"It's a tempting offer, Prabu," I responded, trying not to laugh, "but I'm really not interested. We only left the village yesterday, and I guess my mind is still there. I'm just... not in the mood."
"Mood is no problem, baba. Only first you get bumping and jumping, then your bad moods will so quickly change,
_futt!"
"Maybe you're right, but I think I'll pass, all the same."
"But she is so experience!" he whined. "Those fellows told me she has made sexy business too many times, and with too many hundred of customers, in this hotel only. I saw her. I looked on the inside of her eyes, and I know that she is a very big expert in the sexy business."
"I don't want a prostitute, Prabu. No matter how expert she is."
"But if you only see her. You will be crazy for her."
"Sorry, Prabu."
"But I told them... that you will come and look at her. Only look. There is no harming for a look, Linbaba."
"No."
"But... but I can't get back my cash deposits if you don't come and do some looking at her."
"You paid a cash deposit?"
"Yes, Lin."
"You paid a deposit, for me to have sex with a woman in this hotel?"
"Yes, Lin," he sighed, raising his arms, and letting them fall to his sides in a helpless gesture. "Six months in the village, you were. Six months with no sexy business. I was thinking you must be feeling a big amount of your needs. Now, no cash deposits returned for me, if you don't take one very small peeking at her."
"Okay," I sighed, copying his helpless gesture. "Let's go take a look, just to get you off the hook."
I pulled the door of our hotel room shut, and locked it. We set off along the wide corridor together. The Apsara Hotel in Aurangabad, north of Bombay, was more than a hundred years old, and built to serve a different, more splendid age. Its high, wide rooms were graced with open balconies facing the busy street, and they featured fine detail in their cornices and ceiling rosettes.
The furniture was shoddy and thrown together in haphazard combinations, however, and the carpet in the corridors had worn through to shaggy holes in many places. The paint was peeling, the walls were bruised with dirt, and the rooms were cheap. Just the place, Prabaker had assured me, for us to spend a happy night on our way back to Bombay.
We stopped outside a door on the far side of our floor of the building. Prabaker was trembling with excitement. His eyes were alarmingly wide.
I knocked. Almost at once, the door opened. A woman, aged something over fifty, stood in the doorway. She was wearing a red and yellow sari, and she glared at us malevolently. Behind her in the room were several men. They were dressed in dhotis and white caps like the farmers in Prabaker's village, and they sat on the floor to eat a hearty meal of dhal, rice, and roti.
The woman stepped into the corridor, and pulled the door shut behind her. She fixed her gaze on Prabaker. He was a full head and shoulder shorter than she was, and he returned her baleful stare with the fixity of a school bully's minor henchman.
"You see, Lin?" he muttered, never taking his eyes off her. "You see what I told you?"
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 someone 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..."
