Almost immediately, she turned over again, both her hands lost to view beneath her lower body. The bellaneh stood atop her, one of her feet balanced carefully on each of the girls buttocks, forcing them wide apart. I should have thought the girl would find this weight quite uncomfortable, but such was obviously not the case. The bellaneh flicked the towel again now, with deadly accuracy so that it struck deep in the target she had arranged. More quickly than the first time, the girl's little cry of pleasure sounded out.
Now she got to her feet and the bellaneh poured still more steaming water over her until the perspiration was washed from the girl's body. Then the bellaneh approached her with a large vessel filled with soap bubbles and began to sponge her body. This process too became an erotic game.
Rubbing soap between her fingers, the bellaneh manipulated the tips of the girl's breasts until the sensation became so exquisite that the girl grasped her hand and thrust it against her for another rapid journey to the satisfaction of her desire. This was repeated in different ways until, standing behind the girl, the bellaneh reached around her to wash her innermost bodily regions and in the process flipped her breech-cloth up so that her own quivering sex was pressed tightly between the girl's buttocks. The girl used this portion of her body like hands, and this time the cry of ecstasy was a double one.
The bellaneh lifted the girl in her arms and carried her to the sunken bath, depositing her gently in the water. The two of them in the water now, they played and frolicked and splashed for all the world like innocent children. When they were cleansed of the suds, they emerged and the bellaneh once again resumed her role of servant.
Stretching the girl out once again, she proceeded to lather her legs and belly with a thick froth and shaved them clean. This done, she applied some sort of lotion to the shaved surfaces. This must have been astringent, for when she rubbed it over the plump mound at the juncture of the girl's legs, the girl began to moan and move about so that the flesh there rubbed together. Quickly, the bellaneh used a finger to once again provide the release the insatiable patron sought. Then the two of them rose and disappeared through a curtained archway off to one side of the baths.
“Turn your chair around," the sheikh instructed.
Following his example, I reversed my chair so that we now faced another curtain. The sheikh reached out and parted it. I found myself looking down into a small room with a long, narrow massage table in the middle of it.
The bellaneh and the girl we'd been watching had just entered. The girl lay face-down on the table with a pillow under her head. The bellaneh began to knead the girl's flesh gently. After a while, the gentleness gave way to more vigorous rubbing, and was finally replaced by a series of rather harsh blows. The girl on the table rose to her knees, crouching as the bellaneh administered a spanking which left her hindquarters a bright, glowing red.
Following this, the girl turned around so that she was sitting at the very end of the massage table, one of her legs dangling over each side. The bellaneh picked up a long feather and knelt in front of her. What followed would have been worth an entire chapter on sado-masochism in my report on Oriental love customs. It was impossible to tell where the girl's giggles left off and her sobs began. The bellaneh’s use of the feather was devastating, and the final result it achieved was as much hysterical as erotic.
The experience left the girl limp and drained -- but only temporarily. She remained passive as the bellaneh combed and brushed her hair and anointed the tresses with a light oil. Nor did she respond to the caress of the bellaneh's fingers as they massaged scented oil into her body and then coated her flesh with a phosphorescent balm. Indeed, by the time this process was finished, the girl had dozed off. The bellaneh smiled down at her once, and left the chamber.
“Show over?" I asked the sheikh as the girl continued to nap.
“Not at all, Mr. Victor. It is only just beginning. Watch."
Attendants appeared and arranged a large, wide, ornately slip-covered mattress in the center of the room. As they carried the girl from the massage table to it and deposited her there, she scarcely seemed to stir. The table was then removed from the room. Several incense burners were distributed around the chamber and lit. The heady aroma they gave off readied my nostrils and I found it both sweet and strangely stirring. One of the attendants pulled a silken cord in the corner of the room and four yellow, transparent gauze curtains fell to encircle the area of the room where the girl lay sleeping on the mattress. The attendants disappeared as quickly as they'd come. A moment later, a female figure entered and slipped between the transparent draperies.
"Ahh," observed the sheikh, “the sehhiqeh!"
The label clicked in my mind. I was familiar with the sehhiqeh from my work in the field of Eastern sexology. She was a peculiarly Pakistani product and illustrates better than anything else the strange ramifications of the Eastern mixture of sex and religion.
To understand some of these ramifications, it must be remembered that historically Pakistan is the land where the Muslims of Arabia evolved into the Moslems of the Orient. A downtrodden minority in Hindu India, they ghetto-ized themselves and soon became as strange to their Arab-Muslim origins as they were to the teachings of Buddha. Sexually, they rejected the Kama Sutra be- cause of its Hindu orientation and ostensibly governed their love lives by the Sura of the Koran. But this is a highly complex doctrine, beyond the ken of most of the poverty-stricken Moslems of Pakistan, and it wasn't long before they had shelved it in favor of The Perfumed Garden9 , a Muslim love-guide written by the Sheikh Nafzaoui some time in the late l390s. This breezy and practical sex manual—whose author, oddly enough, came from Tunis on the coast of North Africa, was considered a heretic by the followers of Mohammed, not only during his own time but for centuries afterwards, and had not the slightest knowledge of the Orient-—became the bible by which Pakistan Moslems lived their sex lives. And parts of The Perfumed Garden still call the shots for the love-makers of Pakistan even today.
That part which relates to the sehhiqeh is known as the zewaj-el-mut’ah, which literally means “union of pleasure system." According to this "system," the sehhiqeh is a girl who has been trained since childhood in the specifics of providing other women with sexual pleasure. She is taught the arts of erotic dancing and stripping and her sexuality is encouraged to the outer-most limits of nymphomania. She regularly doses herself with cantharides (Spanish fly) and frequently ends up in the jails of Karachi because of her frenzied assaults in broad daylight on female children. The result of the constant sex frenzy which is the life of the sehhiqeh is that the great percentage of them die of uterine cancer at an early age. Indisputably, she deserves the dubious title of “The World's Most Accomplished Lesbian."
Now, I watched as the sehhiqeh approached the sleeping beauty. Like the customer, her body was nude and glowed with phosphorescent oils. In loveliness, this sehhiqeh confirmed the fact that only the most superbly formed specimens of her breed are allowed to practice their lust in the bathhouses of Karachi. Allowed, not employed, for the sehhiqeh isn't paid for her services; she performs them for the sheer pleasure it provides her.