THE PLEASURE MACHINE
A cross connection, a chance conversation... A saga of erotic encounters—on the phone
IT WAS A SERIES OF LONG AND TENDER AFFAIRS, as carnal as they were disembodied. This was in the eighties. Cordless but not yet mobile and far from smart, phones could be unfixed from that very open place in the middle of the home, and taken to bed to be turned into instruments of darkness. The two had ‘met’ through that now-obsolete mode of technological serendipity, the ‘cross connection’. He was in his late teens. His voice was beginning to deepen, but it was not yet a man’s voice. So, that other man—definitely a man, even a gentleman—whom he had met by chance on the other side of a mistakenly connected line, took him for a woman, with an alluringly husky, yet strangely innocent voice. The boy, on a deliciously perverse impulse, did not correct the man. They simply kept talking to each other. What followed, purely on the phone and without their ever actually meeting, was an enduring and passionate sexual romance that lasted for almost a decade.
During that decade, for the man, he—the boy— became a woman called Ananya, ‘she like whom there was no other’; and he—the man—said that he was called Anitya, ‘the impermanent one’. Anitya told Ananya he was a doctor in his mid-30s, married and with a child. No other details were given or asked for. Yet, over the years, they had interminable conversations on the phone, usually during the afternoon, sometimes late at night, in which they shared with each other some hitherto unspeakable things. Inevitably, their talk would become explicitly sexual. They would both get aroused. The boy would often make himself and Anitya come (or so it seemed to Ananya). Then one day, Anitya gave Ananya’s number to another man, and then to another and yet another. Before long, Ananya had become a telephonic sensation. But what she had with all these men was not just ‘phone sex’: it was something else too, something more, founded on a combination of tenderness, curiosity and compulsion. They longed to meet her, but Ananya resolutely held out against that. Soon, they all got hooked to her and she to them.
During that decade, the boy grew up, but into a creature that his world would not quite call a man. He began to have ‘real’ relationships with men, or let’s say with other members of his own sex, if not his own gender (whatever that may mean). He met them in all sorts of places: trams, buses, parks, streets, toilets, parties, hotels, libraries, offices and homes. Technology was changing fast too. The eighties turned into the nineties and then into the noughts. The mobile phone came along, as did the internet. The two merged; a new smartness was born. And with that, Ananya gradually, and quite naturally, faded into the common light of the virtual and its infinite possibilities. Quite as gradually and naturally, those other men also disappeared, with their clandestine ardour, their peculiar mix of lust and trust, their eagerly unfulfilled longings, their richly varied stories of ‘normal’ life peopled with wives and children, mothers and fathers and neighbours and friends. Ananya had been as fascinated with these stories as she was with the sex she had with them on the phone. She would even say the former had become more addictive than the latter.
Sometime in the new millennium, Ananya turned into Ananda, an LGBTQ activist with an ‘identity’—at once fluid and fixed, personal and political, public and professional—that many found difficult to translate into a polite and practicable third personal pronoun. The third gender had found its way into passports and parliaments. Section 377 was read down and then up again. HIV turned into something people could live with rather than die of. But Ananda missed Ananya, wondering what had been lost, and gained, with her disappearance into the freedoms and algorithms of the 21st century. He now had both Grindr and Tinder on his phone. He had IDs with his own photos and description on several internet dating sites. He met, and had sex, with gay men, straight men, bisexual men and men who had no idea whatsoever who, or what, he, she or they might be. He felt no desire to make them know.
Sometimes these encounters repeated themselves into friendships that remained sexual, or went beyond sex toward a kind of frisson-laden comfortableness. He would often provoke his married friends (straight and gay) by calling contractual monogamy far more unnatural than sodomy. He never sought a long-term ‘partner’. He found the
Theirs was a sexual romance, purely on the phone, that lasted for almost a decade
word boringly un-queer.
When Ananda recalled Ananya with that weird nostalgia he occasionally allowed himself to indulge in, he thought of her disappearance as the Death of the Queer, which seems to have vanished from the world like the Cheshire Cat, leaving not a grin but something called ‘gender’ behind. He did not like this word. He preferred ‘sex’. It was less antiseptic. What had opened up for him in those afternoons of the eighties, and even later in the early years of the internet, were the beginnings of a more radical form of self-invention. Webcams, followed by the ubiquitous phone camera, invested those bodiless texts and voices with a local habitation and a name. Of course, the cause of truth has been served. But perhaps in the stories that were mutually spun out on the cordless phone—“lying together”, Shakespeare would say with a knowing wink—what had blossomed was the possibility of selves that glimmered in a shadowy zone between fact and fiction, the truth and the lie. Could that have been the realm of fantasy itself, tended by none other than the lunatic, the lover and the poet, of imagination all compact? Was it not a Shakespearean jester, after all, who had claimed long before all this stuff had been invented that the truest poetry was the most feigning?