The Blind Massage sign in the hotel lobby had me salivating when I trudged back in all sweaty and stiff from another day enduring the unrelenting heat and rubble-strewn dysfunction of Indonesian cities.
I was aching from riding the cramped and thumping old buses that serve as public transport and tight-necked from being on guard against the thieves and bandits forever hunting foreign prey.
So I booked the masseur to come to my room in about half an hour - time enough for a shower. Blind people across the archipelago work as masseuses and masseurs – it is one profession they can do in a country which has little or no welfare and even the able-bodied find hard to traverse.
My wife and I visit the country each year on business, and she often has her back and shoulders kneaded in little curtained stalls at airports while we wait for flights. If you travel the country you will become accustomed to seeing teams of these people at transport hubs, clad in bright white doctors' smocks and jet-black sunglasses.
However, this time I was travelling solo and had been on the road for a few long weeks. I was stiff and lonely and longed for the touch of anyone but the pinching, insistent, grey-fingered beggars.
The fact the hotel offered a masseur instead of a masseuse made it easier, freeing me as it did from any sexual tension which might arise with a woman visiting my room, and any married guilt about enjoying another woman's touch.
But I also suppose the hotel offering a masseuse would have been unlikely given I was visiting a sternly Muslim area.
In my room upstairs in the wretched rabbit warren, I switched on the only barely functioning window-box air conditioner and showered away the day's grime and sweat.
Wrapped in a towel, I barely had time to sit before I heard the click-thump of the masseur working his way to my door with the aid of a walking stick.
"Hello, sir, my name is Rafik," said the late-middle aged man, his eyes hidden behind black glasses. He felt for the chair and propped his cane against it. "Do you like lotion?"
"Sure."
He felt around in his small bag, took out a dirty little bottle and asked if I was ready. Self-consciousness hit for a moment and I stood with my thumb hooked in the towel. Something felt mischievous about stripping before a blind man.
He was not looking at me or anything else when I pulled the towel away. I looked down at my invisible body, the lines of my stomach muscles, my hanging penis and balls, and then stretched out on the cheap spring bed.
Rafik slicked up his hands with the watery-looking lotion, sat and settled beside me and felt along my back.
His fingers were off-putting, rough and scratchy, and when he pushed up towards my shoulders I smelt a heady waft of nicotine, poverty and grime. But he had a deft touch, unlocking the day's strains and aches.
Rafik's blindness was doubly, triply, relaxing – it removed all male competitiveness, all sense of being judged or needing to hold myself well. I melted into the sheets, allowing my stomach to spread a little. Being naked before the blind was liberating. So my back and butt were hairy. So I hadn't been working out recently. So I was too pale. So what?
Yet from time to time I could not help but crane my neck to see Rafik not-seeing, just to reassure myself that he was in the dark as he worked his hands.
Rafik faced the wall with a tired, bland grin, lost in his thoughts.
He caressed my feet and pushed his hard fingers between my toes, along my soles, around my ankles and up my calves, squeezing the muscles. One after the other, he lifted my legs and bent them back, pressing my heels towards my arse, then spread them back out, gently clawing and stroking the backs of my thighs.
To my disquiet, blood began to stir, especially when Rafik ran his rough, stained hands around my buttocks, grabbing them and working them in slow, wide circles, my anus blinking a little with each outward push.
Had he not been blind it would have been embarrassing.
But he could not see, so I felt sort of OK, kind of protected, and it was surely just an autonomous side effect that my cock was growing uncomfortable under my stomach, hardening and thickening.