It was in my 38th summer, lying prone on a massage table in an effeminate G-string made seemingly out of transparent tissue, with the most beautiful nubile young woman in Vietnam straddling the lower slopes of my back that I apprehended the full meaning of the human integument: that the skin, the largest organ in the body, with its predominant purpose of tactile receptivity, is formed in the unborn embryo from the early germ of the neuro-ectoderm — the germ that also forms the central nervous system. Therefore, with the exception of actual coitus and its accompanying practices, cutaneous tactile stimulation by the Vietnamese massage is perhaps the most gratifying dorsal or ventral pleasure available to our species. And there is something of a micro-economy dedicated to that proposition.

And, just as I was descending into a lower state of consciousness, she dug her elbows into the minor trough between my scapulae and mentioned that at this place, on Dong Khoi, by the river Saigon, which was now the Sheraton Saigon Hotel and Towers, once stood the apartment of the girl who provided the inspiration for Phuong in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American . Phuong: Greene’s real-life f*** buddy and mellow fruit, and the grand prize in his novel on Vietnam. What she effectively meant was that this is where she would straddle him and prepare his opium pipe and pleasure him polymorphously. ‘The hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.’

At this point, one is compelled to state an endemic prejudice that inflames the North Indian imagination: that the varied and various eastern young women (anyone remotely paleo-Mongoloid in appearance) are in some way or the other sexually permissive, available, promiscuous and purchasable. And that all of them are in a state of continuing depilated grace for the delectation of their patrons. That’s why (the prejudice goes on to dovetail with empirical evidence), in India, women from the liberal Northeastern hills are hired in sectors where they’re required to provide ministrations: restaurants, nightclubs, bars, hotels, spas, etc. I choose to affect a supreme loathing of most stereotypes, particularly this one, but the continuing depilated grace bit, I’m afraid, is implanted rather deeply in the old cerebellum to eradicate.

Also, dear reader, you have to understand the cultural framings of this piece. Almost every massage I’ve partaken of has been of the head and neck region, administered by the friendly neighbourhood nai (barber) called Dashrath. I have, wistfully but with open-mouthed glee, heard stories of Sandwich Massages in Siam and the great Japanese tradition of the slippery Nuru treatment. On a few occasions, I have, rather unsuccessfully, beseeched the spouse for an oil massage. Well, let’s just say that we’ve managed to reach a modus vivendi where I shall not broach the subject again and in return shall not have to worry about my food being poisoned. The only other time I’ve allowed my thorax to be rubbed was in an ancient hamam in Istanbul, by a large wheezy man in a stubble. That was when I was cowering on a warm marble slab in a small towel and the rubdown was actually a scrub down with a sandpapery glove, which was actually like a carpenter’s randha (plane) being applied to my skin relentlessly. I could swear that thin shavings of the epidermis were falling off with every heave. It was intensely pleasurable the moment it ended.

That being the case, when one can feel the glabrous inner thighs of a Vietnamese Goddess in shorts against one’s flanks while being given a rubdown with hibiscus oil, with the ghost of Phuong in the background, one does wish for the action to somehow move to the mezzanine and have what is known as a happy denouement.

What was truly admirable was that she didn’t have to ask permission for touching any part of me. It was all duty and pleasure and marked by a sublime lack of embarrassment on her part. She would, for instance, quite insouciantly, move parts of my reproductive anatomy around if they were getting in her way. For my part I think I kept her entertained by showing how prolific and well-ordered my cremasteric reflex was. The reflex is an urgent contraction of the cremaster muscle in the scrotum upon stroking the upper and inner thigh leading to a sudden pulling up of the testis on the side stroked. For the longest time, while she was toing and froing in the valley where the scrotal sac attaches itself to the groin, it seemed like she was conducting an exploratory study of the burst activities and latencies of my cremaster. After that she also did a couple of other things that are for the most part unsayable, not to mention unspeakable, that had the effect of eliciting the other perineal reflex, popularly known as the anal wink, but let’s just leave it at that, shall we?

She had introduced herself as Tuyet, which meant snow white. I don’t know how old she was, but clearly she was born into the new Vietnam, post Doi Moi, the 1986 market reforms that made the transition to what was called a socialist-oriented market economy. She revealed that she was from the provinces, from the neighbouring Tây Ninh district, from a family of farmers in crop-related debt. She’d been in Saigon for five years. There were probably suckling infants back home waiting to be fed, rent to be paid, a mother awaiting surgery. North Indian ideas about sexuality are complex and hyphenated. Ninety minutes with Tuyet in Saigon for two million Vietnamese Dong changed what was, for me, licit and respectable.

If I am allowed to stretch a parallelism, my Vietnamese massage was slightly analogous to a properly desexualised medical examination. The American sociologist James Henslin had once considered the pelvic examination in theatrical terms and asked what the acceptable stagings were for a woman who must expose her vagina in a non-sexual manner to a male? ‘The drape sheet is a prop: it hides the pubic area from herself but exposes it to the physician. The pelvic theatre largely occurs between her legs, which serve as wings of the proscenium.’ The speculum or the proctoscope is a diagnostic dildo. The physician, even so, must perform the examination without profaning it. Ditto for the masseuse, except that she can’t use the physician’s etiquette of disregard to sublimate the sexuality of the situation. She has to keep it studiedly asexual while appearing as though she is devoted to the client’s body.

I know this isn’t a very good analogy. For the woman in stirrups, the pelvic examination is a Sadeian narrative. For me, the state of affairs at the end of it was so tranquil that I was a gormlessly blinking mass of protoplasm.

( Ambarish Satwik is a Delhi-based vascular surgeon and writer; > asatwik@gmail.com )

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW