Sweet Sanjay

I heard my name being called out from the midst of the teeming horde pressing in on the barriers after customs in New Delhi's Indira Gandhi international airport, and a head and arm waving a sign was bouncing up and down over the tumult. The sign the young man was carrying said "Clifford Jenkins" with "New York" written under it. That was me. But I wasn't being met by anyone that I knew of. The young man obviously thought I was, though, as he was pushing his way through the crowd, moving toward where I would have to join the crowd myself at the end of the separated-off corridor. He had his eyes on me and was waving just for me.

"Mr. Jenkins?" He held up a photograph that clearly showed that I was the man he was looking for. "I am Gupta," he said, as he came up to me. "I am your escort here in India."

"My escort?" I said, not comprehending.

"Yes, yes. I take you to Chennai to find Tamil translator. I speak Tamil and Gujarati and very, very good English. I guide you where you want to go down in Tamil Nadu. I guide you here in New Delhi too."

How did he know why I had come to India and what I was to do here? I stared at him blankly.

"Khurana. I am cousin to Khurana. Khurana, who works for you in New York. He tell me to meet you and to guide you and to take care of you."

Ah, Khurana Bhutra. One of the news agency's Indian translators in New York. One who was very good at what he did, but who also was irritating and demanding. It had been Khurana who had set off this notion that the international news agency I worked for needed another Indian translator in New York. We had taken on some government translation work in Hindi and Tamil, and Khurana had insisted we had to have another Tamil speaker to handle it.

"Come just this way. I have transportation. What is your hotel, please."

He had taken charge, and one part of me was very glad he had. I was overwhelmed by how many people were swarming around in the airport, jabbering in a mix of languages, some I didn't know, and many of these people—too many—looking emaciated and holding their hands out in supplication, their eyes big with hope, their hopes somehow focused on me.

Even as I let the young man, Gupta, lead me along through the crowd, him now rolling my suitcase so that there was no question I would follow along, I could see the hope in his eyes too. He somehow needed to establish favor with Khurana; he needed to do this service. How could I politely deny him? This ploy was just like Khurana, though. I could manage this on my own, but Khurana wanted me to be in the position to owe him as well. So I was being forced to need something from him. He was always doing this around the office—and then calling in on a chit I hadn't asked to possess and often didn't realize would have been seen as a favor from Khurana until he made a claim against it. It was maddening, but he did it expertly.

Gupta was as thin as many of those pressing about me, but he looked more strongly built than most, and he also was a handsome young man, neatly dressed in a white shirt and khakis and with clean tennis shoes, I noticed. I noticed they were clean, because so much of what others were wearing, especially their shoes, weren't clean, were in tatters. Even here, in the airport, the filth under foot was noticeable, as was the scruffiness and dinginess of everyone's shoes—those who were wearing shoes. Most were in some sort of thin sandals or were barefoot.

He had expressive brown eyes and a shock of unruly jet-black hair, and, surprisingly, since most around us were dusky skinned, his skin was alabaster white. Khurana was similarly pale and somewhat superciliously had told me it was how you could tell the purer descendants of the Mogul rulers from the masses. And, indeed, Gupta cut his way through the crowd as a prince would. The mass parted for him, and we shortly were on the curb at a cab stand.

I was sweating profusely already from the sweltering heat I had been slathered in from the very doors of the passenger jet and from the press of the crowd, starting in the arrival lines at passport control. I couldn't help myself. I was glad that the young man was here, even though he was holding my elbow possessively.

"What hotel?" he repeated.

"The Ashok," I answered.

"Ah, very, very good hotel. Khurana picked well."

I would have retorted but for the fact that Khurana, indeed, had suggested the accommodations. And later, as the cab approached the sprawling hotel, looking every inch like a raja's palace, I reluctantly had to thank Khurana under my breath for his choice.

I felt no disappointment all the way through the efficient check-in process. In contrast to the airport, all here was calm and long stretches of regal furnishings in cool fabrics and marble walls with few people in sight, or, rather, with everyone in sight looking attractive and well heeled, and at their leisure, not in a hurry to be anywhere. This contrast had already hit me as the cab that, as Gupta had said had been waiting for only us beyond the cab stand at the airport, drove through Old Delhi into New Delhi. The atmosphere turned from filth, heat, oppression, and teeming and seemingly hopeless and helpless masses, to, as we entered the new city, cool greenery, serenity, majestic buildings set in vast gardens, and the near absence of people on the streets. There were no sidewalks here; pedestrians obviously weren't welcome.

"Most Indians cannot enter New Delhi," Gupta answered to my question on this. "It is for the government and foreigners. As an Indian from the old city, you must work here or obtain a pass to visit."

I was disappointed in the answer—the thought that the people's government wasn't accessible by the people themselves, but the foreigner in me couldn't help but be pleased at the lack of pressing humanity and the frustration of the wants and needs of fawning South Asians closing in on me.

My room was large, appointed in cool silks, and wood paneled. The two windows looked out onto a vast green lawn. The bath was marble and also luxurious in its waste of space. The tub was sunken and square, enough for a couple, and I immediately had visions of honeymooners spending their entire hotel time together in the tub.

Gupta had left me at the reception desk, with the promise of meeting me again at 10:00 a.m. the next morning after I had breakfasted, saying he'd show me around New Delhi in the one day I'd scheduled to be here. After two nights here to acclimate myself, I would be heading south, to Tamil Nadu, and the city of Chennai, once called Madras, and the center of the Tamil-speaking population.

An assistant manager and a bellhop took me to my room. And then there to greet me in the room, head bowed in respect, was a young male room attendant, berry brown, demure, and quite handsome almost to the point of being pretty. He was dressed traditionally, in a white silky dhoti—the traditional skirt that Indian men wear that is a gathered length of material bound around their waists and nearly touching the floor—topped by a white silky vest tightly hugging his chest. His midriff was bare, and I was surprised to see a ruby-red gem stud in his belly button. He was wearing bangles around his wrists and ankles too that jangled a bit when he walked, and he was barefoot, with silver rings on a few of his toes.

I thought the assistant manager looked down his nose a bit at the young man as he was handing over the room key to me and the bellhop looked away until I pressed a generous tip in his hand, but then he thanked me politely and withdrew. The assistant manager treated me like visiting royalty, and I had trouble stopping him from fussing around to show me the room's amenities despite my early conveying of another generous tip to his palm.

I listened to the room boy jangle his bracelets as he unpacked my bag and stowed the clothes away in bureaus and armoires as if I was going to stay a month, while I wandered around the room, contemplating taking the shower he had hesitatingly suggested after my grueling travels—which I had to admit were pretty grueling. I stopped at a large bouquet of flowers and a bucket of ice cooling a bottle of wine and noticed there was a card in the flowers. "Welcome to India. Enjoy. Leonard," the card said.

Ah, that explained the hospitality, I thought. Leonard Wright—Sir Leonard now—was an old, very close, friend of mine from his BBC days and my early news agency days. We'd first met at the Henley Regatta when he'd been with BBC Monitoring in nearby Caversham Park and I'd been working for the U.S. government news agency. I'd later settled in New York with a private news agency and married my Jennifer, a stockbroker, who came with a powerful father as well as with a Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment that I loved and would be hard pressed to give up. Leonard had married even better. An Indian correspondent then in London, Manjula, a woman who had returned to India and to politics and had risen to near the top of the Congress Party. She was cabinet secretary of something or other now, although I never could remember which one. Her position was so important that Leonard too had been living here for the last decade.

I wondered how he knew I'd come to India. But then, through his wife, he probably knew everything that happened in India. Thinking back on my relationship with Leonard, I poured myself a glass of wine, saluted him silently, and took a sip. It was first-class wine, as I was sure it would be, knowing Leonard.

I heard the bath water running in the bathroom and I moved in that direction, stopping in the doorway in surprise and shock.

The room boy was drawing the bath. He also, though, had stripped off his dhoti and vest and was only clothed in the bangles, the navel stud, a silver nipple ring, and a shy smile.

I was about to say something when he held his hand out and I took another small card from him. "And above all else, enjoy this. He cost a fortune. Leonard," the card read.

I smiled, as the room boy started unbuttoning my shirt and raised up on his toes and kissed me shyly on the lips.

"You will have me?" he asked in a soft voice.

"Oh, yes, I most certainly will have you," I answered and took another sip of wine as he went down on his knees in front of me, unzipped my trousers, lowered my briefs, and took my cock in his mouth.

The memories of Leonard. We not only met at the Henley Regatta and both covered the event for our respective organizations, but we also got sloshed on ale together, conversed long enough together to know what each other wanted and that we wanted it from each other, and fucked and slept the sleep of exhaustion together. Leonard was interested in a particular sex technique, and I was interested in providing that same technique, so our coming together had been a miraculous event. He often said that I didn't look and act in public the sort of man who I was like that in bed; in turn, I told him that he looked just the sort of man who looked for that in another man. Neither of us took umbrage, delighted that we had fallen in with each other.

For eight years we conveniently met all over the world on assignments and tumbled into bed together as quickly and for as long as possible. Leonard was an old English school submissive bottom and I was a power top. We enjoyed each other immensely. But then he married for advancement first and I did so afterward—not in any sort of revenge, but in search of the luxuries of life. And, although we still coupled a few times after that, Manjula became a much-investigated politician in India and that was that between us.

It stood to reason that Leonard wouldn't meet with me here in India, on his own home ground—but also that he would make the gestures of welcome that he had.

I fucked the room boy in the double tub, laughing at the image I'd had when I first saw it of honeymooners who wouldn't leave it. After scrubbing me, he had climbed into the tub and, facing me, settled his channel, challengingly and evocatively tight given that he was a rent boy, on my cock and, leaning his body back, had grasped his ankles. I bent my face down to his nipples and pulled at the ring with my teeth until he was giving little gasps and whimpers. I had established that he was an adult, but he had the slim, soft body of a boy. He told me that he was as many adult Indian men were, spare and small, but an adult nonetheless. I reveled in that and in Leonard, also small, knowing what I liked. I pulled his pelvis up from my buried cock, which could accommodate considerable upward pull without dislodging, with my palms grasping his small buttocks orbs, and my lips traveled down his sternum to his navel, where I grasped the ruby gem in my teeth, pulled it out, spit it out of the tub, and stuck my tongue in his navel. He was trembling and murmuring in some language I didn't understand and then gasped, as I lightly teethed the smooth, soft flesh around the navel.

He cried out and began to jerk and writhe as, grasping his waist now, I slammed him down hard on my cock. Lifted him and slammed him down; lifted him again and slammed him down again. Lifted him and slammed him down. Lifted him and . . . until, with another cry, the water between our bellies became cloudy white with his cum. He had lost his grasp of his ankles and now was grabbing at my sides, digging his fingernails into my flesh.

I enjoyed the heightened sensation the pain gave me—enjoying more the mixture of pain and passion in his eyes. His head was slanted to one side and he was eyeing me out of one eye, the other one being covered by a hank of his silky, black hair. The look was a mixture of wariness, awe, lust, and pain. With one hand I cupped the back of his head and brought his lips to mine in a brutal, possessive kiss. I encased his small cock and balls in the other hand and squeezed, causing him to gasp and whimper at the double assault.

Then, abruptly, I released him at both ends, gripped his waist in my hands again and renewed slamming him up and down on my cock until I too had ejaculated and he was just flopping around like a rag doll.

He had endured it all without throwing up any defenses. Leonard must have explained my need well in engaging him, although he still seemed to be surprised at the reality of it. Leonard knew I wanted full control and mastering, full domination.

The room boy rubbed me dry with a towel, slowly and sensually, as if he hadn't been fully and forcefully taken in the tub. Then he suggested a massage. During the massage, and when I was completely relaxed, he started giving me a blow job. I put up with it until I was fully engorged and then I heaved myself off the massage table, grabbed him around the waist, and carried him, easily, over to the bed. I slammed his back down on the foot of the bed, his eyes wide in surprise and all of the breath knocked out of him, and slapped his legs apart. Grasping an ankle in one fist and raising and spreading that leg, and, after stuffing my cock inside his tight hole as he grunted and groaned, I grasped him by the throat with the other hand. He arched his back and babbled to me intelligibly as I fucked him hard and fast to a second ejaculation.

Afterward, after I'd taken a shower, I asked him how long he'd been engaged for.

"For the night, sahib," he answered with a sob. He was curled up in a fetal position on the bed. I had no idea how genuine his distress was, although during the fucking he'd tried to assert that I was thicker and longer than other men he'd lain under. I patted him on the buttocks and told him I would be going to the dining room for dinner, which would give him a chance to get something to eat too, and that I would be gone for an hour or more.

"Is this too much for you?" I then asked. I was being rougher than even was normal for me. I hadn't had male sex for months, because I hadn't traveled from New York for some time and I wouldn't go there in my home environment. But I couldn't help myself. This was what I liked, and I was keyed up from not having had it for months. I wasn't beating him, I just was hung and preferred to fuck hard. I wanted a tight hole—and the feeling of taxing it to the limit.

"No, sahib," he said with a sniffle. "It is hard but . . . but it is so . . . I don't know. The harder you are with me, the higher in the clouds I go, and the more I want."

"Then I expect you to be naked and on the bed when I get back."

"Yes, sahib."

He was good and I hadn't had a good, freestyle fuck in some time. I walked on eggs in New York with Jennifer. I wanted to make the most of this gift.

Sometime after 9:00 p.m. I shot another load. The room boy's torso was arched out from my belly, my hands gripping his sides half way between his waist and his armpits, his arms dangling down to the surface of the bed, my knees wedged under his buttocks, his knees bent and his feet flat on the bed behind me. His ankle bangles jangled quietly with each of the thrusts I made inside him for more than a half hour. I was tired, but he was exhausted. When I fired off, I stretched out beside him, and wrapping the fingers of one hand around his cock—it being too small to take a full fist—I slowly masturbated him to a moaning completion.

I was getting on in years, so I mounted him again only twice more in the night. He gave every impression that that was three more times than he had expected this gig to entail.

He served me breakfast in the room the next day, him redressed as when I'd first seen him and me in briefs and a silk hotel robe. He told me he was leaving then and one of the regular room attendants would be taking over the duties.

"The hotel room boy isn't—" he began to say, his head lowered demurely and looking shyly at me.

"I understand," I interjected. "And, please, come over here."

He walked over to me gingerly and with some apparent reluctance, probably expecting me to brutally attack him. But when he reached me, I placed a wad of rupee bills in his hand, probably far more than he made in a week of regular johns. Giving me another shy smile, he moved back to the door.

"And . . ." I realized I'd never asked him his name, so I pressed on without using a direct address. "You were very good. I know I am demanding, but you were very good. I will make sure I make that known to those who arranged for you."

"Thank you, sahib." He smiled a little smile. He seemed grateful. I didn't know if this made up for how forceful I'd been, but I hadn't been able to help it. It had been quite some time.

"I was going to ask if you managed to find your red gem, but I see that you have."

"Yes, sahib, I did. Thank you, sahib. And your staff, sahib, I have never . . . no man has ever taken me so cruelly but made me want more. I don't know . . ."

He didn't have a chance to finish that, as there was a soft knock at the door. He opened it and there stood Gupta. I felt a little flash of irritation, having understood that he would meet me down in the lobby at 10:00 and it was only 9:00. But there he was.

He stayed in the outer corridor briefly, exchanging a few remarks with the room boy, and then he came into the room.

"I thought rather than New Delhi that you might want to see the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort instead," he said, "since you only have one day in the city. Much of what you can see here would be from inside a car, and I have hired one to take us into the countryside."

"Thank you, Gupta," I said, fully aware that we already were on his schedule, not mine. I dressed there in the room in front of him, and he watched my every move.

It was an exhausting day, but, I had to admit, a good one. I would never have been able to arrange to see all that was covered on my own, and Gupta was an expert guide, filling my head with information but all of it interesting and enlightening, nothing frivolous or tiring.