An Encounter with an Unexpected Indian MILF - Ch. 02
Chapter 2 - Guddu ke Papa
Anjali is widowed and alone, so I bring her into my house. And the one thing she always held back, she finally gives me.
* * * * *
Before I go on, let me correct a few things from my first story, because I told it in a hurry and I got some details wrong.
First, my name. I never gave it to you last time. It is Dev.
Second, the ages, because I muddled them. As I sit and write this, I am 33 years old and married. I have a wife and a family in Mumbai, and not one person in that city has ever heard the name Anjali. Anjali herself is 45. Her daughter Mansi is 22.
And one more thing, so the rest of this makes sense. My factory is in a small town, three hours down the coast from Mumbai, past the salt pans and the chikoo orchards, where the highway finally lets go of the sea and turns inland. The coast runs on three languages, Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati, often all three in one sentence, and Anjali had all of them. I keep a bungalow there, and I spend about ten days of every month in it. For six years now, those ten days have belonged to Anjali.
Then, a few months before this chapter begins, her husband died.
* * * * *
It was an accident. A truck on the highway, late at night, coming back from wherever he worked. He was a distant man. He came home once in two weeks, slept in a different room from his wife, and left again. I felt nothing about him alive, and I am ashamed to say I felt very little about him dead. But Anjali called me at two in the morning, and before she could shape a single word I heard the sound she was making, and something in me went hard and did not go soft again.
She and Mansi were alone in the world now. A widow of 45 and her 22-year-old daughter. A rented room on a lane where the drains ran open in the monsoon. And a small town that watches a woman without a man the way a crow watches an unguarded plate.
I did not think about it for very long.
* * * * *
"You will resign from the factory," I told her.
We were in my cabin, one week after the cremation. It was a small room. A steel desk, a one-way glass window looking out on the shop floor, a calendar from a bearings company, the fan turning slow overhead. She sat on the other side of the desk with her cotton saree wrapped tight around her, her eyes still swollen, her bindi gone. She looked at me like I had raised my hand to her.
"Sir, the factory is all I have. If I leave it..."
"You are not going to live in that rented room. Not you, not Guddu."
I kept my voice level and firm, the way I knew she needed it, and I kept both my hands flat on the desk where they belonged. This was my factory. Whatever we were behind the gulmohar tree at night, in this room she was my supervisor and I was her employer, and I have never once mixed the two.
"You will both move into the bungalow. You will run my house instead of my inspection line. Cook, keep the place, look after it when I am in Mumbai. Same salary. More."
She was quiet for a long time. Out on the shop floor a forklift beeped. The bell rang for the shift change.
"Sir, people will talk."
"People will talk if a widow starves in a rented room also. Let them pick which story they like better."
Her mouth trembled. She looked down at her hands, twisting the end of her pallu.
"And Guddu?"
"Guddu gets a roof. A lock on her own door. And a man in the house who will break the legs of anyone who troubles her." I softened, a little. "Anjali. You have kept my house standing for six years. Now let me keep yours."
Then she cried. Not the loud crying of the funeral, the quiet kind, the kind that leaks out of a person who has been strong too long. I did not go around the desk. I did not touch her. I slid the steel glass of water across to her hand and I let her drink it and find herself again, and when she had, she stood, straightened her saree, said "thank you, Sir," in a small even voice, and went back out to her line. The workplace stayed the workplace. That has always mattered to me.
* * * * *
They moved in two weeks later, once the month of mourning was done.
Let me tell you about the house, and only broadly, because it matters to what happened in it.
It was a yellow bungalow behind a gulmohar tree, two floors and a small garden. Downstairs was the hall, the kitchen, and one bedroom. That one bedroom I gave to the two of them, and Anjali and Mansi shared it, mother and daughter on one wide bed, the way half the households in that town sleep anyway.
Upstairs was mine. Two big rooms. One with a bed, a writing table under the window, a lamp on the side table, and above it only the terrace and the open sky.
The house changed the day she walked back into it as its keeper instead of its visitor.
I had eaten Anjali's cooking for six years, but always in stolen bits, a hurried dinner before I drove off. I had never had her run a kitchen at me full force. She is from a good Ahmedabad family that lost its money but never its recipes. She was a fabulous cook.
"You have gone soft in Mumbai," she told me one evening, standing over me at the table, watching me eat with her arms folded like a jailer. She reached down and pinched a little roll at my side, quite shamelessly.
"In this house you will eat like a man, not like a bachelor hiding from his own kitchen."
"I am the master of this house," I said, with my mouth full of her bajra roti.
"You cannot pinch the master."
"The master will finish what is on his plate," she said, "and the master will have one more laddoo, and then the master may go and be the master upstairs." And she put another laddoo on my plate and walked back to her stove, swinging her hips just enough that she knew I was watching, and I understood then that this was going to be a very different arrangement from the ten-days-a-month one, because a mistress you visit is a fantasy, but a woman who feeds you and scolds you and steals a laddoo off your plate for herself is a wife.
There was the rose, too. Every morning a fresh one appeared in a steel tumbler on my windowsill, red, from the bush in the garden. On the third day I asked her about it.
"For luck," she said, not looking at me, chopping onions with that flat fast knife-work that could take a finger off.
"For luck, or so you have an excuse to come into my room every morning?"
She did not even pause. "A widow needs many excuses, Sir. You should be grateful I have chosen a cheap one." And she flicked the onion skins into the bin and told me my tea was getting cold. That was Anjali. You went at her with a joke and she came back over the top of it every single time.
* * * * *
Outside the yellow walls, though, the town was watching.
You do not move a widow and her grown daughter into a single man's bungalow in a small town like that and expect silence. The fisherwoman, the maid, the aunties at the temple where Anjali went on Tuesdays, all of them had a great deal to say, just quiet enough to be deniable and just loud enough to be heard.
She bore it the way she bore everything, with her chin up and her back straight, and only once did I see it get under her skin. She came back from the temple one Tuesday with her jaw tight, put the prasad down harder than she needed to, and said, "Kamla auntie asked me today, very sweetly, whether I have found the housework 'very demanding at night.'"
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her that at my age I sleep like a stone, and that she should worry about her own son, who I hear is neither sleeping at home nor at his wife's." She untied her pallu from her waist and let out a breath, and then, despite herself, the corner of her mouth went up. "Her face, Dev. Like a slapped fish." She caught herself using my name in the daylight, in the kitchen, and colored, and turned quickly back to the stove. But she was smiling. I have always been able to make her smile, and God knows in those months she needed it.
The one time the whole town went quiet on her, funnily enough, was during Ganpati.
The Ganesh festival is a big thing on our coast. For ten days in the monsoon the town belongs to the elephant god, the dhol goes half the night, and on the last day the whole town walks the idol down to the water and drowns it.
A woman in her first year of mourning does not go to a festival. So while the town sang, Anjali stayed home. On the visarjan evening the drums came up the lane and the street emptied toward the creek, and I found her at the upstairs window in the dark, watching the torches go past below.
I came and stood behind her. I did not touch her. On the road under us, the town carried its god to the sea.
"He used to like this festival," she said, not turning. "The one useful thing about him. He would take Guddu to see the big Ganpati and come home smelling of the crowd." A long breath.
"This is her first Ganpati without him. And I could not even take her."
"I will take her tomorrow," I said.
"To the small one, at the market. I will buy her something nice."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she reached back, without turning around, and found my hand, and held it, there in the dark with the drums going away toward the water. She had never once, in six years, held my hand like that. Not for pleasure. Just to hold it.
"You are a strange man, Dev," she said softly. "You will not touch me for three months because you are being decent, and then you say a thing like that and undecent yourself completely."
I laughed. She laughed. And that, if I am honest, was the night the three months of not-touching truly ended, though it took the monsoon another week to force the matter.
* * * * *
Because, understand, for those first three months I had not touched her.
Six years we had been lovers. But a woman does not bury a husband on Tuesday and open herself to another man on Wednesday, and I would not have respected her if she could. So we lived in the house like two people holding their breath, and the not-touching, after six years of touching, filled it like a smell you cannot name.
It broke on a wet night, in the last week of my third visit after the passing.
* * * * *
The monsoon came in hard that evening, and around nine the power went, the way it always goes in that town when the rain means it. Mansi had eaten early and gone to the downstairs room. I ate late by the light of a single emergency lamp, and Anjali stood at the counter clearing the plates, and the only other light in the house was the lightning.
"Sir, sit," she said. "I will carry a candle up to your room."
"Leave it. Sit with me one minute."
She hesitated. Then she came and sat, not across from me but on the bench beside me, close, her knee almost against mine, near enough that I could smell the jasmine in her hair and the faint sweat of the kitchen on her skin. In the lamplight her tired face was soft and very beautiful.
"Are you settling?" I asked her. "Truly. Not the answer you give the neighbours."
She turned the steel glass in her hands.
"Truly?" A small breath. "That first night we slept here, I lay on that bed with Guddu beside me, and I listened to your feet on the floor over my head. Walking. Going to the bathroom. Lying down." She looked up at me. "And I was not afraid. For the first time since he died, I was not afraid. There was a man over my head at night, that is all, and I slept."
She has no idea what she has just said, I thought.
"Anjali."
"Sir, I am sorry, I should not have..."
I reached over, took her by the wrist, and pulled her into my lap. She would never have come on her own. She came because I brought her, and once she was there, her arms went around my neck like they had been waiting three months for permission.
Her forehead dropped against mine. I could feel her breathing, quick and uneven, and the warm weight of her through the thin cotton.
"It is not too soon," I said. "Is it."
"No," she whispered. "It stopped being too soon a long time ago. I have only been waiting for you to decide."
That was Anjali. Six years, and she still waited for me to decide. I kissed her, and she made a low sound into my mouth and kissed me back with a hunger she had been holding down since the funeral, her hands in my hair, her fingers pulling at my collar. I let her have it for a while. Then I took her face in both hands and slowed her right down, until she was shaking against me.
"Look at me," I said.
She opened her eyes.
"Whose are you."
It was our old game, from years of nights in that upstairs room. She used to answer it laughing. She did not laugh now. Lightning lit the kitchen white, and she looked straight at me and said it low and sure, and it changed everything.
"Yours. Completely. There is no husband now, Sir. Nobody in the next room, nobody I have to go back to, nobody waiting up. If you want me tonight, you are not stealing me from anyone anymore." Her eyes filled. "You can have all of it. I am only asking you to take it."
"Then stop calling me Sir," I said. "Six years, Anjali. Not tonight. Tonight you use my name."
She smiled, wet and shy, the way she had the very first time.
"Dev," she said, like she was testing whether she was allowed. "Dev."
I stood up out of the bench with her still in my arms.
* * * * *
I carried her up the dark stairs. She hid her face in my neck the whole way, and the rain was loud on the roof, and the lightning threw our shadow up the wall ahead of us, one shape, not two.
My bedroom was black except for the storm. I set her down by the bed and lit the lamp, and the light grew and turned the sheets warm and gold. Rain streaked the window. I could smell the wet garden coming up through the shutters.
I undressed her slowly. The way I had never let myself before, because before there had always been a clock, a fortnight, a husband down the lane. Not now. I unpinned her pallu and let it fall. I found the loose end of the saree at her waist and turned her slowly, unwinding it round and round, six yards of cotton pooling on the red floor while she stood and watched me over her shoulder with her breath going short.
"Dev sees everything today," she said softly.
"Dev waited six years to see it with the lamp lit and all night to do it."
She laughed, wet and surprised. Then I got the blouse hooks open, and the laugh went out of her.
Her body undid me. It was a widow's body and a mother's body, and I loved it more than I had loved it before. Heavier now. Softer. The belly no longer flat. The breasts full and low and beautiful, and those big dark nipples, thick as my thumb, already tight and standing. She moved to cover herself out of pure habit and I caught both her wrists and drew them down to her sides.
"No," I said. "Not tonight. Tonight you let me look at all of it."
She let me look.
I laid her back on the sheets. Her black hair spread out on the white cotton, the lamp on one side of her, the rain-light on the other. I did not rush a single thing. I kissed her mouth, her jaw, the soft place under it, down her throat to the little bare hollow where her mangalsutra used to hang and now did not. She flinched when my lips touched that empty place, so I stayed there, kissing it, until the flinch melted and her hands came up into my hair to hold me down.
I took my time at her breasts. I ran the flat of my tongue over one dark nipple, slow, again and again, until it was wet and shining in the lamplight, then closed my lips around it and sucked, and she arched up off the bed with a gasp. I moved to the other. I pushed both breasts together with my hands and went back and forth between the two nipples, licking, sucking, letting my teeth just barely close, while her hips began to move under me on their own.
"Haan," she breathed. "Haan, like that. God, I had forgotten a man could be like this."
Then I went down.
I kissed my way down over her soft belly, over the old silver stretch-marks Mansi had left there twenty-two years ago, down to the inside of one warm thigh and then the other. Her legs closed on reflex. I put my palms flat on the insides of her knees and opened her, slow and patient, the way you open something you plan to keep. In the lamplight I could see how wet she already was, her pussy dark and swollen and glistening, a thread of it catching the light.
"Dev, no, it is dirty, you should not..."
"Anjali. Quiet."
She went quiet.
I put my mouth on her. Six years, and she had never once let me do this properly, with the light on and time to spare, and the first touch of my tongue made her whole body jump and a sound come out of her that was half a sob. I did not hurry. I licked her slow from bottom to top, tasting the salt and the wet of her, again and again, and then I found the little hard knot of her clit with the tip of my tongue and stayed there. I circled it. I flattened my tongue and dragged it. I closed my lips around it and sucked, gently, and her hands flew into my hair and gripped hard enough to hurt.
"Dev. Dev, I cannot, that is too much, I..."
I slid one finger into her while I kept my mouth on her clit. She was hot and soft and so wet that I went in to the knuckle with no resistance at all, and when I curled my finger up and found the rough patch on the front wall she cried out and slapped one hand flat against the headboard. I gave her a second finger. I worked them slow in and out, curling them each time, and I kept sucking and flicking her clit, and I felt her start to climb. Her thighs began to shake against my ears. Her belly went tight. A sheen of sweat came up on her forehead and her upper lip, shining in the lamplight, and her breath broke into short high pieces.
"I am going to, Dev, I am going to, do not stop, please do not stop..."
I did not stop. I pushed my fingers deep and curled them hard and sucked her clit, and she went over. Her back came right off the bed. She clamped down around my fingers in long hard pulses, and a small warm spray of her wet came out over my hand and my wrist, once, twice, just a few drops thrown loose by how hard she broke. She gushed hot around my fingers and soaked the sheet under her, and my name came out of her in pieces, and I held my mouth on her through all of it and did not let her go until the last wave had shaken out of her and she fell back flat, wet-thighed, chest heaving, forehead damp, completely wrecked.
I sat up between her legs and looked at her lying there in the lamplight, undone, glistening, and I have to tell you, I nearly finished just from the sight of it.
* * * * *
Then I came up over her. My cock was so hard it ached, standing up thick and heavy, the head shining with pre-cum. She reached down between us without being told and wrapped her warm hand around it, and the moment she touched it I felt it jump against her palm.
"Please," she said, looking up at me, her hand stroking me slow.
"Atta bota nako, lawda ghala! Ata rahavat naahi" [Not your fingers now, put the cock! I can't bear it anymore.]
I brought the head of my cock to her pussy. She was soaked, swollen, open. I pushed in slowly, and we both went dead still and just felt it. Even after six years, even after everything, that first push still took the breath clean out of me. She was so warm. So soft. So wet that I slid all the way in with one long slow stroke, and the heat of her closed around me like a fist made of silk. Her eyes came open and found mine at the exact second I was fully inside her.