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Tall Tales

Posted on December 23, 2006
Filed Under The Stories |

Rohan looked around the room.

The laughter was subsiding; people were sipping their drinks again or rooting through the kebab platter with their toothpicks, spearing anything that looked like food and closing their mouths around it. Within moments the room was silent, save for the hum of the air-conditioning and chewing or sipping sounds. In a minute or two the eyes would search those of their companions’. In the absence of an anecdotal account no one had anything to listen to or roll their eyes in the universal sign of here-we-go-again. His guests were becoming uncomfortable.

Not good for the party.

Rohan cleared his throat and pushed his spectacles up his nose. The act of drawing attention also caused him to avoid eye-contact. He single-mindedly studied his own hands as the others stirred or sat up slightly at the prospect of their host telling a story. This never happened. They were definitely intrigued. Rohan hazarded a glance at his company and immediately lowered his eyes when he found theirs upon him. He nodded to himself; cleared his throat again. “Funny thing happened to me the other day. I saw this guy… God what was his name…? I don’t know, anyway I saw him and for some reason I felt like I had seen him somewhere before…Savio…? No, I don’t know…yeah so I was all wracking my brains trying to figure out where I’d seen this guy and suddenly it struck me… maybe it was that smug smile of his or something…I don’t know I somehow remember him always looking at people that way, with this smug smile on his face…Shit, what was his name! Kiran? Yeah so I see this guy and suddenly it’s like, wait a minute, I used to work with this guy!”

Rohan checks, he has their attention but they clearly don’t know where he’s going with the story. He nods to himself and continues, avoiding eye-contact again, “Yeah, it was one of my first jobs, a long time ago. Back then, this guy was in a rock band, did these sales gigs to make some quick money and he was always talking about sex. Me, I was just trying to get some real savings…So anyway, this guy, he always had these sex stories.”

Rohan sneaks another look around. The guys are all ears. The girls are wearing the I-can’t-believe-he’s-going-there expression but then Sheila betrays her interest by making an impatient face at his sudden pause and so he goes on, “Like this one time…I can’t even believe I’m repeating this, he told me about this building in Vashi…or was it Vasai, yeah whatever, apparently these guys walked in on these two chicks making out and the girls got all scared and said, ‘don’t tell our parents’ so the guys said they’d keep quiet about it if the girls gave, um…y’know, gave them…”

Sheila rolled her eyes impatiently and completed the hanging sentence,

“Blowjobs?”

Rohan’s head snapped up in surprise, “Erm no, handjob actually.”

Sheila shrugged, “So? What’s the big deal?”

A couple of the guys looked at her with newfound interest. She pretended not to notice but a smile teased the corners of her mouth. Rohan continued, “Yeah and this one time we were at this trade fair but we were working different stalls so I went over to talk to him and he kept saying things to me while looking at this other girl who was also working in the same stall. Every time she looked at us she would get this weird glazed-eyed look if she saw him looking at her, not like she didn’t like it or anything, just like she was giving herself up to him or something…I don’t know, it was weird! And then we talked some more and he suddenly says, ‘I’m going to fuck her you know.’ And I go, ‘who?’ And right there, while she’s looking at us, he points at her and says, ‘her.’ She kinda frowns at us for a second and suddenly she’s smiling. He takes me over and introduces me to her. Of course I’ve forgotten her name, but this guy, for some reason he stuck with me.”

Rohan looks up and is surprised to find that everyone is still listening, attentively. Ellen begins stirring her drink but it’s almost as if she’s simply giving her hands something to do. After it feels like their eyes have been locked onto each other for ages Rohan breaks the connection. His hands are suddenly very interesting to him again. He stares at his fingertips and clears his throat, “It’s weird how all my memories of this guy are sex stories. Like this one time he told me that in their neck of the woods, wherever it was, Vashi or Vasai or whatever, there was this building watchman who allowed them to use the pump-house for sex…for a price of course. Maybe I’m just mixing all the stories up but I think one of those lesbian chicks was really popular in the pump house.”

When he laughs at the memory of a story that isn’t actually his, he simply blows air out of his nose and bobs his head up and down. It’s not a real laugh like it’s not a real story, “So I see this guy, all these years later and guess what he’s doing?”

The room is his, he owns them. Rohan checked each expression, trying to evaluate the appropriate duration for which he could drag out the suspense, “Imagine my surprise when I realize that the reason I took so long to place him is that he’s still doing the same thing we were doing twelve years ago!”

The room couldn’t believe it.

“Oh come on! Really?”

That was Mayank.

“You think he’s still trying to screw the girls he works with? They must be like ten years younger than him now…”

“Yeah but we all know men prefer their meat tender.”

Sheila and Ellen.

Rohan smiled, pleased with the reaction and more comfortable because they weren’t all staring at him anymore. Colin spoke over the rumble of voices, “Dude, you do realize he could have just been spinning a bunch of yarns right?”

Rohan nods, “I didn’t at the time but I do now.”

Colin didn’t seem to get it, “So then what was the point of the story?”

Rohan shrugged and went to the table to refresh his beer. Mayank took it as his cue to pick up the thread of the story, “All this sex talk reminds me of this guy who used to work with us. One day the boss takes us out for kebabs…”

Colin gets in on that too, “Oh really? Where did he take you?”

“Forget it dude, you wouldn’t be interested.”

“Why not?”

“It’s like in Pydhonie or something.”

“So?”

“So you don’t even know where Pydhonie is.”

“I know where Pydhonie is!”

“Really? Where?”

“It’s…”

“Guys!”

Sheila had downed a third of her vodka tonic during that little exchange, “I don’t care where Pydhonie is. Sort it out on your own time. Mayank was telling us a story.”

Mayank cleared his throat. Rohan recognized the bobbing up-and-down of his prominent Adam’s apple and smiled. Mayank took the smile as encouragement, “Yeah so we’re in this place, waiting for our kebabs and naans when this dude starts telling us some story. Nobody asked him, he just started and straight away he was on about how at their college the terrace is used for gang bangs.”

A couple of the women’s spines stiffened and the guys allowed themselves a snicker. Mayank was wide-eyed and completely earnest, “I’m serious! So then he starts telling about this one time he got invited to the circle fuck. He said the girl was just lying there, a couple of the guys had already finished and then one of them told him to go ahead. But guess what?”

“What?”

That was Sheila again. Her enthusiasm for these stories indicated the level of her inebriation more clearly than it gave clues to the kind of date she would be. All the guys in the room had taken notice all the same.

Mayank looked around the room with a silly smile on his face.

“He couldn’t get it up!”

The guys jeered immediately but Rohan only noticed that the girls were nodding, surprising him with the thought that all of the women in that room had encountered limp dicks before.

Wow, he thought to himself, what do we have here?

It was a thought that had crossed the minds, in one form or the other, of all the men in the room.

Sheila and Ellen were sitting next to each other on the couch but there was just enough space between them for a third person to imagine filling the space. It was like traffic at any time vehicles weren’t moving at a steady pace, if the driver in the following car was more than a second away from sticking to the tail of the car in front of him another vehicle would insinuate itself into the space that opened up. That is exactly what Colin did. He sort of eased Ellen’s knee away with his own and slipped into the space that widened between Sheila and Ellen. Both girls were liquored up enough that they didn’t mind a man was touching them with the entire length of his body. Though Ellen looked receptive enough Colin had zeroed in on Sheila and he wasted no time breaking the ice, “So you don’t think it’s weird that those guys forced the lesbians to give them handjobs to keep their mouths shut?”

Sheila shrugged, “What’s the big deal?”

“Nothing. But I like how you think.”

Sheila smiled and sipped her drink. Colin evaluated the contents of her glass and after a moment of contemplation raised his arm over his head, stretched and brought it down on around Sheila’s shoulder. She simply settled in.

Rohan noticed and nodded to himself.

Good party.

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