Read Online Delhi by Khushwant Singh - Free Book Online

‘What are you staring at?’she demanded looking up through the shower and coyly hiding her nakedness.
    ‘You, who else?’ And though I had not the slightest desire for sex left in me I escorted her back to my bed and let her sleep beside me.
    I slept as if I had been drugged. It must have been some time in the early hours that I began to dream. It was a mixture of fact and fantasy. Bhagmati lying on the road in a puddle of urine beckoning to me. Bhagmati grabbing me by the neck and pinning me down as a wrestler puts down his adversary. I realized that it was not all a dream and that Bhagmati was in fact lying on top of me. She nibbled my earlobes and gently led me out of my dreamland into her dusky, lusty world. She was taking me as a man takes a woman: clawing my scalp, biting my neck, heaving into my middle with a violence I had not known. I submitted to her lust with supine abandon. I felt the room go in a whirl, all my life-force from the top of the crown to the soles of my feet sucked into my middle and erupt like lava out of a volcano. The three acts of sex were like the
scala menti
of a mystic’s ascent to union with the Divine. The first rung in the ladder was the purgatory; the second, the seeking; the third, the final act of destruction of the individual self (
fana
) and the merging of two lights into one. In simpler terms—that of my relationship with Bhagmati—the process was masturbation, fucking and the body’s rapture. But I still did not know how a
hijda
like Bhagmati was different from a breastless woman.
    It was 5 a.m.
    While Bhagmati was getting into her sari I opened the safe hidden behind my bookshelf and took out a wad of ten rupee notes.
    ‘What is this?’ she asked with feigned surprise when I pressed the money into her hands. She counted the money. ‘One hundred! You do not have to give me money,’ she said. Then she quickly changed her mind. ‘I can’t refuse to take what my husband gives me, can I?’
    ‘One hundred thousand husbands!’
    She put her arms about my neck. ‘As Allah is my witness, hereafter you will be the only one. You have been kind to me. I will be forever indebted to you.’
    ‘Let’s go,’ I said unlocking her arms.
    ‘You don’t believe me?’ she demanded. She re-counted the notes and handed them back to me. ‘All right, I’ll take ten to give to my husband,’ she said plucking out one of the notes from my hand. ‘Keep the rest for me. I will come for them another day.’
    I looked out to see if it was clear. Budh Singh was fast asleep on his
charpoy.
We tiptoed past him and slipped into my car. Even the starter didn’t rouse the watchman from his slumber. It was a clean getaway. We went through a deserted Connaught Circus under Minto Bridge and then onto Ajmeri Gate. ‘Drop me here,’ said Bhagmati putting her hand on the steering wheel. I pulled up and opened the door. She pressed my hand. ‘Your maidservant thanks you a hundred thousand times. Don’t forget her.’ Then she walked away, barefooted, in the middle of the deserted road.
    Bhagmati had not bothered to ask me my name. She had not enquired about the number or even the location of the block of the apartments in which I lived. How would she find her way back to get her money? I certainly had no intention of going into the
hijda
locality in Lal Kuan to look for her.
    Days went by and weeks. With the passage of time I began to think that perhaps Bhagmati was not as much of a whore as I had earlier presumed. And the memory of that one night she had spent with me came back to me with pain. I lost hope of ever seeing her again.
    The way Bhagmati re-entered my life made me believe that the gods had decided to have fun at my expense.
    I resumed my usual routine of life; a few hours of work in the morning, a round of golf in the afternoon, a cocktail party in the evening followed by a late dinner. In Delhi one could manage a drink and dine off other people all 365 days of the year. The