Jhoomey badariya [the clouds are dancing]

U performed a titillating rain dance for me last night. I had to get down on my knees and beg for it. But it was supremely worth it. Because he did it right outside the men’s loo in office. Which sounds so much better, so much more suggestive, when said like that, but the truth is that our ‘wing’ [if one room be wing enough] of the office happens to nearly share the door with the men’s loo, which is beginning to sound much bigger than the office itself, but it isn’t, it’s just a 3 ft by 3 ft cubicle, which is also probably why it’s such a landmark -- for the sounds and smells it cannot contain. The sounds and smells that it leaks into the kitchen that is less than three feet across from it. Predictably, U & I shoot up a heady cocktail of the most confusing smells each day. Warm coffee and urine. Sometimes it’s warm chick peas, pre and post lunch; or warm coffee, urine, chick peas and beans - pre and post lunch. The one uniformity, however, is that the smell is always warm, like an almost-tangible presence.

But this is about U’s rain dance which he performed in tune with the raunchy rendition of a titillating hindi rain song - one of those it’s that time of the year, oh darling; my body aches, and it pines and it shudders so for the rain… and yooooo; accompanied by some suitably loud and appropriately lascivious laughter from a leery eyed would’ve-cracked-whip-if-she-could-let-go-of-her-bladder dominatrix [famously given to referring to herself in third person when in denial - so clever is her manipulation of English Grammar].

When we were little, The Sibling and I would take great pleasure in dressing a littler U up in our longest skirts and mum’s dupatta and pasting our crayola make up on him with a vengeance [very eighties electric blue eye shadow and rude red lipstick]. Then we would make him dance to Geeta Dutt’s mud mud kena dekh, mud mud ke [don’t keep turning around and looking at me…]. which he did obligingly for his two scary, on-their-way-to-becoming-dominas older cousins.

Happy times.

Revisited. He was just as obliging yesterday. He writhed, and he swung and he wiggled his bottom, flailing his arms sensually with bust thrusts that kept time with his song. By the time he stamped his feet to his last bust thrust, I nearly peed in my pants, because just then a very frightened young intern emerged from the men’s loo, with an expression of discomfort mingled with terror... and determination.

“I shan’t let the boss’ son seduce me.”

Ever. Never. No.