13 Men Who Bought Me: C7: The One Who Was More Than One.

Note: This is a series. The prologue can be found here. All pieces can be accessed here in order.

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Chapter 7: The One Who Was More Than One.

I had just returned from the annual trip to the Maldives that I took with a client who liked to spend about seven days a year being pegged by a gorgeous woman. It had been a week since I had seen Guru, and eight days since I had met Shreya. The night I first met her I had come back home and told Guru what had happened, his responses started off amused and got successively angrier as my story progressed.

“It sounds like you’re telling me you cheated on me,” he told me, as I finished the story.

“What?” I asked him, “She is a client, Guru, she hired me to fuck.”

“Did she also hire you to have feelings for her?” He asked.

Until he said that it had not occurred to me that he may see my interest in Shreya as a betrayal. I didn’t fully understand this form of monogamy in which we were engaged. The rules of love are so strange, I could have sex with a dozen different people a month and it made no difference, but if I so much as liked one of them, it was a betrayal. I am so tired of this idea of the whore as a cold, emotionless creature who is able to do her job because she doesn’t feel anything. I feel everything. I cannot extricate my heart from my job, my heart is a flaneur who wants to go everywhere I do, and some places, it wants to stay longer even if the circumstances of my employment don’t allow it. Sometimes my heart falls in love, who should have known that better than the man I did love?  

“I cant help..that,” I tried to explain, “Are you really threatened because I like a woman?”

“Why does it matter that she is woman?” He asked.

The moment he asked, I knew I was on the wrong side of the argument. The one time I counted on the heteronormativity of a man to get me out of a bind, I found the one man who seemed completely immune to it.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” I responded, “But I don't see how I could possibly lock up my heart to the people I meet."

"Really?" He asked, indignant, looking at me like he had never seen me before, "You don't see how you could possibly be loyal to the relationship you are in?"

Again, when he put it like that, it seemed like I was in the wrong, but this tendency I have, this proclivity to being eternally open to love, I come by it honestly. I don’t see it as a lack of loyalty, it didn’t even occur to me that is what it was until he was standing in front of me and accusing me of betraying him, I’ve never considered the possibility of true monogamy. I didn’t even really distinguish between my attraction to men who may have been paying me or my attraction to men who didn’t. Sometimes Guru made me feel betrayed as well, he knew better than anyone, the circumstances in which our relationship began, did that girl ever indicate to him that she wouldn’t impulsively leap to love another?  Did that girl ever appear to have qualms about labels and structured relationships? And if that was what he wanted then why had we spent so many years stepping over every possible hurdle as if it didn’t matter? Did they matter and he just hadn’t told me?

I looked up from my reverie and saw him sitting on the couch, his hands together on his lap, he was leaning forward just a little bit and steadfastly staring down at the floor. He looked dejected and small, not at all like the man who smashed my head against the bathroom mirror while he fucked my ass. I went over to him and knelt between his legs, I put my hands on his knees and kissed him.

“I am sorry,” I told him, even though I am not sure even today what it is I was apologising for, “Can you just forgive me and we can move on from this?”

“I cannot fucking forgive you,” he said, pushing me away, “You have to be punished, you have to fucking suffer for what you did.”

That Guru.

That version of him was so difficult for me to understand or manage, it emerged without warning and I never had any idea what it would do to me. His rage wasn’t the rage of helpless men who knew as little about what they were doing as I did, it was cold and seething. In legal parlance, I guess you could say that his rage was not that of the heat of the moment, its impact was always premeditated. He got up and walked towards the door.

“Where are you going Guru?” I asked him.

“Shut the fuck up, Savera,” he said, “I’ll be back at eight, if you’re not here, I will start throwing your stuff out into the street, if you have plans for tonight, cancel them.”

I didn’t have plans, but on principe that bothered me immensely. As he walked out of the house, I felt an unfamiliar emotion, that of anger. I avoid anger at all costs, it makes my mouth taste dirty and my skin crawl.  I started to pace around the house, considering whether I should be out at the time and see if he really would throw my fucking stuff into the street, but in a few minutes, as my heart-rate went up, I started to feel placated. The anger subsided and I began to wonder why he was responding so intensely, with such deep-seated ire, over what seemed like the smallest of indiscretions.  A new emotion arose within me, one that didn’t dissipate until the day I finally left Guru, it was the discomfort of unresolved conflict, of knowing that my moral and social ambivalence meant I had no idea how to meter my behaviour or align it with the needs of other people, and I introduced, into my life, only those people who would didn’t have the best moral standing themselves. I sat on my balcony, for hours, just looking at the city lights and drowning myself in the sounds of traffic, wondering if any of the sounds I heard were from his vehicle, desperately sounding off against the blockades, hoping he could force them out of place.

He was as good as his word, he didn’t return until eight, a nervousness grew inside me, like a child who knows they will be beaten as soon as their parents get back home. As I heard his car pull in, the trepidation that had been simmering all day rose like lava inside a volcano no longer dormant, by the time he unlocked the door, I was faint from the nausea. I stood up as soon as he entered the room, but I wasn’t able to decide if I wanted to run to the safety of my bedroom, or towards the door he was unlocking, so I froze in place, leaning towards my bedroom and staring at the front door. He entered, and with him, four other men. Not having expected company, I wasn’t prepared to greet them, so I stared at the group of them, awaiting an explanation. Guru walked up to me as he told the men to make themselves comfortable on my couches.

“What is going on?” I asked him, as he approached me.

“Oh, these are clients of my service,” he said, feigned nonchalance dripping from each syllable, “They’ve always wanted to run a train on someone, who better than you, right?”

“Are you out of your mind?” I asked, no longer able to hide my terror, “Guru, please tell them to leave.”

“Come with me,” he said, holding my wrist and taking me into the bedroom.

“I am not going to change my mind,” I told him, “This is not happening, we need to talk about what happened between us, this isn’t going to resolve anything.”

He laughed and pushed me onto the bed. In him, at that moment, I couldn’t see a single sign of the man who loved me, the one I loved. I didn’t fear the men in my living room as much as I did him, it is startling to discover just how much of a person can remain hidden from you for how long. He seemed to relish this cruelty he directed at me. I knew there was nothing I could say to bring him back, his eyes were red.

“You can leave if you don’t want this,” he said, initiating a sigh of relief, “But if you leave you can never see me again. You say this won’t resolve things, but it will for me, I don’t need to talk to you, I need you to suffer and once you have, you will learn and I will be fine. This is what I do to disloyal whores.”

Every single day of my life, I wonder why I didn’t just walk out of the door. The easy answer is that I loved him and I couldn’t bear the loss of him. The harder answer is that somewhere inside me there lived a creature that was truly compatible with Guru’s cruelty. On some level, I understood why having me raped in a row by four men who wouldn’t be able to afford to fuck me in a million years would resolve the conflict between us, for him. I also, actively chose not to walk away from the trauma that hadn’t yet splattered all over me, I could not walk away from it, in the same way one cannot walk away from a dress they cannot afford. Even before I had responded to him, I began to justify to myself how I could handle it. How I would.

“Fine,” I said, finally, reaching out to place my palm against his lapel, “Punish me however you see fit.”

I have tried but I have never been able to recreate the intensity of that moment, when I said those words, I really meant them. It felt like everything about me changed within five minutes or less, and I was stripped down to the bare essentials of our love and for the first time I saw it clearly. He was my keeper, and I, his willing victim. His love was generous but his cruelty was non-negotiable.There is a beautiful sentence in the retelling of an old Urdu poem written by a dissident: Zindagi toh apni mehman maut ki mehfil me hai. It means that life is just a guest at the feast of death. That’s what his tenderness always was, it was a guest, in the feast of cruelty, and choosing not to see that, was my way of continuing to engage in cookie-cutter love, even though we belonged in the gutter. A whore and a pimp, pretending to normality, and then being surprised when the slightest whisper of reality unsettled us so thoroughly the only way we knew to resolve it was playing rape with real consequences. That’s the real reason why I didn’t leave, I didn’t just finally see the entirety of Guru, I saw myself as well.

He didn’t ask me to undress I did it myself. The fear softened into something else, maybe it was resignation, I lay back on the edge of the bed, and lifted my knees to my chest. I remember everything about that room — I remember the scent of sweat and whiskey that came from him, the scent of arousal and fear that came from me, the scent of the fabric softener that came from the bed — but I cannot, for the life of me, remember breathing.

“Are you going to tie me?” I asked him.

He leaned over and looked at me, his face had changed, it looked a lot more like mine felt.

“Do you think that if you do this for me, I will love you again?” He asked.

“No, I believe you love me now,” I told him, and I did believe it.

“Why are you doing this, Savera?” he asked, it appeared as much as I hadn’t expected that version of him, he hadn’t prepared for that version of me.

“I’m a disloyal whore, right?” I asked him, and he flinched, even as his fingers gripped my arm so tight, he bruised me instantly.

They say one act of sexual violation can change a person forever, but for me it took four, delivered in rapid succession. Guru left the room and returned with all four of them at once, I could only see parts of them, but I could sense the amalgam of their discomfort. As perverted as once gets, a part of the discomfort of acting out your fantasies seems to remain. I believe fantasies can become very real sometimes, but the stench of reality can never permeate that barrier. You cannot write a smell, you cannot share it, you cannot explain it either. It exists only in the moment and it controls everything. I can repeat everything that happened as it did, but I cannot explain how it felt because I cannot translate the scent into words. They say love is ineffable, but I can explain love, it is scent that is ineffable, it is a language unto itself, and there exists no key to its translation.

The first man who fucked me smelled of charcoal and the colour green. Guru’s indifference as he sat right next to me and fiddled with his phone smelled of alcohol, turpitude and petrol. The second one smelled of pain and the dry texture of skin as it flakes off your arm. The third one emanated the redolent notes of hopelessness as time morphed into notes of violation, the shame felt like morning, and the pain like eternal darkness. The fourth one carried the most noisome odour of desperation, his thrusts like fists grabbing at my insides, hoping to destroy something so I would never forget him. They took turns, over and over, and soon I stopped being able to tell once scent from the other, everything smelled like latex and man, even I, once vibrant and awash in the naive awareness of my gender, began to smell, like man. I didn’t notice their eventual departure from the room for a while. It came in waves. First, all sound was gone, slowly fading into a distance, then the sensation between my legs started to return, desperately attempting to escape numbness, and finally, when I was able to smell myself again, I opened my eyes and set my legs back down on the floor, but the moment I felt the cool marble under my toes I lifted them back up again.

Guru entered the room as I was lifting my knees back up into the air. He tossed a wad of cash he appeared to have just received onto the bed, and then he walked to me and pushed my hips further, my hip joints felt like they would be broken in a matter of seconds. He let go long enough to unzip and force his way inside my asshole. I remember wondering why I wasn’t screaming, I remember questioning why his cock inside my ass was rushing me towards an orgasm, I remember apologising as he came inside me, and I, into an entirely new existence. As soon as he finished, he picked me up and tossed me into the shower. For a few seconds, the water was scalding on my skin. As it got cooler, he stepped into the shower and began to kiss me. I cried into his mouth and he inhaled my tears touching my shoulders like I was allowed to be a woman again. I realised why my job seemingly never bothered Guru, it wasn’t because he didn’t care that I was a whore, he needed a whore. He just needed to own them. Later we sat together in bed, I leaned over his shoulder and he kissed my forehead, he looked older than ever, but even he didn’t appear to have aged as much I felt like I had in the past few hours.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “I wont see Shreya again.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said, “You should see her.”

I should have wanted to scream, I should have walked out on him, but it didn’t seem insane. He didn’t need me to see that I couldn’t do it, he needed me to see that it wasn’t my decision. It wasn’t my body he wanted to own, it was my will. He needed a whore who would behave exactly as he wanted. He would take any reason to reinforce that lesson, I would never be able to tell what caused the trigger.

“In fact, maybe I would like to meet her,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, confused as to why he would want to meet my client.

“Yeah but Savera,” he began, “It really doesn’t matter what you think.”

To be your own executioner, to write your own death sentence, to pen the very sanguine sentence that forebodes your eternal destruction, I said, “I guess not.”

The next day I left for my annual trip with my occasional client. I wrote to Guru a lot, but we spoke very little. I wrote to Shreya and asked her to meet me. She suggested I visit her at her home upon my return. I wrote to Guru to ask if I could do that, he didn’t tell me to do that but I understood that something had shifted between us. When I landed, Guru met me at the airport. He brought flowers, pink carnations, I know everyone hates carnations but I don’t understand why they are an different from any other flower. He drove me home and asked about my week, he never did that, I didn’t ask about his. We had dinner, quietly, sitting at the dining table.

“You may go see Shreya tomorrow,” he said, as I took his plate to the kitchen.

I thanked him and cried over the sink. Something was breaking inside me. Something else was coming alive. I knew it was time to stop playing whore and become what I had resisted all my life. It was time to live like a sexual object.