, and he reached with both hands to hold her by the upper arms. Again the vivid shock of the flesh. She fell back easily against him, offering him her neck. Under his nuzzling she squirmed and said, “The curtains.” He stumbled back, dizzy, found the curtains and pulled. When he turned around into the sudden dimness she was sitting on the sofa, her hands together on her knees. “I’m going to marry him,” she said, and her voice was small. Sartaj navigated towards her, one step and then another, and they peered over the sudden distance. He knew it was true and there was nothing he could say to it. He tamped down his entirely unreasonable anger and searched for words. Then she giggled. He followed her eyes and there was the unreasonable bulge in his pyjamas, his red shamiana she had called it once.

This time they found each other somewhere over the coffee table. He dragged her over it, one hand on her back and the other in her hair. Once they would have delighted in the lingering discarding of clothes, the slow fall of silk, the shifting of cotton and slow revelations, but now there wasn’t the time. He laboured with the complications of her skirt as she shrugged off her blouse. Her pull at his nada dug into his side but his pyjamas came down efficiently with a single movement of her wrist. “Sar-taj,” she said, and took his hands away from her skirt, and with two clear snaps it came away, and then she was against him. Now he dared to look at her face, and in the dark flush of her cheeks there was that concentration, that singular look of intent purpose he had not seen for a long time, and he was no longer afraid. Under his thumbs her nipples bloomed and she shivered helplessly and smiled.

But he buckled under the scrape of her fingernails on his thighs. She was arrogant now, full of secrets and sure, very sure, as he slid to his knees and onto his back. She pressed with her hands on his shoulders, pushing him down, straddling and hovering over him, her breasts a maddening lightness on his chest. Again her fingers moved over his stomach, scuffing, and his face contorted, saying take pity on it, my thing my muscle my cock, take pity on its loneliness, and she grasped him in her hand. She leaned low over him, breathing in the agonized relief in his exhalations. When she looked down along the length of their bodies, he looked with her, and saw her hand grasping hard, and springing from her fist, him, each pulse distinct. They had argued and talked and laughed about what to call their parts, she hated lund and chut , how vernac and crude and vulgar she said, cock and pussy and fuck felt foreign in his mouth, he said that to her and she laughed fondly and said all I want in your mouth is me and thrust her breast against his lips, me by any other name. But now she groaned, a curious groan mingling hunger and joy and defeat and yearning and she snaked down fast moving like heat over his skin and she took him in her mouth. She reached with her neck, mouth wide open, and took him in. Me by any other name. His mind drunken reeled and she made greedy little noises, slobbering, and he heard his own voice calling, and her head bobbed and weaved, and in the confusion of pleasures he remembered a long walk along a sandy beach the feeling of the sunrise ahead ,and raised his head and saw with wonder her lips on him. The stretch of the flesh and beautiful and grotesque. His gasps in his mouth. A burning warmth against the side of his chest through the thin silky cloth on her hips. With his right hand he reached down and pulled pins from her hair. It uncoiled reluctantly and dropped slowly to his stomach.

When she looked up her face was blurred, her eyes hazy from wine. “Condom?” she said. “Condom?” He was still running back, retreating from the edge she had brought him to and relieved she had stopped, and as always the way she pronounced the word with the flat “um” baffled him. “Condom?”

“In the bedroom,” he said finally. He followed her, followed that movement of her haunches, that slight jiggle which still and now made his heart surge in tender ferocity. He found the unopened condom packet easily, in the table next to the bed. She lay back on the bed, twirled off her panties in a single arcing moment that bent her like a bow and back. Orange light spilled through the curtain on the west-facing window, across her belly and into the shadow below. His fingers fumbled at the plastic.

“Give,” she said. She took it from him as he tumbled onto the bed. She kissed his tip with a swirl of tongue, then rolled the rubber down. Then she was over him, squatting. She held him and he thought of the other man viciously. Look where she is now. Look. But who is the cuckold, which is the husband, and he felt despair in his throat, like black and bitter iron. But then he cried out in love, from the scalding oily embrace of her. She took him in, a fraction, just so much, so little. His hips bucked and she put a hand on his stomach. Don’t move. He knew her pleasures. Her engulfing would last an eternity, little by little. She was absolutely still, not moving at all but yes slipping down eighth by infinitesimal inch. On her face an expression of indescribable luxury. Even during the first time together, which had been her first time ever, she had been confident. Afterwards she says ah that wasn ’ t too good but I think it’s going to get better and rolls herself in a yellow silk sari. Sartaj saw now that this was the last time, and again flickering shadows of hopelessness chased the pleasure up his spine. He opened his eyes wide, to see her breasts light and golden in the slanting light, against the black brassiere, and he wanted to touch them but he knew not yet. Her mouth was open and he knew she was on the same razor edge between excruciating delight and impatience, holding by the will on to time. For in time there was joy. Children’s shouts tumbling into the room but here the harsh breathing. In Benares he is overwhelmed by time as an owl-faced shopkeeper displays for Megha his saris, he throws them in the air with a flourish and the silk billows, red and gold and deep blue and green,and Sartaj laughs as the colours float and fall but he is full of loss and afterwards on the street she asks.It’s nothing,he says.Nothing. Now she exhaled, a wail, “Sartaj it’s so good.” He considered the nuances of “it,” distilled the traces of regret and exultation in her voice, but now with another grateful sigh she gave up, gave in, reached with a right hand to their joining, under her, above him, and with a finger strummed at herself, at the centre. Through her flesh he felt the vibration. Which he remembered. When she finds out about him and someone else she cries and leaves for two weeks and three days.Later when he finds out about her,much later,he cannot believe it cannot see it in his head and then wants either to die or kill someone. She flick flickered with her finger and he could hear it in her breathing and nothing else was moving and he raised his head to watch and she leaned down suddenly and kissed him and her tongue moved in and out of his mouth furiously. He felt fucked and was grateful. She spoke into his mouth now, a cry, something, and then shook and came down on him the rest of the way, and trembled defencelessly on him, and he held her. Until she was still.

But with his hands spread wide on her buttocks and his face in her neck, her shoulder, he found his rhythm. She stirred and moved with him. There was the fleeting awkwardness, a move this way and that and an unsatisfactory impact and a farting sound from between their bodies, but then she pushed herself up on his chest, palms spread, hair falling over his face, and together they had the movement, and he was moving in and out slicked from the sweet pocket of contentment‚ his thumbs on nipples pulled from the brassiere and rolled, and she made now small sounds on every stroke, halfway between protest and welcome, between all worlds, and Sartaj somewhere aware of the bed below, the roof, the building, and what they were doing high in the air above the earth, the eager grinding of the bodies, he in the body and out of it, mind moving and not moving, sweat on her forearms, me by any other name, the moving sun, and then she looked down at him with eyes shining with wonder, and he held her by the hip and strained up to her, rising off the bed and reaching in her, saying Megha, and she rolled down to meet him, and at the closest point of their meeting he felt the spill, ecstatic and alive, and in a last moment of thought he asked, is this me? Is this you?