Durga Puja Shoot0 (0)
A Married Bengali Woman. A Young Danish Photographer. One Festival Week.
IN PICS: UDITA | CONTRIBUTED BY: THE PROFESSOR
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Some of my stories are loosely based on real-life incidents, but details are fictionalized. My stories involve unsafe sexual acts. I do not condone unprotected sex and recommend readers to always practice safe sex. The risk is not worth it. These are fantasies and meant for entertainment only. My stories are my hobby — an expression of my erotic side. I mean no disrespect to women featured in my stories. If you know the woman in the story, please write to me and the pictures will be taken down — no questions asked.
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Paromita woke before the alarm again, the fourth morning running, with a warmth in her pussy. Devotional songs on the radio rose over the rooftops of Kolkata the way they had every Mahalaya of her life. The goddess was coming.
The build-up to Durga Puja always excited her. Ten arms, a lion beneath her, a demon at her feet: Durga, who had conquered the demon no god could kill, was what Paromita, like most of the women she knew, had grown up wanting to be. But this year was different.
Her body was changing, hormones, she told herself. She’d tried, once, to tell Deb. He’d patted her hand and promised it would pass in a few days.
She padded to the bathroom without turning on the light and stood under the shower longer than she needed to, letting the hot water work through her shoulders and down a body that she had spent ten years of married life being polite about: the full breasts, the soft give of her stomach, hips no amount of pleating had ever made modest. It felt absurdly, embarrassingly like being nineteen again, in a body that had no business remembering nineteen this clearly.
Soaping her body absently, she went over the two items at the top of her list: dhak drummers at seven and the electrician she didn’t trust. Once she’d rinsed off, she turned off the water, wrung her hair out, pressed the day’s pill from its strip on the shelf, swallowed it dry, and wrapped herself in a towel.
She asked herself most mornings why she still bothered with the pill. Because perimenopause wasn’t menopause, her gynaecologist kept saying. It had come early, way too early and nobody seemed to understand, including her.
Debojit was awake.
She could tell by the stillness with which he held himself when he was watching her move through a room. Twenty-five years of marriage taught you these things whether you wanted to know them or not, and at forty-five she’d stopped wanting to.
“You have time,” he said, as if it were already decided.
“I don’t.”
“Five minutes.”
“Deb.”
She should have said no. For the last ten years five minutes with Deb had meant at least one orgasm, and her body was aching for one.
“Five,” she said. He reached for her wrist and she let herself be pulled.
The towel came loose when he drew her down. His mouth found her nipple, gentle, as it always did. It hardened against his tongue, and she moaned softly.
He pushed her thighs apart with his knee, careful about it, as always. She was already wet, and when he finally pushed his cock inside her pussy, she pulled him deeper with her own hands on his back, wanting more of him than the angle gave her.
He wasn’t clumsy. He moved in and out of her pussy with the same sure, unhurried strokes, his cock filling her as it always did, and for a while it was good, genuinely good. She responded to his weight, to his mouth moving from her throat to her nipples to her mouth and back to her throat, to the tempo of his cock picking up gradually inside her.
But today it wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted him to fuck her like the slow build wasn’t enough. She wanted his hips to slam instead of glide. She knew he didn’t have that gear; he’d never needed it, because gentle and sure had always been enough to make her come.
She wrapped her legs higher around him and lifted her hips to meet him harder, tried to show him with her body what she couldn’t yet say, and he read it as encouragement rather than a question and kept his rhythm, just a little faster, pleased with her body’s response.
“Slow down,” he murmured against her ear when she pulled at him harder, mistaking her for someone who needed calming rather than someone who’d finally caught up to her own want.
She came anyway, clenching around him, her body finishing on the rhythm it knew while the rest of her went on asking for more. The orgasm was real. It left her more unsatisfied than none at all would have. He followed a few strokes later, unhurried to the last, his come spilling into her with his face in her neck.
Done.
She lay there after, still warm, still wanting, her own hand sliding down to her clit before she’d decided to let it.
He caught her wrist. Gently. Which made it worse.
“Mita.” A short, fond laugh. “It’s not a competition.” He kissed her temple like he was closing a conversation. “Act your age, na? We’re not teenagers anymore.”
He was at the bathroom door when he turned back. “And Strand’s son will be at the pandal by seven. The photographer. I’ve told him he can have whatever access he wants.” A pause. “Make sure he’s looked after, Mita. His father signs the bonus that pays for the fancy sarees you like.”
She lay still until the water started, her hand back at her own side. Her chest closed like a fist. Fancy.
Her sarees were tant, crisp Bengal handloom cotton, bought straight from weavers in Shantipur and Dhaniakhali, no middleman between. He had never once asked.
She got up when the water shut off and showered again, methodically. Under the spray she let herself think, briefly, about the modelling years.
Deb had never forbidden it outright; he wasn’t that man. He’d simply let her know, over the better part of a year, in a hundred small ways dressed as concern, that a wife of his in front of a camera reflected on him with his family, his colleagues, the relatives who asked pointed questions at weddings.
Loke ki bolbe? What will people say. Her mother-in-law had thrown it at her more than once. Deb had never said it himself. He had just never told his mother to stop.
She hadn’t cared what anyone said, but she had cared about the peace in her own house, and Deb had worn her down until stopping felt like her own idea. For twenty-five years she’d told herself it had been. She had almost believed it.
The pandal was organised chaos when they arrived, the only kind of organisation Paromita recognised as real. She was out of the car before Deb had cut the engine, directing the electrician by name and volume. What had gone wrong with the lighting rig overnight was everything. It always was on Mahalaya morning, it was always fixable, and fixing it was why they needed her and not any of the twelve men on the neighbourhood puja committee who stood nearby with tea and opinions.
She was explaining to Bikash, who ran the flower decoration team, why the shola-pith flowers on the left archway, pale as paper, didn’t match the design plan or the archway on the right, and why this mattered both cosmically and aesthetically, when Deb appeared at her elbow with a young man she hadn’t met.
Tall. Hair that went darker in the humidity, and the humidity had already found him. Built like an athlete, the width through his shoulders carrying itself easily. Young, pale-eyed, his jaw already shadowed at seven. He had a camera around his neck and another in his hand and was looking at the half-finished pandal the way a surveyor looks at land, technical, observant, already measuring.
She registered all of this as quickly as she’d registered the mismatched archways, with the mild appreciation a woman allows herself for a handsome stranger when she has somewhere to be. Today it took an effort to file it on the shelf marked noted, irrelevant. Then she returned her attention to Bikash.
“Paromita,” Deb said, in his formal introduction voice. “This is Erik. I told you. The CEO’s son. He’s twenty, in India for a photography project, and I said you’d give him full access.”
She glanced at the young man. He was looking at her with the same attention he’d given the pandal, direct and thorough, like he was deciding what to frame.
“Hi,” he said. “Erik Strand. Your festival is incredible. I’ve been shooting since four and I already have more good frames than I got in a week in Rajasthan.”
“Since four?”
“The artisans painting the goddess’s eyes. The light was extraordinary.” Stated as fact, no performance to it.
“Mahalaya,” Paromita said. “The eyes get painted and Durga is called down. She arrives on Shashthi, six days from now, and leaves on Dashami.”
She looked at Deb. He was beaming with the pride of a man whose plan was going well.
“Full access,” she said to Erik. “Stay out of the way of the workers. Don’t photograph people without asking. If someone says no, it means no.”
“Understood.”
“And if you get lost or need anything, call me.” Erik already had his phone out. She took it and typed in her number herself. “I’ll send someone to look after you.”
Deb nodded his approval.
She turned back to Bikash and the archway problem.
“She had a modelling career once,” she heard Deb say, doing that thing he did where he was proud of her in a way that reduced her. “Gave it up after we married. Could’ve gone places.”
A brief pause.
“I can see that,” Erik said. Then, to her back: “Mind if I take a few pictures with you in the frame?”
“Go ahead, she won’t mind,” Deb said, before she’d drawn breath.
Behind her she heard the camera go up. She didn’t turn around. But the back of her neck did something she chose to ignore.
He spent the morning shooting. She knew this the way you knew weather, peripherally, through small evidence. The click of the shutter when she was signing papers, pen cap between her teeth, the committee treasurer’s folder open on her knee, aware, unwillingly, that the angle of her bent head opened her neckline. The click when she was on her toes handing a basket of shola flowers up to Ramesh on the step ladder, the tuck of her aanchal working loose, one arm extended overhead. She was aware that the position revealed her navel, the line of her waist and the soft skin above her hip. She didn’t step down because Ramesh still needed the basket. The click when she was arguing with the tent-pole contractor, the estimate in her fist, brow creased, lower lip caught between her teeth.
She’d nearly decided the contractor’s price was extortion, but a defensible kind, worth paying to keep the schedule, when Deb arrived at her elbow and took the estimate out of her hands entirely.
“Let me,” he said, already smiling at the contractor, already recalculating out loud in the easy, managing tone he used for people he found simpler to handle than his wife. He settled it in four minutes, on terms worse than the ones she’d have taken. The contractor left satisfied. Deb looked pleased with himself.
“You worry too much about these things,” he told her, not unkindly, in front of the two men still packing away their gear. “Let me handle the money side, shona.” The pet name had stopped sounding like one years ago. “You’re better with the flowers.”
Erik was three feet away with a camera he didn’t raise.
Once, crossing the pandal with a clipboard, she walked through a shaft of morning light that had broken through a gap in the tent fabric. The sweat on her collarbone caught it, and she heard two quick shots and knew they were of her.
She was crossing the pandal to brief the dhak players when Erik appeared beside her and tucked a strand of hair off her face with two fingers, the way he might have moved a branch from his own path, instinctive, certain.
The touch lasted half a second. She felt it considerably longer. Heat rose to her face, and she knew from the quality of the silence that he’d seen it.
The shutter clicked.
“Sorry,” he said, not sounding it. “It was in your eye line.”
She held his gaze. He waited, camera at his side.
“The dhak team needs a briefing,” she said, and walked away.
Shashthi came with cooler air and the city’s first real smell of the festival, incense and frying oil and the green-water scent of fresh marigold stems being stripped by the hundred. The pandal was done, or nearly, and Paromita was reviewing the finishing details when Erik found her at the back of the structure where the committee had set up a folding table, two chairs, and a flask of tea that had gone cold an hour ago.
She hadn’t seen him in six days. He’d spent them at Kumartuli, the potters’ quarter where the idols were made, and at pandals across the city.
“Everyone keeps telling me she arrives today,” he said, sitting down across from her without asking.
“Tonight they unveil her face,” Paromita said. “Until then she’s only clay.”
He put his camera on the table, turned it to face her, and scrolled back through the frames from Mahalaya in silence.
She looked.
The first shots were what she expected: the artisans, the idol, Kumartuli’s half-made goddesses, men hauling equipment, close-up studies of concentration and effort, a shot of two workers arguing over a rope pulley so perfectly framed it looked like a painting. He was good. She’d stood in front of enough photographers in her modelling days to know it, and men with years behind them hadn’t come close. He had an eye for the moment just before or just after, rather than the moment itself.
Then her.
She’d expected the shots to feel intrusive. They didn’t. That was the unsettling thing. They felt true. The unguarded laugh, she remembered that moment, a remark of Bikash’s about the flower supplier, captured from across the pandal, and she looked in the frame the way she never looked in mirrors: unaware, therefore herself. Her eyes, wide and dark and heavy-lidded, kajal smudged at the outer corners. The dimples she’d been told about all her life and had stopped noticing, deep in both cheeks and set high on a face that had never been round, whatever anyone said about her being pretty in the ordinary way. The full lower lip she’d always thought was too much, and in the frame wasn’t. She leaned forward to look more closely.
A single bead of sweat tracked from her hairline past her temple, along her jaw, and down her throat, where it pooled in the hollow between her collarbones. She’d thought he was shooting her eyes and the small gold nolok at her nose in that moment, and she’d half-managed a composed expression. But the sharpest thing in the frame was the bead, and where it stopped. He hadn’t been shooting her face. He’d been shooting what the face didn’t know it was showing.
She kept scrolling.
The tiptoe shot. She’d heard that shutter. She hadn’t known what it was seeing: her arm extended, the basket of shola flowers, the soft fold of her midriff above the petticoat, the flare of her hip beneath it, the curve of her navel, and the slight gap at her armpit where the aanchal had fallen away. A shot that wasn’t indecent, and for that reason was harder to look away from.
The pen-cap shot: the curve of her mouth around the plastic, her eyes down, and the neckline of her blouse falling open just enough. She kept her face neutral.
Then the other sweat shot. She went still.
Close, from slightly above, the channel between her breasts where the fabric gaped in the heat, three drops she hadn’t known were there catching the morning light. He’d been that close. She sat with it: she’d been carrying on with her work, unaware how close he’d come, while he shot this. That he’d been looking at her like this all morning.
That no one had looked at her like this in—she did the arithmetic and stopped doing the arithmetic.
She set the camera down.
“You shot me a lot,” she said.
“You were the best thing in the frame every time.” He said it flatly, leaving no room for deflection.
“You didn’t ask me,” she said, mostly to see what he’d do.
“You knew where I was standing.” He said it without apology, the way he said everything. “You didn’t step out of the light. You didn’t say no.” He tilted the camera towards her. “Say it now and I’ll delete them.”
She didn’t say it.
He scrolled back through his frames of her. “You could’ve been famous,” he said. “If you hadn’t quit.”
She gave him the rehearsed version. It had been fun, a few gigs didn’t make a career, she’d never been ambitious, and there had been family to think about. He listened without the sympathetic sounds men made when they weren’t really listening.
When she finished he said, “That’s a loss.” He looked at the camera between them. “My favorite shots this week are the ones of you. I’d like to shoot more of you. Properly. All of you.”
The phrase landed with a weight the words alone didn’t carry. She understood both meanings. She understood that he understood both, and that they were both going to let the second one sit there unaddressed.
“I run a festival,” she said. “I don’t have time to be a subject. Tomorrow’s the Kola Bou snan at dawn. Nine plants tied together and dressed as a bride, bathed in the river. Half the city will tell you she’s Ganesh’s wife. She’s the goddess, in leaf form. Nobody will be posing.”
“Then that’s where I want to be. Let me come.” He held her eyes. “I’m asking.”
“Don’t be late,” she said.
He reached across the table and tucked another strand of hair off her cheek. Deliberate this time. No pretence of necessity.
She didn’t move away.
“Don’t wait for me,” he said. “I always come late.”
It was a corny pickup line. And yet something low in her stomach tightened. She stood, gathered her files in one motion and went to the committee treasurer standing near the pandal. She didn’t realise she’d left the small cotton handkerchief she’d been using against her neck all afternoon on the folding table.
He locked the door and put the camera on the desk before he’d even taken his shoes off. Then he stripped down to his boxers and plugged the camera into his laptop.
He told himself he was backing up the week’s files. That part was true, technically. He skipped past the week’s other folders to Mahalaya, the only one with her in it, and there she was: the pen cap between her teeth, the sweat at her collarbone. He went slower through those, thinking of how still she’d gone across the table that afternoon, understanding what he’d meant and choosing not to say so. Then slower still.
By the third pass through the frame with the sweat between her breasts he was hard enough that it had stopped being deniable.
Her handkerchief was still in the pocket of the shirt he’d dropped on the bed. He’d picked it up off the folding table after she left, meant to give it back, and then simply hadn’t. He fetched it now and held it to his face before he’d decided to, and the smell of her, sweat and, underneath, a floral note he guessed was whatever she put in her hair, went through him like a current straight to his cock.
He shouldn’t have been thinking about a married stranger like this. He was doing it anyway, methodically, his free hand already sliding inside his boxers.
He tried to picture the rest of her, since the photos only went so far, and made himself be honest rather than generous about it.
He took the nipples he’d invented for her and imagined them in his mouth anyway, hardening against his tongue, the gasp she’d give when he bit down just hard enough. He imagined sucking one and then the other.
In his head his mouth went lower. Over the soft swell of her stomach, tracing the faint stretch marks with his tongue, slowly, as if they were a map he meant to learn.
Down to the dark hair he’d have to get through rather than around. He pushed it aside with his fingers, coarse and damp, and put his mouth on her pussy.
He didn’t know how she’d taste. He decided on salt, and something sharper under it, musk and heat, the taste of a body that hadn’t been properly wanted in years. She’d be wet already, slick on his tongue as he licked her, then as he drove it into her, fucking her with it, drinking what she gave him.
Then his tongue flat and slow against her clit, then quick when her hips began to lift. Her fingers would fist in his hair. She’d drag his face into her pussy as she came, thighs locking on either side of his head, and he wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t let her go until she’d shaken all the way through it.
His hand had sped up without his permission. He stopped it. He gripped the base of his cock hard and breathed through his teeth, once, twice, three times, until the edge backed off.
When he could trust his hand again he made himself go on, slower.
She wouldn’t be tight. He made himself picture that honestly too, all those years of that husband fucking her—lucky bastard—and decided he didn’t care. He wanted to know how she’d feel wrapped around him regardless, warm and lived-in and real, her hips lifting to meet him, because a woman married that long to a man who took things out of her hands would have forgotten what it was to be met halfway.
He’d push into her slowly at first, giving her a second to adjust, and then not slowly at all, one hand squeezing a breast, the other gripping enough hip to bruise, driving into her pussy the way he was fairly sure nobody ever had. She’d be surprised by it.
Her voice would go somewhere she didn’t recognise, asking for more, saying his name like it had been punched out of her rather than offered.
His hand moved faster now, matching a rhythm that existed only in his head, the handkerchief pressed to his nose and mouth so the smell of her stayed with the fantasy the whole way through: sweat, flowers, and underneath, a faint musk he told himself he was imagining and knew he wasn’t.
She’d shake under him as she came a second time. He’d fuck her through it, make it last, until she was begging him to come inside her. He pictured filling a woman who’d probably only ever had the one man do that, and never like this, and the thought alone nearly finished him.
He came hard, in ropes over his fist and into his boxers. Her name stayed nowhere near his mouth, because he didn’t trust himself not to say it out loud. Not once, not even at the end, and he’d fallen apart over a woman who had no idea where he slept. He sat there afterwards with the cloth still held loosely to his face, breathing her in, already annoyed at how little the release had done to want her less.
Saptami morning would tell him how wrong he’d been.
At dawn the ghat, the broad stone steps down to the Hooghly, was pale grey and silver, the river flat and unhurried, a low mist sitting on the water that the sun hadn’t burned through yet. The air smelled of river and damp earth and the incense someone had set up at the ghat steps. Deb had stayed at the pandal—logistics on Saptami were their own emergency—and Paromita had come with their neighbour Ontora, who drifted towards the incense as soon as they arrived, leaving Paromita at the water’s edge.
Erik was already there.
He was shooting the mist and the temple spire across the river when she arrived. He turned at her footsteps, and she watched his eyes move over her: the white cotton saree with the thin red border she kept for morning rituals, the deep red blouse, her hair in a low knot. Then they settled on the details she’d stopped noticing herself. The sindoor in her parting. The bindi. The shakha-pola, white conch and red coral bangles, and the thin iron loha beside them. The silver toe rings, the anklets she’d worn since her wedding. The marks of a married Bengali woman. He looked at them, not past them, like something worth framing.
He raised the camera. She looked away and went to the water.
The Kola Bou’s bath required going in. She removed her sandals and descended the stone steps, the mud soft at the bank, the current pushing against her calves as she waded to where the river bed levelled out. The white cotton soaked through at once. She’d known it would.
What she hadn’t calculated was the temperature, colder than expected, and the way the wet fabric clung to the backs of her thighs and pressed into the curve of her lower back as she turned upstream for the ritual. The saree wasn’t transparent, not yet. It didn’t need to be. Wet cotton described what it covered.
She kept her eyes on the water and her hands in the ritual, aware of her own body as she usually wasn’t: the wet fabric heavy against her thighs, a drop of sweat tracking from her temple into the curve of her jaw even in the cool morning air, because she ran hot, and hotter lately.
She turned to take river water in her cupped hands for the Kola Bou and looked towards the bank before she meant to, and found him at once. He had the camera raised. He didn’t shoot.
She turned back to the river.
When she’d completed the ritual she turned towards the bank and was three feet from the steps when the river bed dropped away, the hidden shelf every ghat had and that she should have remembered. The cold water hit her to the waist all at once. She gasped, lurched forward, and Erik was in the water to his knees before she’d found her feet, jeans and all, camera held high in one hand, the other reaching for her.
He pulled her up onto the stone and she stood there dripping, the saree plastered from the waist down, the petticoat showing through where the cotton went translucent and everywhere else the wet cloth describing her exactly: the line of her thigh, the swell of her hip, the soft roundness of her belly above the petticoat’s waistband. His hand was at her waist to steady her. His eyes went over her once, fast and stunned, and he seemed to have stopped breathing.
She looked away, the heat in her face having nothing to do with the morning temperature. Flattering, she told herself. That was the word for the rush that went through her.
The honest one was aroused, and she wasn’t ready to face it yet, standing at a ghat with Ontora twenty feet away. Between her legs she was slick, and she couldn’t have said how much of it was the river.
She stepped back. He removed his hand.
Ontora was there with a towel before she’d finished dripping. Paromita wrapped herself and was composed in thirty seconds. She let Ontora walk ahead. Erik fell into step beside her and showed her the shots wordlessly. She took the camera and scrolled. The ritual shots were extraordinary. And then the shots she hadn’t known he was taking: the wet cotton at her lower back, the fabric at her hip, the sweat at her jaw. Not pornographic. More deliberate than that.
She handed the camera back.
“Your husband said you gave it up,” Erik said. “That’s not the same thing as knowing what you lost.”
She kept walking.
“What happens tomorrow?” he asked.
“Ashtami.” It was easier to talk about the festival. “The goddess at her fiercest. At whatever hour Ashtami turns into Navami, and this year that’s close to midnight, they light a hundred and eight lamps for the moment she struck down two demons at once. That’s Sandhi Puja.”
“This, I have to see,” he said. “I’ll make sure I stay up.”
“Where are you staying?” The question came out before she could stop it.
“The Riverside Inn. Across the lane from your pandal. Nice light in the rooms in the evening.”
She nodded. Said nothing else.
Deb found her that night with her hair still damp from a second shower and her mind refusing to leave a room she’d never seen at the Riverside Inn. He came to her in the dark the way he always did, and this time she didn’t wait for him to reach for her.
She turned to him, closed her eyes, and slid her hand between his legs, stroking him through his pyjama until he hardened under her palm.
“Mita,” he said, surprised and pleased, and pulled his kurta over his head. Under it he wore his baniyan, the thin sleeveless undershirt he’d worn to bed for twenty-five years. He smelled of plain soap and the day. She wished, distantly, that he smelled of something else.
She pushed him onto his back. Deb allowed it, puzzled, and lifted his hips when she tugged at the drawstring of his pyjama. She drew it down with his white briefs, took his cock in her hand, warm, familiar, already hard, and bent her head and took it into her mouth.
His hand closed on her shoulder. Gently. “Mita.” He drew her off him. “Act your age.”
She sat back on her heels. He looked at her a moment, then sighed, the sigh of a man restoring order, and laid her on her back. He drew her nightdress over her head, gently and in order, and his mouth found her breast as it always did, known and unhurried.
Two fingers slid into her pussy, competent and patient, the same two fingers for twenty-five years. Behind her closed eyes she put another man’s hands where Deb’s were. She thought of the ghat, the cold water, the shape of him straining against wet denim, and I’d like to shoot more of you. Properly. All of you. Her body answered the sentence, not the man touching her.
She kept her eyes shut against what that meant. Her hips began to lift.
She put her hand on the back of his head and guided his mouth down her body. He let her take him as far as her stomach. Then he sat up.
“What’s got into you today?” He sounded more aggrieved than angry, a man whose routine had been misfiled. “You’re killing the mood.”
She lay there with her thighs still open and said nothing.
He did what he always did, because it was what worked. He lowered himself over her, gentle and sure, and pushed his cock into her pussy, and she shut her eyes again and gave him the rest.
Behind her eyelids it was a different mouth that hadn’t stopped at her stomach. Erik’s, dragging over the soft slope of her belly and down between her thighs, his tongue flat and slow against her clit until her hips lifted.
Then he rose over her and what the denim had promised pushed into her, slowly, then not slowly at all. Deb’s strokes stayed exactly where they’d always been, and she borrowed them, tilting her hips to meet a man who wasn’t there, her clit dragging against Deb’s pelvis at the angle she’d learned to take. It built low and unfamiliar.
When Deb groaned and began to come inside her, she let it be Erik, spilling hot and deep, watching her face as he did it. That tipped her. She came with her teeth clamped on her tongue, hard enough to taste copper, because his name was climbing her throat, ready to be punched out of her.
Deb rolled off her. He didn’t ask. For twenty-five years, most nights, he’d put the same ordinary question and waited for the ordinary answer. Tonight he turned onto his side, his back to her, and pulled the sheet over his shoulder. Within minutes his breathing had evened out. She was left with the aggrieved set of his shoulders to look at in the dark.
Good? she asked herself. Very. It was true, and none of it was him. She lay with the copper still on her tongue and her heart going, and understood, with a clarity that frightened her, that she’d done something she couldn’t undo. She’d found out what she was capable of. She wasn’t going to be able to stop wanting to feel it again, with her eyes open this time.
Ashtami was the festival’s heart and everyone knew it. By late evening the pandal was full beyond capacity, dhunuchi dancers moving through the crowd with clay burners smouldering with coconut husk and incense resin, the dhak drums so loud the air itself vibrated. Paromita had been on her feet for fourteen hours. She’d managed a flower crisis, a generator failure, a committee argument about the sequence of the evening aarti, the lamp ritual, and a caterer who’d doubled the price of the bhog, the festival feast, overnight.
She hadn’t looked at the Riverside Inn once. It stood across the lane from the pandal, four storeys of peeling yellow plaster, and she was so aware of it she could have drawn it with her eyes shut. She kept her eyes on the goddess. She kept them on the committee, on the dhunuchi smoke, on every tall head in the crowd, and none of them was his.
He’d said he would stay up for Sandhi Puja. This, I have to see.
Just before midnight the priests lit the first of the hundred and eight lamps. The drums dropped to a low, urgent roll, and the whole pandal seemed to lean towards the flame. One by one the lamps caught, small gold shocks against the dark, and the crowd went quiet with the hush of people who believed. Paromita, who believed, stood in the middle of it furious. The best spectacle of the year, and the one man who’d promised to see it had missed it. She was angry on the festival’s behalf, she told herself, and only that.
Afterwards the crowd began to thin.
Deb found her as the last lamps burned down, flushed and damp, three friends from the committee waiting at the gate behind him. “We’re going to sit somewhere and have a drink, Mita. Sanjoy’s driving.” He pressed the car keys into her palm. “You take the car home. Don’t wait up. I might crash at Sanjoy’s tonight.”
He didn’t ask whether she was tired. He never had. She watched him cross the emptying ground and go through the gate, laughing already, and the keys were still warm from his pocket when her phone buzzed.
That was something. And you’re looking stunning too.
She turned a full circle, scanning the thinning crowd, and couldn’t find him. The phone buzzed again.
Look at your ten o’clock. Top floor. Room 314.
She turned, and looked up. A window on the top floor of the Riverside Inn stood lit, and a man stood in it, the long lens of his camera catching the light, one hand raised, waving.
Heat climbed her neck. She turned her back on the window as though the whole pandal had watched him do it.
You said you’d stay up for the puja, she typed. You missed all of it.
I watched all of it. Best seat in the city. I got lots of pictures. Some frames of you too from up here. Come and see.
Her thumb hovered. Tomorrow, she typed. Tired. Back is killing me. Need to lie down. All of it true, which was the problem.
Of course, he wrote. Good night 🙁
The frown wasn’t for her back. She knew exactly what it was for.
She deleted the thread and couldn’t have said why.
She went out through the rear gate of the pandal, where a stray dog had been waiting for scraps all evening. It decided they were friends. She crouched to scratch behind its ears and, under cover of that, looked up. The top-floor window still glowed. Empty. He’d left the light on.
She stood, went to the car, and started the engine. She told herself she was going home.
At the end of the lane she came to the junction behind the Riverside Inn. Right led to the Inn. Straight led home. Between them a narrow alley ran off to the left, the shortcut that joined the road home a few hundred metres on, and she turned into it without thinking. A shortcut, nothing more.
Halfway along, three streetlights in a row had fused, and the alley was in complete darkness. She stopped in the middle of it, turned off the headlights, and left the engine running.
Her heart was thudding so hard she could feel it in her hands on the wheel. Ahead, the alley bent towards home. Behind her, if she reversed to the junction, was the Riverside Inn. She sat in the dark and listened to the engine idle.
Tell me which way, she asked Durga, in the only language she had for it. Show me.
She needed a sign.
Somewhere behind her, on a rooftop, someone sent up a rocket. The whistle made her turn in her seat. She twisted round and looked out through the rear window as it climbed, dipped a little over the Riverside Inn, and burst gold and white directly above it, and hung there.
She turned back to face the road, closed her eyes, and switched off the engine.
She knocked once. He opened.
He wore only his boxers. Pale skin, a light sheen of sweat, as though he’d been pacing or doing push-ups before bed. Fitness freak. A body sculpted in a gym: shoulders, chest, a six-pack cut so clean it looked drawn, and not an ounce of softness anywhere. Her eyes went lower. Down the hard lines of his stomach, the dark trail of hair beneath his navel, to the boxers, where his cock was already stirring under the cotton. She watched it lengthen, slowly, right in front of her.
She tore her gaze away and looked at the room instead.
It wasn’t what the guesthouse had provided that she noticed. It was what he’d brought. A long lens laid on a folded towel like something precious. A laptop, a tangle of cables, a pair of worn running shoes by the door. A Bengali phrasebook with a cracked spine, one page dog-eared, a phrase practised in pencil in the margin. A blue enamel mug with a dry teabag still in it. On the windowsill, in a glass, a spray of bel phul, the small white jasmine, that he must have bought from the flower seller at the temple corner, still damp. She looked, quickly, for a photograph in a frame, a woman’s shirt over the chair, a second toothbrush through the bathroom door. There was nothing. A man who lived out of one bag and spent his attention where it counted.
Something in her eased, and something else tightened.
The bedside lamp threw a low amber light, the kind that made everything look like a photograph already. He had the camera on the table.
“How’s the back?” he asked, perfectly straight.
“The back.” She let the silence sit, then the corners of her mouth turned up. “Why? You offering a massage? Or do you want to shoot me… properly?”
He didn’t answer. He picked up the camera.
She unpinned the aanchal from her blouse at the shoulder and took the end of it between her teeth. With both hands free she reached behind her and worked the hooks open, one by one, her arms lifting her breasts as she did.
Shrugged the blouse off and let it drop. Then she took the aanchal from her teeth and laid it back over her shoulder, and the fine handloom cotton, a saree’s worth of it, was the only thing covering her breasts, thin enough to show the dark shadow of the areolae beneath. She stood in the amber lamplight and watched him look at her the way the camera had been looking at her all week, not consuming, cataloguing. Taking inventory.
He shot her like that, the aanchal her only cover, moving around her slowly, telling her with his hands where to turn and when to be still.
Then she let it fall.
The lamp found the full weight of her breasts, heavier than at twenty and better for it, the dark areolae.
“Herregud,” he said quietly, the Danish coming out before he could stop it. The camera clicked a second after his finger seemed to remember it. “Don’t move.”
She raised her arms and took the pins out of her bun one at a time, dropping them on the table beside his camera, and her hair came down heavy to the middle of her back.
He shot her bare to the waist, circling. The shutter was the only sound in the room besides the ceiling fan and her own breathing, which she’d stopped trying to slow. His boxers had stopped pretending.
The cotton stood out from his stomach in a long slanting ridge, and each time he stepped, it moved.
She found the tuck at her waist and drew it free. The saree came away in a long slither, five and a half metres of it, the pleats unfolding one by one and pooling round her ankles.
He lowered the camera an inch. He didn’t seem to know he’d done it.
“Keep going,” he said. His voice had dropped.
She stood in her petticoat, the drawstring knotted at her hip. She undid the knot. It fell.
Underneath were plain white cotton panties, the kind she wore for a fourteen-hour day in the heat, chosen for sweat and not for anyone. She’d thought about them on the stairs, about the fact that nobody who meant to end up here would have worn them. He glanced at them for less than a second and didn’t look at them again. He was looking at her hips, and the soft curve of her belly, and the place where the cotton clung to her, damp.
“Those too,” he said. It wasn’t a request, and it wasn’t quite steady.
She hooked her thumbs in the waistband and pushed them down over her hips and thighs and stepped out of them. She stood in front of him wearing nothing but the shakha-pola on her wrists, the anklets, the silver toe rings. Smooth all over, nothing between her thighs but the soft mound and the closed, plump seam below it, unopened, keeping its secret until she chose to share it.
She watched him take it in. It was like watching a man read a sentence for the third time because he couldn’t believe the first two. His eyes went from her breasts to her belly, her hips, the heavy curve of her thighs, and back up, and each place stopped him where he’d meant to move on. His mouth was slightly open. The camera hung forgotten in his hand.
“I had it wrong,” he said quietly, to himself.
“Had what wrong?”
He shook his head. “All of it.”
His boxers had given up. The waistband no longer contained him, and the head of his cock had pushed clear of it, dark and glistening, the shaft running up along his hip under the cotton, longer than the shape at the ghat had suggested. As she watched, it lifted, one slow pulse, and grew thicker still. A small sound escaped her, halfway between a gasp and a laugh. It wasn’t something she’d ever expected to have to fit.
He set the camera down.
“Are you only going to take pictures,” she said, “or what?”
He crossed the room like he was starving.
He kissed her first, hard and open-mouthed, one hand fisted in her loose hair and the other already dragging down her spine, like he’d been holding his breath since Mahalaya. Something in her chest opened that she hadn’t known was closed. She put her hands on his chest, hot and slick with sweat, the muscle flexing under her palms, and pulled him closer.
He groaned into her mouth, and the length of him pressed hot against her belly, the head slick where it had pushed clear of the waistband, and it pulled low in her.
His mouth left hers for her throat, the salt-damp curve where her neck met her shoulder.
He put her on the bed with more haste than grace and was over her at once, a breast in each hand, staring at them like he couldn’t believe he was allowed. “These are perfect,” he said against her skin, and she believed him, because he said it like he’d run out of better words. His mouth closed over her left nipple and he sucked, hard, his tongue working the tip until it drew to a point against his teeth. He pulled off with a wet sound to look at it, dark and slick and swollen, and went to the other. Then back. He couldn’t seem to leave either one alone. He pushed them together and buried his face in the valley between them, tasting the salt of the day’s sweat, and she arched, gasping, her fingers in his hair.
He fastened his mouth to the upper slope of her left breast, above the nipple, and sucked: a hard, steady pull that made her cry out and dig her nails into his shoulders. When he let go a mark was already darkening there. He looked at it with naked satisfaction, then bent and bit the nipple beside it, not gently, and her hips came off the bed.
His mouth went down her sternum and over her belly. His tongue found the faint silvery lines low on her stomach, and he dragged it along them one by one. Her throat tightened. Nobody had ever looked at those and stayed.
He pressed his face into the soft skin below her navel and breathed her in. “Marigolds,” he said into her skin. “Smoke and marigolds. It’s all over you.”
Then lower, kissing across her mound, smooth and warm, and he bit there too, gently, and the bite shot down through her to her thighs.
Then he raised her arm above her head, the pose from Mahalaya, handing a basket up to Ramesh, and put his mouth to her armpit. She flinched, embarrassed, fourteen hours on her feet and she ran hot, hotter lately, and tried to pull her arm down.
He held it there and breathed her in like it was the best thing in the room. “You smell incredible,” he said, lower this time, as if the word weren’t big enough. “All of you.” Of everything so far, that undid her most, because it surprised her.
He turned her over. His mouth went to the back of her neck and then down her spine, and she was gripping the pillow before he reached the middle of her back. Down to the small of her back, mouth and thumbs working together, and lower, his teeth at the top of her buttocks, at the full lower curve, and she gasped.
Then he parted her cheeks with both hands and put his tongue to her hole.
She clenched on reflex, hard, and he groaned against her as if it were a compliment. He pressed, worked the tip of his tongue against the tight ring, tried to open her more. Her whole body went rigid: alarm first, then a curiosity that wanted to say yes and knew what came after yes. She pushed back off him and rolled over, palm flat on his chest, and looked at him.
He looked back, lips wet. He didn’t say a word. He understood. Neither of them named it, and something crossed his face, disappointment or respect, she couldn’t tell, and then it was gone.
Instead she hooked her fingers in the waistband of his boxers. The front was dark and wet where the head of his cock strained against the cotton. She pushed them down over his hips. He sprang free and slapped against his stomach, and she stopped breathing.
She’d seen the outline. She’d watched it lengthen at the door, and she’d thought she knew what she was dealing with. The outline had been polite. He was thicker than she’d have guessed, veined and flushed dark, the head swollen and wet, and long, so long it lay against his stomach nearly to his navel. It bobbed once as she stared. Nothing she could have planned for.
“Ishh,” she breathed. The word came out without her permission.
She put her hand around him and her fingers barely met. She needed to feel that twice to believe it. Both hands on him, the heat and weight of his cock, stroking slowly, and she heard him exhale through his nose.
Even with both hands, there was a little of him left over. She looked at him a moment before touching her mouth to him, just looked, and he groaned low in his throat at being looked at like that. Then she bent and kissed the head of his cock, tasted the first bead of precum, salty and clean, and ran her tongue down the full length and back up.
She took him into her mouth as far as she could and kept her eyes on his while she did it, and he stared down at her like the sight might undo him before anything else did.
“Ishh,” she said again around him, and he twitched at the vibration of it. She worked her tongue against the underside and sucked, used both hands on what she couldn’t take.
Her jaw ached with the stretch, her throat working around him each time he hit the back of it, and she didn’t mind at all. She’d never taken anyone this deep before, never had to, and the awareness of her own limit somewhere just past what she could manage was its own kind of arousal.
She cupped his balls in her palm and rolled them gently. His breathing changed, the seconds stretching heavy, as they only did when a body was close.
“Paro.”
It tore out of him before he knew he’d said it. Not a warning. A reflex, half a groan, his hips jerking and one hand fisting in her hair.
He came with a sharp exhale, more of him than she could take, and it spilled past her lips onto her own hand. She swallowed what she’d caught and held him in her mouth until he stopped shaking.
She looked up at him. He was looking down at her. He was still hard.
Deb was done for the day after one. She’d forgotten that wasn’t universal.
Wordlessly, he hauled her up the bed by the thighs and pushed them wide.
He looked, and she watched his face. The plump smooth lips of her pussy were closed like a secret, glistening. He set his thumbs to them and opened her, slowly, the way you’d open something you’d been told not to touch: the outer folds parting, the inner lips swollen and slick and darker than the rest of her, a deep rose at the centre, her clit a hard bead half hidden in its hood. Cool air touched her. It had been years since anyone had looked at her there, and longer since anyone had looked like they wanted to.
He breathed in, deep, and shuddered. “I could stay right here,” he said, dazed, “and just breathe you.”
Then he put his tongue flat against her and licked one long stripe from the bottom of her seam to the top, and lifted his head, his mouth shining. “Sweet,” he said. “You’re sweet.” He was already lowering his head.
He took her inner lips into his mouth, first one, then the other, sucking them, tugging them with his lips, letting them slip free and taking them again, his tongue flicking between them, his nose pressed to her clit so every breath brushed it.
There was no technique in it. He was too hungry for technique. He licked and sucked and rooted at her as if starved, groaning into her, his hands clamped on her thighs, his chin already wet, and every time she gasped he did that again, harder.
He pushed his tongue inside her, fucking her with it in short hungry thrusts, and dragged it back up to her clit and circled it, quick, sloppy, urgent. Deb used to do this, carefully, in order, in the early years, and somewhere along the way it had become a courtesy, then a rarity, then nothing. Nobody had ever devoured her.
The dhak still throbbed somewhere across the lane, enough to swallow a cry. She stopped caring about that fairly early on. Her hands found his hair without her sending them. She fisted them in it and dragged his face into her and heard herself say, “Yes, there, don’t stop,” in a voice she hadn’t used in years.
She came with a cry that scraped her throat raw, thighs locking around his head, and at the crest something released that she hadn’t let happen in twenty-five years: a hot rush of wetness flooding into his mouth and over his chin.
She went rigid with mortification. The one time it had happened, in the first year of her marriage, Deb had jerked away, alarmed, grabbed a towel and asked if she was all right, and she’d spent the years since learning to hold herself back at the edge of it. She braced for Erik to pull away.
He didn’t. He made a sound low in his chest like a man handed water in a desert and drank her down, swallowing, greedy, lapping at her, chasing every drop, his forearms locked across her thighs so she couldn’t close them.
When the last spasm passed he didn’t stop. His tongue kept moving, slower but not gentle, a wet flat stroke over her swollen clit, and she jerked with a hiss.
He was going in for more, hungry, as if he’d found something he wanted and meant to finish it. Every stroke was almost pain.
She pushed at his forehead with the heel of her hand. “Stop. It’s too much. Wait.”
He stopped at once. He lifted his face, chin and lips shining, eyes wild and unfocused, and grinned at her, delighted. “Okay,” he said, breathless. “Okay.”
He kissed his way up her body, hip, waist, breasts again, and when he reached her mouth she tasted herself on him, salt and sweet, and pulled him closer rather than away.
He rose over her on his knees, breathing like he’d taken the stairs at a run, and reached between them. The head of his cock met her entrance, hot and blunt and slick. She took a breath.
He pushed.
Nothing happened, except that her body happened. The head of him met her and stopped, and she felt herself stretch around it, tight and burning, but no further. His hips jerked forward again, impatient, braced for a slide that didn’t come. He looked down between them, frowning, like a man whose key had stopped fitting the lock.
“Wait,” she said. She laughed, a breath of it. “Slowly. You’re big, Erik.”
“Okay.” He shook himself. “Okay. Sorry.” A smaller push, and the head pushed past her entrance, and she hissed and gripped his hips.
“Hyan,” she said. “Aste. Slowly.”
He slowed, and it cost him. His arms shook, his jaw locked, holding himself back by force. An inch, and her body clamped on it like a fist, and he groaned and stopped. A breath. She loosened, and he took another inch.
It went on like that, a negotiation between two parts of two bodies that each believed they were owed the whole of the terms: he’d push, she’d clench, the heat and stretch would build until she gasped, he’d stop, and she’d breathe, and her body would give.
“God.” Sweat ran down his chest in lines. “You’re so tight. You’re not—” He bit it off, tried again, half a laugh, a Danish curse under it. “You’re not supposed to be this tight.”
She heard it. Supposed to. Somewhere in his head there had been a version of her, a different body with a different history, and this one had refused to match it. She should have been insulted. Something bright and stupid and proud went through her instead, and she wrapped her legs around his hips.
“Then stop being polite about it.”
He went the rest of the way in one long push, and she cried out, and he stopped, buried to the hilt, his forehead against hers, both of them shaking.
He tried, for a few strokes, to be slow. She could feel the effort in him, the hips held to a glide, and then it broke. He was moving in her hard and deep, chasing her, greedy, with nothing held back. She opened around him stroke by stroke, and what had been pressure turned to heat. She shifted her hips, found the angle, and gasped.
Twenty-five years. She’d had twenty-five years of knowing exactly what sex felt like, and in the space of a few strokes that knowledge had become useless. Deb had loved her carefully for a quarter of a century, in the dark, and had never once asked what she might want. No one, not once, had ever fucked her like they meant it.
“There,” she said. “Right there.”
He picked up the pace. He found her mouth, and this time when he kissed her it moved with him, his tongue matching the rhythm of his hips, driving in when he drove in. She moaned into his mouth and felt him groan back into hers, the sound passing between them instead of into the air.
His hands went to her hips, gripping now, and he drove deeper, and the change in depth made her dig her nails into his back. He broke the kiss only to find her nipple, sucking, biting gently. She gasped. He did it again on the other side, and she was making sounds she couldn’t manage into silence.
“You feel incredible,” he said against her breast. “So tight. So warm.” A Danish word slipped out under his breath, short and rough, and she didn’t catch it. She didn’t need it translated. She could feel it herself, the involuntary grip of her body around him at the deepest point of each stroke. Deb had never noticed. There had never been anything to notice.
He fucked her harder, and she understood, somewhere underneath the noise she was making, the difference: not handled, not made love to, used, his cock pounding into her deep enough to knock the breath out of her, her breasts bouncing with the force of each thrust until his hand came up to catch one and his mouth found the other, greedy, like he couldn’t decide which part of her he wanted more.
“Harder,” she said, and heard her own voice crack on it. Her hands went to his hips and she pulled him into her. He gave her what she’d asked for: deep, driving strokes that moved her up the bed. His mouth went everywhere. Her neck, her shoulder, back to her mouth, hard, tongue and teeth. Then back to her breasts, kissing and biting and sucking her nipples until she was arching up into his mouth and pushing back against his hips, doing both at once and not caring how she looked doing it.
She came with her face in his neck and her nails in his back. He held himself still through it, shaking, not finishing, as if he’d decided, for once, that she came first.
When she could move he flipped her. She went to her hands and knees and he entered her from behind. The angle shifted, considerably more direct, and she bit the pillow. He gripped her hips and set a rhythm that rattled up her spine. She reached back with one hand to slow him at the new angle, then let him in deeper, and pushed back against him because her body had stopped consulting her and its answer was more. His hand went to her hair and pulled just enough, and she felt that pull all the way down her spine.
“Paro,” he said, rough against the back of her neck. “I’m coming.” She felt it, the heat of him spilling inside her, pulse after pulse. She came with him, his groan one she felt she could have lived inside.
She collapsed. He lay beside her.
She became aware of her breathing first, then the ceiling fan, then the bel phul on the windowsill. The dhak had gone quiet across the lane. Her body felt like it had been taken apart and reassembled in a different configuration. She ran a quick inventory and found everything accounted for but nothing quite in the same place.
He still had the camera on the table.
“Can I see them?” she said. “The ones from tonight.”
He reached over and put the camera in her hands.
She lay on her side and scrolled through the shots in the amber light. The first ones, her with the aanchal drawn across her breasts, then without it, were what she’d expected: she recognised them as photographs, understood the composition. But then the one after the blouse, just the shakha-pola at her wrists against her bare skin, and she stopped. She’d been standing in this light and he’d framed her against the windowsill and she looked like the woman she’d been at twenty before she’d stopped looking. Like the woman the agencies had seen. She’d forgotten that woman existed. More than that: she’d told herself that woman had been a girl’s vanity, unrealistic, and that the sensible thing had been to set her down. She lay in the amber light of this small top-floor room above the festival with a young man’s camera in her hands and understood that she’d been wrong about that. The woman in the frame was real. Had always been real. Had been waiting in every mirror she’d stopped looking at.
She scrolled further. The fully nude shots. Her standing in the amber light unaware of what was happening to her face, because she’d stopped performing for the camera several frames in, and what the camera had caught was just her, not a wife, not a festival organiser, not a committee’s fixer. Just a woman in a room being looked at by someone who wanted to look.
She lay still with the camera in her hands.
She felt him stir against her hip.
He was watching her look at the photos, and he was hard again, which should have been surprising, since he’d come twice, the last not half an hour ago, and wasn’t.
“How,” she said. Not really a question. More like wonder.
He said nothing. Watched her.
She put the camera down and reached for him.
Her hand closed around his cock and he grew in her hand. She stroked him slowly and felt him push into her palm.
Her thumb worked across the head of him and he exhaled, long and unsteady. She shifted down the bed and kissed his cock, just as she had the first time, thorough and unhurried.
She took him in her mouth, felt his hand go to her hair again, and worked him. It took longer this time.
Two rounds had blunted the edge and she had to earn it: her tongue dragging under the head, her hands stroking the base, then his balls, cupped and rolled and finally taken into her mouth, one and then the other, until his thighs began to tremble and his breath broke. He said her name once, quietly, and she took him back into her mouth and brought him all the way, swallowing, holding him through it.
They lay wrapped around each other, sweaty and spent, her ear against his chest as his heart slowed. He was quiet for a long while. Then, half into her hair: “Paro.”
He’d started using it without asking. She should have minded.
“My Devdas,” she said, and laughed.
“Who?”
“It’s a long story.” She was still smiling. “I’ll send you the movie.”
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“Navami,” she said. “Her last night with us.”
When she sat up to find her petticoat his hand closed on her wrist. “Stay.”
She didn’t answer. She looked at his fingers on her wrist, pale against the white conch and red coral of her shakha-pola, and then at him, and that was the whole of her answer.
She watched him understand. His fingers opened. “Of course,” he said quietly.
She dressed by feel, an old skill her hands remembered even in the dark: the petticoat knotted at her hip, the blouse hooked behind her back one stubborn hook at a time, the saree pleated into her waistband, the aanchal pinned at her shoulder and drawn high over the mark at her neck. The damp panties went into her bag. She took her pins from the table beside his camera and twisted her hair back into its bun, and he watched every movement as if he were memorising it.
Then she went back to the bed, bent, and kissed him, slowly, long enough to taste herself and the day on him.
At the door she paused. “The photos,” she said.
“They’re the best thing I’ve shot in India.”
“Delete them before you leave.”
He looked at her a long moment. “Fine.”
She studied his face for the lie and couldn’t find one. Twenty-two, and it had cost him to say it. She had to trust him, and she did.
She left.
She went down the stairs and back across the road into the dark alley where the car waited. With no panties to catch it, every turn of the road brought him back to her: leaking out of her, warm and slow down the inside of her thigh and into the fabric. She pressed her thighs together, drove a little too carefully, and her face heated in the dark. At forty-five. She didn’t stop being aware of it once.
Deb had come in at five, smelling of whisky and other men’s cigarettes, and dropped onto his side of the bed in yesterday’s kurta.
She woke before the alarm on Navami morning and got into the shower before Deb was up. It was there, under the water, that she found the first mark: a bruise-dark bloom above the curve of her left nipple. She stood very still. She turned in the mirror and found the second, where her neck met her shoulder, where her aanchal would cover it if she kept it high all day. The third she found last, at the smooth mound.
She stood in the fogged bathroom with her hand flat against her own body for a long moment, marked in three places by a twenty-two-year-old Danish photographer, and felt something that wasn’t quite guilt and wasn’t quite pride, and was mostly just hers.
Deb reached for her at the door, sleepy and sour with whisky, one arm sliding around her waist.
“No,” she said.
He blinked, surprised, more at the word than the refusal itself. “No?”
“I have a hundred things to do before the pandal opens. Not this morning.” She kissed his cheek so it wouldn’t sting, and meant the kiss. She left him standing there.
She dressed with her aanchal high at her throat all day.
By noon the city had the exhausted beauty of a festival on its last full day. The pandal smelled of incense and crushed marigolds and the accumulated warmth of thousands of bodies. Deb had slept off Sanjoy’s whisky until nine and arrived at ten.
Freshly bathed and freshly cheerful, he was now everywhere, the genial face of a festival he’d barely touched. He accepted the committee’s congratulations on the lighting. He shook hands with the councillor’s men.
When he passed her he said, “Mita, tea for Sanjoy,” without slowing, and she found herself carrying tea, and later, because one of the committee women noticed she hadn’t eaten since dawn, a plate of khichuri, the festival’s rice-and-lentil offering.
She ate standing up and watched him across the pandal, directing someone about the aarti arrangements she’d drawn up herself, laughing, shaking hands, taking the thanks. Her husband. Everyone loved Deb. He was warm with the whole world, and it had taken her twenty-five years, and one photographer, to see that she’d been counted in the world and never once picked out of it.
Erik was somewhere in the crowd with his camera. She didn’t look for him. Once, passing the idol, she heard the shutter and registered it and kept walking.
The tent-pole contractor came back that afternoon for the final settlement, the immersion-day charges, and Deb drifted over as he had on Mahalaya, hand already out for the estimate.
Behind him, the ten-armed goddess stood over the buffalo demon, her trident in the demon’s chest, where it had stood all week.
“Let me handle this one too,” he said…
She looked past him at Durga. A marigold slid loose from the garland at the goddess’s throat and dropped at her feet, an offering nobody had made. If she needed permission, she had it.
She didn’t hand the estimate over.
“I’ve got it,” she said, and when he reached for the estimate anyway she held on to it and looked at him, not raising her voice, not needing to. “I’m not in my twenties anymore, Deb. I know exactly what I’m doing.” She turned back to the contractor and settled it herself, in her own numbers, on better terms than Mahalaya’s by a comfortable margin.
Deb’s hand stayed half out. His eyes went past her to Erik, the CEO’s son, standing by the idol with his camera lowered, then fell to the ground. Whatever he’d been about to say, he swallowed it. He didn’t look at her. He turned to the contractor’s men instead and said something about the schedule that didn’t need saying, busy with anything that wasn’t her face.
She reached for his arm, an apology she hadn’t decided to make yet. He shrugged her hand off without meeting her eyes and walked towards the pandal entrance, his back very straight.
She didn’t follow him. Whatever this cost her at home, tonight or in some argument she couldn’t yet see the shape of, she’d deal with it then. For now she watched the contractor’s men finish loading, and found she wasn’t sorry.
In the evening, in the crush around the dhunuchi dancers, a hand found hers in the dark between two bodies pressed close by the crowd, and she knew whose it was. He didn’t pull her anywhere. He just held on, his thumb moving once against her palm, while the crowd surged and Deb’s voice called something two feet away that neither of them heard properly, and then the crowd shifted and the hand was gone and she was breathing hard, and not from the press of bodies.
She told Deb, before the crowd thickened further, that she was going home to sleep early. He’d be at the pandal all night, as he was every Navami, keeping vigil over the goddess with the committee men. She left at nine, checking her bag out of habit: keys, phone, the strip of pills.
He opened the door before she knocked. Jeans, no shirt, bare feet, his hair still wet from the shower and pushed back with his fingers. He smelled of the guesthouse’s cheap soap. He’d made the bed. She noticed that, absurdly, over his shoulder: the sheet pulled tight, the pillows squared, a young man’s idea of ready.
He pulled her in by the hand and his mouth was on hers before the door had closed. She kissed him back with all day’s wanting behind it, through every obligatory smile and committee conversation and every minute of standing beside Deb knowing where she was going. His hands went to her hair. He found the pins without looking, plucked them out one by one, dropped them on the table beside the camera, and her bun came down heavy over his wrists.
The bel phul on the windowsill had opened further. The room smelled of jasmine and river and the two of them from the night before, and her body understood before her mind did.
“Did I do that?” he said against her neck, and pressed his thumb to the place her aanchal had hidden all day. The mark had darkened overnight to the colour of a plum.
“You know you did.”
He went for the pleats of her saree and she caught his wrist. “It’s tant. It’s not a rope.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re not sorry.”
“Not even a little.” He was grinning, and he kept pulling, and she let him, laughing, until the saree slithered to the floor and he was at the hooks of her blouse, swearing softly in Danish. He took them as if they’d insulted him. The blouse went. The petticoat went.
Underneath, tonight, it wasn’t the cotton. It was black lace from the back of a drawer, bought years ago for an anniversary Deb had forgotten, and she watched him see the difference and understand what it meant: last night she hadn’t planned this, and tonight she had. He didn’t say anything. He went to his knees and dragged the lace down, too fast for care, and something tore at the seam. Neither of them stopped.
He sat her on the edge of the bed, pulled her thighs over his shoulders, and his mouth was on her pussy before she’d drawn breath.
There was no astonishment in it tonight. He knew now. He went straight to what he’d learned: long flat strokes across her folds, her inner lips tugged between his lips, the tip of his tongue circling her clit, hard and quick and exactly right, with the impatience of someone who’d thought about nothing else since dawn.
He moaned into her pussy and she felt it in her spine. She’d been wound tight for a day and a night, and it didn’t take long. Her fingers found his hair. Her heels dug into his back.
“Ma go,” she said, the word breaking in the middle, and she came, thighs locking on either side of his head, and he stayed with her through every pulse, his tongue slowing but never leaving, until she pushed at his shoulders, shaking. It was a short, sharp release, the edge taken off. It was nothing like the flood of the night before, and the pressure was still there underneath it, waiting.
She pushed him back onto the mattress and was at his belt before he’d finished falling. He kicked off the jeans. Then she pulled his boxers down and he kicked them off too. His cock lay hot and hard against his stomach, no less of a surprise in her hand than the night before, only a surprise she’d chosen.
She straddled him and held him at her entrance. She knew the route now, and she lowered herself by degrees anyway, because knowing the route didn’t change the size: an inch, a breath, another inch, the stretch bright and burning and welcome, until she sat on him, full, her hands flat on his chest. His fingers dug into the sheet. He didn’t hurry her. It cost him.
She rode him slowly at first, then not slowly. The bells on her anklets chimed with every rise and fall, small and bright and ridiculous in the quiet room.
She bent to kiss him, and he kissed her back, his tongue meeting hers in the rhythm of her hips, and she moaned into his mouth each time she took all of him and felt the sound answered back into hers, their breath and voices trading places until she couldn’t tell which of them had made which.
He caught a breast in his hand and pulled it into his mouth. “Gud, Paro,” he said around it, and she felt the words as much as heard them. It took only a few more strokes before he lost his patience.
He gripped her hips and rolled them over in one move, still inside her, and she laughed, breathless, at how little patience he had left. He took her ankles in his hands. He lifted them, bells jangling, and held them wide, and drove into her, hard and deep, watching where they joined, watching her breasts move with each stroke.
She stopped laughing. “Theme jeo na,” she said. He didn’t need a translation. He didn’t stop. He couldn’t. The angle went deeper than any other, each stroke striking something in her that made her toes curl in his grip, and the pressure came back, low and heavy and near, the one she knew now.
“Erik,” she said. “I’m going to—”
He pulled out. The loss was so sudden she cried out at the empty air.
“Ki holo?” she said. “What happened? Why did you stop?”
He grinned. Then two of his fingers were inside her and curled hard against the front wall.
He was watching her face as she came apart: a cry she’d never made in her life, hips bucking, and the first hot jet of the squirt arced out over his wrist.
“For helvede,” he breathed, staring, and then his mouth was on her, catching the rest, his forearms locked across her thighs, drinking her down. Last night she’d braced for him to pull away. Tonight she’d warned him and trusted him, and he took all of it, giving her nowhere to go but through it.
He surfaced, chin dripping, and looked at her, wrecked, satisfied, still wanting, all three at once, and she knew she’d carry that look for a very long time.
She was limp.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, reaching for the camera without getting up.
“You already have it in your hand.”
“One frame, Paro. Just one. You, right now, like this.” He looked at her, serious under the ease of it. “I’ll delete everything else before I leave, like I promised. This one’s yours to say no to.”
She thought about it for a breath. “One. And I get to decide whether you keep it or not.”
He nodded once and raised the camera.
The shutter clicked, soft in the quiet room, and he put it down without looking at what he’d got, already moving back towards her.
He entered her again and she laughed, half disbelief, because she was spent and her body still answered him like a tuning fork finding its note. But he moved differently this time. She slowed him with her hands on his hips until he moved the way she wanted: slowly, deliberately, his forehead against hers, long strokes she felt all the way through. Not the animal urgency of an hour ago. Quieter, and for that reason more unbearable. The end was close, and they both knew it, and the knowledge was in every movement.
They kissed through most of it, unhurried, her tongue matching the slow rhythm of his hips, quiet together except for breathing and the sounds passing between their mouths.
He came with his mouth against her throat and his hands in her hair, her name worn down to just “Paro.”
She felt the pulse of him, and her own body answered in a long slow wave. They lay still afterwards with his weight on her, which she didn’t ask him to shift.
Later, when the festival sounds had dropped to near-silence, she felt him stir again, his hands moving across her skin, unhurried, relearning. She was almost asleep and then she wasn’t. His mouth at her nape. His hand at her hip. His cock against her from behind, hard again, and not waiting.
She didn’t speak. She moved back against him.
He entered her from behind and they moved together slowly, her back against his chest, his arm across her, his mouth at the back of her neck where he’d found that place on the first night. She could feel every movement of him inside her, the dark and the quiet made it different, more present, nothing else to pay attention to. What she felt now wasn’t heat.
It was a fullness that wasn’t only physical, a recognition that this was ending and that she’d chosen it, and that both of those things were true at once.
She didn’t know if she was saying goodbye to him. She didn’t know if it was him she’d be missing. She only knew that the woman who’d waded into the Hooghly two mornings ago and the woman lying in this dark room weren’t the same woman, and that the difference had a cost attached to it with Deb’s name on it, ten years of it, small refusals and estimates taken out of her hands and a career ended by inches until she’d called it her own choice.
Erik had only been the one who’d shown her the bill. She came quietly, her hand gripping his forearm, and he came with her. Afterwards he held her and she let him, and didn’t think about anything that came after this room.
She got up at two. He was awake, watching her find her clothes. The lace lay in two pieces on the floor, and she put the pieces into her bag with the pills. He got out of bed, naked, and did up the hooks of her blouse for her, one by one, slowly, no impatience left in him at all. She let him.
“How do you feel?” he asked into her shoulder.
“Amar bhalo lagche,” she said, and then, because he was waiting, “Good. I feel good.”
She pleated the saree back into her petticoat by feel and pinned the aanchal at her shoulder, and dressed over the slow wet heat of him still running down her thigh, without a thought for it.
“Will I see you tomorrow? At the immersion?”
“Everyone goes to the immersion. We give her back to the river.”
She went to the door.
“Paro.”
She turned. He was standing with one arm braced on the wall, watching her.
“You should’ve been in front of cameras the whole time,” he said.
She looked at him. Let the words be what they were.
“I am where I want to be,” she said. “Good night, Erik.”
Bijoya Dashami, the day the goddess goes home, arrived the way it always arrived, like grief wearing celebration’s clothes. The idol was carried out of the pandal at midday to drums and ululation, the lanes filling with the noise and colour of a neighbourhood in procession. The women of the neighbourhood surged forward to do sindoor khela, pressing vermilion to each other’s foreheads and to the goddess’s feet, the red going everywhere, on sarees and faces and the drummers’ hands. Paromita stood with the other women of the committee and smeared sindoor across a neighbour’s forehead, took six different hands’ vermilion on her own brow and gave it back.
Durga was leaving. She came every year and left every year, and the grief of her leaving was genuine even for the women who’d organised the whole thing, especially for them, because they knew what it had cost. Paromita’s mind went back to the rocket and the marigold. She almost believed the goddess had given something back to her this year. Herself. She looked at Durga and folded her hands. Not praying. Thanking.
The procession moved towards the ghat. She walked with Deb and the committee through the lanes, the drums ahead, the crowd thick on both sides, marigold petals underfoot turning orange-soft in the heat. The smell of the Hooghly reached them before the river came into view, the green-mud smell of a river that had carried a city for centuries, stronger than usual today with the weight of the festival’s last act coming. She was still a little sore, low and pleasant, a reminder every few steps of what the last two nights had been. Raising her arm to wave to a neighbour on a balcony, she remembered his mouth in exactly that hollow, and had to look at her feet.
At the ghat the idol went into the water. The young men of the neighbourhood carried it as they had every year, and the crowd made the sound that Bengali crowds made at this moment, the collective ah that held sorrow and release in the same breath, the sound of a people who’d practised this grief so many times they’d learned to hold it without breaking, and Paromita felt her throat close the way it closed every year. Nothing to do with the past five days. Everything to do with Bijoya.
She watched the goddess go under.
Deb found her arm and held it, his fingers a little too firm, for the benefit of the neighbours. He hadn’t looked at her directly since the afternoon before. She didn’t lean. She let him hold her arm, and looked at the river. Somewhere behind them a shutter clicked. Erik came up beside them, camera lowered, and thanked Deb for the access, easy and formal in front of him, as he’d been on Mahalaya morning.
“Shubho Bijoya,” he said, the phrase she’d seen pencilled in his margin, carefully, the vowels a little too round.
“Shubho Bijoya. Good luck with the rest of the project,” Deb said, shaking his hand.
“Thank you. And thank you, Paro—” He caught himself, and Paromita felt her whole body go still. “Paromita,” he finished, careful over every syllable, too careful. “Sorry. Four syllables is a lot before I’ve had coffee.”
If Deb heard anything in it, he didn’t show it. “When do you leave?” he said.
“Tomorrow, for Delhi,” Erik said. “Qutb Minar, the Red Fort, Taj Mahal in Agra, and then home in a week.”
“She comes back every year,” Paromita said.
“And you can bet the pandal will be bigger next year,” Deb added, and laughed.
“That, I have to see,” Erik said, looking at Paromita.
The car was cool and quiet after the crowds, the city’s festival noise already a memory by the time Deb turned onto the main road. She sat with her aanchal loose around her shoulders and watched the street lights move past and let the quiet be.
Her phone buzzed in her bag. She slid it out and tilted it towards the window, away from Deb. A photograph.
It wasn’t what she’d braced for. No body, nothing anyone could be shown. Just her face, close, on his pillow: the bindi smeared to a comma, her hair spilled loose, her cheeks flushed, her nostrils faintly flared, a single tear tracked back towards her ear that she hadn’t felt fall, and under it all a smile she didn’t remember making. She looked like a woman who’d just been told she was wanted, and believed it.
Beneath it, one line. Yours, as promised.
She looked at it until the streetlights had gone by twice. Her thumb went to the trash icon, out of habit, and stopped. Then it moved to the keyboard.
Keep this.
She sent it before she could think, locked the screen, and put the phone face down on her knee. The woman in the photograph was someone she meant to keep. She knew that. Deb would meet her too, in time.
They drove in silence for a while.
“That young man, Erik. He was happy? He’ll tell his father it was a good Puja?”
She looked at the road.
“Yes,” she said. “He shoots really well.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And he shoots a lot.”
Deb nodded, satisfied, watching the road.
THE END
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