veranda, Murari, the oldest and laziest of the House staff,waited deferentially with a glass of chilled coconut water and what he considered the more important items of the morning’s mail.
On his way to the puja room, Raghupati’s penis twitched as he ripped open an envelope from the Civil Service Welfare Association. On his good days, his penis quivered even when he spotted a gecko on the wall, poised to pounce on some moth fluttering about in the wan blue of a tubelight.
His massage-boy, Chamundi, waited for him in the master bedroom on the first floor of the house. One of the boy’s several duties was to smile, exhibiting his dimples all the time that he was with Raghupati. Whenever his smile slipped, which happened ever so often—when the Commissioner’s cock swayed alarmingly close to his face, for example, or when he was huskily ordered to mix his, Raghupati’s, spunk with the massage oil, usually mustard—the Commissioner’d lean forward and tweak his cheek rather hard.
Chamundi bolted the door to the veranda, Raghupati flopped down on the bed. The boy began to remove every item of the Commissioner’s clothing. This took a while, since each piece—sandal, belt, hankie—had to be neatly put away before the next could be touched. ‘Mai dream to make da seets run red,’ faltered Chamundi, grinning from ear to ear in bashfulness at his pronunciation.
Naked, spanking his thigh with the buff envelope, liking the sound, arm flung around his masseur’s shoulders, Raghupati strutted off to the adjoining puja room. Ten-by- six, windowless, red night light, incense, shivalings and Ganeshes all over the place, flowers from his front lawn, mattresses on the floor, freezing airconditioning, Mutesh’s whine from the tape recorder. ‘Here, before you start, just shave my armpits and my crotch.’
More than a month ago—at the last get-together of the Civil Service Welfare Association, a dinner convened in the capitalto honour Dr B.B. Bhatnagar for having wangled, after two decades of undistinguished and venal self-service, a Ph.D degree out of the Bhupati Aflatoon International Open University—more than a month ago, Bhupen Raghupati had for the first time set eyes on Miss Lina Natesan Thomas. She’d been wearing a grass-green georgette sari that evening. It had slunk deep into the crevice of her meaty, rather attractive arse. On the preceding Sunday,
The State Today’s
Thank Your Stars column had advised Raghupati that the dominant colours for Scorpios that fortnight would be red and green. His personal astrologer, Baba Mastram, who visited him thrice a week, rheumy-eyed and halitotic, had confirmed that very morning that green would be triumphant for him uptil Thursday. Thus it was that on the veranda of the Golf Club, when they, glasses in hand, were comparatively alone in a shapeless queue before the water cooler, Raghupati had plucked the sari out of the crack, in the process coming richly into his pants, which in turn he’d interpreted to mean that the gods were with him. He’d been about to ask Kumari Natesan whether she was virgo intacta, and if yes, whether she’d like to redden some bed linen with him, when up had bustled Chanakya Lala, a comparatively junior bureaucrat and Raghupati’s erstwhile subordinate, the one whose after- shave could be sniffed twenty paces away.
‘Shame on you, sir,’ Kumari Natesan had hissed and stalked away, jiggling more than ever in her distress. For a moment, Raghupati’d thought that she’d meant the spreading wetness in his trousers. Then, calm of mind, all passion spent for at least half an hour, he’d sliced through the vapours and focussed on making polite conversation with a life-size, animate bottle of Fabergé.
While lathering Raghupati’s crotch, Chamundi, as was his wont, began to prattle of office matters. ‘After Saab left thismorning, three advocates came, also one morcha to demand the transfer of the Keeper . . .’ To speak thus of
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