My Gift Took Me to a Lost Temple in India

This is my confession, told exactly as it happened to me. Some people won’t believe me, others will think I’m exaggerating. It doesn’t matter. When you’ve been carrying what I’ve been carrying since I was fourteen, you stop caring what other people think.

Mine is called priapism. For those who don’t know, and to put it bluntly, it means I’m hard practically all day. The name comes from Priapus, the Roman god of fertility. Mine is the painless kind, the lucky version of something rare: it doesn’t hurt, and I can come several times in a row without going soft. What for others is a curse ended up becoming a way of life for me.

The most obvious drawback is peeing sitting down. The rest, over the years, I learned to handle as a gift. And a gift has to be used. I’ve used it with women, with men, with transvestites, with entire groups where no one was quite sure who was with whom. There was always someone willing to check that the story was true.

But being rock hard isn’t everything. I like the whole thing: the pleasure of skin, of tongue, of the smell of sweat in a closed room. So when I started getting bored with the European routine, I decided to cross the world. The idea was simple: travel to India, read the Kama Sutra in its own land, and let some local master teach me things that in the West don’t even have names.

I took a flight from Heathrow to Bombay. A long twelve hours, with a stopover. I wore loose linen trousers and nothing underneath, because I knew the pressure would be with me the whole trip. And it was. The flight attendant assigned to my aisle noticed before we even took off.

Her name was Carla. Blonde, tall, with thighs that seemed never to end beneath that corporate little skirt. Every time she bent down to serve drinks to the row in front, I could see the edge of her ass and the transparency of her lingerie. I didn’t pretend to look anywhere else. She didn’t pretend not to notice either.

—Have you been without sleep for a long time, sir? —she asked with a smile, while serving me a whiskey I hadn’t ordered.

—Longer than you can imagine —I answered.

—If you need anything during the flight, find me. I’m in the back galley.

She said it without lowering her voice, looking straight at my lap. The passenger beside me pretended to read the newspaper. I closed my eyes and let the pressure do what it had to do.

***

When I got off the plane in Bombay, the heat hit me like an open hand. Humid, thick, impossible to breathe without feeling your shirt stick to your back within minutes. I took off my jacket, loosened my tie, and put it in my bag. I wasn’t going to need the tie in the days ahead.

Carla caught up with me at the terminal exit with a small suitcase, already changed into a spaghetti-strap dress and flat sandals. We shared a taxi to the hotel without asking each other anything. No need. The driver handled the car as if the lane markings were a suggestion, and we used every brake to brush our legs together in the back seat.

The hotel was the best in the area. Money doesn’t worry me when I travel; I’d rather pay for a firm bed and air conditioning that actually works. That night Carla shared the bed with me. It wasn’t a negotiation, it was a continuation.

She undressed in front of me without theatrics while I opened the minibar wine. She had the body of someone who walks a lot through airports: firm, with white marks where the swimsuit had kept the sun away. She climbed onto the bed on her knees and waited for me.

—I want to see if what they were saying in the cabin is true —she said.

—And what were they saying?

—That you’d been like that the whole flight.

I answered by unbuttoning my trousers. No further explanation was needed. She laughed softly and lowered her head. Carla wasn’t the kind to be satisfied with receiving; she gave herself completely —mouth, hands, everything— and at the same time demanded that I not stop touching her. We switched positions so many times I lost count. When I came in her mouth for the first time, she smiled and told me that was the beginning, not the end. She was right.

***

The next day we decided to explore the temples. I’d been told about one on the outskirts of the city where, according to the guides, ancient festivals in honor of deities of pleasure were still held. Carla put on an almost transparent dress, with nothing underneath. “What for? —she said, laughing— it’s going to end up on the floor anyway.” I stayed in my fine linen too, also without underwear, because by then nothing mattered anymore.

The temple stood at the end of a red dirt path, surrounded by palm trees and incense smoke. We were greeted by Aruna, a devadasi priestess, dressed in a yellow sari so delicate it wasn’t clothing but a second skin. She had dark skin, deep brown eyes, and breasts that thrust shamelessly against the fabric. Her nipples stood out like two buttons.

—It is an honor to receive visitors who respect our customs —she said in flawless English, bringing her hands together at chest level.

Behind her, a group of young people from the temple were cleaning statues and arranging flowers. They all wore similar saris, all moved with the same calm. They were preparing for the next day’s festivities.

We invited her to dinner. Aruna looked at the bulge in my trousers with the naturalness of someone reading a page, nodded, and accepted. We took her to the most expensive restaurant in Bombay, on the top floor of a colonial building overlooking the harbor. She ordered fish, white wine, and told us stories about the temple, the rituals, how she learned to breathe with her whole body and not just her lungs.

When we returned to the suite, there were no preliminaries. Aruna kissed us both at the door —first Carla, then me— without haste. I went into the bathroom to take a shower. When I came out, wrapped in a small towel, the two of them were already on the bed, stroking each other with that slow deliberate rhythm only women who know each other’s bodies have.

I joined them from behind. I grabbed Aruna’s breasts while she slid two fingers into Carla. I moved toward the blonde’s ass, which was already stretched and wet from the night before, and entered her slowly, hearing her moan against the Indian woman’s mouth. Carla came before anyone else, undone between the two hands working her over.

Then we switched. I ended up between the two of them, facing Aruna, inside her, while Carla wrapped her arms around us and caressed the priestess’s breasts from behind. Aruna breathed as if she were meditating, controlling every movement, every contraction. I had never felt a cunt grip me and release me with such precision. It was training, not chance.

We had several orgasms. I lost count again. At some point, Carla came down to my cock to drink me in one gulp while I slipped two fingers into her ass. Aruna climbed on top of me, rubbed her clit against my pelvis, and came trembling without making a sound. We made love for hours. When the sky began to lighten at the window, none of the three of us had slept, and none of us cared.

***

In the morning, after a long breakfast on the terrace, we went back to the temple for the festival. It was a ritual orgy, plain and simple. Naked bodies, thick incense, drums somewhere in a corner, and a heat that made the skin sticky within two minutes. Aruna vanished into the crowd as soon as we crossed the door. Carla did too. I was left alone amid bodies that didn’t know me and didn’t need to know me.

Near me, a couple was embracing against a column. He was fucking her slowly. I came up behind her, stroked her ass, and started going into her from behind without anyone objecting. Quite the opposite: she threw her head back against my shoulder and sought my mouth with her lips.

My hands never stopped. I was touching her breasts, brushing the man’s cock and balls, and after a while I felt another head between my legs starting to suck my testicles from below. I pulled my cock out of the woman’s ass and shoved it into the mouth of the girl below. The guy fucking her, seeing me free, kissed my back and started stroking my ass with both hands.

When I came in the mouth of the one on the floor, the man touched my shoulder and turned around. He offered me his own back, ass spread, and I went in without thinking. I fucked him slowly, his hands searching for mine over the hips of the woman still beneath me. Three bodies at once, all three of us moving to the same rhythm, all three of us silent.

Then he was the one who turned and took me by the hips. He rammed me from behind while I was still inside the woman’s ass. His balls slapped against mine. When he came, he did it by pressing my neck with his open hand, not violently, just marking that he was there. He stood up, kissed me on the mouth, and went off to find another body in the crowd.

I stayed. The woman sat up, dragged me onto a silk rug, and sat on top of me. Another girl came over, kissed them both, licked my chest. A third tore off what little I was wearing and took over my cock with her mouth before the first could mount me again. I was laughing by then, not from amusement, but from sheer disbelief.

Another woman sat on my face and offered me her open cunt. I licked her slowly, parting her lips with my tongue, until she came trembling and left my face soaked. Meanwhile, hands reaching me from every direction ran over my chest, my thighs, my neck. I stopped knowing whom each caress belonged to, and that was exactly what I had come looking for.

At some point I saw Aruna again among the crowd, covered in sweat and чуж hands, looking at me from across the room. She smiled the way someone smiles when they already know how the story ends. And she tipped her head, as if to say: now you know. Then the crowd swallowed her up again.

Carla appeared hours later. She found me lying on my back, with two girls at my sides and a boy still inside. She laughed, kissed my forehead, and sat beside me to wait for the next turn without hurrying. The Indian woman had been right: in that temple, pleasure wasn’t measured in orgasms but in hours. And with my gift, I had hours to spare.