An Erotic Dream

We were sitting quietly watching the rain. Actually we could hear it too. We were seated on cane chairs, facing the verandah, only a small table (also cane) with the spent tea things, separating us. She was to my right, which meant I was to her left of course, but I don’t know whether at that moment she was as acutely conscious of spaces and distances, as I (was). It was a tropical afternoon. The dull heat of the day had melted with sudden violence into a thunderstorm. We watched the forked lightning rend the metallic gray of the sky, the coconut fronds being stirred, the emerald banana leaves awash with life; we heard the shrill cicada chirp of midday give way to the frenetic croaking of bullfrogs, and a sudden quietness enveloped our beings.

There was no one around. We would part ways tomorrow as she would go away to live in another city. We had never declared our love to each other, but we could both feel the attraction, the electric tension zinging between us. I knew I wanted to kiss her. But I didn’t have the vehemence of lightning to gather her in my arms all of a sudden and demonstrate my earth-shattering love. She too seemed a quiet dignified girl with an understated sense of humor-my type exactly. She didn’t have that singsong liquid laughing flippancy, that the heroines of most of the novels I frown upon, have. At this rate we were not going to get anywhere.

Suddenly there was a thunderclap louder than usual, and our hands sought each other out, she wrapped her fingers around mine with childlike insistence. I turned around to look at her, she was blushing. But she had that woman thing about her, that ability to be coy, childlike and mesmerizingly seductive at the same time. I picked up her hand, stroked it with my other hand, and put it to my lips, while somehow gathering the courage to look her straight in the eye. Immediately I wondered whether my act was too lame. It was. She started smiling, seeming to berate me with her now dazzlingly bright mischievous eyes , the blush was gone and suddenly before I realized it, she was astride me, facing me and pouting her lips for the expected kiss.

We kissed…I don’t know for how long, sucking on each others’ lips like hopeless adolescents on a stiflingly hot night. Meanwhile my hands set to work furiously : caressing her, arousing her, busying themselves with her dewy skin and the various complex, unfamiliar strings and knots, cuts and furls of women’ s clothing. She threw her head back with a laughing nod and I found my nose buried clumsily in her bosom. I felt wrapped all around by the aroma of her hair, the scent that clung to her breasts, the slightly salty twang of her tongue that now clung to mine. Till now I was conscious of the rousing intensity of these first nervous acts of love and how it spurred a certain unrecognizable urgency in me. I was surprised by my own hands and lips, by the strong focus my mind had acquired, by the sense of purpose and unity with which my hands and erogenous parts had responded, by the acute sense of awareness, of her body and mine, and more surprisingly, of my thoughts, and even hers. But when I discovered her breasts, (I think it was the right one first), that it was all brought to focus on a single point. She still had her underclothes on, but I was lost like a child , fascinated with that single lump of flesh in another human body, playing with its softness, nibbling on its firmness. My obsessive attentions may have pleasured her, or amused her, or possibly exasperated her, but at that point I had lost my previous heightened sense of awareness, and nothing else seemed to matter. I know people often personify their sex organs in pornographic films, or in chummy dirty jokes, but here it hit me with literal force. Here I was vehemently loving her right breast with all my being, attentive to nothing else in the world. I was physically loving a lover by dismembering her, coping with the intensity of this outburst of sexual energy by analytically taking her apart; loving her piece by piece.

At this point things turned complicated. The raw power politics of sex hit me. The kitschy setting disgusted me. Both the trivially comic and the deeply tragic aspects of sex danced like exaggerated shadows in my mind. My insecurities took over. The dream was over too and I was left wakeful, hot and breathless and painfully far from a climax. It would need some more work before I could seek refuge in endorphin-laced languor and feel like that Spanish poet who never published his works because he felt that humanity hadn’t learnt to love.