Between the Sheets

An enjoyable erotic adventure, cooked up right at the publisher’s office, takes us directly to the young loins of politically correct urban India

Erotica is not an Indian forté, post The Kamasutra. We tend to laugh at ourselves in bedroom scenes, or romanticise the naughty bits. It’s never easy. Notably, we’ve had Electric Feather, an anthology of erotica from around the Subcontinent with some valiant attempts in this difficult genre (disclaimer: I was one of its original editors at Random House India, though we didn’t end up publishing the volume), in 2009; last year, Aranyani’s A Pleasant Kind of Heavy, with some heavyhanded stories from a woman in Tamil Nadu using a nom de plume; Khushwant Singh’s naughty stories. Like many, Chiki Sarkar, publisher of Penguin Random House India, looked far and wide before she found someone to write unabashed erotica—and there he was, working right by her, orchestrating the sales of her books.

“One day, when we were discussing EL James [author of the notorious S&M fantasy novel Fifty Shades of Grey] and commissioning erotic fiction, Chiki said, ‘A, you have to write this’; R Sivapriya [Penguin’s managing editor] had seen my work and told her about it. I said I’d give it a shot. On my commute from Gurgaon to Delhi every day, I would think about what I would do,” says the publisher’s unlikely erotica debut, Ananth, senior vice-president of sales. “It’s very difficult to get it right.” He couldn’t have picked a better or more difficult place to try his hand at writing about pleasure; your average head of sales is both perfectly placed to understand his market and new to playing the role of author.

Always an avid reader, Ananth took a summer job at Landmark, Chennai’s favourite bookstore, after finishing school, and was offered a job in sales by then Penguin publisher David Davidar in 1997, which led to a longterm career in the industry. The writing began with a delayed meeting.

“About two years ago, on my way to a meeting, in Delhi, I had to pull over and wait in Saravana Bhavan because the meeting got pushed by an hour; I sat there and wrote my first erotic story in an hour. It’s about a guy who goes to New York on work and goes to a strip club called Pink Panther. He sees this girl there and thinks he’s seen her somewhere; he last saw her when she was 10 years old,” says the writer.

Were his professional instincts far off? “The only time I used my sales head was to pick up this Excel sheet, write what I wanted to happen to these people, then every time I was done with a chapter, turn the red color to green,” says Ananth. “I sat down as if I was presenting the story to someone; what would I tell them? It helped. When I was rewriting the eighth chapter I could go back and see if the connection worked; I wrote the last chapter long before many others.”

Play With Me is a bold contemporary story of love, sex and some dhokha, told through the character of Sid, a young man with his own advertising agency, where he is surrounded by lovely women, several of them in love with him. It all begins when Cara, the book’s glorious central figure, walks into Sid’s life as an intern who signed up asking to work only with him, sparking a torrent of fantasy in her boss—only she makes all the first moves. For, it’s all fifty shades of political correctness; Sid thinks about how he might be objectifying her, for example, reflecting how modern an Indian man he is (in fact, everyone has an Indian name that is turned Western, or is Western in concept; the book might be set anywhere though this is definitely modern India, we are reminded).

Luckily, the natural impulses of sexual play are never forgotten in a book that is written purely for pleasure (the epigraph duly notes: ‘for the pursuit of pleasure and the pleasure of pursuit’). Even as the plot twists —Sid starts to recognise feelings he has for his pretty friend Nat (though she is married) on a trip to New York, and even to act on them—it’s always the sensory experience that has us.

And what is wonderful is that Ananth’s women enjoy their bodies fully and take ownership of what they unleash. “She’s like a juggernaut. There’s this joke: typhoons are like beautiful women, they come in wet and wild and they leave you without a home,” he says of Cara, who is indisputably the book’s draw. Wild, fiery and irrepressibly naughty, she wears killer outfits (a little too much party wear maybe for an office? Who cares, in the name of fun) and writes the best ad campaigns. In a way, she’s more quintessential man than sensitive Sid, great at banter—‘Cara was blessed with the ability to convert any casual conversation to sexting and use it as foreplay’—yet aloof.

“She’s not guilty, not jealous, and has never withheld what she wants,” says Ananth. “But one thing you never find out—I couldn’t get her to say whether she loves him or not. Getting Cara right was important. It was difficult because it was through Sid’s voice that I had to paint Cara and Nat. I didn’t want to cloak anything either. And he was almost looking for a relationship, more than her.”

The very embodiment of the equivocal married woman unable to sate her lusts, Nat is behenji meets vixen—her Mommy-like worrying over Sid is perhaps where the Indian background shows itself more tangibly. A repressed tease, she seems almost evil in her ability to lead poor Sid on; though he’s having too much fun for us to feel too bad for him, by that point. It’s threesomes in Goa with Cara and an equally hot friend Rhea one weekend, adulterous sex as soon as he gets back with Nat, the following week.

“It’s the classic ‘bad girl who is actually good girl’ thing,” says Ananth. “He loves both of them. I think people are capable of loving more than one person, for various reasons. You choose to be with one person or not, even if you’re single. Loving two people is not in relation to whether one person is committed or not.” He adds: “The contrast between Cara and Nat became more apparent as the guy’s confusions became apparent. He’s not sure. Unless you’re sure in a relationship, you go through self doubt.” Sex and romance are clearly not mutually exclusive, even in erotica.

Ananth, who reads The Fountainhead once a year, is a phographer too. “Photography helped me immensely. It’s almost second nature. It’s what [Sid] sees. He zooms in, zooms out. It’s the light in the house, the light in Central Park, in the late evening at the Brooklyn Bridge. You’re listening to stuff, as the photographer would say it. There is a certain photographer’s patience.”

Is his hero flawed? “I thought, there must be a reason this guy’s single. He has this great girlfriend, the sex is great, and there is no reason to be confused with Nat. He seems to have a past that is not letting him do any of these things completely. He is not obsessive about Nat either, and is not trying to make her feel guilty. He doesn’t want to hurt himself further; their relationship is as close as can be, yet as far. There’s no compulsion but there’s possessiveness.” Sid was hurt by someone on a romantic level and he also lost a romantic relationship over a period of time, Ananth explains, bringing up the character’s first love, touched on but not quite dealt with.

“Nobody likes the first girlfriend, Kay, but the idea is I’ll probably be writing a second book, called Think of Me. Their relationship is unresolved. Kay might come back.” Readers may be watching a trailer very soon.

EXCERPT

‘This is now officially my favourite place on earth,’ Cara said and, walking straight into the rain, she spread both her arms and began to dance.

I stood there transfixed. Twirling amid the twinkling terrace lights, her bare, wet legs gleaming, Cara looked like an ice cube inside your drink. Something you desperately wanted inside your mouth, to roll your tongue around. I couldn’t take my eyes off her even when she saw me gawking, and when she smiled, a slow, dull ache began to gnaw at me. She continued dancing in the rain, moving like the tongue of a black fire. Her wet dress clung to her like a second skin, accentuating every curve of her gorgeous body, begging to be peeled off. She was bathed in sparkling light. The dress, now wet, was almost transparent. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a brasserie. I had read somewhere that breasts were the perfect size if they fit within the rim of a champagne flute and that made me smile—her breasts were beautiful and delectably larger and wouldn’t fit in any champagne glass.

She motioned to me, asking me to join her.

‘Maybe I should get out of this, I am completely wet.’ She looked me in the eye and pulled off her dress and stood there in the rain, just in her red panties.

I couldn’t feign indifference anymore, so I walked up close to her and said, ‘Cara.’

She leaned towards me and I pulled her into my arms.

I could taste the rain on her luscious lips and when I slid my hands down her back and squeezed her ass, she moaned.

Kissing my way down her body to her navel I went down on my knees and licked her along the edge of her panties. I felt her shiver for a delicious moment and then she yanked my head back up to her breasts, which I gladly took in my mouth, one by one. I rolled my tongue around her nipples, sucking and biting them lightly. She arched her body towards me and groaned.

AnanthPlay with me