Akhil Sharma - An Obedient Father

Compared to farm work, the three years in the navy were like a long holiday. This is because a farm is yours, and since it is the only thing that is yours, you are always worried. I did not mind the constant work in the navy, because it was just work. Locks had to be greased regularly, chains and cables carefully examined and repaired or replaced. Equipment, radios, generators, parts of the engines often all of a sudden stopped working. In return for doing this, I saw the ocean for the first time. I visited cities where people spoke strange languages. More than these things, though, leaving Punjab freed me from the sadness I had been feeling for the last year and a half I again began to believe that my life could be lived purposefully.

If we had ever gone into battle, I might not have considered myself lucky. But my years in the navy were a series of marvels. Once, while we were far from land, enormous dark clouds began pacing back and forth several miles away on one side of the ship. On the other side, also several miles away, were similar clouds, which looked like gigantic jellyfish dragging their million rain legs beneath them.

But directly above us was the sun, a clear sky, bored gulls. It was like being in one of those zoos where the people travel in buses while the animals roam free.

I visited Calcutta, which in my memory is only boxy jute mills and the wonderful green stretch of the Maidan. Madras had strange intricate temples which were so different from any I had ever seen that I doubted whether their Ram and Vishnu could be the same as mine.

The navy was also a time of debauchery. There was so little shame about prostitution that at brothels sailors got lower prices than any but the most frequent customers.

In Bombay I slept with a child. An acquaintance told me about the girl, that she was thirteen. I went looking for her the evening of the same day I heard of her. I imagine this means something. But at that point I was not actually interested in children. What I found exciting was the idea of doing something altogether different from what had become banal to me. When I heard about the girl, my heart began to flutter in a way it had not since several months earlier, when I had had sex with a vastly pregnant prostitute.

The red-light district was several blocks along a narrow road. The brothels were old two- and three-story houses pressed together on either side of the street. I cannot recall whether I went to the girl on a holiday night, but the road was crowded and noisy with voices and radios playing. There were no streetlights, and the only illumination was what spilled out of windows and doors. People came right up to each other before they stepped aside. Most of the houses did not have numbers written out front, and as I walked around looking for the one I had been told about, I kept patting my breast pocket to see if my purse was still there.

Many of the brothels had long balconies, galleries almost, attached to the front of each story. That night I noticed for the first time that some of the men, women, and children on the balconies wore village clothes and some wore city clothes. This made me realize that neither customers nor prostitutes would sit around chatting or listening to music on the radio. The people on the balconies were probably visiting someone who worked there. I had never before

thought of brothels as places where people lived for years at a time.

I overcame my embarrassment and asked a man working at a betel-leaf stall for directions.

I walked down the street. A fat woman with an enormous bindi painted on her forehead was sitting sideways on a bicycle before the brothel's narrow door. I asked her if she had a "young girl," because I could not say child.

She immediately said, "Twenty rupees."

I was so shocked by the price that I thought the woman had misunderstood me. "I don't want a virgin," I said.

The woman eyed me. "For twenty rupees you get firewood, not a forest." Probably because I did not say anything, she added, "You'll get your own room and can enjoy yourself with respect. With respect." I gave her the money and she tied it inside a handkerchief and tucked it between her breasts.

Usually I became hard as soon as I entered a brothel, but as I followed the woman up a dimly lighted stairway and down a narrow hall, I stayed soft. We were on the second story. Small waist-high windows lined one side of the wall. Voices from the street rose to us. I looked down and could tell where people were, because they were even darker than the streets. I wondered whether I would actually have sex with the girl. I believed that if she looked truly young, something at the last moment would deflect me. I did not think I, myself, could do much about what would happen.

The fat woman brought me to a small blue room, where a girl was sitting on a cot reading a comic. The girl looked up at me. I had not remembered that thirteen was so young. She had an oval face, a broad hooked nose, and round bulging eyes which, because she appeared to blink only rarely, gave her an unchanging, startled expression. Her legs were no thicker than her arms, and her breasts were just beginning to grow. She looked so young in her pale green salwar kameez that I felt the enormity of her helplessness. "Half an hour," the woman said as she left the room. She did not close the door but drew a curtain with a weighted bottom across the doorway.

The girl continued staring at me. I sat down beside her. I won-

dered if she thought the same things each time a man was brought to her room. I told myself I should leave, that twenty rupees was not so much and maybe the woman would let me have another prostitute for the money. "What's your name?" I asked. She did not answer and her eyes did not change. I wondered if she was drugged.

"Chandni," she suddenly said, as if I had only just asked my question.

I knew that prostitutes renamed themselves when they joined the trade, often using the name of a flower or a precious stone, and I felt rebuffed by the pseudonym she had given. "Is that your real name?"

"Stop asking questions," she said.

The girl stood, in the same sudden way that she had given her name. She pulled her shirt over her head and unhooked her skirt. Her pubic hair was sparse. Her waist was no wider than my thigh. She looked almost sexless. I was still not hard. But I stood also and gathered a breast in one hand. That breast was the softest thing I have ever touched. It was like water. I kissed her nipples and laid her on the bed. Her nipples had wide areolae and, like her eyes, appeared astonished. As I took off my clothes, the girl spat into her hands and rubbed the spit into her vagina. This disgusted and excited me simultaneously. I finished becoming hard.

"How long have you been doing this?"

"For twenty rupees you only get to fuck."

I was embarrassed, for the questions were a way to own her more completely. The embarrassment made me protest, "Twenty rupees is alot of money."

She grimaced, as if she was disgusted by my poverty. "All you get is fucking."

Sex with her was not much different from that with an older woman, except the vagina was shallower.

"Do you like this?" I asked when I was in her. I often asked this.

"No," she said, and then a little later added, "I hate men like you, sweating and talking, talking. Wanting things for free."

"Is it ever good?"

"Never with men who pay."

I had been insulted by prostitutes before, but never this much. As I rode a rickshaw back to the ship, I felt shame. Thirteen was so young that she and I might as well have been different species. I swore out loud: "I will never go to a whore again. For the next three months I will give a tenth of my salary to charity." But there was no solace in words. After a while memories of my mother began coming to me, the way she always walked around barefoot, her taste for sweets, how I moved my cot next to hers when she was sick and dying. I began to cry, because it seemed to me then that being good was, for me, one of those impossible tasks which are given to the heroes of fairy tales.