One cold evening, when his head is badly trying to contain the tumult of words inside it, and with an upper stomach burning slowly, he takes a walk to begin, belatedly, an acquaintance with other streets, other buildings. He starts off with the certainty that he’s going to lose his way, stray into badlands and have trouble getting back to the haven of his college. With every step forward he thrills with this little fear. He walks past shops and streets with people bathed in the sick orange glow of sodium vapour lamps till he feels he has wandered well beyond the High Street. It is on a darker side street off an excessively lit road that he suddenly sees the man looking at him. No, looking, the kind that tells him in a flash that he has been noticed for some time now.
With that sudden emptying squeeze in his stomach and the drowning out of all noise by the percussion of his heart he knows, he knows he’s been followed, he knows this is going to be a pick-up, that he can walk ahead, turning his head around a couple of times to let the stranger know he knows and that he can carry on following him because he’s interested too; it’s a little courtship dance, like the eight-patterned flight of bees or the choreographed code of birds.
There is that very familiar dryness in his mouth as he plays out this first movement of the suite with a stranger. It has its unerring, delicious shiver as always, but also an inchoate fear of the unknown: who knows, this is not Calcutta, this is the country of psychopathic serial killers, of thousands of AIDS-infected people, of twisted criminals the papers write about almost every day. What if he is one of those? It was only a few days ago he read about how two ten-year-old boys had led a toddler away to a railway siding and battered him to death.
Ritwik absurdly splices together unnamed and imagined horrors with the almost mythical accretions around the names of the Yorkshire Ripper and Jeffrey Dahmer. The thought of disease keeps dipping and circling in his head. He marks how unattractive the man is — short, pale, with small eyes, jowls, and a terrible and impossibly black moustache — and he knows with an almost pathological sense of sureness that he’s going to have sex with that man.
And here he is now, on another dark street — god knows how far and lost he is — unsure whether he has led or been led by this man. The man nods, there is a twist of a smile on his weak mouth. ‘Hello,’ he says.
‘Hello,’ Ritwik replies and then, almost out of sheer habit, asks him the very first question people asked each other in Calcutta once they had moved into stage one of the game, ‘Do you have a place we could go to?’ Casual, uninterested, trying very hard not to let the tremor in his knees or the manic thudding of his heart inflect his now slightly phlegmy voice.
‘No, I don’t.’ Pause. ‘Do you live here?’
‘Yes. . yes, I do, I’m a student.’ He knows what the next question is going to be.
‘Can’t we go back to yours?’
‘No, no. . you see, I live in college. .’ he deliberately lets it tail off.
That man is just too unattractive, not what he wants, but the game has begun; in fact, they’re too far in it. For Ritwik, it wouldn’t do to give up now; he’ll be left with that uneasy itch which not seeing things through to their end unfailingly gives him. It’s almost a feeling of déjà-vu, almost, this illusion of choice which ultimately reveals its hand but always too late, this going through with something to its conclusion out of a misplaced purism. It’s a game, there must be closure, must be. The man seems to understand Ritwik’s constraints about taking him back to his room in college. ‘Oh, I see,’ he says. Silence. ‘I have a car, though. .’ he adds.
This is it, Ritwik thinks, the standard opening gambit of a serial killer; you’re powerless the moment you enter his car. It speeds down anonymous highways as your life flashes past you in its aura of lurid orange glow from the streetlights, till you reach an abandoned barn or a hillside cottage where no one can hear you scream except the cold stars and the gently nibbling sheep. He gets into the passenger seat, the fear so indelibly stained with excitement he can’t wash one of the trace of the other.
The car races along what seems too unfamiliar, too far, for a long time. His nervousness mounts, he starts fidgeting, tries to muffle all the edginess out of his voice as he answers all those unimportant questions, ‘Where are you from?’, ‘What are you reading?’ He recognizes the kick in his insides at the less innocuous one, ‘What do you like doing?’ Maybe he is a mutilator-rapist: he won’t kill but bruise and maim, leave him infected with HIV and he’ll have nothing to take to the police, no name, only a description. But descriptions either become fuzzier with time or lose all their sharpness and certainties under close questioning and the faceless requirements of bureaucratic forms. He must note the number of the car and commit it to memory, but it could easily be someone else’s car, maybe even a stolen one. He tries to concentrate on the names of streets that slip by in an orange blur. On top of all this, the man is really really unattractive.
He drives down some dark side streets, pulls the car at the end of one and turns off the engine. The street is badly lit and there are some infrequent yellow squares of light where the curtains haven’t been drawn in the houses along each side. It seems completely deserted as well. Ritwik doesn’t feel comfortable here. ‘It’s not really safe, is it? A police car could drive in here.’
‘It should be OK.’
Ritwik insists, ‘Could we go somewhere else? Not a residential street.’
The man turns the ignition again. This time they drive through darker and darker roads till they reach a place where streets end and it becomes a slightly bumpy ride over crunchy pebbles and gravel. That gives out as well and they’re soon in the wider dark of open space. The countryside, maybe. It’s impossible to make out shapes or contours but it’s better to leave the lights out, he supposes. He lets his eyes adapt to the outer darkness; through the windscreen he cannot so much see as sense a treeless plain with the dull mirror of a stretch of water. The darker hulks take on edges and become caravans. Or maybe they are big trucks. It’s so quiet the slight chink-clink of the chain and keys still dangling in the ignition switch seems capable of bringing people running from all sides.
In seconds, Ritwik has established that the man is of the type who tries to kiss and stroke and be affectionate first before getting down to business. He averts his face as the man brings his mouth closer to his. In case it appears as too overt a rejection, he puts his arms around his neck and pulls him into a hug. There, no chance of a kiss now.
They pull their trousers down to their ankles. Ritwik’s rigid cock springs out, slapping his stomach, while the man’s tumescing one just lolls. He bends down sideways, takes Ritwik’s cock in his mouth and starts sucking him off with such full-throated ease that had it been at all possible Ritwik would have been taken inside his mouth up to his entire hip. It’s cramped and uncomfortable and being sucked from that odd angle, rather than from the front, with the man’s bobbing head between his thighs, does not quite make it to his A-list of Top Ten Oral Sex Moments. There is also a subdued whiff of curing leather somewhere; he hopes it’s not from the man’s body or his mouth. He is jerking himself off as he keeps sucking. As Ritwik whispers, ‘I’m going to come soon,’ he lets go of his cock, leaving him to finish off, while he starts to moan, ‘Oh, yeah. . oh yeah. . come on then, come, come, shoot your load. .’ the movement of his hand becoming more and more furious. There seems to be a restless animal in his devouring eyes. Ritwik finds his exaggerated porn-speak so ridiculous that he has to make an effort to subdue the laughter bubbling up from inside, it’s in his throat now, it has to be pushed down down, no he can’t let it come out, can’t come out as he comes all over himself, the little opal pools pearlescent on his dark skin even in the darkness inside and around. He watches with detachment the man bringing himself off, whispering more of those absurdities while eyeing his semen hungrily. Ritwik makes sure he doesn’t come anywhere near his jeans or his legs.