Chapter One: An Accidental Arrangement
This is a F-F story, with BDSM elements, although it takes a while to get there. Chapter 1 is introduction only; there's no sex until Chapter 2.
Posting schedule: I'm submitting Chapter 2 immediately after Chapter 1, after that I expect to post new chapters about once a month. I'm expecting the series to run to about eight chapters altogether, but last time I said "four to six chapters" and it ended up running to fourteen, so maybe you shouldn't put too much stock in that.
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* * * * *
"I'm thinking of becoming a kept woman," said Anjali, as calmly as if she'd been commenting on the quality of the café's coffee.
I froze, hiding my reaction behind a forkful of cake. "A... a what?"
I didn't know whether to take her literally. Anjali was a peculiar mix of deep knowledge and childlike naiveté, and it would be just like her to misuse an expression she'd read in a book somewhere.
"A kept woman. You know? A mistress. But I wanted your advice."
Literally, then.
I caught the eye of the waiter and beckoned him over; I could see this was going to be a two-coffee conversation. Before I take that any further, though, let me explain the nature of our acquaintance.
* * * * *
We'd met seven years earlier, back when I lived in Sydney. I was halfway through a doctorate in operations research. I had a friend by the name of Kavita, an Indian-Australian student in the engineering department, and both of us had been doing mathematics tutoring to help pay the bills.
Kavita had been engaged for as long as I'd known her, with no definite date set, and then suddenly the plans all came together and the wedding took over her life with little warning. She asked if I could take on some of her students, and that's how I came to be tutoring Anjali Kapadia.
"She's a smart girl," Kavita told me, "she's going to be a doctor." There was no
if
in that sentence. "She won't be any trouble, but you must be on your best behaviour. Her parents are very very strict."
Anjali was sixteen when I met her, a slightly-built girl who wore great big glasses that made her look like an owl. She was in her second-last year of high school, attending a private ladies' college that her parents had most likely chosen for the height of its perimeter wall and the cast-iron spikes at the top.
She wanted to do Extension Mathematics Two, which is the hardest maths stream in the NSW system. It's the course for hardcore STEM nerds like myself, but it's also popular with kids who want the high marks to get into medicine or law.
E2 is hard work even for a bright kid with a good teacher, and unfortunately Anjali didn't have a good teacher. The college's Head of Mathematics had just retired, and the replacement teacher was out of his depth with the harder content. That's where I came in.
Tutoring Anjali was the easy part. She was bright, and not just willing but
eager
to work. That worked well for me. I'm a good explainer but a bad motivator, and E2 is tough enough to feel like serious punishment to anybody who's just doing it for the marks. I'd been tutoring a lot of wannabe med/law students who didn't really want to be there, so it was a relief to have a pupil who wasn't going to ask "why do we even need this?"
She loved to spend her lunchtimes alone in the school library, reading anything she could lay her hands on. As a result, she could reel off facts about anything from the history of watchmaking to the moons of Jupiter, and she'd do so at the slightest opportunity.
For all that, though, she could be deeply clueless on some matters. She had an impressive vocabulary but found literature classes immensely frustrating because she always missed subtext; she could recite the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech from memory, but never noticed how Antony uses that speech to manipulate the crowd.
Once we had a very confusing conversation where Anjali insisted that Australians used to eat mammoth meat. It turned out she'd been reading an old novel where somebody had a "mammoth sandwich", and hadn't understood that the author just meant a
big
sandwich.
I soon learned never to laugh at such mistakes. She was very sensitive to embarrassment, to any situation that made her look foolish, and it was easy to bring her close to tears with a careless remark. I had been much the same at sixteen; I struggled to make friends of my own age, so I worked overtime trying to impress adults with my intellect, and failure was unbearable.
A little later in my own life, I would be diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, what's sometimes misleadingly called "mild" autism. (I'm not fond of that expression; "mild" just means that I'm good enough at faking normal that I don't inconvenience people around me too badly. It says nothing at all about what it's like for me.)
Looking back, it's blindingly obvious that Anjali was a kindred spirit - although more obviously so than myself - and perhaps that's why we got on so well. But at the time, I just assumed her naiveté was the consequence of her sheltered upbringing.
About her parents. I don't mean to be too harsh on them. They most certainly were strict, excessively so, but they weren't
mean
. They doted on their girl, they were proud of her achievements, and they wanted the best for her in everything.
Unfortunately, their idea of "the best" involved wrapping her up in cotton wool. Her mother drove her to school and collected her again every day. The only computer she could use was in the living room, so that her parents could keep a watchful eye on her, and it was locked down with parental-control software that made it almost useless for anything beyond word-processing. The TV was switched on only for parentally-approved content. And so on.
One afternoon when my bike was in the shop for repairs my then-boyfriend Edgar gave me a lift to tutoring in his car, and knocked on the door afterwards to pick me up. They said nothing at the time, but on my next visit Mrs Kapadia asked for a word with me before the lesson.
She offered me a cup of tea and then explained, very apologetically, that Mr Kapadia considered it inappropriate for Anjali to see me with a boy I wasn't married to. In future, should I be unable to ride, I was to call them and she would come pick me up herself. Mrs Kapadia was as polite as could be, but I was left in no doubt that this was not to be repeated. For her part, Anjali seemed quite startled that I might be dating such a scruffy-looking lad. (In my defence, Edgar wasn't a scruffy-looking lad when we started dating, but more on that later.)
Perhaps the hardest restriction of all, she wasn't allowed a mobile phone until her seventeenth birthday, long after all her classmates had one. Her brother Mahesh, two years younger, got his the same day she did. There's no justice.
Privately, I thought the Kapadias were making a big mistake. You can't keep your child in a bubble forever, especially if she's going to med school. Sooner or later Anjali was going to meet the Big Wide World, and then she'd need to learn the life lessons she'd been missing. But there wasn't much I could do about it - or so I thought at the time - so I just took my seventy dollars an hour and did my job.
Like I said, I'm a good explainer and she was a good pupil. Sometimes it took a while for her to understand a concept, but once I got it across I never had to explain the same thing twice. I wasn't surprised when her father told me she'd topped the school's Year Eleven maths exams, and after they returned from the annual trip to visit family in Mumbai I agreed to continue for her final year.
In Year Twelve the content got tougher, but she was equal to the task. Solids of revolution, integration by parts, polynomial factorisations, conic sections, she learned it all and then practised until she could do it in her sleep.
The one topic where we ran into difficulty was complex numbers. It wasn't that the subject was too complicated for her; the rules were simple compared to the other E2 content, and she could have memorised them easily enough.
No, it was an ethical dilemma. She was being asked to work with the square root of minus one, a thing that simply didn't exist, and that bothered her deeply. "If it's not true," she asked, "why are we learning it? In
mathematics?
Why should I try to believe in something that isn't true?"
That was a tough one to resolve. In the end I had to go home and spend a couple of hours with my undergrad textbooks before I could figure out an explanation that would satisfy her. (In brief:
all
numbers are abstractions that only exist inside our heads, but they give us a useful way of thinking about things that do exist in the real world.)
Of course, Anjali Kapadia was only a small part of my schedule. I had plenty of other things going on in my life. I had my other tutees; I had Edgar, and my own family; I had a doctoral project that was gradually mutating away from its original outline and threatening to eat my entire life if I couldn't wrestle it into submission. But I liked her, and I felt a little pang when it came time for the last of our weekly tute sessions.
Our final session was a couple of days before the big exam. We ran over all the major topics, and I reminded her to make the most of the reading time. "I don't think you'll have any trouble, but if you do get stuck on anything, go on to the other questions and come back to it later."
She gave me a little card signed by the whole family, and Mr Kapadia insisted on giving me a bonus. Then I wished her luck and rode home, wondering how her life would turn out, and thinking that I'd probably never see her again.
* * * * *
My phone woke me at one in the morning. I fumbled for my glasses, and saw it was Anjali, and wondered why on earth she'd be calling me. It was late November, and her exams should all be over.
For a moment I assumed that she'd hit my number by accident, and I almost ditched the call. But then I noticed that I had two unread messages that had arrived while I slept, and I realised that it wasn't like her to be calling
anybody
at one in the morning. Something was up. So I answered it, padding out into the hallway to avoid waking Edgar.
She was talking very quietly; I could hear loud music in the background, and people who sounded drunk.
"Sarah. Sorry, sorry, I didn't know who else to call."
"What's up?" I mumbled groggily.
"I'm at a party with Ellie." I remembered the name: one of her classmates. "My parents don't know I'm here. Some guys wanted me to drink something and I said no, but Ellie's passed out and I can't wake her..."
