Avtar Singh -Writer

Fucking India

Avtar Singh

July 1, 2001

Being the only Indian in an American college can be a gas, or a drag. Occasionally, it's both at the same time. You get people in the street calling you a sand-nigger (which can be hurtful, once you figure it out), you get people thinking you own elephants (which can be cool). Occasionally, you get someone who wants to tell you how great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is (very great, of course, but he's Pakistani. Or was, when he was alive. But you don't mention that).

Sometimes, you get the kookier sort of coed looking gooeyed at you and saying how much she loves your culture and how much she's gained from it, and how she really wants to give something back. "What culture", is not the response you make, if a blowjob is what you have in mind for her back present.

The grimly healthy girl/women I was in school with were mostly pink and blonde joggers, garnished with beer and the occasional joint. The passing Goth or rocker chick only served to drive home the essential lacrosse and barbecue genealogy of my school's female fauna. Even the hippies amongst them probably grew up to marry Young Republicans.

India was nothing like them.

She was the bartender at a bar that would have been happy to be described as grotty. India herself looked like what she was, a seasoned veteran of the sexual wars. She told me, after I'd bought her a drink she could have poured herself for free anyway, that she was thirty. She looked like she'd been living every one of those years to the full.

She was lushly proportioned, dressed in haute-slut, with a cigarette that never seemed to go out. She did shots with all the men that walked in, wiped her hands on her ass after she mopped the bar. I'm not sure she didn't have a chipped tooth.

I wanted to fuck her so badly, I almost gagged on my drink.

She asked me where I was from. India, I said.

No shit, she replied. Great country.

I think so, I said. Ever been?

Nope. But my daughter's called India.

I thought that was your name.

No, it's hers, she replied. But I like the sound of it so much, I've started using it too.

I ordered another drink. Even then, I knew it was going to be one of those nights.

She told me about herself. About being married young, then divorced. That her daughter had been acquired from an itinerant lover whose itinerary didn't include her anymore.

Does that bother you, I asked her.

Not really, she said. He's a creep. And I don't trust him with India.

Sensitive plant, is she, I asked.

Yes, she is. She's a real doll.

Would you like to meet her?

So I never did get a chance to say hi to India the Younger. I watched her mother kiss her sleeping forehead, then followed mommy into her bedroom.

The exercise itself was fun. As I had anticipated, India knew exactly where everything went, and had a great deal to say while it was getting there. She had mentioned to me, back when our relationship hadn't made the jump from booze to sex, that one of the things she loved about India was its history of sexual expertise. I considered saying that what I loved about India was her sexual expertise, but thought she might think it in bad taste, so I let it go. When I finally got to her bed, and was finished for the night, I never asked her whether my sexual expertise had been up to what she considered par for the Indian course.

Mostly, I just wanted to go to sleep.

I never slept with her again. She asked me, a couple of times when I walked in her bar. I said no. I was seeing someone by then. Not pink and blonde, no, but definitely not a woman who was named after her daughter. Then, later, I asked India, but she said no. She mentioned a boyfriend, but she didn't have to explain. I wasn't that interested.

I felt vaguely guilty, for not being that interested.

I stopped going to her bar, then.

A few observations:

1) Entering India is so much more fun when you're not paying 1000 dollars for the plane ticket home.

2) Sinking metal into flesh does not make metal more palatable. I find nipple-flavored steel strangely unsexy. The same goes for bellybuttons. A lot of junk accumulates in them anyway. To add to the mess is unseemly. When she mentioned that she was thinking of getting her clit pierced, though, I was intrigued. Visually. And it was as good a hint as any I've ever heard that the lady is now ready for her daily dose of oral sex, please.

3) The only time to bring up the historical sexual expertise of India with an Indian man is when you're planning to bed him, or are already engaged in the activity, thereby experientally verifying your hypothesis.

a) For one thing, most of us can't make out the difference between a conversation about sex, and being asked for sex.

b) For another, none of us have read the Kamasutra. Or any of the other "Sexual" texts. The colorplate pillowbook edition doesn't qualify.

4) Is all this talk of sex being culturally loaded on the money? Sure. But then, maybe it's not. Everything still goes in the same places, no matter what place you're in, or from. And the aftermath of the casual sexual encounter is still the same.

Having scored, you fall asleep. You leave. If you don't return, you either feel relieved, or guilty. Sometimes, you're both.

5) Maybe I'm just more Yank than I let myself admit.

6) I still wish I'd met India, though. The original one, that is.

I'm sure I would have liked her.