Tales of erotica: A pleasant kind of heavy

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a new collection of short stories, A Pleasant Kind of Heavy and Other Erotic Stories ( Aleph Book Company, Rs 295), authored by Aranyani, a nom de plume used by a native of Tamil Nadu. It offers a slice of the title piece which tells the tale of a pregnant woman who discovers and succumbs to irresistible new cravings. Reader warning: Since this is erotica, some parts of the content are explicit. He began rising at 4 a.m. to keep up with his work deadlines, for his morning was often inundated by the exigencies of shopping and cooking. He was unable to keep up with the variety and specificity of her demands—all for oral pleasure and all equally urgent— even as he satisfied one, the next would be upon him, leaving him no room for the satisfaction of accomplishment. ‘You threaten me with sex,’ he complained to her one night when she’d been insistent in her demands for lovemaking, insensitive to his exhaustion, the result of a double food excursion—to the chocolate shop on the Upper West Side for a kind of date-filled truffle, followed by one to the Indian restaurant in the Twenties for kachoris. Another time, he’d combined sweet potatoes and ginger into a buttery purée that she’d chewed on laboriously, masticating it with her teeth and tongue with the thoughtful air of a curious animal; then, to his consternation—because he’d used the last of the supplies in the fridge for his creation—she’d demanded more, erasing the pleasure of this success with her next demand, and rendering him impotent once again. ‘You castrate me with your needs,’ he’d grunted. [caption id=“attachment_851613” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational Image. Reuters[/caption] A Henry Moore retrospective at the Guggenheim delivered to them, and to T especially, a bronze sculpture that captured their experience. Family Group showed a child embraced by two parents; the child’s figure originated in the mother, but as it emerged was received by the father, the whole installation giving the impression of a human animal hatching: eggshell breaking in the mother, feet passing first to the father and then out into the world. T’s pleasure in feeding her exceeded the demands this placed on his time, and he could now understand why: he was receiving his child inch-by- inch, cell by growing cell. He felt tender doing this; he wondered if this was what a mother felt like when she lactated. She grew bigger under his care. At seven months her ankles swelled, and she needed to spend more and more time off her feet. He was obliged to postpone work deadlines and call in excuses in the interest of food manufacture and supply. He did so unhesitatingly: a woman could only get that much bigger, and he could go back to a more regular routine soon. Today, dessert is seethaphal—Sita’s fruit—the result of T’s generous excursion to the mammoth Indian grocery in Queens— but I want him, not the fruit of his labour. I am becoming a mother though and I need to learn consideration. He does, after all, have a terrible cold. I badly want to go to the bathroom where I know the laundry basket contains a pair of his boxers. How I’d love to smell them. But that will only turn me on further and T has a cold. I prepare to sublimate. That day, the fruit became the palette of her playtime art project. She pulled open the leathery-green exteriors and removed handfuls of the black seeds enrobed in white flesh from the two cups of skin. She spread the sweet sticky seeds on her vulva and thighs. Her hands glissaded between the lips of her vulva bringing the scent of the fruit there. She ate the flesh and spat out the seeds, unmindful of where they fell; as a form of climax she pulled off her top and bra and rubbed the sticky white flesh onto her breasts and nipples. Before I got pregnant I used to account for my inordinate love of male juice by referencing evolutionary biology—I told myself that I loved sperm because I really wanted to get pregnant, that the enchantment of the milky sour-sweetness of men’s juices was simply attractive because of its potential. Sort of an it’s-not-what- it-is, it’s-what-it-can-do-for-me. I’ve debunked my own theory, however, because my fetishistic attraction to c** has been undiminished through my pregnancy. I really wish T did not have a cold today. The seethaphal project had made matters worse. She was seized with that sense of entitlement that seems to possess some pregnant women, feeling incensed that T was not present and available for sex. She resolved the problem in a fantasy about overpowering him, taking him on a train, the Konkan Express perhaps, as it puffed its way up the coast from Bombay to Goa. In her imagination, he is lying on one of the middle berths in nothing but one of those cheap patterned dhotis. She approaches him in a salwar, topless, bra-less, her milk-engorged breasts proudly erect. She mounts him, despite his protests that this is too sudden, too public; his embarrassment is dispelled by the convenient appearance of a sari that falls from the top bunk all the way down to the lower one, providing them with the privacy that they need. ‘I’ve heard about you, about how you assault men, about how you fuck them,’ he whispers fiercely as he squeezes her hips and buttocks, an urgent grasping that could pull the flesh right off her. She is turned on to hear about herself as the talk of the town, the slut of many men. When they come, hers is a white endless orgasm, jets of milk shooting like c** from her hard breasts onto his body and face.