I am not lying, and I was not deluded, I was not crazy. The thing grew smaller. Not so much in length but in its circumference and heft. I remembered it being hard and muscled and healthy, and now it seemed apologetic and wan. Once it needed no excuses, now it was weakened by constant doubt. No, not that Zoya ever said anything. She was still as energetic in her sucking, as compliant as always and as expressive of her pleasure. She moaned when I took her, she shut her eyes, she flung her arms over her head – as always – when the shudders spread from her chut. Once, pounding on her daana, taking her to that edge, driving her over it into the fall of joy, had made me feel righteous and victorious. I was the ruler of her rich brown expanses. But now I had seen what an artful actress she was. On screen, she had made me believe completely that she was someone else. But then, how was I to know that the Zoya I knew, who I thought I knew, was not actually someone else? Was my Zoya only a performance? Were those moans only acting?
This is the ache, if you are unfortunate enough to care what a paid woman feels and thinks. This is the fatal squeeze of that paradox. The more she shrieks from the press of your pleasure, the more you suspect that her sighs are overstated, that you are not pleasing her at all. And you can never know the truth. If you ask, she will tell you what she thinks you pay her to say. If you don’t ask, you will get angry. You will get angry enough so that the only reaction you will accept from her as true is the evidence of her pain. I grew rough in my handling of Zoya. I pulled at her hair, I bit her breasts and tugged at her nipples, and she winced and writhed but never tried to stop me. I understood why. After all, I gave her money. I had paid for parts of this perfect physique. And yet I could never be sure that it was not invulnerable to me, that this body did not escape me most precisely at those moments when I took it most deeply. I grew angry. One morning I took her in a way that I had rarely done before, I took her like I took the boys in jail, like I had taken Mumtaz of the luscious gaand. I ploughed into Zoya from behind, I held her by the hair and took her hard. She screamed and gave way before me. My fingers left scarlet clusters on her sides. ‘Saali,’ I spat out at the flexing camber of her back, ‘randi, take it, here, here. Take it.’
She turned her head against the pull of my fist, and her sweat slipped against my knuckles, and she said, ‘Yes, yes, give, give,’ and she laughed. She laughed. ‘It’s good, saab. Give. Yes, give.’
The delight in that hoarse laugh chilled my golis like a shivery splash of iced water. At once, immediately, I was unable to give. I was incapable. I slipped out of her, and I went in a stumbling rush into the next room. I sat on the sofa, and Zoya followed and curled in next to me. ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
I sent her away. I had nothing to say to her, and in no way could have explained to her what was wrong, what I needed from her. The trap I was in was immaculate. I didn’t trust her joy, and it seemed I couldn’t even hurt her. I was so small. I sat in the dark. I kept thinking of Zoya’s co-star, Neeraj Sen. That bastard was six foot two, with grey eyes and biceps like hand grenades. Yes, he must have a lauda that matched up to the rest of him. I shut my eyes and saw Zoya and Neeraj standing in a doorway, symmetrical and matched and equal to each other. She had an arm around his neck, and a leg raised up to his right shoulder, and she was taking his enormous machine, and she was transported. Her ecstasy was real, I knew it. I could tell. They were coloured red by a rising dawn, and they were happy.
I jumped up, rattled at the side of my head with an open palm. Wake up, bastard. Come back to your senses. Zoya would never do that. Zoya knows what she owes you. Zoya understands that you have made her. Zoya comprehends your power, your reach. Zoya would never offend you. Zoya is a good girl. Realize this.
I apprehended this, I had it locked up in my fists. I knew exactly how much I frightened men, how I overpowered women. Nobody would dare offend me. If there was a fool somewhere in the world who insulted me by mistake, I could have him erased the next day, he would vanish as if he had never existed. I could have Neeraj Sen taken up and vanished. He would cease, he would desist, he would go. He would not exist any more.
No, no, I needed him. I had already spent sixteen crores on this film, and the budget was inflating itself, surging up to reel in all those helicopter chases, those location changes in the songs. I had invested in Neeraj Sen? Why was he so big, the bastard Bengali? Six foot two and bulging? Who had ever heard of a six-two Bengali? Ah, yes, his grandmother had been a film actress, a Shakira Bano, one of those dancer-prostitutes who had become actresses in those black-and-white days. She had been a minor success, and under the screen name of Naina Devi she had played Madhubala’s sister in a couple of films, and had done a famous bar dance with Dev Anand. She had married a Bengali cinematographer and had retired from the filmi game. But her sons had gone into distribution, and now this grandson Neeraj Sen was a hero, three films old and rising. Moving up and high and higher, with his six foot two height inherited from his grandmother, that’s where he got those Pathan muscles. Bastards, I should kill them both, Neeraj and Zoya. There was a Glock in my bedside table, with a round in the chamber, and two extra clips. I could walk in, sweep it up and blow her head off. I could put two bullets in every limb, one in her belly, one in her chut, one in that unreachable heart.
I sent her home instead. I made some excuse about a sudden phone call from Thailand, some urgent work that required my presence. She knew something was wrong, but she was also intelligent enough not to press me. She kissed me (she had to bend low to do that), and then she went back to Bombay and work. I went back to Thailand, and took the yacht out to Ko Samui. And then I tested myself on several girls. I followed Guru-ji’s advice to take only virgins, and paid extravagantly for them. Jojo sent me a girl from Andhra, and another one from Kerala, and a Bengali one. This last one was a Muslim, with hair down to her knees and slanty brown eyes. She wasn’t as tall as Zoya, in fact she stood eye to eye with me. When I laid her down she covered her face with her hands, and I was instantly hard. When I released with one final thrust, she screamed. And in that instant I had the title for my film: International Dhamaka. I lay on top of her, laughing, and called Dheeraj Kapur and Manu immediately afterward. They agreed that it was a dhansu title that would attract the masses and the classes. ‘We are going full speed now, bhai,’ Manu said. ‘Like your title says, we will explode internationally.’ And he did not know how correct he was. With these girls, I was full speed. With all of them I was capable, confidently competent and more. They were too young and inexperienced to fake their reactions. Their pleasures were as real as their pain. I had no doubt, I was so very sure.
But I was also sure that my own pleasures were halved. The sensations that came buzzing up my spine were as high-voltage as always, and the hum in my head that came from seeing a beautiful Bengali novice clumsily tonguing my lauda was still heated, still high. But somewhere in this circuit between my high and my low, between my head and my crotch, there was a missing connection, and this fissure broke the current and damped it. I felt the excitement, but from a great distance. Of course I understood why this was so. I was Ganesh Gaitonde, and I had lived long enough and seen enough of the world to understand it a little, and understand myself even more. I knew why I could be confident and strong with these girls: they were trivial, I cared nothing for them, or for what they felt. When I took the Bengali at night, when I bent her like a bow over the railing of the boat, the water plunged against the prow and the crouching winds rushed the clouds over our heads, and I raced into her but my heart was quite still. It did not move.
Zoya shook me, she shuddered me directly into ecstasy. When I was with her, there was a constant agitation that pierced me through, a vibration, a friction, a warmth that was both joy and pain. When I was away from her, this stirring subsided, but never quite vanished. Zoya had disturbed me, and I hated her for it. And I loved her. I admitted it, I had to admit it to myself: I was in love with her. It was shameful, that I had fallen into the very trap
that I warned the boys against, but I could not deny it. There was this word ‘love’, and now I understood what it meant. Suddenly I didn’t want to fast-forward all those love songs in the movies. No, I wanted to soar for four and a half minutes with Ke kitni muhabbat hai tumse, to paas aake to dekho. In my cabin I sang along with:
Abhi na jao chhhod kar, ke dil abhi bhara nahin
Abhi abhi to aai ho, bahar ban kar chayi ho.
Hawa zara mahak to le, nazar zara bahak to le
Ye shaam dhal to le zara, ye dil sambhal to le zara…
Main thodi der jee to loon, nashe ke ghoont pee to loon
Abhi to kucch kaha nahin, abhi to kucch suna nahin
Abhi na jao…
The boys noticed my new affection for swooningly sentimental music and made little jokes about it. I laughed back at them, with them, but I told them nothing. I could tell nobody, the very thought of revealing my love made me flush and tingle like I had a fever, like I was a little boy caught by a sudden glance of light from an opening door. I shut away my love in a bunker, I hid it and held it safe. I didn’t tell the boys, I didn’t tell Guru-ji, I didn’t tell Jojo. I didn’t even tell Zoya. I just gave her diamonds, and a new car, and sent her regular shipments of cash.
I am sure she understood. We spoke every day, even as the pre-release madness of dubbing and photo-shoots and interviews took her from one end of Bombay to the other. I followed her on her special pink late-model Nokia mobile phone which I had given to her, which of course she used only to talk to me. On that phone, she called me ‘Bill’, and told me stories of her day, and her meetings with magazine editors and producers, and her excitement for the future. I listened, and gave her advice, and dreamed with her. In those days, just before the release, everything seemed possible. Even a bigger lauda.
I loved Zoya so much that I was determined to be bigger for her. In Bangkok I could have bought a tiger’s penis, and had it pounded into pills that promised me potency and stamina. But I was long past such superstitions. I already knew how to take care of potency and stamina: I ate food with little oil in it, I exercised every day, I had a new stair-climber installed next to the engine room, so I could get a rigorous aerobic workout. No, all I needed was size. And in this age of research and development, I could expand scientifically. By now I was more fluent in my handling of the computer, and could navigate my way to a search engine. I told the boys I didn’t want to be disturbed, closed the door, and I searched. I had trouble with the language, at first. Typing in ‘lauda’ found a site for an airline named exactly that, and a site about some racing-car driver, and another one about drug called ‘laudanum’. You stupid bastard, I said to the half-face I could see in the screen, of course use English. I knew the English, I knew it from the X films that the boys brought on board, from the tangled acrobatics of those images, from the close-ups. I typed in ‘big cock’. Now I got listings of dozens of sites offering pictures of enormous laudas in every colour. I didn’t want that. I had to struggle for a few minutes, until I remembered ‘penis’, from an article in the Times of India about elephants and their mating habits. I tried ‘penis size,’ which gave me surveys of average size of penises, but also, lower down on the page, http://www.100percentpenisenlargement.com and http://www.big-penis-enlargement-size.com and http://www.betterpenis.info. Much better.
So, I read and learnt and thought, I took many days to make my decision. This was no trivial decision. I was trying to grow and structure my future and myself. I was trying to anchor my love, to make my beloved happy, happier. I studied, and I thought. I learnt the physiology of the penis. Cross-section drawings showed me the mechanisms under the surface, the branching pipes of blood that made it rise and made it strong. Very early, I ruled out the use of penis pumps as obviously harmful to the capillaries, causing tiny tears in the tissue as the penis expanded in a vacuum. Weights, I thought, would work. Hang enough weights on a tissue and it will lengthen, that was obvious enough. I had seen, back home, tribal women whose ear lobes were stretched from the earrings they wore. But the elongated ears had always seemed hideous to me. A stretched penis may be longer, but it would be thinner, like a piece of rubber pulled out of shape. No, not acceptable. I wanted length, but I also had to have girth. It had to be steel-hard, a sleek, tireless engine that Zoya would love.
And then I found Dr Reinnes. A week after I began weeding out the thickets of penis sites, I came upon http://www.scientificpenis.com. The name itself was an attraction, and I clicked on it right away. When I saw the page, I was impressed by its simplicity. There were none of the lurid colours of the other sites here, no huge flashing fonts in green and red that made tall claims. No, just clean, even black lettering on a white background. The whole site was reasonable and neat, it was clean. There was a sobriety about the page, and in Dr Reinnes’s whole approach, that came from him being a medical doctor. As he explained on the site, he ran a regular medical practice in California. His techniques for enlargement had been developed over years of research and experience, and they were based on a deep scientific understanding of the functioning of the human body. And all this was offered discreetly over the internet for the low price of 49.99 US dollars. A simple credit-card transaction would enable the user to access the locked pages which contained the Reinnes Method, and to begin the seeker’s journey of self-improvement.
I had six credit cards, all in different names. And what was 49.99 in good US dollars, for such knowledge? I used my Platinum Visa, in the name of ‘Jerry Gallant’, which was an alias based in a Belgian PO box address. And two minutes of typing later, I had access. I skimmed past the multicoloured diagrams, and the advice on hormonal dysfunction and nutrition. I wasn’t sick, and my intake of protein was already balanced. I only wanted size. Here was the secret: pump more blood into the penile arteries. And this was achieved through a daily programme of exercises, first an application of a hot compress, a towel soaked in hot water and then moulded around the penis. And then the main exercise, which was a milking motion with thumb and forefinger ringed, from the base of the lightly lubricated penis to the head. I tried it right then, in front of the computer, the milking I mean, not the hot towel. Yes, it was true, if you drew the finger-ring down the length of a semi-erect penis, you could see the blood being forced to the head. There were other exercises also, a pulling one for length benefits, and an internal pelvic one for stamina. I could see the sense of the routine, its basis in what lay underneath, the logic of its sequences. Of course you could exercise the penis as you exercised every other muscle in your body, and make it strong and big. The genius of Dr Reinnes was that he gave you a system. I printed out the charts that allowed you to track your daily progress, all the way until you moved to the ‘Advanced’ section six months and many added inches later. I began that very evening.
After forty-seven days of regular and sustained penis exercise, I registered a growth of half an inch. Zoya came to visit me in Singapore four days before the release of International Dhamaka. This was necessarily a lightning visit, she flew in on a Thursday morning and flew out that same evening. Keeping her visit to the city secret was now impossible, since the stewardesses knew who she was now, and little girls came up to the first-class cabin to ask for autographs. So the official story was that she was coming in to do some shopping before the premiere, to pick up some jewellery and dresses. We put her in the Ritz-Carlton and had her go down a private elevator to a waiting limousine. She called me from the car, ‘I’m on my way, saab.’
She was as respectful as always, as careful of my time and feelings. Me, I was nervous. I had on a new black Armani suit, and a tailored gold shirt. My shoes were polished, and my fingernails were shiningly manicured. I sat in an easy chair facing the door, not at all easy. I drank from a glass of Evian, and I was ridiculous, and I knew it. I heard her coming up the stairs. I stood up. The door flung open, she came in, flinging off her hooded coat, shaking back a tidal ripple of hair. I had a bare glimpse of fawn-coloured pants and a little top, a
nd then she ran to me. In the squeeze of her embrace, in the balm of her breasts, all my doubt vanished. ‘I missed you,’ she said. ‘I missed you so much.’
And this was the girl Jojo called the Egotistical Giraffe. She was kissing my neck, coming back up to my lips and then going down to my chest again. With a drawn-out sigh she went to her knees, and nuzzled at my zipper, her arms still reaching up to my shoulders. I put a hand on her forehead and tipped her face up to me. ‘No, wait.’ She was worried, she looked up at me like a reprimanded child. This was our usual ritual when we first met, this frantic first sucking. I loved to see her mouth opening to me. But today I held her chin delicately. ‘We will, we will,’ I said. ‘In two minutes. But first I want to hear about what’s been happening.’
Up she jumped, laughing and happy. We sat on the easy chair, her back and legs sprawled over the arms and on my lap, and she put her arms around me and told me everything. Instead of two minutes it took two hours. She told me about the problems of shooting, the artificial lake that was supposed to be Switzerland, that began to stink because the bastard light-boys kept pissing into it. Then there was the beautiful white horse that gave eight shots in complete calm, it was a long-time filmi horse. Then, in the lighting break before the ninth shot, an electrician was dragging a power cable through the grass, and this white horse panicked, and bucked, and backed itself off a cliff and dropped thirty feet. They had to shoot it. With a real revolver.
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