SEXTING THE SUNNY WAY
Set in a range of locations, Sunny Leone’s erotic short stories feature assertive women, confident men, and sexual scenarios that steer clear of sleaze
Sunny Leone’s the kind of hot that could make a staunchly heterosexual woman consider switching sexual preferences. You didn’t know that when you walked into the appointed suite at JW Mariott, Juhu, in Mumbai to interview her ahead of the release of her erotic short stories. In the lounge, Sunny’s husband, Daniel, a good looker with a direct gaze, and a spider tattooed on his neck, chats with the bouncers. Chiki Sarkar, whose new mobile-focused publishing house is unleashing Sunny’s literary efforts on the Juggernaut app, is there too. “One story will be released every night at 10pm,” she says. There are 12 stories in all. The three you’ve read are certain to be devoured by good Indian girls and boys in spotless pajamas. Sunny emerges from the bedroom, her hair perfect, her face perfect, her perfect porn star body encased in an impossible sheath dress. You immediately hope she’s dumb just so you can feel intellectually superior. Alas, a few minutes into the conversation you become aware of the excellent marketing nous that’s got her thus far in Bollywood. “We had to keep in mind that the stories related to the Indian market. I was keen on making things seem more pleasant, sexy, but make it so some readers won’t go, ‘Oh! What?” Sunny says in mock shock. She believes women readers, especially, are put-off by the explicitness of erotica by men. “Women love the story. That’s why they love reading romance novels; they love the idea of things being described, but described in a different way than how men see things,” she says. All of which means that if you’re expecting hot BDSM on your mobile, perish that line of filthy thought. Sunny definitely isn’t a desi Anais Nin. Her stories set in locations like call centres and small towns feature affable Indian protagonists with sexual fantasies that are never transgressive. “People are not always comfortable talking about these things. This will give us a good idea of whether you need to bring it up a notch or tone it down. We don’t know what our audience is going to be like,” she says. Some stories are inspired by common fantasies like the one about having sex with a stranger on a plane. Sunny insists she isn’t (yet?) a member of the mile-high club. “There are not many people who are part of it,” she giggles. “You have to have guts to be able to do it. So when you’re writing about it, you have to think, ‘OK, what would I want it to be like?’ I liked making sure the characters seemed normal,” she says.
Sunny steers clear of degradation, spanking, graphic language, or characters with ‘unnatural’ tastes. “These guys are not cheap or sleazy. There are situations that might seem very forward but I didn’t want any character to seem like a total dirtbag,” she says adding that her favourite story is one about a couple who doesn’t consummate their relationship until the young man returns to his small town after establishing himself professionally. It’s so in step with vintage Bollywood, it could be a Shah Rukh Khan-Kajol starrer circa 1995. “He is a true gentleman and treats his girl like she’s his princess. He’s from a small town and respects family and traditions. It brought a tear to my eye because it was sad but it was so beautiful,” Sunny says while you suppress a snort.
But then you’re a cynic with a comic imagination. Her story set in a call centre featuring a charismatic female senior manager having wild sex with a bumbling underling on office premises only makes you wonder about mundane things like CCTV, security guards and whether the manager has stocked up on vaginal wipes. You are also certain that, in the real world, after the event, the underling will text the manager non-stop before clubbing her to death in a dark alley. “Well, we don’t want to end this story on a bad note!” Sunny says.
Her stories are relentlessly optimistic and are set in a world that veers on the border of Valentine’s Land with floating pink hearts and soft focus lighting. But it’s the women characters – always sexy, intelligent and never passive – who make these pieces interesting. “I did like to keep ideas of women having these encounters because they do happen; we just don’t talk about them,” says Sunny, who has created a new space for herself in the Indian imagination that has so far subsumed itself in the binaries of the ‘good’ woman on the pedestal who keeps her desires in check and the fallen one who doesn’t. And here she is, unashamedly capitalizing on her porn star past in her films and now in her fiction too. Her success has much to do with how Indian society is changing, with how we are coming to reject the Madonna-whore dichotomy and embracing a more liberal approach to sex. “I think Indian culture is quite open now. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” she says.
It occurs to you that Sunny Leone wouldn’t have got very far if she had been a homegrown porn star, someone whose skin was a few shades darker, who spoke broken English in say, a Bihari, Bengali or a Malayalam accent. Perhaps she is emblematic of contemporary Indian aspirations; our urge to be more westernized; our yearning to be whiter, brighter, sexier. She speaks to our inner selves that crave modernity while being held back by self loathing, the gift of centuries of stratified social systems topped by the colonial experience. Whatever has propelled it, Sunny’s success is real. Her stories with their fully-described orgasmic money shots are certain to be successful too. There were difficult moments. “The hardest part was trying to make the intimate encounters different in each story,” she laughs. Do the descriptions of that perennially unchanging yet infinitely varied act read differently in each of Sunny’s stories? Ah, fiddle with your smartphone to find out. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Sunny encounter, this writer ponders her suddenly shaky heterosexuality.