Slither
the first story from the book “Slither ~ carnal prose by urmilla deshpande”
Slither
~
I was in love with this man once. I loved his hazy brown eyes, as he looked at his computer screen, or the TV screen, or some obscure book about the lifecycle of Amazon gingers (probably his own PhD thesis). I loved his hands, I watched them for hours, looking surreptitiously over my newspaper, as he dug, planted, watered, caressed the aggressive, suggestive flowers and spiky leaves. I watched him wash them in the greenhouse sink, he always examined his broad, muddy nails and pulled at the webbing between his long dark fingers as he waited for the tapwater to heat. Then he would hold them in the stream, softening the caked-on dirt, squirt the unscented soap onto his palms with his elbow, and entwine and unentwine them in a slow dance, covering them in a bubbly casing. I had seen snakes mating one day, on one of our ginger-finding expeditions. He had stopped me with his arm, put his hand on my mouth, and pointed. I would have gasped at the sight, but for his hand. We were alone, the rest of the team had taken a different path. We watched. I was bound to the sight by my eyes, but also my heart. They wrapped around each other like living vines, an elaborate motion of sinew and sex, they were slow, and took their time, and were fast and moved on each other in a series of strangleholds, over and over, tightening and moving like muscular liquid, time meant nothing, not to them and not to me, and I was a snake in the green shadowlight of the jungle, I was a mate, I was inseparable from the sound of my scales and the grip of my lover, and his whole body wrapped around mine so I could tell no more, which move, which touch was me and which him, and we were not one, but we were one, tied and untied, lost and found, past, present, future, and yet nothing but the flesh of our being. I remember the feeling of turning to slime when I watched them, and of despair knowing that I could never be a snake in a love knot with my snake love, not with this man, who watched dispassionately with me, nor any other. And as I watched him wash his hands, I thought of them, always, as the two hands of the same man, not his and mine, not entwined. Not now or ever snakes.
And still, I loved his hands. I wonder what it is about him that rejects me over and over. It is not that he does not touch me, or that he does not look at me. But it is not with the eyes of a lover that he sees me. It is with the eyes of a botanist. He sees my eyes, humans have two, plants none, so perhaps they do not impress him, though they are, I’ve been told, fine eyes. He touches my skin, but with his fingertips, not his whole hands, through my clothes, not with the delight of knowing I’m right there below that layer, but with some practical purpose—to guide me through some forest path perhaps, or stop me as he did that day to watch those snakes. He even lays with me, often enough that I would not notice his disinterest, but not often enough that I felt elevated above Amazon gingers. I suppose such a flamboyant obsession makes it hard for him to see me, a mere human female, thousands of whom pass him in the street every day. I was not one he had tramped through mud and slashed through vines for, I was not one he had finally encountered, standing in a clearing alone bathed in pale green sunlight like a fire-hued goddess of the verge, waiting there for him to take her home and make babies with her. No, I was just a garden-variety human female. Well, not garden, I suppose. Asphalt. But I loved him, and I hoped that one day he would love me. Not as he did now, but in the way of a snake.
I did not care for the gingers themselves. They looked to me like abominations, like some unnatural plastic product which had been stuck all over that otherwise luscious rainforest landscape. The flowers were hard and did not invite a second touch, the colours were without subtlety or nuance. I loved our expeditions, and everything about the forest and its people. Everything except the ginger plants. It might have been that I had no choice but to hate them, they were after all my rivals. But I didn’t think so. I just did not like them, their look, their feel or anything about them. Even the smell of the gingers, some coquettish and some almost animal, put me off.
He was not always one of practical hands. Or maybe I misunderstood, or mistook his early explorations for desire. He once loved exploring me as he now did those gingers. He had once enjoyed smelling the vanilla perfume of that flower I had between my legs. He took pleasure in discovering its purple folds and in tasting its creamy nectar. He loved watching it bloom and change colour and consistency as it grew, it was a little springtime every time he gave it the attentions and ministrations of touch, and watered and fertilised it with spit or his own slime. And then eventually our ritual became just that. He would kiss me sometimes, and sometimes not even that, he would absently note with his fingertips that I had breasts, and they had nipples, he would pose between my legs for a few minutes, make a few desultory thrusts and I heard the slightly sharper intake of breath before he stopped and went to wash himself. Sometimes he would return to the bed and put his fingertips on that just-abandoned bud, and I would feel a stirring of hope, if not arousal, but that was soon stopped in its tracks by the shallow steady breathing of a sleeping man. I began to avoid the whole exercise. I began to wonder if my desire to touch and be touched was leaving me altogether, as they promise it will when ignored long enough. Sometimes it was a relief to think it would be gone and would no longer plague me, but sometimes I would wake up in a sheer terror of longing and loneliness that kept me awake all night looking at the sleeping form of the husband I had once loved and longed for, now with thoughts of suicide, murder, at least escape. Literal escape. But I ridiculed those terrors and desires into the corner, and threw the body bag of sleep over them eventually, night after night.
In daylight hours I would wonder how this had happened. He seemed quite contented with our life, he went about his work in the greenhouse, he wrote papers, he taught classes, he graded, he advised students, he was much admired and liked. One day after a particularly good dinner party, as I was washing up the good china, the panic came to me in full consciousness. It alarmed me. I frantically scraped the salmon bits off the plate. It had been a really good salmon. I used an edible ginger root that he had sneaked past customs a few years ago and grown several large plants from over the years. It had a distinct sweetness that lent itself perfectly to salmon. The guests had eaten in reverent silence. He had praised my skills too, he said that the fish had not given its life in vain, and neither had the ginger. Thinking about the salmon and the salad with candied ginger shreds and the gingery pear tart all made with different gingers did not help me at all. My heart shuddered in an awfully unrhythmic way and I put my soapy fist over it. I began to wipe the washed plates and put them in the drawers where they would stay until the next time there was a dinner party for important guests. My sexuality was treated the same way as those washed-up plates. It was put in some drawer in my husband’s mind between ‘Other Plants’ and ‘Student Papers 1981-1990’. It was taken out for special occasions. There simply weren’t too many of those in the life of a botany professor and his sometime painter-slash-travel agent wife. A few anniversaries, the memory lapse of a birthday covered up with a large ribbon on a small unimportant ginger plant were not special enough occasions to take out the good china. And so it went. My heart settled down a little, into a deep sadness for myself, but also for him, for the lost opportunity, for the lost life of my physical self, the beaches of my thighs and the coves and moonlit tides of the vast kingdom of my skin and hair and breasts, a place made for cavorting, for finding the depths of lust and the shallows of peace, the place I lived.
Summer came, and with it our trip to the Himalayas. He had heard, some years ago, a friend in meteorology describe a plant to him. Apparently this one had no blooms, and there was an abundance of it in a particular spot in the forest near a village. The villagers would go to the spot and just stick a device like a giant apple corer into the ground and bring out a tube of ginger enough to last them a month. It wasn’t so much that he was interested in culinary ginger, but this one intrigued him. He imagined the entire ground under the spot was a giant ginger root, and he wanted to see it. It tied in with his desire to trek in the region, and he planned for this trip as meticulously as he did everything he did.
The village was as I had expected, a beautiful, neatly laid out smattering of little houses on a small slope close to a dense forest. As soon as we got there after plane and train and bus and jeep and final stretch on our feet, we were taken to a hut that was a bit larger than the others. It was cool and dampish inside, I felt the dampness immediately as we walked in from the bone-dry air outside. It was lit only by the soft glow of persistent sunlight that made it in through the tiny perforations in one of the walls. When my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I saw a man sitting quietly cross-legged on the floor. Of course he was quiet as in he did not make a sound, but there was something quiet about his whole being. He was looking at us as we bumbled in with our heavy hiking shoes and heavy backpacks. There was nowhere to sit, so we stood, the two of us and the guide who brought us there from the jeep drop-off point, and the villager who brought us to the hut. The seated man had long dreadlocked hair, and there was an odd matte shine to his face and arms that made him look blue in the faded light. He was looking directly at my husband’s shoes, and it suddenly struck me that there was an alcove outside the door with a couple of sandals in it. I stepped outside and sat on the parapet bench built in to the side of the house. I unlaced my boots and took off my socks, and left them and my backpack with the sandals.
Everyone had settled cross-legged on the floor by the time I went back in. There were some introductions in progress, and then some plans were made about seeing about the ginger grove and visiting some temple high in the hills behind us, and talk about three days hence being the second full moon that month, and something about the feeding of snakes. I noticed suddenly that the wall behind the man was hung with snake skins. Some of them were six and seven feet long, and had been looped around because the wall wasn’t tall enough for them to hang straight down. There were at least forty skins there, if not more. They were also alarmingly broad. I thought they must have belonged to rat snakes, huge but harmless. I asked. I was told each and every one there was a cobra skin, and they had all been found between the rocks surrounding the village, where the snakes left them after moulting. And some in the ginger grove.
The days went by fast, walking up and down hills and valleys. The pain from walking miles and miles kept me in my hut on the third day. That night was the blue moon. Everyone in the village got ready to feed milk to the snakes. They brought out polished silvery bowls, and the children drank no milk that day, it was stored in brass buckets in the coolest part of each house till the moon rose. I had not seen a single snake in all our walking, and no moulted skins either. I wondered where all these tens of snakes that I was told would come to drink the milk would suddenly come from, on this one particular day. Nor had I seen the man we met on the first day, though he seemed to be the chief, he ran everything and all the others referred to him all the time, whether it was something he said, or some instruction of his they had to follow. When I asked our guide he said he had gone somewhere and would return that night when the moon was rising. He did not know where his chief had gone, but he seemed uninterested in finding out. If he found my constant questions annoying or surprising, he did not show it, he just stopped acknowledging them after a while. My husband had found several species of ginger that he had never seen before right around the village, and he was too ecstatic to be interested in the whereabouts of the village chief either. I was intrigued though. There was nowhere to go from the village, as far as I could see, other than the mountains that ringed us. I imagined this man walking around in the ice and snow looking for moulted snake skins. I decided to see if he was in his hut. My husband had gone to the grove of the big ginger, I was not up to the walk.
I knew the hut, it was different from the others. People ignored me as I walked toward it, the children followed me and asked for candy, but when they saw I had nothing, they ran off too. I approached the hut. I sat on the ledge bench again and took my shoes off. I knocked on the door, and waited for an answer. There was none. I pushed open the door and went in. As my eyes got used to the blue gloom inside I saw that there was no one there but me and the skins of those snakes. I stood in the middle of the room and looked around. I noticed the curtain that hung at a door on one side, and moved toward it, hoping he was there, and afraid that he really would be there. He was. He sat with his back to me, completely naked from where I stood, blue-black skin stretched over supple flesh. His vertebrae fell like a string of giant black pearls from the back of his neck down to the point of his tailbone. I could not see what he was doing, I was too afraid to move. He was cross-legged and so still that I thought he was a statue of blue flesh and blue blood. The complexity of my desire made me think it was a long time I stood there, but the speed of thought meant it was probably only minutes.
Where did desire come from? Or was it always there, buried under attempts and rejection, loss and years. All those barriers and systems of repression failed in this unknown place with this unknown being and his aura that neither conveyed nor signified anything at all. I took a step forward into the even deeper gloom of this room, where hardly any of the sunlight from the other room made it, and there were no windows or even perforations in the wall. I expected him to turn around, or to move or start at the sound of my foot on the packed mud floor. There was no movement, not even the sound of breath. I took several steps then, I was convinced he was in some kind of state where my sounds and presence did not reach him.
His eyes were closed, blue-sheened almonds resting slanted below those long dark arches of his brow bone that joined in the centre to flow down his nose and separate again into the wings of his nostrils and lose themselves in the velvet texture of his face. His mouth repeated that flaring arch of his brow, dipping deep where the arches met, a small perfectly round circle in the centre formed by the way the lips rested on each other without quite touching at that spot. I followed, with my starving eyes, the line of his chin, his throat, my gaze ran down his torso, dissecting it into two perfect halves. And then I saw something I had surely never seen before. From the intersection of heels rose a creature of his body, muscular as one of his snakes coursing between two rocks as they left their old skin behind, a single pulse flickered at its head. I turned again to slime as I looked, I was back in the forest all those years ago when I had watched the two snakes in their love dance. But I was a woman, and here was the power of manhood before me, self-possessed, self-aware, capable of great pain and great pleasure, and also oblivious. This was without a doubt the biggest, strongest, most sustained erection I had ever seen. It seemed suspended in that state by something in this man’s mind, it was physical, of course, but yet also not. He was not even there in that body, and wherever he was that was causing this perfect state of manhood, was where I wanted to be.
I did not perfectly understand my own thoughts, but I stood there, unable to take my eyes or mind or body away from that man being a man and nothing else, and I have never wanted anything so much as union with that maleness. Nothing more, nothing less. I wanted to surround his strength and power with the softest, slimiest flesh I had, and be with him in that expanse of raw, basic, utter life. I imagined slipping slowly down on him, feeling that sweet pulse inside me, and then, with my legs around his body, feeling nothing but our own living, our existence, and the existence of the world. I wanted to know where his mind was, where he was travelling, what he saw and whom he was with, that made this beast stand before me without any physical reason to sustain its life.
When I left the hut, it was almost dark. The moon would rise any minute, and I waited with all the other people, men, women, children. The moon began to rise, we couldn’t see it yet, but a serpentine vein of white began to creep along the edge of the hills, moving slowly along until it suddenly got lost in the wash of blue white moonlight as the moon’s curve appeared gently from behind the hill in front of us. I sighed, and my husband standing beside me asked where I had been, he had been looking for me. He didn’t wait for my answer, he began to tell me about the amazing size and depth of the ginger root. I hushed him after a while, not with any heat, just gently, so I could watch the moon in silence, as everyone else was doing.
As soon as the whole disc became visible, there was a lot of activity. Everyone disappeared for a few minutes and returned with the little bowls which they placed around the open courtyard. Then they just sat down and waited. I sat too, three quarters of an hour, perhaps, but there was nothing. I had no memory of any thought or decision of what I was going to do, but I was standing outside the main hut again, outside his hut, taking off my shoes again. I went inside. He was there, and there were seven small children with him. He smiled at me, slanting his eyes even more, and asked me to sit. Then he explained to us how we would call to the snakes, how we would sing, and they would know that the milk was there for them. He told us all not to be afraid, because the snakes would not do anything to harm us on that day, but also that they would not come as long as they could taste our fear on the moonlight. Then he gave the children his silver bowl and asked them to put it in the right hand corner of the courtyard farthest away from the village. And then they all ran out. We sat there, face to face, and though he was fully clothed, I could think of nothing but his closed eyes, and the creature that lay sleeping against his thigh. He laughed, startling me. He offered me a cup of milk that sat next to him. I took it, and took a small sip. He motioned me to drink the whole cup, but he didn’t need to. It was creamy and went down smoothly leaving a faint aroma of flowers in my throat. Then he stood up and began to walk toward the door. I wanted to follow him, but I could not. I heard him laugh again as he closed the door behind him. I noticed another cup of the milk in a bowl right where he had given me the one I drank from. It had a pinkish tinge to it, and I leaned forward to take a sniff. I found I kept leaning forward, and couldn’t stop. And then I knew what he had given me, or what he had done to me. My vision was different somehow. I could see everything, but I felt I could see it with my eyes and some other sense as well. I felt the earth below my ribs, and I heard, or felt, I had no words to form thoughts of my sensations, footsteps everywhere. I went to the door, though I knew he had closed it. But it was as good as open to me, I just went through what must have been a huge gap between the door and the floor. I went out into the moonlit courtyard, and I saw so many bowls of milk, and I saw at each of them beautiful beings glowing in the cobalt light, their scales making a soft shirring as they moved about, their black tongues flickering like flames savouring the dry air smoky from the small fire someone had lit at one end of the courtyard. I saw a familiar leg, dark and covered in curls, and I brushed along the skin. He did not move, or notice what to me was a definite and not abrupt touch. I could not smile, but I felt a smile inside my new self. I went to one of the bowls, but I knew I should not drink. I knew my spell would be broken if I even touched that milk.
The darkness called me, I could hear soft sounds of insects and birds in the short grass. I scrubbed myself along the rocks, and it felt good. I stopped on a smooth rock and tasted the air again and again. And then I tasted his smell on the night air. It came to me, clear and strong, and I was ready for him. And he appeared beside me, his scales delineated, a precise pattern of iron and night, silver and water, blue as the depth of the ocean. I was ready for him.
This was everything I thought it would be and more. I knew there would be touch. I did not know that it was not just surface touch. The kneading and muscularity of the way we moved on each other went deep into the layers of my body, down to the bone. The skin that I thought would not feel anything sent repeated shivers and tingles up and down my long leanness, the scales rippling the wrong way when he slid his on mine, tugging at each nerve ending in a crisp and staccato prickling, and then as it got almost unpleasant, smoothing out again with the movement the other way. There seemed to be no purpose to our ceaseless mutual motion but pleasure, there was no need or urgency about it. We just went on and on climbing, rubbing, knotting and weaving, holding and lengthening and shortening and gnashing and jerking, standing almost on our tail points in moments of ecstatic oneness where I could not tell where he began and I ended and I ended and he began. I had not understood at all when I had seen those other two in the jungle in another life what it meant to be this way, I did not understand the nature of touch when it belongs to two and not just one. I did not understand the nature of coupling, and how there was no separation between the two units of the couple in those moments. And they were not just moments, they were hours. I could see him, I could hear him, I could feel him, and I could smell-taste him with a flick of my tongue, and every time I sizzled my tongue I could feel and taste the metallic electricity we had made like a blue cloud on the air around us.
And finally he lay along my full length and gripped me, and I felt him within me, and then he grew and grew, and I knew the power of that maleness finally, I had longed for it since I was born that first time, lifetimes and lifetimes ago, and I had been this same me, and he had tried to show me then, how it could be, and how it was meant to be, life, love, and the making of new life.
He stayed with me till my eggs were laid, and hatched, and a year went by like the flow of water over the stones in the river. When it was that time of year again, he led me to a place that was not familiar to me anymore. And I followed him because I trusted him, and I found myself in a place full of heavy footsteps and moonlight like that first night we had been together. He led me to a place where there was drink for us. And I knew what it was. It was the milk, it was the night of the snake, it was the night I could return to the life I had known before, one that had faded every day from my senses. I left him and turned away into the dark places that I knew, the rocks, the leaves, the cities below the earth that were damp and cool and away from the dry air. I knew he would be back for me. We were one, he and I, I was his lover.
I came out into the morning sun, and began my search for a place where I could thrust off this old skin, it had grown too small on me. I found it, a place of spiky leaves and a smell that I knew very well, where a huge root lay below the earth. I would smell of it for a long time. I found two rocks and began to move and writhe between them. It would soon be off me, that skin, laying there in the ginger grove, abandoned like an unwanted life.
