Days of the Raj

George Appplewhite lay on his sheet, on his metal framed bed with its chipped cream paint. Outside the Gangetic plain offered up its steamy heat and its swill and ordure. The ceiling fan droned and creaked, stirring the sluggish air. This was his junior teacher's bedroom- hardly bigger than a closet- where he had slept since his arrival in India to teach at Sarah Maitland's school. Next to it was the dormitory for 18 year old Indian youths, 20 of them- some with reddened or stripped bottoms- lying in their beds. On either side of George's bedroom were the identical rooms for his colleagues also newly arrived in India, Nicholas Elliot and Thomas Cowgill.

None of the males- boys or teachers- was resting. In this school, with its unique disciplinary code, the simmering excitement was slow to fade. After all, on any day a dozen boys might have been subject to full nude punishment by female English teachers. And in full sight of sari-clad maids and, more recently, English schoolgirls. Enough to fill the boys' heads with the most lurid thoughts and refined fantasies. And to keep them tossing and turning on their sheets.

None was as restless, however, as George.

Nudity. In front of females. Dressed females. The whole notion rioted in his mind.

Oh, the agony, of standing in front of Sarah Maitland while she rifled photos of him taken in that Shaftesbury Avenue photographic studio. Photos that showed him absolutely bare, even closeups of his organ! And how she had lingered over each one, while he had stood before her desk: photos of him standing head to toe without a stitch and of his penis head drooling fluid. Photos of him- oh, how shameful- bent over with his bottom facing the camera, the light catching the dusting of fine hairs on the crease of his gluteals. Oh my goodness, one photo had shown his ballsac close-up, the penis rearing above and out of frame- even the tiny bubbles on his scrotum had been visible, and every fine wrinkle.

The shame! The agony! Especially when she looked up deep into his eyes, photos displayed on her desk beneath. She had seen everything. She now knew everything. Those photos!

And then the agony as he stripped in front of her grim secretary, Miss Plimmer, in that little staff library, handing his clothing to her item by item. The moment when he had had to ease down his underpants...oh my god, he thought...her eyes staring hard as he brought his pubic bush into view and then his stubby, shiny-headed organ, which was beginning to inflate, to stretch parallel to the floor. He recalled the expression of the hard faced secretary: intent, aroused, curious.

Then the corridor time and the five female teachers arriving to grin and mock him in his shuddering nakedness. Teasing him for being "unrigged." Talking about his "tally wag" and his "whirly gigs." Making him put his hands by his sides when he had tried to cover up. Making fun of his engorgement and the trickle of fluid coming out of his penis. Followed by the spanking in the principal's office. By each of the five teachers, forcing him to twist and turn and shuffle and dance as their hands slapped hard against the globes of his bottom. Then the worst: over Miss Maitland's lap and the cruel paddle and then the shameful, wicked thing that had happened...just the most humiliating thing that had happened in his life.

The shame engulfed him, lying there thinking about it.

But there had been the relief, too.

The relief that had flooded through him when the five teachers had left and Sarah had looked him up and down, the matted ejaculate glueing his pubic curls, his bottom lacquered.

"Well, don't you have something to say to me?"

Her words were a command. He was hypnotised by her authority. The naked young man had sunk to his knees in front of her- punished pageboy in front of his lady- hands clasped over his sticky chest. Begging forgiveness.

"Please Miss, I am sorry to have..."

The tears resumed.

His nudity was striking. His submission perfect.

"...to have challenged your authority."

The silence hung over them. Naked 21 year old, on his knees, and the commanding spinster eyeing him sternly.

He felt the knot of humiliation in his chest.

Something made his depleted penis stir in his exposed groin, and rise out of the hair congealed with his recent explosion. The extra serving of shame made him grow warm and treacly inside.

"And you will always accept my authority in future?"

"Yes, Miss Maitland."

"Even when it means going naked in front of your female colleagues?"

"Yes, Miss Maitland."

His insides were warm water.

She pressed her case.

"Naked in front of the English girls who have joined our school? And you teaching class in front of them...as naked as you are now?"

In one jerk his penis was rigid and upright. Of course, she could see it.

"Yes."

Now reliving this, on his metal framed bed, George unloosed his stripped pyjama bottoms and slid them to his ankles and flung them off. He unbuttoned his top and shook himself out of it. Lying naked, his mind running wild, he began to stroke his stubby, insistent erection.

In his head he returned to what had happened in her study.

While he was on his knees Sarah had stepped close. He had smelt her lavender perfumed soap. She had reached out and tousled his auburn hair.

She had talked some more.

"Of course, spanking in a condition of total clothing deprivation- that too, is part of your life here. With your colleagues and students- those girls- watching. Even..."

Her fingers had played with the floppy auburn locks.

"...even with these females, some just a few years younger than you, performing the spankings. Padding away on your naughty behind."

Now lying naked on his bed- and this was strange, stranger than all the magic in Wales- he would give anything to be there again...submissively on his knees, naked in front of the lady, cock standing up between his thighs...and he pledging his undying allegiance.

She had patted his blazing bottom as she dismissed him, him blubbering with gratitude and, yes, love, with his short cock pointing the way...to leave her study still naked and return to the little staff library to be helped by Miss Plimmer, with her iron countenance, back into his cheap tropical suit and his other clothes. Was it true that he dressed slowly, to draw out this funny warm feeling in his tummy, this peculiar, queer sensation at being naked in front of a woman- an older woman at that? Did he thrill to Miss Plimmer noting his engorgement? And probably the dried out emission in his bush? Was this true- that he had grown to love being nude and submissive before this glowering lady?

Yet, if so, wasn't this somehow, mysteriously, the right and just thing, now, here in India? That he should sink into the special discipline at this school- so far from Home and so far from his family who would never learn of it- to sink into this special environment like sinking into a warm bath? To embrace the joy of submission, of surrender and shame? Embrace, too, his devotion to Miss Sarah Maitland and her code?

His role was in fact to be naked, under the command of females, just as the Indian boys were...

...and then, as he allowed this new attitude to take command and thought of the shocking thing he was to do tomorrow- to walk naked under his mortarboard into a classroom of girls- his stroking became faster...more urgent...

...he thought of those girls, pretty and cheeky...eyes curious...riveted on his cock...

Yes, as he stood and talked algebra and stiffened and his penis drooled. Why, he might even spend whole days nude, ordered out of his clothes by Sarah and her minions like Miss Maxse...

...be made to go naked in classroom, corridors...all the time...

...with girls crinkling their freckled noses as they stared at his "tallywag" or his "whirly gigs"...

...what shocking nicknames, his "tallywag" and his "whirly gigs"...

...on display...

...oh delicious thought!

He stroked furiously.

And he exploded, sending a silvery rope high- a pearly shower- to spatter on his chest and shoulders.

Its medicinal aroma flavoured the air, stirred by the fan.

As he slipped into sleep he found himself wishing the morning would come sooner.

He wanted to be naked, in front of Miss Maitland- yes, on his knees with bottom fire engine red- and his punchy cock on lewd display, pledging obedience to her and all the females at this unique school in British India.

A sexual mystic herself, Sarah Maitland was drawn to the writing of others, among them Richard Burton, explorer and poet, who declared in his Kasidah:

He noblest lives and noblest does who makes and keeps

his self-made laws.

Sitting in bed, under the tent of her mosquito net, she often read late into the night, needing no more than four hours sleep. She would read the works of other sexualists- Frank Harris, Havelock Ellis, D H Lawrence, Sigmund Freud. Tonight it was Sir Richard Burton and his privately printed Arabian Nights, called by one critic, "one of the most indecent books in the English language," that occupied her. It was Burton's dilation on the size of the Negro penis in particular that held her attention:

"Debauched women prefer negros on account of the size of their parts. I

measured one man in Somaliland who, when quiescent, numbered nearly

six inches...In my time no honest Hindu Moslem would take his womenfolk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there and thereby offered to them."

She put the book aside and turned to a copy of a letter Burton had sent to a supporter in London. He had described a slave market in Zanzibar and a line of African captives, strapping young men, chained together, under the fold of a slave trader's tent. The slaves were naked, the better to display their strength. One young man boasted a penis filling out the space between his thighs, hanging half way to his knees. Burton described its qualities and charms- grey-brown in colour, zigged zagged with heroically big veins, a glans like a half moon emerging from its prepuce. In the shadow hung "elephantine testicles, in a voluminous scrotum."

"All his private parts had been carefully shaved," he wrote.

"Nothing prepared me for the interest taken by a party of Arab women, maybe the wives and daughters of slave traders, certainly of merchants, arriving for an inspection. They were wearing head to toe Arab dress, decorated with jewellery and they were clearly from the property-owning elite, however, decorum vanished when they sighted the naked negroes.

"They bent close as if to memorise every wrinkle and inch of the males' endowments all the while talking excitedly about the size of the organs. I heard them making unabashedly comparison with their own husbands- and, interestingly, sons-in-law! Several speculated about how much stouter and longer the organs would become when aroused and at that point they closed in on the young man who had caught my eye. He was the one with the grandest engine of generation.

"I recall there were six females. Two were no older than the boy. They were all still gabbling about the gorgeous endowment between his legs - they little dreamt that I, a foreigner, could understand every word. Then several began to touch it. One stroked it like a pet, another gingerly fingered the foreskin as if an expensive textile, another attempted to lift the penis with thumb and finger but had to use her whole hand such was its heft. All the while the boy, who I guessed to be no older than 18, looked aghast. His big eyes darted.

"One lady - older than the others, perhaps a granny- undertook to weigh his Arbor Vitae in her palm as if assessing meat: first the mighty penis, then the heavy ballsac, inviting others to join her. I remember one of the girls with fire in her eyes reaching out. Her face flushed as she lifted her palm with the apparatus sitting in it.

"To the obvious distress of the buck his organ began to respond. His glans emerged from its prepuce and the whole stem stretched and, veins filling, hardened. Unable to abort this embarrassment he seemed close to tears. I imagined that making his tackle rise was the objective of the more mature women. One began gripping and releasing the stem as if to test its hardness. The boy's mighty engine now jerked skywards. A stupendous artery was on view, running along the belly of his upraised stem.

"That this was a transformative demonstration for the females seemed to be confirmed by their reluctance to remove their eyes from the boy's root and take their leave. Then, later, confirmed as well by their lustful inspection of other slaves, making them twist and turn with shame, as their penile endowments were touched and compared. One tall, lean, handsome slave drew much attention because of the well-defined bullocks in their loose-hanging sack. What effect this drawn-out exercise had on the womens' subsequent assessment of their own husbands or future husbands- or, indeed, sons in law- is impossible to know..."

Sarah released the letter and sunk into her pillow.

Her imagination wandered. Wandered to the old dream. The dream of a school for Negro boys in the Caribbean, the sons of the tiny class of educated blacks. Boys like the slave that Burton had so evocatively described, with that hefty apparatus between his thighs, lowering himself over her knees, for example, the paddle in her hand ready to be applied with stinging effect to a bottom as black as shoe polish. As a car bonnet. The obsidian shine of those orbs thrilled her imagination.

Oh, so many examples to think on. Of black boys being introduced to the laws of hygiene bathed by white nurses - lonely young women from Wales or Scotland- the boys being daintily patted with wet sponges all over, tenderly soaked and sluiced by those girls with their blushing but fevered expressions, including with devoted attention to private parts so responsive to their touch.

Of corridor punishments with a platoon of black cocks standing to attention. With white mothers and their daughters being invited for school inspections on days when, say, 20 boys were lined up, not unlike the slave market that Burton had witnessed...and the girls growing giggly and faint at the sight, even aroma, of all those rigid inches stretching out from crinkly pubic hair.

Even the possibility that a young Negro teacher- oh, say in his early 20s- might challenge her authority and be punished by having to surrender every item of clothing...oh, leave him his mortarboard...and be made to teach a class of white lasses. Standing before the blackboard teaching algebra with chalk dust in his wiry pubic bush. Walking between the desks with his cock swinging. Making the young females tremble when he had to lean in close and check their calculations, his weighty penis and scrotum inches from their faces. Oh, to think of the under-the-cover fantasies and dreams that would agitate those feminine psyches for life!

Sarah grew sleepy, as the images crowded on one another...repeated themselves...and overlapped and merged...

Eyes drooping she found her mind yielding other suggestive possibilities.

Of something resembling that line of slaves, yes- even here at this school. The Indian lads stripped and lined up, along the corridors, one every few yards or so. A special occasion, a kind of school fete, raising money from the English women stranded here with their husbands at sea or in the trenches- money to be despatched for war charities. Few of the English ladies she knew would be unlikely to gainsay such a proposal. Sarah could anticipate their lively, prurient interest. They all- in her observations- responded to Indian physiques. And skin tone.

The girls, too, would relish the prospect of a long diverting afternoon with every boy able to be inspected and teased at leisure. One could equip them with sketch pads and note books, even tape measures, to make a scientific occasion of it. Biology, Sarah thought, a practical lesson, a field day.

She was beginning to doze, her fantasies becoming more gauzy.

For the artistic girls and mothers, there would be brushes and water colours and crayons. What an assemblage of male models! More than their peers at Home could even dream of, studying at the art academies. And what fetching aquatints these embarrassed 18 year old males might inspire, even if being exposed standing to attention before females with notepads intent on recording their charms were distressing in the extreme.

Yet if they chose to turn it into a more playful event, say a "penis inspection" - these girls and their mothers- then so be it. There is a saying about omelettes and eggs. And from the whole school population, what a variety to sate their curiosity: from the most petite to the most ample, from the most lily white to the most deep-died black, from the most streamlined circumcised rods to those with the most shaggy overhangs, there would be a lot of comparisons to be made and contrasts to be drawn and a great deal to be learnt.

To relieve the monotony Sarah could envisage an afternoon tea with small orchestra and dancing, with the mature women visitors to the school able to waltz with who among the male students had caught their eyes. Standing in the corridors the boys would be numbered, the women therefore able to lodge competitive bids. How the boys, steered onto the dance floor, would cope with the women's touch on their back or buttocks, or their scent, or the press of their silks and cottons, would be most interesting to observe. Likely they would require iron control. Were there any such boys? Not in her experience.

Her hand reached beyond the mosquito net to extinguish the bedside lamp. In the darkness she reached under her pillow. Yes, the shape was always a comfort. So decisive a firmness. Such an audacious curve. Her elephant tusk was no substitute for the warmth and flexibility of Nicholas Elliot's seven inches and the ecstasy it brought. Rather a necessary comfort after the stimulus brought to her mind by the writings of her soul mate Burton, explorer and sensualist, and such a chronicler of all things African.

Nicholas Elliot stood in his spartan bedroom over a washbasin, sluicing from his privates the last aromas of his lover, school principal and sexual visionary, Sarah Maitland. He was lissome and muscular. His body discipline was extreme, cultivated from his study of the ancients and emulating his erstwhile commander, Laurence of Arabia. He exercised at the Gymkhana Club in its exercise room with lathe-turned wooden dumbbells, Spaulding equipment and a canvas punching bag. To inspire the boys in his Physical Culture class he had once completed 200 pushups, under tropical sun. He was sought after for inter-regimental polo tournaments and for pig-sticking hunts on the plains, the most dangerous of British India sports.

Tonight, back in his room after love making and dinner with his principal, he had trimmed and shaved his pubic bush. On the floor lay leather sandals crafted by the finest cobbler in Bombay who, at Nicholas' direction, had followed sketches from Athenian vase paintings: leather, with gilded wings as heels. On his bed lay a round helmet, woven with merino wool by a Sikh tailor, and dyed gold.

When he slipped out tonight, on his excursion through dark streets to the bungalow with the female teachers, they were all- the sandals, the woven helmet- Nicholas would be wearing. Apart from helmet and sandals, he would be buck naked.

Like Hermes.

Hermes, the son of Zeus.

Famous for moving freely

Hermes, the god of border crossings. Of border transgressions.

Hermes, as sculpted by Praxiteles, the life-sized work found at Olympia in 1877, the young god curly haired, graceful and naked.

The god of athletes. The guide to the underworld.