He didn’t know why but sitting in a moving bus always gave him an erection. When he was a young lad, prone to a constant state of wild, hungry, panting lust, he had thought it was himself that was to blame. Since he could think dirty all the time, he had then thought his penis merely followed directions and pointed at awkward angles in response to the phenomenal hormonal tsunamis that had lashed his system all the time then. But as time passed, he was disturbed to find that his mind had nothing to do at all with his throbbing dick inside a bus. His dick would mysteriously become a rogue entity with an agenda of its own. He would be thinking of something innocuous like buying a nice pair of blue canvas sneakers and midway through deciding which shoe shop would be best, he would suddenly find his penis aligning itself with a distant star system. He had been genuinely perplexed by this and could only stare at that tight bulge next to his zipper. What the fuck? had been the gist of his thinking then. He had hoped that it was actually the rolling, bumping motion of buses which provoked his dick but then he had realized that he just wasn’t someone who got turned on by mechanical vibratory forces, so the good cock was obviously self-motivated. In the end, in resignation, he had simply accepted that this was so and so it must be. He had come to be fatalistic about the ways of his dick when inside a bus.
As he sat now with a denim jacket carefully placed over his crotch, the bus was swerving its way through the Ghats, a range of gnarled, rolling hills that occupied most of the space between the cities of Bombay and Pune. He had taken a break from reading The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple and had leaned back in his seat with eyes closed. He had checked whether his formidable but mysterious state of arousal showed any signs of fatigue or lack of enthusiasm but finding none and no better options for himself, he had simply let his mind go where his cock already was. He carefully went over the long list of lasses, maidens and women that had evoked a 90 degree response from his mighty fifth limb. He felt proud of the all-encompassing range of feminine charms and appearances that had delighted him over the years. His roster of fantasies and actual conquests was long and wasn’t limited by age, geography, race and circumstance. He had been a dirty old man since the age of thirteen. Thus an endless parade of women’s faces and other body parts flickered and flashed inside his mind. Most of the women no longer held any interest to him but there were some, magnificent queens of nights past, the very stuff of former dreams, who still brought a contented look on his face. There were many such women, yes, there were many.
Mmmm, what had been her name? Yes, her name had been Pooja, a very common name. It is so common that if you were to do a quick poll in a typical college classroom, you’d be sure to find at least seven Poojas, maybe more. But this Pooja had something that had set her apart from all the other Poojas and indeed all the other girls in college. She had the most perfect pair of breasts that he had ever seen. The moment his eyes had fallen on them, his cock had snapped to attention and saluted in absolute respect, and a bit surprisingly, so had his sense of Beauty. Those were breasts that were all together beyond the descriptive scope of words like ‘boobs’, ‘tits’, ‘bazoombas’ and such. They were beautiful, giant and had the same effect on the senses as the Concorde. They simply took everyone’s breath away. They were breasts that demanded respect and he would pay his utmost daily. He had liked the way Pooja had humbly accepted her superhuman gifts. She hadn’t been showy and better still, she hadn’t been meek about them. She would simply put them up for public adoration everyday and go about her life without further fuss. He had been greatly affected by her breasts and now regretted never having let her know how much devotion they had inspired.
He had a high regard for women who never made it to the Top 20 charts. He had studied them in great depth. The world referred to them in condescension, with phrases like ‘she’s a nice person’ or ‘what a lovely smile!’ but he knew that their plainness was their greatest attraction. Denied spectacular plumage, such a woman was free of pretension. She didn’t carry the burden of knowing that all a man really wanted with her was to shove his cock deep into her. She didn’t need to surround herself with riddles so that only a persistent and worthy male specimen got to enter her award-winning pussy. She was free of being simultaneously attractive and intimidating to men. She was real, so alluringly real. He would simply walk up to such a fine lady, be explicit about his intentions and eight times out of ten, without complication, airs or ritual, he would have her clawing deep grooves into his back by the weekend. He would get what he wanted and she would get what she wanted and the birds would sing, the world would shine and the cosmos would be in sweet harmony.
He had lost his virginity thanks to the noble game of hide-and-seek. One cool morning at his aunt Vanitha’s house, feminine fingers had burrowed for and held aloft his prick for the first time. The girl had been the best-friend of his cousin Priya and was in hiding, just like him and next to him, under a bed, giggling lightly in the semi-darkness. Her chest had yet to sprout anything significant but her body had suddenly overpowered his senses and set his innocent prick on fire. Her smooth hands, calves, neck and armpits sent him into a state devoid of breath and speech. A powerful, ancient instinct had woken up within him and as he teetered close to spontaneous self-combustion, she rolled her eyes and pretended not to notice. With slow, gasping breaths, he had looked at her, filled with a sudden strange guilt but she had smiled at him, holding his burning gaze and then, praise be to the kind Gods with their kind ways, he had felt soft, girl fingers sneaking into his shorts and gripping a penis that could not decide whether to be ecstatic or terrified. Later, he would appreciate her presence of mind (which proved he had not been her first, didn’t it?) as she had made him ejaculate harmlessly and a bit clumsily onto his left thigh. His sexual debut had not been particularly picturesque but he hadn’t felt like a moron later on.
Some women made the most ridiculous facial expressions and sounds when they had sex, he thought. Though he was quite the beast while doing the job, he wore a stoic, determined look with maybe an occasional grunt or two, but some women, Oh c’mon, he felt like telling them. “Ohhhh you wicked man, let me go, stop hurting me, I WILL tell you the name of the rebel leader, please stop using that blowtorch on my genitalia, ooooohhhhh!” He was pro women’s self-expression and all that but making him feel like he was a sadist demented torturer in some God-forsaken prison-camp, that was going too far, he felt. The thing was, these unearthly and uncalled for facial contortions and anguished wailings were so damn distracting. There he would be, poking away in a nice, vigorous manner, single-minded and focused and then suddenly, it sounded like a pig was getting slaughtered with a toothbrush right under him. It was unfair and selfish then to expect him to exercise control and continue being the oiled pneumatic drill while she carelessly and noisily regressed down the foodchain, he thought.
Once, for a brief period, his dick was named as Victoria. Victoria Lodgings, to be precise. He had remonstrated with passion: A penis, damn it, is the ultimate symbol of masculinity. In fact, it is the ultimate masculinity. So how can you name my dick as Victoria? His then-girlfriend had chuckled and said, I get to name him and so I can call him Victoria if I want to. He had looked at his dick then and his dick had looked back in disgust. And Lodgings, why Lodgings, of all the fricking names possible, why Lodgings? I think it lends an air of distinction, she said, Victoria Lodgings, it’s a name from a brooding Agatha Christie murder mystery set in an English country home. Ok fine, do name my dick as a character from a brooding Agatha Christie murder mystery set in an English country home but at least let it be a male character, for God’s sake. Why not name him after say Graham, the Duke of Thinglestone-on-the-marsh or even after Edmund the butler? But she had refused to alter that name and then for months, he could not look at his penis without feeling miserable. That was the last time he had given nomenclature duties to a woman. He now named his dick himself and for the past few years, he called it Saheb, which means ‘Sir’ in Hindi.
He had spent one glorious summer of his early-teens at his uncle’s home in Mount Abu, Rajasthan. His uncle was a fabulously wealthy businessman and over and above, an unabashed Anglophile. He had stayed unmarried all his life and when asked about it, he would wink and say, Britannia is my only love har-har-har-har ha! The house was like a museum of colonial memorabilia – army rifles, a suited butler, expensive silverware, royal hunting maps, an ancient set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, giant portraits and marble busts of obscure officials of the Raj, a stuffed tiger, an old but stately Rolls Royce with a peacock-like turbaned chauffeur, a stable of pure breeds, to name a few. Once you entered the musty and sprawling wood-panelled interiors of the bungalow, you half-expected a British District Supervisor to come bustling past, followed by his retinue of servants. His uncle still existed in British India and he made sure his home stayed with him. As his nephew, he personally looked upon this uncle as an eccentric but illustrious peer of some sort who led a life of quiet distinction so he had been doubly embarrassed by what had happened one quiet afternoon. He had returned from a round of golf and had been told his cousins would be back shortly from a shopping trip. He had retired to his room, sipping a chilled cola on his bed, when Leela the maid-servant had entered to dust the room. With his already polished flair and a few practiced sentences, within minutes, he had the buxom lass in his arms, moaning and sighing. She had then dragged him towards an inner room for some undisturbed carnal recreation. When they had breathlessly thrown the door open, a most unedifying site met their eyes. Kneeling on the floor, with a slight frown on her face, was Kantha the housekeeper and sitting on a high-backed chair was his uncle. His uncle sat with his eyes closed while Kantha’s lips were delicately wrapped around his erect penis. Just then, his uncle had opened his eyes to see his favourite nephew with a bare-breasted servant girl in his arms. Just to make things worse was the unfortunate fact that Leela happened to be Kantha’s niece. He had been rescued from this steaming cauldron of horny uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces the next day when his mom had telephoned to call him back to Bombay as his uncle had to leave suddenly on a business trip. Long live the Raj, he had thought then.
One day before his sixteenth birthday, he had formally parted ways with organized religion (which included the speculations of all faiths, denominations and offshoots thereof). It had been easy actually. Religion, it had seemed and this would be confirmed later on, looked down on sex and for some reason, even looked on it as a weakness and a sin. He couldn’t understand that and felt disappointed. By then, he was already bringing breathless, sweaty adventure into the lives of most young women of his neighbourhood. He had considered sex as the greatest creation of God and judging by the response of his partners, he was obviously right. To be told then that all this was sinful was, for want of a more apt word, bullshit. His boys-only ‘convent’ school in fact raised this bullshit to a painful degree. For one hour every week, a Catholic priest was assigned to set the minds of the students on a virtuous and morally-upright path. This man, with a harsh, booming voice and equally fierce manner, made some astonishingly naïve statements about man and man’s nature in general. The highlight of this drivel was an insistence on calling masturbation a mortal sin. Puncturing the eyeballs of newborn babies, masturbation and Nazi Germany all belonged on the same plane of pure evil, it would seem. Later in life, whenever he thought of that crazy man screeching on about God, sin and lust, a descriptive and ironic phrase would immediately spring to mind: What a wanker!
As an accomplished master of the art of Fucking, he was often consulted by less-successful men. How do you do it? How do you get so many women to do it with? What’s the trick, please tell. He would then clear his throat and as humbly as possible, he would reveal an ultimate truth: You cannot climb the Himalayas unless you really, really, really want to climb the Himalayas. You cannot seduce and achieve coitus with scores of women unless you really, really, really want to do that. Casanova-style sex cannot occupy some lowly place on some lowly to-do list. It cannot be the wind that fans your fire, it has to be the fire itself. The difference between the man who gets blown off by a different woman every month and the man who thinks that would be a good idea as he switches through TV channels is that the first man craves all that sex while the second man is also thinking about changing the batteries of his TV remote. You get what you really want and that’s all there is to it. So you mean if I start to really want to fuck many women, then I can? No, he would say, if you need to start wanting all that sex, then you don’t need it that much really, so hang on to your current woman, get married and have kids, thank you, a pleasure talking to you.
The bus he was in came to a dusty and noisy halt at a large bus-station that had a board that said ‘PUNE’ in hideous red letters. His fellow passengers picked up their belongings and made their way towards the exit. He however remained on his seat. The passenger next to him said, Excuse me, so he moved his legs sideways and let that man squeeze past him into the aisle. He closed his eyes and started to take slow, deep breaths. He tried to make his shoulders, abdomen, arms and legs relax completely. The ticket-collector walked over to him and said, Sir, we have reached Pune. Yeah, I know, just give me a moment, he replied. The man frowned and walked back towards the front of the bus. He closed his eyes and continued to breathe in a deliberate, precise manner. He then looked down at his crotch finally and thought, Down, boy, down … please?