Fever Pitch

You kiss me everywhere — everywhere, for hours

and hours and hours. My lips are dry, my body salt-

encrusted. You have eaten every bit of pleasure,

yours and mine. I feel parched, dry, in spite of all the

plenitude of water and our body-sweat.

Under the soft translucent linen, the ridges around your 

nipples harden at the thought of my tongue. You — lying 

inverted like the letter ‘c‘ — arch yourself deliberately 

wanting the warm press of my lips, it’s wet to coat the skin  

that is bristling, burning, breaking into sweats of desire —

sweet juices of imagination. But in fact, I haven’t even 

touched you. At least, not yet.

The very last drop of rain perched on the edge of her navel 

— the last bead of sweat balanced on the feather of her 

eye-lash — the last long-wet of my kiss on her skin — all 

these demand more, more, more — more wet, more wet — 

yearning for more rain, fire, desire, moisture — and the 

cool chill of crystal-water, thirst, saliva, longing, rain.

Summer’s dead heat — humidity teasing clouds to shed 

rain — absolute stillness — every leaf balanced, tentative, 

eager, quivering, aching to feel the moisture on their skin. 

Your body scent and strands of long night-kissed hair left 

on my pillow — broken blouse-buttons on my bed-sheet —

a disengaged lone eyelash curved, left behind as a 

question mark — What happened? —

Reflecting quicksand, mirrors of time — my answers live in 

your punctuations.

The seductiveness of a slim tall transparent glass tube — 

the curved silver juices it contains — is such that it even 

makes me forget the news of the birth of a new child. 

Human life and inert chemical life compete in insidious 

ways, the same way fact and fiction does, desire and disgust 

does, as does illness and passion.

Like an aria, it is a curious melody, as distinct from 

harmony — a solo part in a cantata or opera. Its inherent 

nobility and splendour, its treble and bass, create an enigma 

of its own private architecture.

The thermometer’s spine rises, gradually and numerically, 

to a height where human equilibrium can just about 

balance itself. I stand at its base. The glass-chamber rising 

many storeys above me holds a reservoir of finely 

granulated liquid that changes its grey silvery shade in the 

changing light. Above that, a constriction, then a towering 

shot of fine tubular glass hoping to reach a degree of sanity 

at the cost of human heat.

Summer is already approaching outside, as my body sweats 

gently in appreciation. The heat worn by my skin’s surface 

is nowhere near the heat that is slowly welling up inside 

me. It takes the finest of touches, a feather-swivel for it to

 shoot up the scale. But, at the moment, all is calm as the 

storm gathers pace.

I am dying for the monsoon rains — but I am caught. 

Trapped in the wrong longitudes these wet dreams are 

dreams that would have to remain un-soaked. The hair on 

the surface of my skin itches to raise its hood to attract any 

pheromone in sight. There is a magnetic lull and hush, a 

loud silent sound of breathing, in different voices. 

Platoons of clouds clash softly without any hint of thunder. 

There are electrical impulses that are waiting, poised to 

spark. But the perfect noiseless moment is what everyone is 

waiting for. Only the obtuseness of instrumentation could 

clarify that, but that would be too intrusive. 

The mercury shows its first sign of life — a little trickle, 

then a tremor, then a surreptitious u-turn past the erectile 

crystal-tissue. Thereafter, complete freedom. It is at this 

point that the human’s heartstrings and the chemical‘s soul 

marry perfectly. Each follows the other’s actions, 

responding on a natural impulse, like the soothing scratchy 

sound of ice severely eroding under a ballerina’s silver 

skates. Metal matches metal, breath matches breath, glass 

matches ice, freezing the heat itself.

I sit — serenely delirious — on the convex tip of the 

mercury’s crest. All around me is vacuum — and beyond 

that glass — and beyond that a semblance of life and 

world. Here the vagaries of temperature do not seem to 

matter, a sanitised skyscraper holding the elements of 

inertia and energy. Here I feel particularly buoyant, not 

because of anti-gravity, but at the hint of rising 

temperature.

This is the third thermometer I have bought in a day, and 

yet I cannot trust it. Twice before, the reading shot out 

beyond the graduated scale itself, hinting either I was 

heated to the point of insanity or it was a case of glass’s 

own neutral impotence. 

This time I am determined to get to the heart of it, inside 

its very core, whatever the consequence. However, when 

one is caught in the process of creating a grand score, it 

does not matter what the root causes are. Genesis like the 

Christian one should remain a Buddhist mystery — then 

all religions can command the private power of the 

elements themselves.

Molten silver — boiled, cooled, boiled, cooled, boiled 

— then caressed variously over skin — finds intimate space 

that intersects the point of heat — glows, dense and quiet. 

One knows the gravity of such events, but not its intimacy, 

not its relationship with follicles that create their own 

forest-fires with their own human climatic changes. 

It is these alterations that marry physics, chemistry, 

biology, and mathematics — there is hope in all these 

— just like the sine curve’s elasticity and predictability, the 

graph’s nodes are stretched straight on the ‘x’-axis, the 

subjects collude to a point of nullity. At the point of birth, 

there is the death of the womb itself, but one lives — so 

there may be hope. 

It is at such interstices that art and passion find their true 

shape. The unknown boiling and freezing points that I hide 

within myself provide the ultimate enigma that even the 

most specialised doctors and architects find hard to map. 

My body is a terrain that defies the contour of safe plotting 

— indices like Celsius, Fahrenheit, torque, are all 

inadequate — just as bone marrow count, triglyceride, 

hdl, ldl, do not form pretty, explainable equations.

Amid this oratorio, the cold tactility of a three-faced glass 

case, its triadic ancient constancy, its contained columned 

virility, provides comfort to my talisman. Sometimes even 

the most brittle seems to find some soft shape for hope. 

Silicates form so many forms — but what I like most is 

their stubborn transparency, their supine pirouettes, like the 

vicissitudes of mercury — like breathing itself — at least 

until they last. 

(Excerpted from Erotext: Desire, Disease, Delusion, Dream, Downpour by Sudeep Sen with permission from the Vintage: Penguin Random House India)