JOIN USThe editor of this anthology, who disclaims any erotic qualifications for the job, recollects an early incident in his life involving a young shop assistant who helped him into a shirt. “As her fingers glided down my body, my nerves thrummed in a sweet tingle I had not known before.” Innocent though it was, “it is to this stranger that I owe my initiation into the erotic,” he writes.
Three things are at work here. Sensitivity that converted an innocuous act into an “initiation into the erotic”. Anticipation (though without form or outcome), that made the event momentous. And memory, that returned the moment to him, signalling its importance. Most of the stories reiterate this, it’s mostly in the mind.
Taslima Nasrin’s Sexboy is a representative forerunner. Chaitali develops a lusty cyber-relationship with a man who promises explicit physical things. He turns up, looking even better than she’d imagined. They bond even better, but not in the way she’d imagined. Arunava Sinha’s translation is simple, telling.
It paves the way for a diverse experience, especially in view of the editor’s carte blanche to his writers. G Sampath does instruct the reader, though, to “leave your shoes of political correctness at the door before you enter the portals of literature, especially erotic literature.”
In order of appearance, the next three stories by Kristen Cosby, Amitava Kumar and Jaishree Mishra keep us in full steam.
The lush transition between sensuous kneading of fresh dough to awakening tingles in the flesh charges The Baker of Milna with a more-Moravian-than-Moravia passion, an unashamed tumble in the best European classic style. Harsingar is a quietly narrated story that involves (and stirs up) passion, yearning and possibility in the mind of the young narrator and his theatre friends. In Naked Cleaning Lady, an elderly widower advertises for a cleaning lady who’ll do it in the nude. The cleaning, that is. Just that. It’s a gentle story of two people looking for fulfilment in their own ways, ending with a stiff salute to the erotic.
Cyrus Mistry is the master-stroke of the collection. The Degradation of Erasmo S is about a pent-up teacher whose expulsion results in more freedom to indulge in his prurient proclivities, a dark, hilarious tale brimming with perversion and written with understanding. It’s an uproarious roller-coaster ride ending in a runaway climax.
Krishna Shastri Devulapalli’s The Middle-East Position reminded me of James Hadley Chase and Tarantino’s black humour, with the occasional touch of a Madras pickle.
What’s this with the mind? Ensconced in a comfortable situation, it conjures up treacherous possibilities. Mili-Rudra-Nish. Permutations shift feverishly in her mind as she watches her husband with another, her own chess-game of lust. Mitali Saran dips into a luscious dictionary of the senses, making Insomnia very atmospheric.
Rupa Bajwa’s Jharna in The Last House is a maid who works from house to house, and bonds briefly with a sick employer. Bajwa’s writing is pure, clear, with a powerful raw undercurrent. Simply written, its passion stays far beyond the reading. “My younger sister’s mind had stopped at age four.” Born into a godman’s family, the protagonist of Shinie Antony’s Thy Will Be Done inherits the job along with a dark mental status enlivened only by dreams of passion. It’s a story that skillfully chronicles the scattering of a mind.
Meena Kandasamy’s The Holy Sex Tape Project is a straight-faced monologue that cleverly takes on the prudes, the regressive reformists. A startling inclusion is Kankana Basu’s Graveyard Shift, a delightful erotic thriller unmasking itself as it moves through the night, layer after layer.
Priapic youngsters growing into insatiable seekers of fulfilment, at times eventfully. Vikram Kapur, Tabish Khair and Aditya Sharma see young blood boiling in First Kiss, The House Help and Chunni Lal. The first, deliciously amusing, traces the tale of an embarrassment that reaches fulfilment only in the mind. The second is a masterly, almost archetypal, telling of a boy’s early fascination with a young maid that has him seeking her clones. Chunni Lal is luckier, able to practise his passion except for some technical difficulties. This explicit tale of almost-there lust rests easy when he finally finds his match. The book concludes with Amrita Chatterjee’s erogenous exploratory foray into the where of fulfilment, The Real Sex, about an erotic detour from the thick of a friend’s wedding.
Textbook definitions aside, there’s a moment in your togetherness when you do merge, maybe not physically; when the orgasm of the mind defines your fulfillment. There are also moments when external objects stimulate you even without an object in your mind. That, then, is what the book is about — the intangibles that make you tick, the sum of sensations that make it erotic. When the mind sustains even after physical promises have decayed.
The Pleasure
Principle
Edited by G Sampath
Amaryllis
2016, pp 224, Rs 350