The Brass Notebook: A Memoir by Devaki Jain

Author:Devaki Jain [Jain, Devaki]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

Touch

‘Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.’

—Simone de Beauvoir

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hidden Dangers, Secret Pleasures

My experience with touch revealed that Simone de Beauvoir’s generalization is misplaced or does not work out many times. There is the good, the bad and the evil.

The year was 1943. It was the middle of the Second World War, and India was involved with the Allied war effort as an important source of supplies. I was ten years old at the time. My father was posted in Madras as the controller of civil supplies, seconded from the Mysore government. We lived in a house on the beach. In October 1943, a lone Japanese reconnaissance exploded a bomb on the coast of Madras, and the family had to be evacuated to somewhere safer.

It was one of those evenings when my mother and aunt had gone out to the ladies’ club, and my uncle—my mother’s brother—was the only grown-up in the house. He asked me into one of the bedrooms, where he was sitting with a book.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked him.

‘This is a medical textbook,’ he said. ‘It teaches you about all the parts of the human body. I need to study it for my exams.’

He proceeded to show me the illustrations in the textbook. One page had the picture of a male body that showed the male sexual organ. ‘Come,’ he told me, ‘I’ll show you what this is.’

The room had barred windows but these were located fairly high on the wall so that passers-by on the street couldn’t see anything if they looked in. There were no curtains, which were a rarity in those days.

‘You can see the road from my room, you know that?’ he said.

To show me the road, he picked me up. I held the bars while he held me from the back. Then he turned me around and asked me to hold on to his neck so that he could swing me. It was a nice game, I thought at first, as he swung me away from him, then back into his body. Then he held me close and asked me to open my mouth. When I did, he put his tongue into it.

‘This is a cow-and-calf game,’ he said. ‘Suck my tongue like the calf sucks the cow’s udders.’ I did as he asked, then decided I didn’t like it and asked to be put down.

‘There’s another cow-and-calf game,’ he said, and asked me to kneel and be the calf. Then he pulled out his penis and asked me to suck it as I had his tongue. I found the experience very odd and ran away, not then concerned about the ‘game’, and thought little of it at first.

When my mother and aunt returned from the club, I told them about my day. I said my uncle had shown me pictures, and had tried to put something funny in my mouth.

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