Paromita is forty-five, twenty-five years married to a man who calls her hunger hormones and tells her to act her age. Erik is the boss’s twenty-two-year-old son, a photographer who has spent a week pointing his camera at her. On the night of Ashtami she sits in a dark alley and asks the goddess for a sign. A rocket bursts over his hotel.

***

She knocked once. He opened.

He wore only his boxers. Pale skin, a light sheen of sweat. A body sculpted in a gym: shoulders, chest, a six-pack cut so clean it looked drawn, and not an ounce of softness anywhere. Her eyes went lower, down the hard lines of his stomach to the boxers, where his cock was already stirring under the cotton. She watched it lengthen, slowly, right in front of her.

She tore her gaze away and looked at the room instead. A long lens laid on a folded towel like something precious. A Bengali phrasebook with a cracked spine, a phrase practised in pencil in the margin. She looked, quickly, for a photograph in a frame, a woman’s shirt over the chair. There was nothing.

The bedside lamp threw a low amber light, the kind that made everything look like a photograph already. He had the camera on the table.

“How’s the back?” he asked, perfectly straight.

“The back.” She let the silence sit, then the corners of her mouth turned up. “Why? You offering a massage? Or do you want to shoot me… properly?”

He didn’t answer. He picked up the camera.

She unpinned the aanchal from her blouse at the shoulder and took the end of it between her teeth. With both hands free she reached behind her and worked the hooks open, one by one. Shrugged the blouse off and let it drop. Then she took the aanchal from her teeth and laid it back over her shoulder, and the fine handloom cotton was the only thing covering her breasts, thin enough to show the dark shadow of the areolae beneath.

He shot her like that, moving around her slowly, telling her with his hands where to turn and when to be still.

Then she let it fall.

“Herregud,” he said quietly, the Danish coming out before he could stop it. The camera clicked a second after his finger seemed to remember it. “Don’t move.”

She found the tuck at her waist and drew it free. The saree came away in a long slither, the pleats unfolding one by one and pooling round her ankles. He lowered the camera an inch. He didn’t seem to know he’d done it.

“Keep going,” he said. His voice had dropped.

She undid the knot of her petticoat. It fell. Underneath were plain white cotton panties, chosen for sweat and not for anyone. He glanced at them for less than a second.

“Those too,” he said. It wasn’t a request, and it wasn’t quite steady.

She hooked her thumbs in the waistband and stepped out of them. She stood in front of him wearing nothing but the shakha-pola on her wrists, the anklets, the silver toe rings.

“I had it wrong,” he said quietly, to himself.

“Had what wrong?”

He shook his head. “All of it.”

His boxers had given up. The head of his cock had pushed clear of the waistband, dark and glistening, longer than the shape at the ghat had suggested. As she watched, it lifted, one slow pulse, and grew thicker still. A small sound escaped her, halfway between a gasp and a laugh.

He set the camera down.

“Are you only going to take pictures,” she said, “or what?”

He crossed the room like he was starving.

Continue the story in Durga Puja Shoot.

All images are AI generated and do not depict any real person.