More than the Taj Mahal

A group of young, good-looking men, were gathered around one of the bonfires. I gravitated there and quickly had my pick. They were moving around me, touching me, offering me all of the services that Sahil had done so earlier in the day. One of them stood out in slight size, berry-brown complexion, with wavy black hair, dark eyes, and an infectious smile. He looked younger than the men I had been going with. Horace had suggested older, but maybe as I got older I should be buying younger.

"You want me, mister?"

"How old are you?"

"How old do you want me to be, mister?"

"I want you to be your real age," I said, and turned toward another young man. It wasn't a bottom I was looking for. The first youth, though, tugged at my sleeve.

"I'm nineteen, mister. I give you really, really good blow job."

But as he was tugging on me, I looked over to another group of men. They were older than I was and not that great looking and certainly not in the best of shape. But I saw that more of the men coming out of the Kitty Su club and showing interest in the offers they were getting were gravitating to this group than any other. A tall, gaunt-looking man of interminable age caught my eye. There was something compelling about him. Something in the piercing "I know you" look he was giving me that made me look down at his hands. They moved elegantly as he had been talking with his comrades and they were compelling as he caught my eye and reached out to me. The fingers were long and sensuous. They looked strong. What was it Horace had said? Something about looking for hands that touched in a special way.

He drew a bit toward me and I moved to him as well. He touched me on my arm and then his fingers glided up the curve of my chest, touching a nipple through the material of my shirt. I shuddered, now knowing what Horace had been trying to convey to me.

I took a small wad of bills out of my pocket that Horace had advised would get a grin and anything I wanted from a man in India. It got a grin from this man. I gave him one of the bills, while letting him see how many more there were, but then the immediate problem occurred to me. I told him my room number, but said, "I don't know how you will get up there. We can't go up in the elevators together."

"No problem," he said with a smile. "There are back stairs they let us use."

Why, of course they did.

"I should clean myself first," he said when he got to my room. "And I don't like to bathe alone," he added, with a grin.

And so we bathed together, both standing in the shower, the gaunt man kneeling in front of me under the cascading water and sucking me erect, followed by the man raising me up with strength in his wiry muscles that surprised me, leaned my cheek into the slick tiles of the shower wall, palms on tiles and buttocks jutted back, while he ate me out and, inserting his hand between my legs, stroked me off. He seemed to know intuitively that it was a top I was looking for. In the States there often was some dancing around to be done on that point because I was muscular. I kept myself in good shape.

The first finale was me backed against the wall, with him, standing, pressed against me, my knees hooked on his hips and my fists clinched behind his neck, as he grasped and spread my buttocks, penetrated me deep, and fucked me to heaven, caressing my channel walls in ways I'd never known a cock bulb could do before.

I wondered if this was one of those male Kama Sutra positions Horace had told me about. It certainly wasn't one of the simple, direct positions men had used with me before. Were there secrets of male positions and stroking in India that were unknown in the United States? The thought that there were helped give me a mighty fine ejaculation.

Taking me into the bedroom afterward, laying me on the bed, running his hands up my inner thighs to coax them open, nudging in between them with his knees, pulling my hips up to his groin as he knelt between my thighs and holding in place as he whispered for me to arch back onto the bed, he penetrated me again and pulled me on and off his cock in another deep, novel position--for me--fuck. For nearly two hours then, every twenty minutes or so, he was putting me in a different and new, melting position and taking me--again and again into the early morning.

Yes, this was what I wanted. I invested in multiple hotel condoms. The fetish cherry of the physical looks of the partner being paramount had been popped. Now I was thinking of getting it from a Kama Sutra master in every other image that floated through my brain.

* * * *

Sahil guided me around the Red Fort, which, indeed, was near the LaLit Hotel, in the morning before the heat of the day hit us. He was an excellent guide. He told me enough to hold my interest but not so much that it overwhelmed me. He mixed it in with questions on my background, providing some of his, and sneaking in a question on sexual preferences, experience, and desires here and there, leading me into mentions of Horace and what had me holding off from giving into him in very subtle ways and being so understanding and agreeable that I revealed more than I ever intended to.

"So, I am perhaps too young for what you are looking for in this visit to India?"

"And much too good-looking," I said. We both laughed, but it was an embarrassed laugh, and I forged on. "How old are you, Sahil?"

"Twenty. But I'm quite versatile. Anyway, either man or woman, it doesn't matter."

"And a dog?" I answered, not being able to resist.

He gave me a confused look, and then he laughed. "You mean what I offered yesterday."

"Yes. I assume you weren't being serious."

"And up there, where that latticework is. That's where the harem was," he said, changing the conversation and turning my attention to an upper floor in the Red Fort's inner courtyard.

It was my turn to laugh at his evasion. We were becoming quite comfortable with each other. He was a beautiful young man, and, increasingly, he had been walking close to me and touching me here and there to draw my attention to something. It really was a pity he was as young and good-looking as he was. That was exactly what I was trying to avoid now. The man who came to my room the previous night was old and well past any sense of good-looking. But he'd given me a window into what Horace had talked about. In the heat of the moment in the shower and then in the dark in the room, he had shown that being masterful and inventive more than compensated for being young and very attractive. It hadn't hurt that the older man was hung. He had told me downstairs in front of the hotel that he was an elephant man and seemed to think that should impress me. It was only later, upstairs, when he had stripped that I understood what that meant.

"You mentioned your older friend and special Indian techniques in sex--the Kama Sutra," Sahil said, withdrawing from me a bit now and becoming introspective as if he was seeing into my dilemma and had decided not to tempt me further. "Your friend might be right about the essence of the act being more important than the youth and attractiveness of the partner--and it is true that mastery of something like the Kama Sutra comes with maturity and practice. Have you ever had an Indian full massage?" he asked.

"Full?"

"I think you know what I mean."

"I haven't had any form of Indian massage."

"You say that your friend--the one who so desperately is trying to cover you--is well versed in Indian culture. Has he ever offered to give you an Indian massage?"

"He hasn't said it's Indian, but, yes, he's offered to give me massages."

"But you haven't availed yourself of such an offer from him?"

"No."

"But you would probably have agreed if he'd been younger and handsome, I suppose."

He was hitting too close to home, so I answered with a clipped "I suppose" and moved directly into a change in topic. "It looks like there's a café over there. Shall we have a meal and then go on to Agra? You say it will take most of the day to visit the Taj Mahal."

Sahil laughed at our bouncing the topic around, not getting to the specifics. "Three hours there and three hours back and maybe three hours in Agra. You cannot leave there without visiting the Sadar Bazaar--a very special place with very special delights."

Four hours later, after a rattling two and three-quarters-hour-130-mile dash south to Agra and a meditative walk along the fountained pathways leading up to the Taj Mahal, with its exquisite exterior and almost barren, rather "so what?" interior--unfinished, Sahil told me, because the woman died before the interior could be done and her husband lost interest, it dawned on me why Sahil was expounding so much on both the beauty of the exterior and the barrenness of the interior. "You know," he said, "although the Taj Mahal is the most famous symbol of India, it almost provides a contradiction in what being Indian is."

"Oh, how so?" I asked.

"The essence of India is just the opposite of a beautiful exterior and an empty interior--traditionally, our essence is to go under the surface and see the worth of what is inside." He gave me a meaningful look and then I smile when he realized that I understood what he was saying, as well as how it applied to the dilemma that had led to my extending my stay in India.

Later that afternoon I also learned why the Sadar Bazaar was so special.

The bazaar was what I would have expected in an Indian city--exotic, with narrow, crowded passageways between colorful blanket-walled display areas hawking all manner of wares. What I didn't expect was to be led through such a display area into a warren of rooms with Oriental carpets on walls and floors to a room with a massage table in it.

"It is time you had a full Indian massage," Sahil said as he guided me through the back rooms of the shop. He said this more as an explanation for what was in store for me than a question either of whether I'd had such a message or wanted one.

"Is the Kama Sutra going to be involved?" I asked, just for amusement--but with a hint of nervousness.

"That is the essence of what we have come here for," Sahil answered.

The masseur was short and old and fat. He was dark brown and wore only a loincloth--and not that for long. When it came off his cock proved to be long and as fat as he was. He was an ugly little gnome with a perpetual obsequious smile on his face that I could hardly bear to look at. It didn't matter. He was a master of both deep-tissue massage and sexual mastery.

I lay, totally under his control, naked and moaning on the massage table, as he worked my body over, first with the strong and sensual touch of his hands and later with the mastering of his cock. He attacked my muscles first and, with me stretched out on my back, his massaging moved ever relentlessly to the core of me, where he used his hands to bring me to the biggest, most throbbing erection I had ever had, but that kept me at the peak of arousal for the longest time, edging me, until I couldn't take any more and, with a shudder, came. At the last second he took me in his throat, me jerking, crying out, and shooting off again and again.

He had exhausted me but was just beginning. He turned me onto my stomach and found, explored, pounded, and master all of my muscles. Then, as I moaned and groaned my surrender, he came up onto the table, now in mammoth erection, saddled himself on my buttocks, grabbed my wrists and arched my back to him, penetrated, and rocked me back and forth, fully possessing and ravishing my channel as he fucked me deep in my core.

I was totally his, defenseless, purring, as he turned me again, stood up on the table, pulled me up to where my weight was on my shoulder blades, put my ankles on his shoulders, and fucked down into me until he had spread his seed deep in my core, ballooning out the bulb of a condom, making me almost wish we were doing this all natural and raw.

What I confirmed from this second taking in a day was that beauty did not trump proficiency.

* * * *

That evening, as we entered the outskirts of New Delhi in Sahil's sputtering old taxi, which miraculously had taken us to Agra and back, the young man pulled out his cellphone and made a call, presumably in Hindi, as I couldn't understand a single jabbered word he said.

As he pulled up to the side of the street around the corner to the entrance to the LaLit Hotel, he parked the car beside two Indian men, the combined aspect of which almost made me laugh in contemplating a Mutt and Jeff pairing. One was old and fat and ugly, the other young handsome and muscular. But had a familial resemblance to, Sahil.

"These are my cousins, Ishan and Nurveen. Ishan is forty-eight and a master of the Kama Sutra. Nurveen is twenty-two and is a personal trainer in a gym. Would you like for one of them to come up to your room now? The other will stay here and watch over my taxi."

Sahil was smiling as he, Ishan, and I mounted the backstairs of the hotel to my room. Ishan was already taking possession, placing a hand with long, sensuous fingers on one of my butt cheeks to guide me, and I was surrendering, leaning into him rather than away. As I climbed the stairs my thoughts were racing. One was that Sahil was worth everything I'd have to pay him. Another was that I wondered if the room maids had replenished the condom supply. And then, for another, I was contemplating my trip back to New York. One thing was for sure. The next time Horace offered to give me a massage, I would welcome it.