MEMORIES from the EAST

by Abdulla Kazim

  The competition was to start shortly, and I could see some topless girls. My group dug their way through the crowded bar, and I followed their trail. While trying to avoid any physical contact with anyone there, I let my hands loosely brush the sweaty hips and thighs of the cute females in the crowd. How strange that so many girls would attend a competition that was for the same gender as them! Most men would feel embarrassed or disgusted to stand in front of another man and stare at his private parts, but all those girls were chanting and enjoying themselves looking at other half-naked females. Women have more privileges than men, it seems.

  I didn’t have to push a single person to reach the front line; my group had special access because of the bright image they showed of themselves. People are always aware of status and the threats it may present.

  Four girls and one woman sat on square white plastic chairs, stripped of their bras. The tits, of different sizes, exposed their nipples into the semi-damp atmosphere, and they were enjoying the chattering of the herd and bringing joy into the unlawful joy-seeking hearts. I was, of course, one of that herd; I wasn’t much better than any of them, if I was any better at all.

  A black-teethed thin guy with narrow red eyes approached the first line of attendees and walked around the girls’ breasts waiting for the start of the competition. He reached his hands up, and I could feel him standing on his toes to push himself a little higher than his normal height, and the dusty brownish flesh of his belly fell out, sneaking onto the brown belt that was wrapped around the modern-style shredded jeans that were decorated by the natural age of the cloth. But the thing to mention about the guy is that he didn’t smell at all bad. He posted a hand-written A—size piece of paper on a few pillars that were fully covered with advertisements.

  I raised my head, and so did my league, and we looked at the new post, “Rules of Competition,” it said in big text, and below it were the points.

  Band Size Measurements Plus 5 inches

  Cup Size measurement

  Regular Bra Size

  And below these lines, there was a note that read, “Free 750ml beverage for the winner”. Then I lowered my eyes and saw the thin guy placing a Tanduay bottle on top of the wooden box that contained music speakers. A bottle of rum! I thought I just couldn’t see anything logical in getting such a cheap prize in a competition where the females have to expose their private parts to the public. But there was really no logic in the whole of what was going on there, and that made that particular competition even more fun.

  A new character was introduced then to the scene—a crude-looking girl in her late twenties with red-brown highlighted hair that was shorter than mine. Her yellowish eyes made her look like someone addicted to some illegal drug. Her shoulders were stretched out, and they resembled those of a man. She appeared from the back of the competitors and, to amuse them, she walked past brushing her big fingers against their bare backs. She stood now in front of them and scanned them with her eyes. I could see she was a tomboy from the way she was looking at those girls.

  The tomboy approached the first girl and quickly she wrapped around her chest the white measurement tape she carried in her pocket. She brought a small gasp from the girl by adding a little pull as she was holding the ends of the tape. She tightened the tape around the girl’s ribcage directly under the bust and then released the tape and picked out a tiny pencil and a square piece of paper to write down the measurement. Again she wrapped the tape around the girl, but this time she laid it around the fullest part of her bust. She noted down the measurement again. Amidst a huge noise from the crowd, the tomboy moved to the next girl, and so on. I could see that she was savouring her work; anyone who has any elements of manhood would cherish the opportunity to caress different sizes of soft tits. She made a longer stop when she measured the last lady; I could find only one reason for that—the large dark areolas.

  The tomboy went back for a minute and then returned to announce the winner. But just at that moment a young girl rushed in, pushing through the crowd and shouting. The noise of the crowd went a bit lower, and all eyes turned to the newcomer. The girl who had just arrived was the prettiest girl in the room, wearing tight light-blue shorts and a light-green T-shirt. Her hair was just touching her shoulders, but it was very thick like a lion’s. She was gasping, and her perspiration was making damp spots through the T-shirt.

  The young princess stood in front of the tomboy, whose jaw was as open as mine, and took off the T-shirt. The big jugs she carried on her chest fascinated the room, given her young figure, and the noise grew louder than ever. All those topless girls in the room didn’t enchant me as much as she did. I think she enchanted every single man in the room. She had fairly white skin that loosely allowed a few red veins appear visible at the top of her thigh, and she had one green one along the surface of her throat. The yellow straps of her green bra struggled to hold the weight of her jugs. She reached her hands and unhooked the bra and there they jiggled, two human natural humps covered in moisture.

  The tomboy stepped towards her, wrapped the measuring tape around her, and took all the necessary measurements. Putting the measuring tape into her pocket, the tomboy jokingly cupped one hand on the young pumped breast. The young girl, full of confidence, just looked in the eyes of the half-woman, and that was enough to push that hand away from her chest. The tomboy withdrew and, raising her voice, announced the winner. It was the new young girl. The tomboy proclaimed that her bra size was 36DD, and she was—no surprise—just fourteen years old.

  I had a question in my mind of how they figured out the bra size, but as soon as the question started to linger in my mind, the guy who had asked me to join his colleagues came to my rescue.

  “Do you know how they find the cup size?”

  “No,” I replied simply.

  But my answer seemed to show my ignorance to the guy. He looked at the friend who was standing beside him, and they both smiled.

  “They take first, as you saw, the band size, which is the measurement of the ribcage just under the bust. They add five inches to the measurement, and if the resulting value is an odd number, they go to the next even number. Then comes the cup-size measurement, and this is taken by measuring around the fullest part of the bust. The formula is to subtract the band size from the cup size. The regular bra size is determined based on this result; if one inch or less, then it is A cup, two inches is B, three is C, four is D, and five is DD.”

  I appreciated this excellent information from this very young man. I smiled at him and nodded to show my gratitude for the clarification.

  Tanduay was presented to the winner, and the girls started putting on their dresses, and most of them were murmuring unhappily about the winner. The competition ended, and the crowd got busy drinking and dancing. Four sexy girls approached, and they happen to be attached to the group I accompanied. They exchanged kisses, and the boys shook hands with me before merging in the crowd with their girls, one of whom secretly looked back at me and sent me a flying kiss in the air.

  But I remained in my place, standing and staring at that enchanting young girl, who now put on her bra and with a little force pulled back the straps to push up her tits. When she was done with the hook, she glanced at me but ignored me and picked her T-shirt, adjusting it by pulling it inside out, and slid her head through it so that when it came out of the top, her hair was bushy. She put her hands through it and brushed it out. Holding her Tanduay bottle, she looked at me again and came nearer.

  “You have good eyes, sir, and a good nose,” she commented.

  “Only if you see them so,” I said.

  “You might want to invite me for a drink.” She smiled.

  “I thought alcohol is not legal at your age.”

  “Nor is it legal to have sex with an underage girl.” She raised her thick eyebrows.

  I guess she understood the ultimate meaning of our
meeting. I invited her for a couple of drinks, as she wasn’t satisfied with just one. In the middle of the drinks, I asked her about her family and how she managed to attend such a loud party, being so young. She told me that just two days ago her “dictator uncle”, as she called him, had passed away and she was now free; that during the life of her uncle, who took care of her after the death of her parents, she was banned from drinking, partying, having a boyfriend, and even staying out late at night.

  At the end of the conversation, she was very loose and her behaviour turned childish. What an unfaithful child she was. Just hearing what had earlier been taboo for her made me pity her poor uncle. How ungrateful and narrow-minded humans can be sometimes!

  I gladly helped the girl stand and wrapped my arm around her under her bust. The tips of my fingers were free to feel the bottom elastic of her bra. Relentless haste was eating me and provoking my lust for that demandingly unique individual. I delivered her to my hotel room, where she started dancing around under the sweet influence of alcohol. I let her do whatever she liked in my green-painted room; she slightly collided with a small table and fell down and burst into hysterical laughter; she hit with her hand a hotel-owned flower vase and smashed it on the floor; she babbled words, many of which were bad ones.

  I didn’t care about all those extra rotten aspects on her bad surface character. I knew that she was going to lie in my bed in the end and that I cared about being with her that night. And that is what happened in the end. She jumped on me, really jumped, and I took few steps back to keep myself balanced on my feet. Her breasts pierced through my chest, but I wasn’t satisfied with that. I picked her up under her bottom and had her sit on a foam-padded wooden chair. I stripped off her T-shirt and then put my fingers under the lower band of the front of her bra, while I lay the second hand just directly under the left breast. It was an intentional act to hold in my hand a sweet sensation. I loved to feel the wet weight of that full breast fall sweepingly and slide unto the surface of my palm. I held it and squeezed it gently like a lively flower and brushed my thumb around the light areola and atop that young nipple. I caressed that young beauty of the night, and the best part was when I went into her; that one green vein That ran along the side of her throat tightened, thickened, and popped out beautifully as her pupils turned up under her eyelids, leaving behind the white sclera like newly turning ghost.

  The night went well, very well, as it the lustful demands of that soft beauty extended our spirit of pleasure. I don’t know how many hours I slept in between feeding upon that juvenile vagina and skimming my cheeks against the soft god-sent beauties of that young chest.

  Then my mobile phone rang—something that hadn’t occurred for the last month or so. I opened my eyes slightly with my blurred vision and reached my hand to my left to feel for my mobile on the bed.

  “Who is this?” I asked, answering the phone.

  “This is John James,” the voice replied.

  I remained silent in my half-awake state, trying to figure out who the speaker was.

  “The guy from the cross-stitching shop.” The voice came as if reading my mind.

  How could I not recognize his soft voice, but why should I? I rubbed my eyes with the bottom of my palm and saw that the digital wall clock read 6:05 a.m. I couldn’t believe that I was getting a call from that strange guy at that early hour of the day. Then in a flash my mind recalled the big-breasted teenager I had slept with last night. With the phone held to my ear, I pushed up my body on the bed and looked next to me. There was only the scrambled bed sheet, the one part of the mess we created together, but she was nowhere to be seen. The room was very quiet, apart from the music that leaked out from the mobile phone. I flipped the bed sheet over and stepped out of the bed and peeked into the toilet, but there was no sign of her. One thing that jumped into my mind was whether I was dreaming about the joy of the previous night, but her yellow panties lay among the scrambled bed sheets.

  “Can I meet you today?” John James said.

  “Okaaay.” I said blindly, while reaching down to the bed and picking up the panties with the tips of my fingers.

  “I will see you then by five.”

  “Okay.” Another unconscious reply came from me, and now I was examining the underwear in my hand and starting to believe the reality of the big-breasted princess in my bed. And on the floor there existed yet another proof—the shattered remains of the colourful flower vase.

  All of a sudden I felt as if the eyes of John James were on my nude body as I stood near my bed. I pulled off the bed sheet and wrapped it around my waist with a single hand.

  John James ended the call and only then did I realize the commitment I had given that guy. But two things were missing from my room: the girl and my wallet. She wasn’t just an untamed badly behaved child; she was also a thief. But I guess she deserved the eight thousand pesos in the wallet; that wasn’t a loss for me at all. There was nothing personal in the wallet, and I was one step wiser than I had been.

  22

  I started my training with John James that same day. From just standing and watching him work on the cross-stitch pattern, to sitting together in a restaurant, and finally to accepting his invitation to go and work in his home, we got to know each other well. He appeared to be interesting to talk with and a funny character, but my hidden internal objection was to him being gay. It is not that I have any prejudice against homosexuals; I believe that one should do what one believes in, and one shouldn’t care much about what others do in the world as long as they mean no hatred or malice towards others. It is just that I always feel slightly uncomfortable around gays. Thus I was always somewhat hesitant in my dealings with him. I got some comfort seeing him answer his mobile phone on a regular basis and saying that it was his boyfriend. I didn’t wish to mingle with such types; I have always been straight in my sexual tendencies.

  Cross-stitching happened to be a very easy leisure-time task to learn. It required just one day to learn its techniques and one week to master it. My time with John James was at an end, and I wished to pull myself away from him, but he suggested that we could work on a piece of art that would cost us nothing more than time and would bring us cash in our pockets. He almost pleaded with me, saying that if money wasn’t important to me, it was to him and that he couldn’t finish a big piece of work alone because he was always busy during the first half of the day at the shop, and in evenings he would feel lazy and too tired to do any extra job.

  I agreed not because of the cash I would make out of that hobby, as I knew it wouldn’t bring enough to feed me, but to help him fill his pocket. And so we started working on a 60 by 50 inch Aida canvas on a picture entitled “Green Life In Africa”; it showed the sun sending its rays over the colourful clothed heads of black happily smiling ladies enjoying their noon-time harvest. I wished the picture was applicable to real life.

  It was really a tedious job to work on that picture. Initially, I started working on it in my apartment hour after hour just to rid myself of a wrongly made commitment. One day John James invited me to join him in his apartment, saying that he would help me with the picture. I had visited his apartment on previous occasions in the initial stages of learning, and so it didn’t intimidate me to visit it again. It had been one whole sexless week for me, and the task was consuming my effort. I was feeling pain at the top of my shoulders from continuously sitting over the task with my head bent.

  His apartment was so plain and clean. He hung stylish pictures of himself on different angles of the walls, made ugly with makeup and hairstyles that killed any little beauty he possessed. He asked me to sit and listen to him sing. I did what he asked, and he brought me a glass of wine. Sitting next to me on the purple rug, he pulled out his recording ornaments. I pushed myself aside before he could start his recorder and video camera and sing.

  What a magnificent voice he had! His voice was no different from Jo
hn Mayer singing “Say What It Needs to Say”. Such a strange character possessed a magnificent voice. He finished his song and stopped recording himself. Then he dragged into the scene his Apple laptop and connected it to the net. Opening the YouTube website, he uploaded his recently taken video and then asked me to and watch a video. Despite the beauty of his voice, I wasn’t keen to hear him sing the same song, but the video he showed me was a different one, and below it was in bold the number of times the song was watched, 3726, and a few comments were placed beneath the video.

  I simply, without any wonderful words, congratulated him on his talent and asked whether we could work on our Green Life in Africa. I didn’t wish to sit the whole evening with him. And so he turned his hand to the picture, and we started working together, me quiet and his lips trembling with some sort of local song. I could catch him glancing at me and the glass of wine I had placed next to me. He wanted the glass back, I thought, and so I swallowed its half-full contents in a single sip. As I vaguely recall, there was a foggy smile on his face afterwards, and in the midst of my clouded view, I could see him as an imaginary ghost approach me with a small pink digital camera, and the flash exploded into my eyes, blinding them.

  When I opened my eyes, John James was sitting in front of me stitching. His dark-pink top dress brought some discomfort to my eyes. I found it surprising to find myself lying on the rug, unconscious of anything around me. I sat and rubbed my eyes and saw him still singing and working. He turned to me then.

  “I see you were so tired you fell asleep here,” he said.

  “How long have I been sleeping?” I asked, still not believing myself.