I wheeled my suitcase out of the New Delhi Oberoi Hotel, numb from a three-day international conference on Sino-Indian border disputes and more than ready for the three days of letting down and experiencing that I'd added on to my itinerary. I was checked out of the Oberoi, though, as nice as it was. I didn't want any of my hoped-for experiencing to be mixed in with meeting any of the people who'd attended the conference with me. I was following the whispered directions of Horace, a guy I'd met at a Hindu meditation retreat I'd gone on as a lark and as an experience in my South Asian studies.
I had thought the meditation stuff was a bunch of malarkey, but for some reason I'd hit it off with Horace, a somewhat oversized black guy who said he thought his father was from Mumbai, what was formerly Bombay, and his mother, from the Bronx, but he couldn't be sure. Horace and I couldn't have been more different, other than we were both gay and had an interest in things South Asian. We shouldn't have gotten on, especially since Horace wanted to make me and made no bones about it, but we did. I would have liked to give him what he wanted--I'd seen that he was hung and I liked big cocks. But I just couldn't.
Horace was old--nearly fifty to my thirty-five and he was no beauty and was pudgy and soft. I went with men younger than I was, who were good-looking, muscular, and fit. I didn't have any trouble attracting the attractive young guys. And Horace was black. I was a blue-eyed, fit, white Midwesterner, recently out of the army as a South Asia intel officer and now teaching those studies at New York University. Horace was leader of some sort of Hindu center in the Bronx, who had been on a busman's holiday in the mediation retreat we'd both attended.
He was a glib talker and charismatic and there must have been something in what he did with a guy, because all of the other gay men went with him in the retreat and walked around dreamy eyed afterward. But there just was too much about him that didn't turn me on, so I hadn't. That hadn't kept us from becoming friends or him from trying to make me. He'd kept saying you couldn't judge a book by its cover and that sort of thing and that there were mysteries of the East and of Hindu sexual techniques, in particular, that I was missing.
When this conference came up, he got on my case, pressing me to try out Indian men while I was in New Delhi and to look past the window dressing and go for men who could give me the experience of the technique--he called it the male Kama Sutra. It's the exotic nature of the fuck, he said. Any man with the right technique can send you to heaven.
"It doesn't have to be me to begin with," he said. "You can easily find it in New Delhi. They are experts in the exotic techniques there." Then he gave me some pointers on what to look for and urged me to be open to it.
"Come back to me having experienced the techniques of the East without being influenced by external beauty," he said. "You don't know what you're missing."
That "you don't know what you're missing" resonated in my mind all the time I was flying from New York to India. I wasn't getting any younger. I was fighting the battle of body maintenance. At some time in the not-so-far-distant future, younger, beautiful men would not want to cover me anymore. This was my chance to give what Horace had been saying a chance.
One of the older men who had probably been stunning when he was younger but who now showed his age mentioned the "getting older" part to me when I noticed him coming out of Horace's room smiling and humming. As old as he was, he was a lot better looking than Horace was and I thought could do better--but he'd obviously been satisfied by Horace.
So, I had booked three days' stay in India beyond the conference I had attended.
Per Horace's suggestion, I wheeled my suitcase past the rank of hotel cars in front of the Oberoi and around the block where there was another line of beat-up old cars of the independent cab drivers. Most of the drivers were out of their cabs and congregating by one, leaning into the taxi's fenders--perhaps the only manner in which the fender was remaining on the car--smoking and jawing with each other.
Immediately forgetting what Horace had counseled, I picked out my driver by the look of him, not with any reference to the estimation of the endurance of his vehicle. The guy I picked--he couldn't have been more than twenty, but I knew enough about India not to ask if he had a license or even that he was permitted to drive his cab--was a beautiful, slender, berry-brown young man with a dazzling smile and an unruly head of jet-black hair, with a couple of locks dipping down over his sparkling, jet-black eyes. My first thought was to wonder if he was a top. My second one was to remind myself that this was exactly what I had been advised not to look for.
"Look at the hands," Horace had said. "And, yes, look at the crotch if you must. But look into the man's interior, past the flash of the exterior." Then, when I'd given him a blank look, he had said something about a meditative Hindu would know what to look for and how to do it and, giving a sigh, had changed the subject. But he returned to it with, "You'll be in India. For the time you are there try to be India. Go for the touch of the hands, not what is pleasing to the eye."
In this instance, that was too late, though. The young man had seen me pick him out with my eyes.
"Taxi, mister? I take you anywhere you want to go. Cheap. Fast."
Ah, good, I thought, he spoke understandable English. Most here spoke English as well, if not better, than I did. But they weren't all understandable by an American. It was we, the Americans, who were insular in that regard, not others in the world. Immerse yourself in India. Be India, I said to myself, pursuing that as a mantra.
"Yes, please," said, and I hardly had the words out before he had the trunk of his taxi open and my suitcase stowed away. The trunk lid came down, and there it was. I was his captive now. From the look of him, I think I could live with being his captive.
"Enter, handsome sir," he said, opening the rear door of the cab. I got the impression that he was the one who would have to open it--that I couldn't have figured out how to get it open as beat up as it was on the outside. "I take you to the Meena Bazaar, yes? Very good tail there, sir. All of the most beautiful young girls."
"Take me to the LaLit Hotel, on Connaught Place, please," I said. The Oberoi was a five-star hotel, but so was the LaLit. The difference, other than I needed a change of venue for the experiences I hoped to have, was that the LaLit was a gay-owned hotel, with a gay bar and nightclub in it. It was another recommendation by Horace. "Do you know where that is?"
"Yes, of course," the young man said, giving me a fresh assessment look that told me that he, indeed, knew where and what the LaLit was. "My name is Sahil," he added. "How long will you be in Delhi?"
"Three more days," I said, after I'd gotten inside the cab. It was cramped for an American, especially one who worked out and maintained a muscular body as I did, striving to hang onto some semblance of youth and fitness into my thirty-fifth year. But the inside of the taxi wasn't the shambles that the outside was, which had more the aspect of bumper cars than conveyance.
