I heard my name being called out from the midst of the teeming horde pressing in on the barriers after customs in New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi international airport, and a head and arm waving a sign was bouncing up and down over the tumult. The sign the young man was carrying said “Clifford Jenkins” with “New York” written under it. That was me. But I wasn’t being met by anyone that I knew of. The young man obviously thought I was, though, as he was pushing his way through the crowd, moving toward where I would have to join the crowd myself at the end of the separated-off corridor. He had his eyes on me and was waving just for me.
“Mr. Jenkins?” He held up a photograph that clearly showed that I was the man he was looking for. “I am Gupta,” he said, as he came up to me. “I am your escort here in India.”
“My escort?” I said, not comprehending.
“Yes, yes. I take you to Chennai to find Tamil translator. I speak Tamil and Gujarati and very, very good English. I guide you where you want to go down in Tamil Nadu. I guide you here in New Delhi too.”
How did he know why I had come to India and what I was to do here? I stared at him blankly.
“Khurana. I am cousin to Khurana. Khurana, who works for you in New York. He tell me to meet you and to guide you and to take care of you.”
Ah, Khurana Bhutra. One of the news agency’s Indian translators in New York. One who was very good at what he did, but who also was irritating and demanding. It had been Khurana who had set off this notion that the international news agency I worked for needed another Indian translator in New York. We had taken on some government translation work in Hindi and Tamil, and Khurana had insisted we had to have another Tamil speaker to handle it.
“Come just this way. I have transportation. What is your hotel, please.”
He had taken charge, and one part of me was very glad he had. I was overwhelmed by how many people were swarming around in the airport, jabbering in a mix of languages, some I didn’t know, and many of these people-too many-looking emaciated and holding their hands out in supplication, their eyes big with hope, their hopes somehow focused on me.
Even as I let the young man, Gupta, lead me along through the crowd, him now rolling my suitcase so that there was no question I would follow along, I could see the hope in his eyes too. He somehow needed to establish favor with Khurana; he needed to do this service. How could I politely deny him? This ploy was just like Khurana, though. I could manage this on my own, but Khurana wanted me to be in the position to owe him as well. So I was being forced to need something from him. He was always doing this around the office-and then calling in on a chit I hadn’t asked to possess and often didn’t realize would have been seen as a favor from Khurana until he made a claim against it. It was maddening, but he did it expertly.
Gupta was as thin as many of those pressing about me, but he looked more strongly built than most, and he also was a handsome young man, neatly dressed in a white shirt and khakis and with clean tennis shoes, I noticed. I noticed they were clean, because so much of what others were wearing, especially their shoes, weren’t clean. Even here, in the airport, the filth under foot was noticeable, as was the scruffiness and dinginess of everyone’s shoes-those who were wearing shoes. Most were in some sort of thin sandals or were barefoot.
He had expressive brown eyes and a shock of unruly jet-black hair, and, surprisingly, since most around us were dusky skinned, his skin was alabaster white. Khurana was similarly pale and somewhat superciliously had told me it was how you could tell the purer descendants of the Mogul rulers from the masses. And, indeed, Gupta cut his way through the crowd as a prince would. The mass parted for him, and we shortly were on the curb at a cab stand.
I was sweating profusely already from the sweltering heat I had been slathered in from the very doors of the passenger jet and from the press of the crowd, starting in the arrival lines at passport control. I couldn’t help myself. I was glad that the young man was here, even though he was holding my elbow possessively.
“What hotel?” he repeated.
“The Ashok,” I answered.
“Ah, very, very good hotel. Khurana picked well.”
I would have retorted but for the fact that Khurana, indeed, had suggested the accommodations. And later, as the cab approached the sprawling hotel, looking every inch like a raja’s palace, I reluctantly had to thank Khurana under my breath for his choice.
I felt no disappointment all the way through the efficient check-in process. In contrast to the airport, all here was calm and long stretches of regal furnishings in cool fabrics and marble walls with few people in sight, or, rather, with everyone in sight looking attractive and well heeled, and at their leisure, not in a hurry to be anywhere. This contrast had already hit me as the cab that, as Gupta had said had been waiting for only us beyond the cab stand at the airport, drove through Old Delhi into New Delhi. The atmosphere turned from filth, heat, oppression, and teeming and seemingly hopeless and helpless masses, to, as we entered the new city, cool greenery, serenity, majestic buildings set in vast gardens, and the near absence of people on the streets. There were no sidewalks here; pedestrians obviously weren’t welcome.
“Most Indians cannot enter New Delhi,” Gupta answered to my question on this. “It is for the government and foreigners. As an Indian from the old city, you must work here or obtain a pass to visit.”
I was disappointed in the answer-the thought that the people’s government wasn’t accessible by the people themselves, but the foreigner in me couldn’t help but be pleased at the lack of pressing humanity and the frustration of the wants and needs of fawning South Asians closing in on me.
My room was large, appointed in cool silks, and wood paneled. The two windows looked out onto a vast green lawn. The bath was marble and also luxurious in its waste of space. The tub was sunken and square, enough for a couple, and I immediately had visions of honeymooners spending their entire hotel time together in the tub.
Gupta had left me at the reception desk, with the promise of meeting me again at 10:00 a.m. the next morning after I had breakfasted, saying he’d show me around New Delhi in the one day I’d scheduled to be here. After two nights here to acclimate myself, I would be heading south, to Tamil Nadu, and the city of Chennai, once called Madras, and the center of the Tamil-speaking population.
An assistant manager and a bellhop took me to my room. And then there to greet me in the room, head bowed in respect, was a young male room attendant, berry brown, demure, and quite handsome almost to the point of being pretty. He was dressed traditionally, in a white silky dhoti-the traditional skirt that Indian men wear that is a gathered length of material bound around their waists and nearly touching the floor-topped by a white silky vest tightly hugging his chest. His midriff was bare, and I was surprised to see a ruby-red gem stud in his belly button. He was wearing bangles around his wrists and ankles too that jangled a bit when he walked, and he was barefoot, with silver rings on a few of his toes.
I thought the assistant manager looked down his nose a bit at the young man as he was handing over the room key to me and the bellhop looked away until I pressed a generous tip in his hand, but then he thanked me politely and withdrew. The assistant manager treated me like visiting royalty, and I had trouble stopping him from fussing around to show me the room’s amenities despite my early conveying of another generous tip to his palm.
I listened to the room boy jangle his bracelets as he unpacked my bag and stowed the clothes away in bureaus and armoires as if I was going to stay a month, while I wandered around the room, contemplating taking the shower he had hesitatingly suggested after my grueling travels-which I had to admit were pretty grueling. I stopped at a large bouquet of flowers and a bucket of ice cooling a bottle of wine and noticed there was a card in the flowers. “Welcome to India. Enjoy. Leonard,” the card said.
Ah, that explained the hospitality, I thought. Leonard Wright-Sir Leonard now-was an old, very close, friend of mine from his BBC days and my early news agency days. We’d first met at the Henley Regatta when he’d been with BBC Monitoring in nearby Caversham Park and I’d been working for the U.S. government news agency. I’d later settled in New York with a private news agency and married my Jennifer, a stockbroker, who came with a powerful father as well as with a Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment that I loved and would be hard pressed to give up. Leonard had married even better. An Indian correspondent then in London, Manjula, a woman who had returned to India and to politics and had risen to near the top of the Congress Party. She was cabinet secretary of something or other now, although I never could remember which one. Her position was so important that Leonard too had been living here for the last decade.
I wondered how he knew I’d come to India. But then, through his wife, he probably knew everything that happened in India. Thinking back on my relationship with Leonard, I poured myself a glass of wine, saluted him silently, and took a sip. It was first-class wine, as I was sure it would be, knowing Leonard.
I heard the bath water running in the bathroom and I moved in that direction, stopping in the doorway in surprise and shock.
The room boy was drawing the bath. He also, though, had stripped off his dhoti and vest and was only clothed in the bangles, the navel stud, a silver nipple ring, and a shy smile.
I was about to say something when he held his hand out and I took another small card from him. “And above all else, enjoy this. He cost a fortune. Leonard,” the card read.
I smiled, as the room boy started unbuttoning my shirt and raised up on his toes and kissed me shyly on the lips.
“You will have me?” he asked in a soft voice.
“Oh, yes, I most certainly will have you,” I answered and took another sip of wine as he went down on his knees in front of me, unzipped my trousers, lowered my briefs, and took my cock in his mouth.
The memories of Leonard. We not only met at the Henley Regatta and both covered the event for our respective organizations, but we also got sloshed on ale together, conversed long enough together to know what each other wanted and that we wanted it from each other, and fucked and slept the sleep of exhaustion together. Leonard was interested in a particular sex technique, and I was interested in providing that same technique, so our coming together had been a miraculous event. He often said that I didn’t look and act in public the sort of man who I was like that in bed; in turn, I told him that he looked just the sort of man who looked for that in another man. Neither of us took umbrage, delighted that we had fallen in with each other.
For eight years we conveniently met all over the world on assignments and tumbled into bed together as quickly and for as long as possible. Leonard was an old English school submissive bottom and I was a power top. We enjoyed each other immensely. But then he married for advancement first and I did so afterward-not in any sort of revenge, but in search of the luxuries of life. And, although, we still coupled a few times after that, Manjula became a much-investigated politician in India and that was that between us.
It stood to reason that Leonard wouldn’t meet with me here in India, on his own home ground-but also that he would make the gestures of welcome that he had.
I fucked the room boy in the double tub, laughing at the image I’d had when I first saw it of honeymooners who wouldn’t leave it. After scrubbing me, he had climbed into the tub and, facing me, settled his channel, challengingly and evocatively tight given that he was a rent boy, on my cock and, leaning his body back, had grasped his ankles. I bent my face down to his nipples and pulled at the ring with my teeth until he was giving little gasps and whimpers. I had established that he was an adult, but he had the slim, soft body of a boy. He told me that he was as many adult Indian men were, spare and small, but an adult nonetheless. I reveled in that and in Leonard, also small, knowing what I liked. I pulled his pelvis up from my buried cock, which could accommodate considerable upward pull without dislodging, with my palms grasping his small buttocks orbs, and my lips traveled down his sternum to his navel, where I grasped the ruby gem in my teeth, pulled it out, spit it out of the tub, and stuck my tongue in his navel. He was trembling and murmuring in some language I didn’t understand and then gasped, as I lightly teethed the smooth, soft flesh around the navel.
He cried out and began to jerk and writhe as, grasping his waist now, I slammed him down hard on my cock. Lifted him and slammed him down; lifted him again and slammed him down again. Lifted him and slammed him down. Lifted him and . . . until, with another cry, the water between our bellies became cloudy white with his cum. He had lost his grasp of his ankles and now was grabbing at my sides, digging his fingernails into my flesh.
I enjoyed the heightened sensation the pain gave me-enjoying more the mixture of pain and passion in his eyes. His head was slanted to one side and he was eyeing me out of one eye, the other one being covered by a hank of his silky, black hair. The look was a mixture of wariness, awe, lust, and pain. With one hand I cupped the back of his head and brought his lips to mine in a brutal, possessive kiss. I encased his small cock and balls in the other hand and squeezed, causing him to gasp and whimper at the double assault.
Then, abruptly, I released him at both ends, gripped his waist in my hands again and renewed slamming him up and down on my cock until I too had ejaculated and he was just flopping around like a rag doll.
He had endured it all without throwing up any defenses. Leonard must have explained my need well in engaging him, although he still seemed to be surprised at the reality of it. Leonard knew I wanted full control and mastering, full domination.
The room boy rubbed me dry with a towel, slowly and sensually, as if he hadn’t been fully and forcefully taken in the tub. Then he suggested a massage. During the massage, and when I was completely relaxed, he started giving me a blow job. I put up with it until I was fully engorged and then I heaved myself off the massage table, grabbed him around the waist, and carried him, easily, over to the bed. I slammed his back down on the foot of the bed, his eyes wide in surprise and all of the breath knocked out of him, and slapped his legs apart. Grasping an ankle in one fist and raising and spreading that leg, and, after stuffing my cock inside his tight hole as he grunted and groaned, I grasped him by the throat with the other hand. He arched his back and babbled to me intelligibly as I fucked him hard and fast to a second ejaculation.
Afterward, after I’d taken a shower, I asked him how long he’d been engaged for.
“For the night, sahib,” he answered with a sob. He was curled up in a fetal position on the bed. I had no idea how genuine his distress was, although during the fucking he’d tried to assert that I was thicker and longer than other men he’d lain under. I patted him on the buttocks and told him I would be going to the dining room for dinner, which would give him a chance to get something to eat too, and that I would be gone for an hour or more.
“Is this too much for you?” I then asked. I was being rougher than even was normal for me. I hadn’t had male sex for months, because I hadn’t traveled from New York and I wouldn’t go there in my home environment. But I couldn’t help myself. This was what I liked, and I was keyed up from not having had it for months. I wasn’t beating him, I just was hung and preferred to fuck hard. I wanted a tight hole-and the feeling of taxing it to the limit.
“No, sahib,” he said with a sniffle. “It is hard but . . . but it is so . . . I don’t know. The harder you are with me, the higher in the clouds I go, and the more I want.”
“Then I expect you to be naked and on the bed when I get back.”
“Yes, sahib.”
He was good and I hadn’t had a good, freestyle fuck in some time. I walked on eggs in New York with Jennifer. I wanted to make the most of this gift.
Sometime after 9:00 p.m. I shot another load. The room boy’s torso was arched out from my belly, my hands gripping his sides half way between his waist and his armpits, his arms dangling down to the surface of the bed, my knees wedged under his buttocks, his knees bent and his feet flat on the bed behind me. His ankle bangles jangled quietly with each of the thrusts I made inside him for more than a half hour. I was tired, but he was exhausted. When I fired off, I stretched out beside him, and wrapping the fingers of one hand around his cock-it being too small to take a full fist-I slowly masturbated him to a moaning completion.
I was getting on in years, so I mounted him again only twice more in the night. He gave every impression that that was three more times than he had expected this gig to entail.
He served me breakfast in the room the next day, him redressed as when I’d first seen him and me in briefs and a silk hotel robe. He told me he was leaving then and one of the regular room attendants would be taking over the duties.
“The hotel room boy isn’t-” he began to say, his head lowered demurely and looking shyly at me.
“I understand,” I interjected. “And, please, come over here.”
He walked over to me gingerly and with some apparent reluctance, probably expecting me to brutally attack him. But when he reached me, I placed a wad of rupee bills in his hand, probably far more than he made in a week of regular johns. Giving me another shy smile, he moved back to the door.
“And . . .” I realized I’d never asked him his name, so I pressed on without using a direct address. “You were very good. I know I am demanding, but you were very good. I will make sure I make that known to those who arranged for you.”
“Thank you, sahib.” He smiled a little smile. He seemed grateful. I didn’t know if this made up for how forceful I’d been, but I hadn’t been able to help it. It had been quite some time.
“I was going to ask if you managed to find your red gem, but I see that you have.”
“Yes, sahib, I did. Thank you, sahib. And your staff, sahib, I have never . . . no man has ever taken me so cruelly but made me want more. I don’t know . . .”
He didn’t have a chance to finish that, as there was a soft knock at the door. He opened it and there stood Gupta. I felt a little flash of irritation, having understood that he would meet me down in the lobby at 10:00 and it was only 9:00. But there he was.
He stayed in the outer corridor briefly, exchanging a few remarks with the room boy, and then he came into the room.
“I thought rather than New Delhi that you might want to see the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort instead,” he said, “since you only have one day in the city. Much of what you can see here would be from inside a car, and I have hired one to take us into the countryside.”
“Thank you, Gupta,” I said, fully aware that we already were on his schedule, not mine. I dressed there in the room in front of him, and he watched my every move.
It was an exhausting day, but, I had to admit, a good one. I would never have been able to arrange to see all that was covered on my own, and Gupta was an expert guide, filling my head with information but all of it interesting and enlightening, nothing frivolous or tiring.
That night I ate alone in the dining room, and returned to the room somewhat regretting that Leonard hadn’t booked two days with the nameless room boy. I read until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and then lay, naked on the silk sheets, welcoming every wisp of breeze stirred up by the ceiling fan overhead.
Late in the night, not even having heard him enter the room, I woke up to a chest pushing my thighs open below me, one hand encircling my cock and another one cupping my balls, and a moist mouth descending on my cock.
Leonard, playful Leonard, I thought. You did go for the two nights.
But then I sensed as the body came up over me that it was somewhat more substantial than the room boy’s had been. And the hands grasping my wrists and forcing my arms over my head were much stronger than the room boy had demonstrated in capability. My eyes shot open. I was looking into the face of Gupta.
I didn’t fuck Gupta, although I struggled for control to do so. He fucked himself on my cock. Pinning me, with strength I could not have believed a man of his size and physique could have, he mounted my cock and vigorously pounded his channel on me, strongly resisting every attempt of mine to gain control and to regulate the fuck.
Exhausted from the day’s excursions, I finally just relaxed, turned my head to the side, and didn’t try to move my pelvis again until the throes of ejaculation approached and then I was strong enough, briefly, to counterpunch him for a few thrusts, to arch my torso and head back, and to cry out to the ceiling as I bathed his insides with my cum.
“Ah, I knew you would want me,” he murmured.
Even as he stretched beside me, he held me in a strong embrace that would have taken much effort to escape from. A half hour later, he repeated the earlier, controlled fuck, and, although his embrace following that was more relaxed and he soon was snoring softly, I was so spent I made no effort to repel him. Mentally, though, although I didn’t find his method of fucking arousing to the levels I went after, it wasn’t like I didn’t accept him. This just wasn’t how I liked to fuck. And even then, I recognized the danger of Gupta, and by association, Khurana, knowing that I fucked men. How had he found out? The brief conversation outside the door to my hotel room with the rent boy?
He was gone in the morning, but I barely had time to shower and repack, when he was at the door saying we needed to get a quick breakfast at the hotel’s buffet, as our plane would be leaving soon.
He did not mention the visitation in the night, and neither did I. But on the plane, with the two of us the only ones occupying the seats on one side at the window, he let his hand move to my crotch, possessively. I can’t claim that what he then whispered in my ear didn’t let him feel some effect with his hand covering my crotch. His wasn’t my preferred sex partner, but it wasn’t like he was raping me. I sought out release as much as the next guy, and what he was describing did heat me up.
* * * *
When we arrived at the hotel in Chennai, chosen for its proximity to the American consulate and because of its American brand name, Sheraton, I thought at first that a massive mistake had been made. The roads around it were nothing but mud and there was a cow in the lobby. I soon was to learn, though, that this was mainly the way it was in Tamil Nadu. I chalked that up to a plus for finding someone who qualified for the job I had and who wanted to get out of this area of the world.
On the whole, the people were shorter and smaller and browner than the Indians in the New Delhi area. Like many in the developing world, they tended to appear attractive when young but to age quickly when they reached their forties and, generally, to be completely spent by their fifties. On the way from the airport in an open-sided cab, Gupta pointed out several men to me who appeared to be in their mid teens but who he said were in their late twenties. He apparently told me that as a warning of what to expect in looks from the translator prospects I would be interviewing and testing, but I’ll admit that, already being heated up, I viewed them as potential sex partners. I liked to fuck smaller, young-looking men. I liked to overpower and fuck them hard. When away from New York and cruising for men to manhandle, I found I often gravitated to South and Southeast Asian men, as they generally were small-and tended to have tight channels.
I needed a hotel near the U.S. consulate on Gemini Street, which was also only a couple of blocks west of the Bay of Bengal and a long, narrow beach called Elliot’s Beach, because the interviews and testing were to be conducted there. It wasn’t public knowledge, but my news agency did work for U.S. intelligence. We were adding the Tamil translator because work we did for the Agency justified the added position. The intelligence section at the consulate was helping me by giving me interview space and by having already weeded the candidates down to twenty who not only had the skills but also could pass scrutiny on entering and working in the States. I was to be aghast when I arrived at the consulate and found out that there had been more than 200 applicants for the position, which lent credence to my thought that this was an area of the world that many wanted to get away from.
There was only one room booked for me at the Sheraton, and although the place seemed deserted the entire time I was there, the desk manager insisted that they had no more rooms available to accommodate Gupta. I had let Gupta go into the hotel ahead of me, not believing that it really was the hotel where I was booked and not wanting to lose the cab if we had to find another hotel. I’ve ever since thought he paid the desk staff to say they were booked up. Without consulting with me, Gupta told the desk manager it would be just fine for us to share the room. I said it would be only if it were just for the one night. Otherwise we’d go to another hotel. The desk staff sheepishly acknowledged that they could find a separate room for Gupta after the first one.
Gupta made the most of that one night. As everywhere I went in India, we had arrived hot and sticky and showers were in order as soon as we got to the room. I let Gupta shower first. When I emerged from the bathroom, with a towel around me, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, naked, and pulling on his meat. His cock was long for his size when it was erect, but it wasn’t thick. His sex talk on the plane had already had me hyped, so when he urged me over to stand in front of him, I responded. He stripped my towel off; got both of my wrists in an iron grip behind my back with one of his strong hands; moved the other between my thighs, with the heel of that hand under my balls and pushing them up and an index finger at my asshole; and he sucked me hard with his mouth. When he was ready to fuck, so was I.
I had never fucked up against a wall quite like he fucked himself on me then. I was backed up against a wall and he hung, facing me, on my front with his fists locked behind my neck. I was supporting and separating his buttocks with the palms of my hands, but, probably looking like a crab, he had his feet plastered to the wall, wide, on either side of my hips, and was pushing and pulling his channel on my cock, fucking himself until we both ejaculated.
I never felt more under his control, almost a prisoner, as I did at supper time, when we went out looking for a restaurant. The town was almost as teeming with people-and needy-looking people-as Old Delhi had appeared. They were just smaller and blabbered more, with almost no English to be heard. They also smiled and laughed more and were more expressive with their hands. But I felt totally lost, completely reliant on Gupta for everything. I could have eaten in the hotel dining room, of course, but he didn’t really give me that option. He just ran ahead of me, out of the hotel entrance, urging me to follow.
That night was more of his controlling sex. I was providing the cock for his channel, but he was controlling how the cocking was done and was providing most of the pumping action. He kept telling me that he was giving me the best fucking I’d ever had, and I was just too polite to tell him otherwise. His mind and mouth were always running way ahead of me, like he wasn’t even listening to anything I said anyway. In that I could definitely see the family resemblance between him and his cousin, Khurana, in New York. The more frustrated I got with Gupta here the more frustrated I got with the Khurana I knew I’d have to return to-and to tell how helpful his cousin had been to me-and to wonder what his cousin was telling him about the sex I had with men.
All of the candidates were excellent. The consulate had done well in reducing them to the most likely. My interest gravitated toward one in particular, a young man named Sanjay. He was so handsome and beautifully formed and had such a winning, shy smile, though, that after the first round of interviews, I had to tax my brain on whether he really was that much better as a candidate or did I focus on him because of sexual interest. I certainly couldn’t deny the sexual interest. And the way he looked at me under long eyelashes and with sultry eyes made me think he had a sexual interest in me too. He wore his straight, black hair in a ponytail, and I fantasized unbinding and running my hands through it as it cascaded to his shoulders. My attraction to him worried me.
It didn’t help that he scored the best in the initial language tests I gave the twenty candidates.
They had all stayed for the entire work day, and at the end of that day, I called them together to let them know which ten I wished to have come back the next day for a second round of interviews and testing.
Sanjay was one of the ten, and the look of gratitude he gave me when I told him that he was ripped at my heart. There was no question he wanted to get out of Tamil Nadu, and the look he gave me made me think he’d do almost anything to do so. I had no trouble fantasizing what he could do for me, but I knew I had to separate the personal from the professional.
Alone in the testing room, I poured over the test results and the personal folders, trying to pick out the best of the best-but really, I knew, also trying to find some way of legitimately disqualifying Sanjay. He made me feel like I’d rarely felt before about a man. And the few I’d felt about in that way had endangered my cushy life in New York. I could not have that. Still, looking at his photograph in his folder was like being a moth drawn to a flame for me. He looked entirely too young. But a check and a cross-check with other information revealed him to be twenty-three. It was the ideal age for who we were looking for for the translator’s position. To have gained the language and area-knowledge skills he exhibited by the age of twenty-three marked him as highly intelligence and quick to process and assess.
No way could I put him lower than the top three.
When I left the consulate, I didn’t want to go back to the hotel just yet. Gupta was supposed to have moved to his own room by now. But even if he had, I wasn’t anxious to move back into his controlling sphere. I could hear the ocean from the street in front of the consulate, so I picked my way through the muddy streets there and, shortly, found myself at the edge of the beach overlooking the Bay of Bengal. From here the sea looked vast and the beach looked almost pristine, even though it bordered a teeming city of nearly five million. That figure alone made me shudder-a city that few in the West even knew about located near the end of the earth and with five million inhabitants.
There were only a few people out on the beach, most of them just standing and looking out to sea. I fancied they all were seeking a private moment, turning toward a vast emptiness and away from a human anthill.
He was standing about half way between the upper edge of the sand and the waves lapping up on the beach. For some reason I recognized him even from the back-out of all of those five million people in Chennai-and even though he no longer wore the clothes he’d been interviewed in.
He was short and a rich brown, but unlike so many in the north, he wasn’t thin and emaciated looking. He was beautifully formed even by Western standards. He was bare above and wearing a white dhoti flowing down to his ankles. The dhoti was being ruffled in the sea breeze, and occasionally opened enough to show a well-turned, if miniature, calf. His feet were in thin-soled sandals. His biceps and shoulders were well muscled, and there was a dip from his shoulder blades and broad shoulders down to a thin waist before his buttocks flared out in back. Not his hips, though, he didn’t have the hips of a woman.
When I came up beside him, I saw that he had his arms folded across his well-muscled chest. A gold medallion on a thick gold chain hung from his neck, the medallion nestled in the cleavage of his chest. He had a sweet, enticing scent about him. Of cloves and cinnamon, and I ever after was to think of the sweetness of these smells when I thought of him.
“Hello,” I said. “It’s Sanjay, is it not?”
“Yes, hello, Mr. Jenkins,” he answered in a soft voice. “Did you hear the sea calling?”
“Yes, exactly,” I answered, a bit surprised because only now I realized that this was so. “Did you as well?”
“Yes, I often come out here to listen to the sea. Often I need to withdraw.”
“Withdraw?”
“Yes, from Chennai, from the taboos of Indian society.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I answered, my heart beginning to beat faster, because I had a definite inkling that I did know what he meant.
He turned and gave me a sharp, knowing look that went to the quick of me. Then he returned his gaze to the sea. “I have a feeling that you do know.”
My heart was racing. Should I just pretend I hadn’t heard him say that? His voice was low. Could he believe that a statement that stripped all pretense from me had gone unheard?
“You did well in the interview and the testing today,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“Very well.”
“My heart soars at the sound of that.”
There was silence between us for nearly a minute, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. It was more of a building of the senses and of a sensuality in just being close to each other. I certainly felt it, but I felt the heat of it coming off his body too, even though the sea breeze was getting chilly. I moved a hand out from my body, toward him, and although I didn’t see him noticing I’d made that gesture, he placed his hand in mine.
“If I asked you to come with me, now, would you do it?” It was not of my own will that I said that; it just came out of me.
“Yes.”
“I’m not talking about for more testing for the position.”
“I know you’re not.”
After double locking my hotel door to bar a visitation by Gupta, I began the evening- and night-long fuck of Sanjay on the bed in my hotel room with the small of his back on the foot of the bed, his legs running up to my shoulders on either side, his feet only reaching the hollow under my shoulder bones and with my palms on his pecs and puffed-up nipples. As with the two Indians I previously had fucked, it was hard going getting the thickness and length of me into his tight channel. But with Sanjay I took my time, and we were both panting and breathing heavily and groaning at the effort. But I was inside and fully buried, amazed that he had taken all of me. He was trembling and watching my eyes with his, big and brown under think, long, black lashes, looking like a deer in the headlights. But I could see trust and acceptance in them as well.
I leaned my face down to his and ran my hands behind his head, lifting his face to mine. My fingers broke the band he was using to gather his hair into a ponytail and then ran through his long, dark hair as it cascaded down to his back. Our lips met in a tender kiss, which turned into one of mutual hunger and need . . . and I began, slowly to pump inside him in long, slow strokes. His cock wasn’t small for a man his size, and it continued to harden as I fucked him. But he didn’t ejaculate. He clutched my arms with his hands and moaned deeply, but he remained tense, not relaxing into the fuck, almost as if he was just enduring it.
I slowed the pumping, trying not to hurt him any more than necessary. Being surprised he had accommodated my cock in his confining channel, and feeling him so small, I wanted to maintain control of myself and was giving him a gentle, loving fucking.
For once I wasn’t thinking only of myself and my own pleasures; I was thinking of his enjoyment as well-and his endurance.
I changed the position, moving him onto his belly on the bed, and I stretched out on top of him, bearing most of my weight on my elbows and knees, but my cock buried, again, to the hilt in his channel and me trying to touch him in as many places as I could-my lips in the hollow of his neck, my toes rubbing his calves-as I slow-plowed and he moaned and groaned.
But, to my surprise and concern, I soon realized that his trembling came from his soft sobs.
“Am I hurting you?” I whispered. “Am I possessing you too much?”
“No, not that,” he murmured. “I just was expected something more-something different from a man your size. I’m not porcelain. I won’t break. I want to be worn out, taxed to limit, fucked hard. Punished. You have such a big cock that I expected more. I thought that you would . . . could . . . when I am taken I want to be taken totally, no prisoners spared. I want to know that I have been . . . fucked.”
I fucked him then as I had done the room boy in the tub, my knees jammed up under his buttocks, his torso flopped back in front of me, arms dangling down to the bed surface, head arched back, a cry and big “Oh” on his mouth, and, hands gripping his waist, pulling him hard off and on my cock.
I rode him doggy style with him bent over the arm of an easy chair and me using his gold chain as reins. I fucked him standing up with him draped on the front of me, fists locked behind my neck, knees hooked on my thighs and, me, palming his buttocks, brutally jamming him on and off my cock-and then still standing, with his torso bowed over the bed, me grasping his wrists and holding his arms taut, and him locking his ankles behind my thighs and me thrusting, thrusting, thrusting.
After his third ejaculation and my second, we fell in a heap on the carpet, panting and heaving and grunting and groaning. He cupped my face in his hands and we kissed deeply, after which he said in a hoarse voice, “Yes, just like that. You are a horse and your fury, your cruel, total taking, arouses and satisfies me fully. Indian men copulate too delicately. This, this is what I’ve wanted, what I’ve dreamed of getting.”
I fucked him, brutally up against the shower wall under the streaming water with his knees hooked on my hips, my lips and teeth working over his mouth and his nipples, and thrusting up deep inside him again and again and again.
And I mounted and fucked him hard three times in the night. After the last time, I ached to possess him as fully as I had the first time, to become one with him, our minds and bodies fused for all time. Between fuckings we lay close together with our arms entwined and our hearts beating together in unison as I drank in the clove and cinnamon sweetness of his scent.
I left him in the morning, on his back on the bed, his knees bent and legs spread, an arm thrown over his eyes, and moaning softly.
I scheduled him ninth out of ten interviews and tests that day to give him a chance to recover and be there on time. With a heavy sense of regret, though, I had already decided I would not hire him.
Sanjay aced the second interview and got all of the test questions right. I didn’t tell him that, though. At the end of the day, I told that he had done well on the tests but not nearly well enough. He seemed more resigned than crushed when I told him this, and it occurred to me that in a city of five million with less than a third of that many jobs, interview rejection must be the assumption of all candidates. I mourned that that was so. But mostly I mourned that I could not give Sanjay the job.
I looked for signs that he had expected to get the job because he’d let me fuck him. But I saw none. If I’d seen that, I would have offered to pay him a large sum. Not having seen that, I felt I couldn’t insult him with suggesting he was a whore.
“Does that mean . . . that we won’t be together again?” he asked with sad eyes.
“Probably. I’ll make my final selection tomorrow and the consulate will handle the processing from there. I’ll fly back to New Delhi and then back to New York.” I tried not to make it sound too hard, but I also tried to make it sound final-and inevitable.
“Oh. Did you not like me? Did I ask for too much?”
“I liked you fine. It was good. Very good. We just won’t be on the same continent.” And that indeed was the crux of the matter. I certainly did like him. I thought that I might even love Sanjay. I knew that his body brought me great joy, and I loved fucking him. But he could not be in New York. I could not trust myself with him in New York. I could not rock the boat with Jennifer that way. My cushy life was too important to me. I steeled my heart and wished him luck. I said I would put in a good word for him to the consulate for the possibility that they someday might need an excellent translator.
He left quietly, and if it was a sob I heard when he got to the door, I pretended that I didn’t.
That night, after he had ridden my cock, Gupta quizzed me on how the candidate search was going-and pointedly asked me if I’d found anyone who spoke better English then he did. Nearly half of them did, but I diplomatically brushed on, concentrating on what else he had asked.
“It was hard deciding. I still have work to do on it tomorrow, but I think I will be ready to leave the morning after that. You can go ahead and look into flight schedules back to New Delhi for us. There is one, named Sanjay, who is beyond excellent.”
“The well-muscled, dark brown one with the pretty face and ponytail?” Gupta asked.
“Yes,” I answered, disconcerted because I had no idea when Gupta might have seen Sanjay. Did he, perhaps, see him leaving my room this morning after I had left?
But he didn’t pursue the point. And he didn’t try to maneuver me into another fuck. He dressed and left the room. I double-locked the door behind him, showered, and got my first full night’s sleep since arriving in India.
I woke up full of remorse. I couldn’t do this to Sanjay just because he was such a good and willing lay. It wasn’t just to him. I had to include him in the last set of candidates. I breakfasted with Gupta in the Sheraton coffee shop and called the consulate and asked them to send someone to inform Sanjay he was still in the running and should appear at the consulate for another test if he was still interested in the job. I had his folder and read his address over the phone to the secretary at the consulate.
Between the second and third interview of the five I’d called back-six, counting Sanjay, Gupta appeared at the consulate and called me aside.
“I went to this Sanjay’s home to make sure he got the word you would test him today,” Gupta said. He was wearing a sad face and spoke slowly and haltingly.
“Yes, and?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Clifford. Sanjay took his life last night?”
“Took his life?” I heard him, but I rejected what he had said. It couldn’t be. It was just too horrible.
“His family said he went down to the sea and just swam out into the water. They recovered his body this morning.”
I sat down hard on a bench in the corridor, my ears buzzing. I felt like I was going to be sick.
“But I don’t know why you need to continue the interviewing,” Gupta said. “I think we both know I am the best man for the job. Khurana told me all about what was needed, and I have prepared myself. I have even let you make love to me. I think it’s obvious the job should be mine. When I am in New York, you can make love to me as often as you want to.”
I looked up at him dully, the horror of what had been happening to me sinking in. It all had been engineered by Khurana-to get his cousin the job. Just as upon hearing that Sanjay was beyond my touch now and realizing that I loved him and my heart had rent, hearing what Gupta had said-so crassly transitioning from telling me that Sanjay was dead to making a claim on the translator position-and saying that he had let me fuck him when he had controlled all of the fucking-I woke up and my heart snapped back together and hardened.
“You can’t have the job, Gupta. Not only are you not as qualified as any of the five I’m interviewing today, but you cannot have the job precisely because we have fucked. I can’t let you come back to New York with me as a man I’m fucking. I can’t do any of that in New York. I am married. I have a reputation.”
“But we have fucked, and I can say that all the way to New York if I must,” Gupta said, his tone just as hard as mine.
“You want a job, I’ll give you one. But here, in India,” I said, realizing the truth of what he said about knowing already that I went with men and my mind already racing ahead to repair my folly. “We are opening an office in India. Khurana will come here as chief. And you can work in the office, but only as long as you keep your mouth shut-and your body in India.”
We’d only talked at the corporate level of opening an office in India and no one had mentioned sending Khurana here, but I could make it so. I knew I could. Now I couldn’t have Khurana in New York either.
“I think you should make your own way back to New Delhi,” I said. “I will be traveling separately now.”
I stood up and marched toward the entrance of the consulate, right by the receptionist, not seeming to hear her trying to tell me that the five remaining candidates were here now and ready to be interviewed again.
I walked to the beach and stood there, looking out to sea. And I wept. After I had no more tears, I opened my briefcase and fished out Sanjay’s folder. It took effort to find flowers and to make my way on my own without help to the address Sanjay had given, but I did it not only because it was the right thing to do, but also as a token of atonement. Perhaps I personally hadn’t caused Sanjay’s death, but I had provided that last push over the edge for him, that last rejection, both sexually and as an opportunity to escape out into the larger, more forgiving and supportive world.
“Sanjay, he not here,” the old crone said when she opened the door of a small shack in a sea of temporary hovels.
“Yes, I know. I am so sorry. I am a friend. I’ve come to-“
“He has gone to Mumbai, this morning. A man from New Delhi came and gave him money and Sanjay has gone to find job in Mumbai.”
I swallowed my breath, almost choking. So that’s how it was, what Gupta had been up to. I could have cursed him, but I was too elated in knowing that Sanjay hadn’t died. “Mumbai? Where in Mumbai? How can I contact him there?”
But she was already closing the door on me. She had taken the flowers, though.
I had lost him once; I couldn’t lose him again.
In the airport, after changing my ticket to Mumbai, I found a telephone and called Leonard’s office in Delhi. My name was enough for me to be put directly through to him. It always had been. We had met periodically over the years, arranging our meetings by phone to our offices under the guise of being old, dear friends-which, of course, we were.
“Leonard. Yes, I’m fine. But I need something urgently. Even Indian citizens have to register when they move from city to city, don’t they?”
“Yes, certainly, but it isn’t really as draconian as you might-“
“I’m not judging that. Listen, can you, from your position, or from Manjula’s, tap into that system and locate someone?”
“Yes, of course, for you, if that’s what you-“
“Yes, good. I need a location for a Tamil Nadu citizen arriving in Mumbai today from Chennai.” I gave him Sanjay’s name and as much of the personal information from his folder that Leonard needed. “I’m headed for Mumbai myself and will give you a call from my hotel when I get there.”
“No, nothing’s wrong. I have selected him for a position and must get in touch with him as soon as possible.”
My relationship with Leonard was such that I couldn’t tell him that, although I would select Sanjay for the translator’s job, his more significant position would be under me and that the touch I was looking forward to was that of my thick cock inside his tight channel.
I had no idea what I’d do about the life I led with Jennifer when Sanjay and I got back to New York. But I was reassessing my priorities as I chased the man I loved across India, and something would work out. I had to believe that it would. I pulled a handkerchief he had left behind in my hotel room out of my pocket and raised it to my face. I ingested the sweet smell of cloves and cinnamon, feeling Sanjay close beside me.
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