FOR 'ADOLTS' ONLY

BY DILIP RAOTE

WRITING ‘about’ sex is easy. Writing erotic stories is difficult. If there is sufficient funding and research infrastructure, it is possible to write a series of articles, or books, on the A to Z of sex – sex and art/architecture, sex and commerce, sex and politics, sex and technology, and so on right up to zoophilia. But it is difficult to write a good erotic story. It requires literary skills and imagination. I lack both. There’s a huge collection of sex jokes in my head; but it’s all borrowed stuff. I can’t create. So when the editor of an erotica magazine asked me to write for him, I was aghast.

Nevertheless, I took the request as a challenge. I decided to write a science fiction story about a couple honeymooning in an undersea hotel 20 km off Mumbai. I made technical sketches of the hotel – a giant ring 30 metres below the sea surface. After that, my imagination collapsed. I was incapable of thinking in terms of sighing, panting and ecstasy.

I showed the sketches to my Press Club friends and begged them to give me a passion-filled plot. There was derisive laughter and shouts of “Hey, this guy has gone senile! He’s forgotten about sex!” I did introspective meditation. I went back into my past to determine the period during which I had the most curiosity about sex. It turned out to be the age between 10 and 16. With this revelation, I was ready to take on the task.

I wrote several stories about sex from the viewpoint of irreverent children. One was about a precocious girl who has to monitor her class because the teacher is absent. She decides to teach her classmates three-dimensional geometry, or how to convert two dimensions into three. She draws two parallel lines on the blackboard and asks the mates how they would convert the lines into a 3D figure. The class is stumped; the children have been trained to think only in terms of flat triangles, rectangles and circles. The girl joins the two parallel lines with curved lines. The figure now represents a tube. The girl adds a large knob at one end of the tube. There’s a gasp of understanding; the boys laugh, and the girls giggle.

The girl draws two circles. How to convert them into 3D in a simple way? One boy steps forward and draws latitudes and longitudes on one circle and converts it into a globe. He is dismissed as a silly academic. With a flourish the girl draws a large dot at the centre of each circle. The two flat circles become 3D breasts. And thus the class progresses towards advanced geometry until the bell rings to end the period.

In another story the exasperated only daughter of fussy rich parents makes pinholes in the condoms she finds in her parents’ bedroom. The mother becomes pregnant and the girl is ecstatic in anticipation of her freedom. In another story, village kids coach a dispirited bridegroom on how to divert his anxiety, which caused his deflation, by doing mental maths in the conjugal bed. The groom tries it out, and it works. He and his bride lose their virginity, many tense nights after the wedding.

And that’s how I got to write children’s stories for an erotic magazine. The stories were presented as ‘For Adolts Only’, an ‘adolt’ being an adult who has forgotten his/her childhood and become a pompous moralising ass.

Bee Gee’s note: Well over a decade ago, Dilip was the books editor of The Economic Times. Githa Hariharan had just picked up the Commonwealth Prize, and Dilip asked me to review her next book called The Art Of Dying. As a young lad, I was to experience a special feeling soon when my review was excerpted on the cover of Githa’s book. The cover carried a second review: that by Michael Ondaatje who picked up the Booker prize for his book The English Patient around that time.
Because of that one moment, I turned into a serious reviewer…before I finally stopped!