What I saw was a plain, wide face with a bulbous nose, and lips so thin and curled with contempt that her mouth resembled a clam that some-one had poked with a stick. The make-up on her face and neck was geisha thick, and gave her scowling expression a villainous intensity.
Prabaker spoke to the woman in Marathi.
‘Show him!’
She responded by lifting aside the covering shawl of her sari to reveal a pudgy roll of stomach. She pinched a good pound or two of the flesh between her stubby fingers, and squeezed it, looking at me with one eyebrow raised to invite praise.
Prabaker let out a soft moan, and his eyes widened.
The woman then scowled dramatically left and right along the corridor before raising her blouse a few centimetres to reveal a long, thin, pendulous breast. She seized the breast and flapped it at me a few times, winking her eyebrow with a bafflingly inscrutable expression. My best guess, stabbing wildly in the dark, was that it might’ve been a menacing, derisive sneer.
Prabaker’s eyes widened even more, and he began to breathe noisily through his open mouth.
The woman covered her breast, and then whipped her long plait of black hair over her shoulder with a jerk of her head. She took the plait in both hands and began to squeeze downward toward the tapering end with her fingers, as if it was a half-empty tube of toothpaste. A thick dribble of coconut oil gathered before her fingers, and dripped from the end of the plait onto the threadbare carpet.
‘You know, Lin,’ Prabaker mumbled, gaping hungrily and almost fearfully at the drips of oil. His right foot actually began to stamp, softly, on the carpet. ‘If you don’t want to have a sexy business with this woman… if… if you really don’t want… well… I could use that cash deposits my own good self…’
‘I’ll see you back at the room, Prabu,’ I replied, smiling politely at the woman. I offered her a little bow, and took her scornful snarl with me back to our room.
I thought to use the time to update my Marathi dictionary. There were already some six hundred words from everyday usage in the list. I’d made the notes on scraps of paper, as people in the village had given me words and phrases, before transferring them to a sturdy journal for future reference. The last and latest of those notes were spread out on a little writing table, and I’d just begun to enter them in my journal when the door sprung open and Prabaker swaggered into the room. He walked past me without speaking, and fell onto his back on his bed. About nine minutes had passed since I’d left him at the prostitute’s door.
‘Oh, Lin!’ he moaned happily, grinning up at the ceiling. ‘I knew it. I knew she was a full-of-experience woman.’
I stared at him in bewilderment.
‘Ah, yes!’ he gushed, sitting up and letting his short legs swing from the bed. ‘She gave me a big money’s worth. And I gave it to her a very, very good sex also. And now! Let’s go out! We will be having some foods, and some drinks, and a party!’
‘If you’re sure you’ve got the strength,’ I muttered.
‘Oh, no need for strength in this place, baba. This place I’m taking you is such a fine place that very often you can even sit down while you are drinking.’
As good as his word, Prabaker directed us to a hovel, about an hour’s walk past the last bus stop on the outskirts of the town. With a round of drinks for the house, we insinuated ourselves into the crush of dusty, determined drinkers who occupied the bar’s one narrow stone bench. The place was what Australians call a
The men we joined in the bar were workers, farmers, and a routine assortment of lawbreakers. They all wore sullen, persecuted expressions. They said little, or nothing at all. Fierce grimaces disfigured them as they drank the foul-tasting, homemade alcohol, and they followed each glass with a miscellany of grunts, groans, and gagging sounds. When we joined them, Prabaker and I consumed the drinks at a gulp, pinching our noses with one hand and hurling the noxious, chemurgic liquid down our open throats. By means of a fierce determination, we summoned the will to keep the poison in our bellies. And when sufficiently recovered we launched ourselves, with no little reluctance, into the next venomous round.
It was a grim and pleasureless business. The strain showed on every face. Some found the going too hard and slunk away, defeated. Some faltered, but were pressed on by the anguished encouragements of fellow sufferers. Prabaker lingered long over his fifth glass of the volatile fluid. I thought he was about to admit defeat, but at last he gasped and spluttered his way through to empty the glass. Then one man threw his glass aside, stood up, and moved to the centre of the shabby little room. He began to sing in a roaring, off-key voice, and because every man of us cheered our passionate and peremptory approval, we all knew that we were drunk.
