Thursday, October 07, 2010

The Backache

It's a true story and a recent one, something that happened last Saturday.

Ms C, a strikingly good-looking woman, hailing from Punjab but currently living in Chennai, had accompanied her husband to a dinner party organised by his office. It was a gala event, held on the lawns and attended by nearly 500 people. It was one of those sophisticated evenings when alcohol and perfume combine to give off a smell that tickles you in the right places; when women look magnetic and the men attractive; when decorum mingles with flirtation and they together lend a certain sexiness to the evening air.

Ms C's husband can be counted as attractive, the well-bred sort who can charm women as well as men. I have seen him several times, but never met him or shaken hands with him. For that matter, I don't know Ms C too well either -- I have been, as they say, only on 'Hi-Hello' terms with her. But I know about her quite well: how she locked her husband out one whole night just because he had forgotten their wedding anniversary (the poor man sat on the stairs till the milkman came in the morning); how they made love seven times in a single day during a subsequent wedding-anniversary trip to Mauritius; how she was thrilled when the husband presented her a diamond pendant on her birthday (I even know the price of the pendant: "Half a lakh rupees").

All this I know because Ms C's best friend and confidant happens to be a friend of mine. They work in the office and during lunchbreak every afternoon, Ms C invariably pours her heart out to her best friend-cum-colleague. Occasionally, some of the titillating details find their way into my ears.

So last Monday, a day after the dinner organised by her husband's company, Ms C walked into office with a severe backache. Everybody at the workplace sympathised with her and asked her to take it easy: the world never lets a pretty woman suffer. And then, during lunchtime, the reason behind her backache came out tumbling. She had had too much sex.

During the dinner night, Ms C had fallen for the charm of a husband's colleague. She had never met him before, he too was seeing her for the first time. Sparks flew, and while the husband was busy making small talk with his bosses, they slipped out to the parking lot and made love in his car. It was a Maruti 800, which has enough room to hold a small family but is small enough to contain the lust of two people. So space was a constraint and therefore she got a terrible backache.

Apart from the physical pain, Ms C had nothing to complain about. She had had a good time, she said. She finally had sex with someone she liked instantly, without making elaborate mental preparations to explain or justify it. It was a fuck for the sake of a fuck: no mess to clear up the next morning, except attending to a backache.

All these years, I had never thought very highly of Ms C -- she was too flawless and model-type to be taken seriously. But once I heard the backache story, my respect for her touched the sky.

We all want sex -- good sex, actually. Sex is something which even animals have, but good sex is something that remains invariably elusive to the lay human. And therefore the search. We often go to great lengths looking for it, and even after having found a potential source, spend a substantial part of our lifetime wondering -- should I or should I not? And even if we decide to go for it, another chunk of the lifetime is wasted in cooking up a socially-acceptable justification for the desire to have good sex. By the time the sex happens, it is so deliberately mired in emotions that pleasure goes out of the window.

Sex is actually an act of pleasure -- procreation is a pathetically secondary purpose. Gandhiji looked down upon sex as a tool of pleasure; he wanted the act to be strictly reserved for procreation, if at all the need arose. But in order to procreate, you need to be sufficiently pleasured to carry out the act of procreation!

Gandhi, for that matter, was married at 13 and became a celibate only at 36 -- after a good 23 years of what they call marital bliss. Twenty-three years is a long, long time to have -- or enjoy -- sex with the same person. But, strangely, in the autumn of his life, when he was old enough to be a great-grandfather and should have abandoned thoughts about sex anyway, Gandhi was still testing his will power to resist the pleasures of sex by coaxing women to sleep naked with him -- disregarding the psychological impact his bizzare acts might have on the young women. In the present day, the so-called 'Brahmacharya experiments' would have landed Bapu in jail under multiple charges of sexual harrassment.

And here is Ms C, who had one clean experiment with pleasure. No psychological residue, no ugly remnants. Only a good feeling and backache.

32 comments:

Unknown said...

Good Morning boss.....nicely written...The mere mention of the word SEX is too offensive for Indians in general and sir you are talking of actually participating in the hellish act....on a nicer note its always fun to indulge once into some wild sex even though its outside the regular gf/wife stuff....nothing to match it

Anonymous said...

Excuse me...leave aside the fact that there is a strikingly good looking woman who had sex the way she had it. Nothing new. There are many good looking women in the same league who have been there and done that. My biggest concern is not about her or what she did BUT for the fact that her best friend let her down! To talk to a mutually good friend is something BUT to open up about her "classy and admirable, touch the sky exploits" TO a total stranger is unforgivable. The writing is a good read. But I am hoping she dumps her best friend and moves ahead and lives her life. I like her, I have no respect for the best friend and well, what can we say about the author of the blog: make your words by the moon light and when the sun shines!

Sepiamniac said...

add to this the fact that sex is highly overrated...

Anonymous said...

Maruti 800 offers 4 possibilities.
1.Drivers seat,
2.Front passenger seat
3.Back seat
4.Boot space.

Each one is a great challenge. Could you pl check out and let me know which one of the above was used.

Anonymous said...

Its an entertaining post for sure Mr Ghosh. This kind of sex you are referring to is what Erica Jong called 'The zipless fuck'.
I dont know if sex is overrated or underrated really but I often wonder is that what really makes humans(women included)happy forever?
I know many such women who are good at catching zipless fucks but my respect really doesnt touch the sky for them. That's not to say I am taking the high moral ground here. If it makes them happy for an hour, for a night for a month GREAT! Good for them!

But I would still reserve my respect for some pleasures that last longer than zipless fucks! If one night of indulgence can bring her a back ache so visible that it has become the talk of the town than I am not sure she is the best example to be followed around. Does she not resepect her body enough to know when its enough? Where it bends and where it creaks?

I wonder whats so brave/admirable about zipless fucks really. Isnt it just like going on a chocolate binge and feeling sick later? And as an author I surely wish you had seen more in life to admire than 'zipless fucks'.

Deepika Munot said...

Let sex be just that, 'sex'!! Its a pleasurable natural instinct leading to procreation as a side effect!! Social norms are just that, 'norms' and no matter how hard the custodians try they will never be able to bind sex and its demand for it in any acceptable form of sanction!! All it will serve is a tendency to do it on the sly keeping it in the permanent position of the forbidden fruit!
Jan Sex is not over-rated, actually its power is under estimated!!
And Anon, its good she got the back ache, it actually probably served to give her goose bumps all day long at the memory of her tryst!

Deepika Munot said...

I think the Gandhi reference was very apt!! A hypocrite if ever there was one even tho' he must be given credit for mobilising the force of national sentiment otherwise lacking!
But I do agree, that if anyone in this entire episode deserves derision its the 'Vibhishan' so-called best friend!!

Ash said...

Beautiful and well-written, as always!

Anonymous said...

Dear Anon@10.05 AM, Ms Munot and readers in general -

People have missed the point and singled out the friend as the culprit, calling her Vibhishan and all. Unfair!!!

It is very very common for 'A' to have a best friend called 'B', and for 'B' to have a best friend called 'C'. One confides in the other, and the other confides in yet another. It is a chain reaction -- a very human thing to happen. No one in particular can be blamed. Touch you heart and say that you have never shared an intimate confession of a friend with another friend???

If at all anyone is to be to blamed in this episode it is BG for making this public, but I am sure he has masked situations so well that no one is ever gonna make out. And who knows Ms C could be fictitious, used by BG to make a point. But thanks BG, I am sure a lot of us would love to be in the car but only you have the honesty to say so.

Anon @ 12.08 PM: You say you are not taking the moral ground but that's what you have done in your comment. How does one night of Zipless Fuck compare with binging on chocolate??? Binging means excess and excess of anything is abound to make you sick, and not a night of good sex.

- SK

aniket said...

As usual a great read but I don't understand one tiny thing: how is the 'friend' to be held responsible for telling what was confided or do we still take the word 'confidante' literally?If one can't keep something confidential on his or her own; is it not too much to pass it on and expect it to remain in confidence? And the tricky thing is that for more people than one suspects, enjoying enjoyable things come full circle only when they have told others what they have enjoyed and how. There is a possibility that the friend was doing only what was expected and being a 'friend indeed':-) There is also another possibility - that the lady in question was indulging her sense of imagination and not her other senses as she is reported to have done. But those possibilities do not add to or subtract from the fact that this is a great piece just like the rest.

Bishwanath Ghosh said...

Dweep: I rarely make an appearance in the comment box -- though I cherish every comment -- because I'd have already said what I had to say in the post. But:

"And the tricky thing is that for more people than one suspects, enjoying enjoyable things come full circle only when they have told others what they have enjoyed and how. There is a possibility that the friend was doing only what was expected and being a 'friend indeed':-)"

That was a piece of genius -- so thought-provoking, true and funny, all at the same time!

Thanks -- to you and to everybody who has spent time reading the post and commenting.

wind said...

sex is the primordial urge. think we shld be doing it in mountain peaks. no backaches ;-)

Enterprise Mobility as a service said...

Its really a headache..True story..

Anonymous said...

" disregarding the psychological impact his bizzare acts might have on the young women"

So is it ok if Ms.C disregards the psychological impact her acts might have on her attractive husband?

Sepiamniac said...

dee: by over-rated I mean it is just another activity in life.. :))))
doing it is neither a virtue nor a vice :))))

Anonymous said...

The most humorous comment :Possibilities in a maruti 800. Consider this that many adventurous men are actually shit scared when it comes to public display of affection or making love to a woman in the car (even if it is the woman that has driven it). The Moral police: zipless fuck. No respect for this kind of act for sure. Its more respectable and Fucking exotic when you are mentally connected first. So the number of acts are limited to few intelligent men that one would meet in their lifetime and yet give them the time of their lives. This is enjoyable and memorable. Best friend to be dumped for sure. No algebra equations or funny full circle quotes can save the best friend from my wrath. If the author was more than just a stranger to this punjabi beauty then there is a good chance of obtaining extra information from their mutual friend.So fuck the best friend. Pity this beauty's exploit. Hope the backache remains as her best memory.

Anonymous said...

It sounds exciting as long as its the other woman who is having whale of a time. Suppose, if it were someone in the immediate family performing such a disparaging act, would it titillate the senses the same manner?

If it doesn't, then I don't see any right why someone's respect should touch sky high at such an amoral behaviour.

Sepiamniac said...

some comments for this post have left me thinking: how does having sex both sanctioned and unsanctioned (as called by many) determine someone's propriety, morals or whatever it is?
It all depends on what sex means to the person. Reading the blog, it is clearly visible that Ms. C had no strings-attached sex, so be it...
What right does anyone have to judge.

Moral policing is immoral, according to me.. Now, judge me please!

Anonymous said...

Anon @1;38: No, it won't. It would hurt.

Free sex like death always hurt when one's own are involved and few things in this world hurt as much. Of course, it is not fair for the bystanders concerned; but then what is fair in this world?

Outside this dilemma of fair/unfair, right/wrong - there is something called life. It acts. On its own terms.

No law has ever been able to tame it fully, no constitution set down its complete conditions.

I respect the lady not for so much as the act itself but for acting on a natural impulse; sometimes it takes a character to do just that.

Yes, if somebody in the immediate family was found involved in a likewise manner, I would be shattered. It would be an ordeal, and I would survive.

But it won't make Mrs C or the person concerned dis respectable to me by any chance...

Anonymous said...

In a maruti 800?
Oh boy!
She must be really flexible.
Sure she is a olympic Gymnastic Material for India.
I have heard of one in Maruti 1000.
She is now participating in the Common wealth Games.

Nepali Akash said...

Now I am beginning to think that you definitely had some serious zipless foursome fuck with them characters in this story.

Anonymous said...

Anon@5.46pm

I totally appreciate the sincerity with which you have tried to defend your vices.

But, one doesn't need any constitution to lay down the rules. The fact that you get hurt if it were someone from the family, and get excited if it were someone else, pellucidly underscores the double standards you seem to harbour and nourish? Why should there be a flagrant discrepency of thought when one feels the act is but a natural instinct? Correct?!

Well, one more question. Since you sound to be a man of unquestionable experience, especially with regard to women, have you ever stepped out of women's bed (Other than your wife. (I am guessing you are married)) after a good sex without the pangs of guilt gnawing at your heart?

Well, if you don't, I have nothing more to say. YOU WIN.

P.S: The act of killing sometimes could be a natural impulse, and it takes character to do that. Would you justify it?

Anonymous said...

Anon @ 8: 12

I am glad that you appreciate what you put as my sincerity to defend my vices - if I really had vices and had to defend them, I would definitely be sincere about them.

Getting excited and understanding are entirely two different realizations and the respect for the lady's act comes from understanding and not from excitement.
When something of a similar nature happens at close quarters, the same understanding happens but it takes a long long time.
I admire your point about why is there this flagrant discrepancy in thought when one knows that the instinct is natural. Why indeed?
Well, for the same reason which makes a person grieve over a parent's death knowing fully well that it is natural. One won't grieve over a neighbor's parent's death in the same way as one's own. It's nature, human nature.
As for your second question, I am not sure how it is connected with the case in question unless you are asking about guilt arising from such an act and if there is guilt whether it is worthy to call the person respectable? Is that what you are saying?
If a person of character is forced to give vent to the primitive instinct and kill then it would not require anybody's justification. The act would be done whether one understands the reason behind it or not.

P.S: I never justified the lady's act; I respected her. It's different.

Anonymous said...

Anon @ 10:02 pm

The thin demarcating line seems to be missing between vices and virtues in the discussion.

It's for the general public to understand on whose side it's missing.

Anyway, no personal offence meant. Cheers.

Anonymous said...

Anon @ 8:00 pm

The line between reason and dogmaticism is surely getting blurred and surely it is the onus of the public to decide which is what, after all vox populi, vox dei.
And yes it's not personal, it never was.
Cheers

Ken Macklin said...

well for all tat one can say or not say .. lets admit .. good sex is a need and not a want from what I think .. beautifully written BG .. we are our desires after all :)

vish said...

Forget all else, just give me her nos :)
Nice writeup.. Ms C is most likely to face the music sooner than later.. good luck to her.. society is just not ready for her ilk
vish shanker

Sam said...

Hi Bish,
Read ur piece. Very well written. In the comments, most people seem to have missed the point while focusing on the titillating part of the story. You tried to highlight, if sex just for the sake of sex is bad, whether sex always needs to have strings attached to it. My take on this is that God or Nature wouldn't have made sex a pleasurable experience if his intention was to restrict it only to procreation. Conversely, we can say that had He not made the act pleasurable in the first place, Man may not have discovered it so early & in the bargain the human species could have perished without man having actually discovered how to procreate. Why talk of humans. Even animals find the act pleasurable-the smell that emanates from the sex organs of the female animals attracts the males of the same species. Would the male species have been attracted to their female counterparts or vice-versa if they found the smell offensive. The males of all animal species have been made majestic & beautiful by Nature so as to enable them to attract the females. The world gravitates towards beauty, towards pleasure. All living beings try to seek comfort, read pleasure foremost. Even the Hindu scriptures don't ask one to sublimate his/her desires;rather they ask one to satisfy one's basic needs, desires & fulfill one's duties before levitating towards the higher or the ultimate pleasure or bliss.
Another point, One spouse norm,sex within the confines of marriage,associating sex with guilt-nothing is constant;things change. So do the perspectives. Homosexuality, same sex marriages what once were considered a taboo, are now finding social recognition.
Last but not the least,Sex is associated with emotions. There can't be any sex without emotions(whatever-there is a wide variety of them). Would it rather be guilt???
Yours ever,
Sam

Bishwanath Ghosh said...

Well said, Sombit!

Anonymous said...

The point here is about whether it is okay to break a trust? The common definition of marriage is to be in a committed relationship. By the common definition, the lady here seems not to respect it.

Many have written about the romanticized notion of sex for the sake of sex, art for the sake of art and so on and so forth. Really?
Are we so mentally advanced as to separate the action without thinking about the fruit that it entails? If so, the discussion ends.

It is true that this post is well written. But because intellect finds a reason as to justify an act of transgression it still doesn't make it a noble act. BTW, Gandhi was never a hypocrite and if I am called "Vibhishana", I would be enthralled, they are great people who abided by the values that they espoused.

My previous comment was No:14, 8:28PM.

Abhishek Mukherjee said...

I second your thoughts, mate. I know I won't find much company in doing so, but that isn't important.

Anubhuti said...

Mr Ghosh, I think I owe you my conversion.
Though, I don't mind people sleeping around but I may not do that or like it if my man does it. But never say nevear as they say.
I am also not sure if I would like to be in Ms. C's shoes, because for me sex is more a mind game, less a body thing and because for me, unless there are emotions attached, there is no fun. To each his own.