Chapter 7: The Outsourced Sex Partner (2005)

By 2005 the night shift owned the city after midnight. The BPOs had come up like new teeth along the ring road — glass towers with lit logos, cab fleets queued at their gates, security guards with metal detectors and clipboards — and the young of the town moved through them in reverse hours, sleeping through the morning and waking at dusk to the smell of their own city doing business with the other side of the world. Ravi was twenty-five. He had cut his hair short, bought two ironed shirts, and learned to say his name the American way on the phone — Ray-vee, with a clean R and a swallowed vowel — because the process guide said American customers trust a name they can say. He sat in a cubicle farm on the fourth floor of a building that had been a godown in 1999, wearing a headset with a foam tip, taking calls from people in Ohio and Texas who wanted their broadband explained to them slowly. He was good at it. He had spent his whole life explaining new things to people — a phone to a woman in a green saree, a screen to a girl in a blue-light café, a door to himself — and the patience came out of him like a practiced thing. The money was real money. The city was full of it.

The cab left the office at eleven. White Qualis, a Ganesha sticker on the dash, a driver named Murugan who had worked the same route for two years and played the same cassette of old film songs through the same blown speaker, the singer’s voice frayed and tinny, the whole ride smelling of air freshener and the sweat of the day before. Ravi sat in the second row by the window, and the city slid past the glass — the lit towers, the closed shutters of the bazaar, the men sleeping on the pavement with their heads on their arms — and the other bodies in the cab were the same every night, the same six process executives from the same floor, the same tired silence, the same two women in the back row talking in low voices about call metrics and husbands.

Salma sat across from him, in the row ahead, by the other window. She had joined in March, two months after him, and she sat the way she did everything — straight, careful, her bag on her lap with both hands on it, her saree a dark office color, her hair pinned flat. Thirty-eight years old, thirteen years his senior, married at nineteen to a man named Farooq who was forty-nine now and worked in a private finance office in the old part of the city, in the lanes behind the big mosque where the azan came five times a day and Friday crowds spilled over the pavement.

She had a daughter in the third standard, a late child, born in the tenth year of a marriage that had already gone quiet, and she had come to the BPO because the shift paid better than anything a married woman with her education could make in the day and still let her be home when her daughter woke. She said this to him in pieces, across cab rides, across the hour of the commute, the way people say the ordinary facts of their lives to the person who happens to sit nearest. She had a soft voice that carried the accent of the district town she had married out of. She said sir to the team lead and ya to everyone else, and she laughed rarely, and when she did, she covered her mouth with her hand, as if the laugh were something to be let out carefully.

The conversation that changed things happened on a Tuesday, three weeks after she joined. The cab was full, the music was frayed, and the woman behind Ravi was talking about a movie she had seen, a Hollywood movie with a long love scene, and the man beside her said something about how people in those movies show everything, and the talk moved around the cab the way cab talk does, loose and tired, until Salma said, quietly, from her window — “I’ve never watched one.”

The cab went quiet for a beat. “Never watched a love scene?”

“Never watched a full one.” She said it without embarrassment, the way she said everything, as a fact about the world. “I’ve switched the channel when they came on. My mother used to say it was haram to watch such things with the family in the room. Filth from the West, she called it. A good Muslim wife keeps her eyes covered the way she covers her head.”

Ravi watched her say it. The man beside her laughed and said something about how she was missing out, and the talk moved on, and Ravi sat in the dark of the cab with the fact of her settling into him — thirty-eight years old, married, a mother, a woman who had never once watched a man and a woman do it on a screen, who had spent nineteen years in a bed with one man and called everything outside it filth.

He leaned forward. “You’ve really never seen one?”

She turned. Her face, in the passing light of the street lamps, was the face of someone who had spent her whole life being careful — the set mouth, the eyes that took a person in before giving anything back — and she said, “Really. Never. I know the men in my family watch them. My brother used to hide a magazine under his mattress. I found it when I was fourteen and I looked at one page and put it back, because I was afraid someone would come in.” She paused. “You’ve watched them?”

“Since I was sixteen.”

The words hung in the cab. Her look went on a moment longer than the ordinary, and she said, “Sixteen. That’s younger than my daughter will be in ten years.” And she laughed — the careful, covered laugh — and she said, “I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine seeing that at sixteen. I was still playing with dolls at sixteen.”

“They weren’t dolls,” the man beside her said, and the cab laughed, and Salma shook her head, and the talk moved on, but Ravi watched her across the dark of the cab while she watched the city slide past her window, and the wanting moved in him — the old hunger, the one that lived in windows and open doors and lit rooms — and it had a new shape now, a shape that wore a dark saree and carried a bag with both hands and had never once seen a man and a woman move together on a screen.

He waited a week. He timed it to the night the cab was thinnest — a Thursday, when two of the regulars took the late shuttle — and he sat in the seat across from her and let the silence go on until she looked up from her bag and said, “You’re quiet tonight.”

“I’ve been thinking about something.”

“What?”

“About what you said. About never watching one.” The street lamps came and went across his face. “I have a DVD player. I have a stack of CDs. My roommate’s gone back to his village for a month, so the apartment’s empty every night.” He let it sit. “Come over Friday. I’ll leave you alone with it. You can watch what you want, as long as you want, and if you hate it, you walk out and we never mention it again.”

The careful face was back, the one that read people before giving anything back. “You’re inviting me to your apartment to watch a porn film.” She said it flat, as a fact. “I’m a married woman. A Muslim married woman. People see me going into a Hindu boy’s flat and the talk starts before I’m through the door. My mother would hear it in the next mohalla.”

“Yes,” he said. “And nobody has to see. You come at seven, when the lane’s quiet. You leave at ten, same way. The only person who’ll know is you.” He looked at her. “What’s the worst that happens? You watch one film, decide it’s not for you, and you’ve lost an hour. What’s the best? You find out what you’ve been missing for nineteen years.”

“Just to watch.” She repeated it, testing the weight. “You’ll be in the other room?”

“Yes. Just to watch. I’ll be in the other room, and you can lock the door if you want. You can watch what you want, as long as you want, and no one will walk in.” He paused. “I’m not trying to take anything from you. I’m just offering you a screen and an hour of privacy. That’s all.”

She was quiet. The cab hit a pothole and the Ganesha swayed, and she looked out her window at the lit towers. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve never gone to a man’s flat alone. Not even before I was married. My father kept me close till the day he gave me away.”

“That’s the point,” he said. “You’ve never once had the chance to watch what you wanted, alone, without a man telling you what to think of it.”

She turned back, and the fear and the wanting were braided in her face. “Farooq works late on Fridays. He’s at his office till nine. My daughter stays with my mother on Friday nights now, for the music class.” She looked at him. “What time?”

“Seven. I’ll be home by seven. I’ll leave the DVDs out and the player on.”

“And you’ll leave?”

“I’ll leave. I’ll go and sit in the other room. You watch in the bedroom, on the TV, with the door shut. When you’ve seen enough, you come out and tell me what you think.”

She looked at him a long moment. Then she said, “Okay,” and she said it the way she said everything, as a fact about the world, and she went back to looking out her window, and Ravi sat in the dark of the cab with his heart going like a machine and the wanting a live thing in his chest, and he did not yet know what he wanted, only that the door had opened, and he was already walking through it.

His apartment was a one-bedroom on the third floor of a building near the flyover, rented with the BPO money, furnished with the roommate’s bed and his own mattress on the floor, a television on a metal stand, a DVD player that had cost him a week’s pay, and a stack of CDs in a plastic case that had followed him from the town — the same CDs, some of them, that had played in the blue light of the café, the images loading one strip at a time in 1999, now clean and instant on the flat screen. He cleaned the room on Friday. He changed the sheet. He put the plastic case on the table beside the player, open, the spines of the CDs showing their handwritten titles, and he stood back and looked at the arrangement and felt, for a moment, like a man setting a stage.

She came at seven. She came in a salwar this time, a dark green one, with her hair loose instead of pinned, and she carried a small bag and stood at his door with her chappals in her hand and looked past him into the apartment the way you look into a room you have been imagining for a week. Her eyes went around the walls and stopped, and she said, “You have a picture of your god above the bed.”

“My mother gave it to me when I moved.”

“I’ve never slept under a picture of another god.” She said it quietly, as a fact about the world, and then she stepped inside, and he took her bag, and he showed her the bedroom — the television, the player, the plastic case, the remote — and she stood in the middle of the room with her hands folded and looked at the stack of CDs and said, “So many.”

“Thirty or forty. All kinds. You can pick whatever you want.”

“How do I know what’s in them?”

“The titles are written on the spines.” He picked up a CD and held it out. “This one’s just two people, a man and a woman, in a hotel. This one’s a story — it’s got a plot, kind of, about a delivery girl. This one’s — “ He stopped. “They’re all just people. Doing what people do.”

She took the CD from him and turned it in her hands, reading the handwriting on the spine, and her face was careful, and she said, “And you’ll go?”

“I’ll go.” He moved to the door of the bedroom. “The door shuts from inside. Take as long as you want. When you’re done, come out and tell me.”

She said, “Okay,” and he went out and pulled the door shut behind him and stood in the living room with his heart going and the thin sound of the television coming through the door — the menu screen, the hum of the player — and he sat down on the sofa and looked at his hands and waited.

The first ten minutes were quiet. Then the sound changed — the music of the DVD menu, and then the first scene, the voices, the wet sounds carrying through the door — and Ravi sat on the sofa with the sounds coming to him through the wood and the wanting moving in him like a tide, and he did not watch, he did not need to watch, he had watched a thousand times, and the thing he wanted was on the other side of the door, a woman who had never seen it, seeing it for the first time in his bed, in his room, on his screen.

Forty minutes in, the door opened.

She stood in the doorway. Her face was flushed, and her hands were at her sides, and she looked at him across the living room, and the look was different from every look she had given him in the cab — the careful look was gone, and in its place was something open, something that had been taken apart and not yet put back — and she said, “Is that what it’s like?”

“What?”

“That.” She gestured at the door behind her, at the sounds still coming from the television, the wet sounds, the voice of the woman on the screen rising and falling. “Is that what it’s like? For everyone?”

Ravi stood up. He crossed the room slowly, the way you cross a room when you know the floor has changed under you, and he stopped in front of her, and he said, “For some people. Not for everyone.”

“Not for me.” The words came out flat, and the flush was still on her face, and she said, “I’ve been married nineteen years. I’ve done it — I’ve done it a thousand times, in the dark, in my bed, with Farooq on top of me, and it’s over in five minutes, and I’ve never once — “ She stopped. She looked past him at the wall, and she said, “I’ve never once felt what she’s feeling. In there. On the screen. I thought it was acting. I thought women just — made those sounds because the camera was on.” She looked back at him. “She’s not acting. Is she.”

“She’s not acting.”

“Then I’ve been doing it wrong for nineteen years.” She said it quietly, as a fact about the world, and then she looked at the door, not at him. “I should go. I should go home and think about this in my own bed, beside my husband, and pretend I never saw it.”

“Go if you want,” he said. “But you’ll lie there tonight and wonder what it feels like, and you’ll never know.”

“And you’ll know?”

“I know. I’ve known since I was sixteen. I can show you what she’s feeling. I can show you what your body’s been waiting for.”

She held the doorframe, and he watched her argue with herself, and then she said, low: “Show me. Just once. And if I want to leave, I leave.”

“Show you what?”

“How.” She looked at him. “You’ve been watching since you were sixteen. You know things my husband doesn’t know. You know what she’s feeling in there, and I don’t.” She took a breath. “Show me.”

Ravi looked at her. The blue light moved across her face, and he took the step that closed the space between them, not touching her, but close enough that she had to look up. “Then let me show you,” he said. “Not because you asked. Because I want to. And I want you to feel it.”

Her breath came short, and she said, “I should say no. I’m a married Muslim woman and this is a Hindu boy’s flat and I should say no and go home and pray.”

“But you won’t.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t. Allah forgive me, I won’t.”