By N K Sareen
It’s an established and proven fact of life, that in matters of sex, size does matter, and it matters equally to both sexes, the bigger the better. Whether the bigger size is just a fantasy or serves any purpose in reality in bedroom activity, is not the issue here.
As a man, I have a pretty good idea of what men crave. Sex gurus, sexologists and analysts have confirmed that women too crave and fantasize about the size of their object of desire; I learnt that fact one night.
About two and a half to three decades ago, in Delhi, suddenly two weekly tabloids had sprung up, one was called Free Ads, the name of the other I can’t recollect.
Anyone having a phone at home could place an ad in either, or both the weekly papers, just by calling their given numbers and dictating the matter of his ad by specifying the category one wanted to put his ad in. I am talking about the days when only landline phones were available without a caller ID.
I found it very easy and convenient and decided to put my ad in both papers. My only intention was to a find few good-looking faces to photograph for the different magazine covers. While dictating my three-four lines ads, I requested the papers display only my phone number in the ad, not my name or home address, as I wanted to talk to a potential subject on the phone first instead of all kinds of people landing at my doorstep.
My request was accepted by the papers and my ad used to appear in the photography category only with my phone number.
Every week I used to go out to the vendor to buy the tabloids to see if my ad was published in them. Those days it was quite easy and possible to know my name and address, for anyone wanting to know, just by making a call to the telephone exchange’s directory enquiry service and giving my published landline number to get all the details about me.
All who called me started addressing me as Photographer, nobody ever tried to find out my real name or address or ever asked my name.
The effect of the ads was totally shocking for me, first, my phone which used to ring hardly once or twice in 24 hours, now never stopped and started ringing day and night. So much so that I had to install extensions of my fixed line phone in all the rooms and in one of the bathrooms too, which I had converted to a temporary dark room for any urgent or quality work.
Second, the ads were placed only for a specific purpose clearly stated in my three- four-line ads that I was looking for some fresh and good-looking photogenic female faces for magazine covers, but here most of the callers were either gays or females of different ages, wanting to talk to me about explicit sex, or have sex with me.
Some even proposed group sex, but when I asked the callers to leave their contact numbers, they all made excuses and those who gave them were invariably wrong numbers.
Was it the effect of free ads, I have no clue. I had no way to check or find who had called me if their names were correct, so I had to believe whatever they told me.
This was the first time I learned there was a huge community of gays in my country. It was an eye opener for me to hear about the sexual desires and fantasies of both male and female callers, what they wanted to do with an unknown/unseen man that included a young female who said she was a university professor, young college girls and plenty of gays.
Within a few weeks, I realised the futility of this exercise, so I stopped putting any ads in any of the tabloids. Then I started getting phone calls from the tabloids begging me to repeat my ad, which was again a strange thing for me, a tabloid asking my permission to repeat my free ad. Even after my firm refusal, my ad kept on appearing without my knowledge as endless calls kept coming.
Some nights I was forced to keep the receiver of my phone off the hook as the number of calls both from gays and females, college girls, and hostellers started increasing at night to talk about sex. Initially, when I still kept my hope to find some subjects alive, I used to keep my phone close to my bed to avoid getting up from sleep to receive a call, because I didn’t want or like to let the phone ring for long. When the frequency of night calls increased, I got fed up and started keeping the receiver off at night to stop all nightly calls.
That night, perhaps I forgot, or I was so tired that I dozed off leaving the receiver on the phone next to my bed. When the phone rang, I picked up the receiver after one ring, and put it close to my ear. A young female voice on the other end said “Photographer, what’s your size?” followed by two giggles in the background.
She had said it clearly and as I was holding the receiver close to my ear; I had heard her and the background giggles loud and clear. She had woken me up from a deep slumber at the dead end of the night, or so I thought. Her accent sounded like that of an English school-educated girl.
Without making any sound, and holding the receiver close to my ear, I was totally nonplussed about her question. One who had just woken up from a deep slumber, my first thought was to make sure it was a real call and that I wasn’t in a dream.
Before that day I had never heard anyone, forget a female and her friends in the dead of night calling me to ask my size. To make sure that the call was real and not a bad dream I waited for a few seconds until the same voice came alive a second time, “Photographer, are you there, can you hear me?”
The second time I heard the same voice made it sure to me that the call was real though this time it was without background giggles. By that time, I had half gathered my senses, but it was still not clear to me what the young girl was asking, what size, do I have one, where the hell is it, why I don’t know, what is her purpose of waking me up to ask for it and so on.
I had often read about the sizes of the girls who went to participate in fashion shows/beauty pageants.
I was still figuring it out and slowly getting fully awake and into my senses, when like a flash of lightning, it occurred in my brain, about the size and location of the object the young lass and her two friends woke me up for. It was the leg between the legs which normally stays hanging down and relaxed but at times, without warning starts getting up, getting harder and increasing in shape size and length.
Now I was almost ready to answer the query of that young lass but wasn’t sure what size would please her who had ruined my sleep. Before that night I had never heard that kind of question. I was still in a dilemma when the voice from the other end came alive again for the third and last time.
“Photographer, don’t you have one?” she asked emphatically followed by giggles again. Now, without thinking, I just blurted some inches I can’t remember. The young lass on the other end said, “Are you a man or a horse?” and banged down the phone.
I felt so miserable, I had lost my sleep and answered her question awkwardly, and in the end, she just banged the phone without letting me say a word. I had no way to trace the caller to give her a piece of my mind for waking me up to answer this question I had never heard nor answered in my life before that night. I switched on the light. It was close to 4 AM.
The second episode of that era is much stranger than the first. Let me say at the outset that I have a fairly good sense and ability to recognize the voices of repeat callers as well as guess correctly the approximate ages of the callers.
This episode started with a call from a voice which neither sounded distinctly male nor female, I could make out instantly. It sounded strange to me. He called me many times and every time I asked the guy to call me later. I guessed him to be one of ‘those’ wanting to talk about the same thing, so I kept on discouraging him from calling me again and again.
After refusing many calls, one morning he literally begged me to listen to his problem. I promised to call him that evening if he left his name and number with me. He promptly gave me both, but I couldn’t call him that evening.
After waiting for 2-3 days, he called up again and said, “Sir I have a real problem and I need your help badly if you have time, I can tell you now?” I promised to call him in the evening that day and decided to hear him, and also help if I could.
To my utter surprise, he had given me the correct number and was available when I called him in the evening. His story: “My family is after me to get married, but in the evenings I myself feel like a woman”.
He was gay I guessed. “A family living nearby has five sisters and they are pressurizing my family and offering me to choose from the five sisters anyone I wanted to marry….”.
“What do you do?”, I asked him about his work or profession.
“I work as a stockbroker at the Delhi stock exchange,” he replied.
“How can I help you with this, why not go and see a doctor, I think your problem is curable,” I said.
My second guess was he might be suffering from an erectile issue. He confirmed that he was gay, and he had already consulted a few doctors who told him that his problem was not curable without surgery. I said, in that case, my sincere advice to you is that you must not get married and ruin the girl’s as well as your own life. I also asked him to talk about his problem within his own family or at least refuse to get married and save two lives.
He said, “Sir, if you help me get out of my problem I have a proposal for you, which will solve my problem and you will like it too.”
And what’s that, I retorted. “I live in Daryaganj, we can meet here at any convenient day and time for you. I will show you all the five sisters; you choose the one you like the best. I will get married to her. Every night I will drop her at your place for her physical satisfaction and bring her back home in the mornings”.
Mind it, that guy was saying all that to me on the phone in his Hindi/English mix without ever having met and without even seeing me.
I was totally shocked about the meticulous plan the gay person had planned, or was he trying to lure and trap me?
Though I asked him to give me time to think over his ‘proposal’, in my mind I was clear I was going to have nothing to do with that strange person. As I already had his name and landline number with me I was pretty sure to report him to the police if he persisted with his proposal or kept pestering me with his calls.
Fortunately for me, perhaps he had himself sensed it. He never called me again.
(This is a first-person account, and the views are the writer’s alone/Main picture by N K Sareen has been used for illustrative purposes only and has no bearing to the blog written by the ace photojournalist)
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