Govinda Ala Re
One night. One festival. No regrets.
She set her bag down on a chair in a stranger’s apartment and did not pick it up again.
Adéla is three days into a sourcing trip she’s making alone for the first time. Mill floors in Lower Parel, fabric weights, dye lots, a serviced flat in Bandra with a crow that shows up every morning like it has bookings. She is good at the work. She has been to Mumbai twice before and understood none of it.
This time the city gets hold of her.
A vada pav eaten standing up. A purse left on a cart. A shared cab in traffic that isn’t moving, and a dockworker who tells her she has picked the wrong three days to start falling in love with his city, because the day after tomorrow the pots go up.
Come and find out, he says, and gets out of the cab.
What follows is a street she doesn’t recognise, drums she feels before she hears, a human pyramid nine men high, and one look held across a crowd for less than two seconds. Then an emptying apartment, a bag she doesn’t pick up, and a night neither of them mistakes for the start of anything.
A standalone erotic short story, explicit and told without euphemism. No reunion, no second chance, no regrets. One woman, one city, and a festival that made the night possible.
A glimpse beneath the sheets…
Adéla, a textile buyer from Prague, was three days into her first solo trip to Mumbai when she left her purse on a vada pav cart in a lane off the mill district. The man who called after her — “O memsaab, your bag” — had a palm harder than she expected. That evening they reached for the same cab from opposite directions and shared it. He was Govind, a Mazgaon dock worker. She couldn’t stop registering the warmth of him a few inches away, the shoulders, the forearms, the general sense of a man built by work rather than by choosing to be. He told her the city was about to stop for two days — Janmashtami, then Dahi Handi, the earthen pot of curd hung high above the street and the human pyramids that train for months to reach it and break it. She asked what he did there. The cab pulled to his kerb.
“Come and find out,” he said.
***
Saturday morning she followed the sound. The crowd took her in and closed, and water thrown from somewhere above soaked her shirt through in one go, and nobody looked twice, because everybody was soaked. Someone grabbed her shoulder from behind and she turned.
Govind. He pointed up — third floor, a balcony with a direct line to the Handi. “My room. Those are my friends. You’ll see everything from there.”
She found the room. His friends absorbed her without fuss, made space for her at the balcony railing, and put a cold glass in her hand. The chant went up from the street, the same three or four syllables the whole morning had been built on. She turned to the woman beside her at the railing.
“What are they saying?”
“Govinda ala re. It means, Govinda has come.” Riya tipped her head at the pyramid. “Govinda is Krishna. And also them. All of them, the ones who climb. Nobody in that pyramid has eaten since yesterday morning — you fast for Janmashtami, then you climb the next day. You thought it was a party?”
Adéla found him then. Mid-tier, bare feet on other men’s shoulders, with the kind of physical certainty that comes from doing something so many times it stops being an act and becomes a fact.
The top tier reached. Struggled. Almost. Water hurled from a balcony hit the man at the top squarely in the face. The pyramid broke.
And in the chaos, as it came down and took everyone with it into the water and the turmeric and the wet street — he looked up. Found her on the balcony.
She didn’t look away. He didn’t either.
***
The room emptied in ones and twos. Nobody asked her if she was staying or leaving. They assumed she’d follow.
She didn’t follow.
At some point she picked up her bag. Stood with it, weight on one shoulder. Set it down on the chair by the door. Did not pick it up again.
She heard him on the stairs before the door opened. He stopped when he saw her — her bag on the chair, the empty room obvious behind her. Dahi dried to a pale crust in his hair, turmeric and red powder sweat-worked into his skin, his kurta soaked through and transparent in places.
“I need to shower,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Obviously.”
He held her eyes a moment longer. Then he went. She stood at the balcony, and the shower started.
Then she crossed the room to the bathroom door. She didn’t think about it. She’d stopped thinking about it a long time ago, sometime during the gap, or maybe in the cab, or maybe when he returned her purse with warm dry hands and she’d filed it away under heat.
She opened the door without knocking.
Steam. The sound of the shower. He heard the door because she didn’t try to be quiet.
“Can I come in?”
A pause. One beat.
“Yes.”
Continue the story in Govinda Ala Re.
A little more spice — on me — for my lovers
This part is for my lovers only.
Sign up, sweetheart — it’s free, and I don’t bite. Unless asked 😉
All images are AI generated and do not depict any real person.