Radhika Pradhan
Before I start my tale, I want you to visualize the space that I grew up in, the space that designed my body, the space that viewed me and the space that mandated me. You enter a deserted draught land; gloomy, lazing winds blow dried leaves on the spaces that you cover. All around are dried twigs hung from aging desecrated trees. The melancholy in everything you see makes you want to run away, but your body is shackled by the same force that keeps the dying trees erect in its space. In my case, my shackles were the society.
‘Open the bra.’
‘I am doing it,’ my boyfriend whispered in between kissing me and hurriedly trying to wrestle open my bra.
We were hidden behind bushes covered by a marble white Jesus statue - erected to protect the dead.
Something about having sex in a graveyard really turned me on. It proved really convenient for my boyfriend as well, as the graveyard stood underneath a wall separating both our schools.
The feel of his wet tongue on my sensitive hard nipples pulled me back from the thought of the graveyard, right into him. I gave in with a hushed moan. My hands cup his bulging cock, and slide over his school belt to open it. He slides my underwear down my legs, and gently pushed into my vagina. My eyes trace over the space behind the statue, secretly hoping to see a figure materialize. As the statue, himself would have it, I saw the figure of a woman in blue salwar-kamez approach the graveyard.
‘Someone’s coming,’ I whispered with feigned alarm, while forcefully pushing my boyfriend out of me.
We hurriedly and quietly wore our clothes, after which we ran from the back into our respective schools, before they rang the bell.
Back in my class-room, I sat alert - scared of crazy nuns and their rulers, ready to strike every behavioral misconduct. My “behind the bush actions” would definitely buy me a few hundred strikes of the fattest ruler, however my reality would buy me a lobotomy.
Outside of the class-room, I saw a burkha clad woman run her way into the door before the nun starts with the attendance call. The minute Minha appeared on the doorframe, Sister Rita shot her dilated red eyes toward her. Minha lowered her eyes, and silently retreated to the bathroom. She came back five minutes later, having already missed the attendance call, and was asked to stand at the back, right beside my bench. As the pigtailed girl, garbed in a short red skirt, and white blouse, approached me, I was suddenly really aware of my wet pussy. I clenched my inner thighs together and contracted in my vaginal muscles as she passed a smile toward me on her way.
For the next twenty minutes of the endless English class, Minha stood right beside me, scrunching her face up in an effort to concentrate, and endlessly shaking her leg due to pain and impatience, slowly rising up.
‘So why did you get late today.’ I asked her, while keeping my eyes fixed on the board so as to not get caught by the nun.
‘You know, same old, same old,’ she mumbled not looking quite eager to answer my question.
‘You always say that. What same old, same old?’
‘I got late because I had to do dishes after breakfast, okay,’ she said through her clenched jaw.
‘But…’
‘No buts, Kavya. Let me concentrate.’
Half-way through the class, Sister Rita broke away from Sakespeare’s “All the World’s a Stage,” from “As you like it”; threw a stern glace toward Minha and asked her to sit down.
‘Come on, Minha. This is unfair. You have got to speak to your parents.’
‘Let it go, Kavya. Everyone has their own chains. This is mine. Let me deal with it.’
‘Fine.’
The bell rang for lunch and before I could speak, Minha got up and left to look for some hidden corner to devour her food in. I wasn’t much interested in food at the moment, so I texted my boyfriend who too would be on his lunch break, to meet me behind the bushes.
‘You know Kavya, don’t get me wrong, it was thrilling at the start, but continuously having sex in the graveyard has started to give me the creeps,’ he said as he appeared at our spot behind the bushes.
‘So, you want to go into the open in front of the nuns and the fathers? Or better yet, why don’t we try meeting at our homes,’ I said sarcastically.
He snorted and sat beside me.
I looked at him and stuck my tongue out teasingly. He pulled my collar and kissed me. I clenched his hair and looked ahead, beyond the Jesus statue. Waiting.
His hands moved to my breasts, he cupped them and played with them as he continued kissing me.
His hands had moved into my shirt, circling around my nipples. He slowly unbuttoned my white blouse, and his lips went over to sucking and kissing my neck. He fiddled with my bra strap again, and finally once the mechanics of the female incarceration device gave in, he moved on to sucking on my nipples. I felt as though I couldn’t endure any longer. No one was coming.
‘Stop.’
‘Is something wrong?’
‘I am not feeling it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I am not feeling anything. Any pleasure. Nothing.’
Suddenly I heard an angry voice and fast footsteps echo from far, far away, ‘what is going on here?’
Sister Rita’s wrinkled and anger-struck face appeared in front of me.
I felt myself get dragged away from the bushes and thrown right in front of the marble statue of Jesus Christ
I heard Sister Rita’s hard wooden ruler strike my back again, and again, and again.
From the corner of my eyes, I saw my boyfriend wear his clothes and sneak back into his school - unseen. No punishment was ensued upon him. I knelt in front of Jesus Christ wearing only my red skirt, while my tits were hanging out and dangling with every strike.
After she was done, she muttered a fabricated prayer and threw my white blouse on me.
‘You should feel shame,’ she said and walked away sans remorse.
She was right. That is all I felt, shame. But not for the act for which I had just been punished. Nor for the act from which she believed I would appear a more resisting disciplined student. But for my own docility. My own complicity in allowing myself to give in to what the society expected from me.
When they looked at me, they expected to see a certain someone, that was agreeable to them. And I made sure that when they looked at me, they saw exactly her. But why?
Today I found the answer to my question. I was merely too scared to face myself in the mirror. So, I just chose to mimic the spectacle and illusions, expected by the society in the well-rehearsed parody of a carnival that they put up as “life.”
However, today I couldn’t shut my eyes at my very own reflection. For it glared back at me. My insides felt like the tentacles of a suffocating cockroach picking on my skin to break free. In the window of the school building I saw my haggard self. Even if it was unpresentable and not agreeable to them. For the first time in my life, I opened my eyes and saw myself for who I truly was, for what I truly wanted. The smothered cockroach had teared up its constructed host, and freed itself of all its fabrications, manifesting into its true essential self. I was the cockroach. And my true self did not desire men.
I dragged my re-born self toward the place it led me. I entered the first school building standing left of the path leading from the graveyard to the school. I hypnotically climbed two floors, and stood right in front of the door frame of the school chapel.
I took a deep breath the minute I stepped foot into the chapel. The silence, the emptiness, and its calm spread its way into my lungs, finally allowing normal breathing to return to its cycle. I walked into the room at the back of the church. The one right behind the Christ on the Cross.
The lights of the room were switched off. Light from a huge window spread all over the room, stopping in front of a huge cabinet, under which I saw the legs of a girl tapping to the tune of her hum. I walked toward the legs to discover a lost Minha, humming away as she ate her sandwich. She ended her tune the minute she saw my face.
In that moment I felt my cells, my bones, my organs, and my entire body collapse and crash into her. She kept her lunch aside and lunged to take me into her arms. I attempted to cry the pain away as she held me close, stroked my hair, and caressed me lovingly through my tears.
I started hiccupping due to the excess of crying. She opened her water bottle and made me drink huge gulps of water. After I had regained some consciousness and some awareness over my body and my feelings, I looked her in the eye.
‘What happened,’ she asked me.
‘Sister Rita saw me making out with my boyfriend and beat me with her bloody rotten ruler.’
‘Oh! my baby, you must be really hurting right now. Just forget about that old hag.’
‘Minha listen,’ I said pulling away from her, ‘before Sister Rita caught me, I had realized something.’
‘What?’
‘The entire time when I was kissing him, having sex with him, I couldn’t feel a thing. It never felt right. It never felt the way it is supposed to.’
‘Maybe he isn’t the guy for you.’
I dragged myself closer to her and said, ‘Yeah, he definitely isn’t the guy for me.’
I stared at her lips. They were thin, puffy, pale, and so very succulent. I leaned in my head closer to her, my nose right next to hers, my lips, halted right above hers. I looked her in her eyes and asked, ‘May I kiss you?’
She smiled. Her upper lip grabbed my lower lip and gently sucked on it. My vagina attached itself to hers, and we moved in a dance in and out of each other. Taking off each other’s clothes, still not letting go of each other’s mouths. We had both awaited and desired this moment and this feeling for so long. Her wet lips moved toward my breasts and cupped around my nipple as her tongue teasingly danced all over my left nipple. We were a spectacle of a symphonic union.
She raised her head and looked at my pleasure engorged face. Then, she smiled.
I returned her smile with the same warmth.
We broke into sinfully pleasurable laughter, as we tumbled across the room laughing and kissing, moaning and caressing, feeling and living.
We halted right below the large windows, submerged in deep ochre sunlight, and burning warmth. Minha lay above my chest. The rays of the sun gleamed over her curved cheekbones. In the backrooms of a chapel, laying over a woman, Minha looked absolutely angelic.
Her nose dipped down into mine. She kissed my left eyelid, and then my right. She brushed her nose against mine, and then she gently kissed the tip of my nose.
Her head made its way right to the tip of my clitoris. Her tongue teasingly licked my tip leaving me with acid tingling all over my body. I had never felt such sensations ever before in my life.
Her tongue made its way deep into my Yoni. Something within me came burningly alive. My whole body vibrated with ecstasy. My hands grabbed her hair. Her beautiful long black mane, falling all over me.
My eyes rolled back within.
In the deep ochre of the sun, spreading all over the expanse of the room, I saw red streaks of light, submerge into dancing blue lights.
Lights came alive all over the room, all over my body, as I awoke from a deep, long slumber.
Minha came up to my face and kissed me. I stared hypnotically into the galaxies abound in her eyes.
In them I saw, a long black night, break into rising dawn with the songs
of the birds cooing on, and on, and on.
This work has been published in Beetle Magazine's June 2020 Issue. Read the full issue here: https://issuu.com/beetlemag/docs/june2020