Misc. Erotica Swati's Downfall (Original Story)

[S Darko]

Ramesh wandered the streets of Bhim Colony, a slum area of Gurugram, late that night, unable to sleep. He had a few friends there, men who, like him belonged to the shakha. Some of them were wrestlers, and a few of them still practiced at the local akhada where an elderly guruji still taught a steadily diminishing number of students. 

He had met the guruji and touched his feet for blessings. Something and someone familiar in a godless and alien city, he remembered thinking at the time. 


Some days, he would spend in the company of the young men who were busy doing push-ups and squats and swinging the jori. He would help out, sweeping the wrestling pit, working the sacred earth with his hands, grinding the almonds into paste for the wrestlers. 

He would occasionally pick up a few weights, but not in any serious way. Just to keep his hand in, so to speak. Sometimes, he would spar with the younger guys, just so they could get some practice. He was always gentle with them. Had he not been forced to leave his village, he might be competing at the state level in the 65 kg category, but alas it was not to be. 

A few stray dogs trotted by, and he paid them no mind. In one of the tenements, a light came on and a woman’s raucous laughter came through. Then a man’s voice telling her to be quiet. A radio, or perhaps a TV played Hindi songs, somewhere in the background. The smell of cooking--cabbage and potatoes, he thought, wafted up to him. An old man sat on the pavement, smoking a bidi. In the street corner, a eunuch was buying paan from a vendor. 

Bhim colony was full of people just like him, he thought, and that’s why he lived there. The people though had changed from when they’d lived in their villages. They had become worshippers of the almighty rupee. He didn’t hate them, just a low level sort of pity. He had his own demons to wrestle with, and paid not much mind to them.

His thoughts turned, naturally enough, to Swati. He hadn’t seen her for a few days and wasn’t sure when she would be back. He knew though that she would message him on his phone when she returned, they had that much set up by now. They no longer had to depend on his regular schedule of cleaning offices. 

Prakash too, was away and he had the chawl room to himself. A lot of time to think and decide what to do, but the answers were not easy. He had no one to talk to, and he wasn’t sure Prakash was the right person.

Their relationship had changed over the last few months. He knew the whole thing started off as an accident when he barged into her office, believing it to be empty. Her initial bitchy attitude was simply because she hadn’t recognized who he was. He figured the chaprasi uniform was part of the problem. 

Or had their “thing” started the next time when she dressed herself in front of him, giving him an eyeful? He wasn’t sure. 

Many years ago, when he still lived in the village, he had visited a temple, several kilometers away where the donations, and oblations were in the form of liquor. The prasad too, was liquor. People flocked from far and near to pay their respects to the temple deity, a form of Kali. 

He had attended a divine assembly that the head priest there had organized and had been very impressed with the way he explained how liquor, or soma ras, was something the gods themselves used, and had given the recipe to mankind. It was not a bad thing; like everything, in moderation, liquor too had its benefits. He had partaken liberally of the prasad and danced all night with the tantriks and other mendicants around a fire. In the morning, he had felt an exhilaration unlike anything he had felt before. 

It was from one of the tantriks that he heard of another temple, that of Mata Rati, several hundred kilometers away from his village, where the goddess of love was worshipped. The temple was reportedly large and the sevikas were all young women who provided sexual services for free.

Were they prostitutes then? Like the devadasis of old were thought to be?

Not at all, the tantrik replied between puffs of his chilam. They were there of their own free will, and they were highly regarded and worshipped as such. Any man could go there, and his wish would be fulfilled. 

Ramesh was intrigued. The year he turned seventeen, he and a couple of his friends had traveled to the village where the temple was situated. Supposedly, one could not visit the place unless one was invited. The call reportedly came in a dream, and the person had no control but to go there. Of course, the local villagers could visit when they wanted, but there was no advertisement for the temple, no tourism or anything at all.

Ramesh believed he’d received an invitation in his sleep. A Hanuman Bhakt, and a wrestler, he believed it was some incarnation of Sita mata who had invited him there. He could not be sure, of course, and there was no one to ask without fear of being ridiculed. He was not going to go as a common worshipper; rather, he had been called to be the protector, and he went there to receive instructions on what he was to do.

When he got there, a mela, a festival of sorts, was in progress, and he decided to stay as long as he could. The temple was open at all times, and he was able to get a better idea of what went on there. 

The chief of the temple wasn’t an old man, but rather, a beautiful, older woman, perhaps as old as his mother. She wasn’t available, not to anyone, but the others were.

Each more beautiful than the other, there were twenty-one girls that lived and learned in the temple. The girls were considered lucky to be chosen, and they were holy as well. They “donated” their time, a year or so, to the temple Devi and initiated young men into the mysteries of the body. The whole thing had a holy feel to it, a spiritual dimension that Ramesh could not understand very well. 

The girls were later often wed into prominent families in the neighboring villages, and there was quite often a bidding war. A bride price had to be paid to the girl’s parents. This was quite a reversal from the usual dowry system that plagued so much of the country. 

Ramesh sat with the old priestess and talked with her. And learned from her. She invited him to take part in the festivities, to be taken by one of the girls, but he declined. 

His need was of a different kind. He had come to learn the purpose of his life. And, he had decided at that time after his long conversations with the priestess, it was becoming clear. 

He looked down at his hand where the bidi was still smoldering. He tended to smoke when he was stressed, even though he didn’t know that was the term to use. 

Just that his head was spinning. He would have to give it up. He tosses it into the street, walls a few steps and then returns to crush it under his shoe. Fire hazard. With all the wooden and the inflammable materials the shacks around him were made of, it was a real risk. 

And now, he was back to Swati. 

Like a circular argument, he went back and forth if his relationship with Swati madam was of the divine kind or the carnal. Ramesh always thought of her as Swati madam even though Prakash often used derogatory terms for her, like whore and slut, and even more colorful and demeaning terms in Hindi. 

He would have to figure it out soon, he decided. In the meanwhile, the encounters with her were too good to pass up.