The Arithmetic Of Breasts And Other Stories

By Rochelle Potkar

Narain who lusts for Munika, hypnotized by her bosom in The Arithmetic of Breasts, and old Jaganlal who wants a favour from young Dia in The Room with a Sea-view.

Jackie who is in love with Nic in Sky Park, and the surgeon in Dr. Love who is changing much more than Sneha’s hairline, nose, lip and chin.

Shonali and Neel who are realizing that infidelity might not be such an easy thing in The Scent of a Conscience, and a woman who walks the tight rope between tradition and sexual exploitation in A place they call Scary.

And Sunil who meets the woman of his desires in What Men Want through an adult dating site.

Through these stories, Rochelle Potkar explores the intensely personal ‘unrelationship’ that exists alongside its conventional and socially articulate twin, the relationship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rochelle Potkar
• Release date: Jan 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781301206575

Rochelle Potkar

Rochelle Potkar's short stories have appeared in Far Enough East, Sein und Werden, The Medulla Review, The Nassau Review, Women Writers, Writer's Hub, Bewildering Stories, Cantaraville, Muse India, The Bangalore Review, Revenge Ink, Nivasini, Unisun, Triangulation, and Lame Goat Publications, Annapurna magazine, Rollick Magazine, The Freshwater Review.She narrated two true-life tales at Tall Tales, Studio X, Kitab Mahal, where her content and performance were lauded. She completed an Advanced Fiction Seminar offered by University of Iowa's International Writing Program via distance learning, 2013.Her poems have appeared in The Brown Boat, The Finger Magazine, Haibun Today, The Bamboo Hut, A Hundred Gourds, and Poems for the Road podcast.Her poem, 'Knotted inside me' was shortlisted for The RaedLeaf Poetry India Award 2013. Her poem 'Swing' won the second prize at The Wordweaver's contest, 2014.She has read her poetry at100Thousand Poets for Change, Kitabkhana, Godrej India Culture Lab, PEN@Prithvi, The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, American Library-Chennai, and Out Loud & Fringe Club, Hong Kong. She was an invited poet at Poetry with Prakriti, Prakriti Foundation, Chennai, December 2014.Her first book of short stories, 'The Arithmetic of breasts and other stories' was shortlisted for The Digital Book of the Year Award 2014, by Publishing Next, Goa. Her next book, 'Dreams of Déjà vu' is a speculative novel.She forms the core team of Cappuccino Readings at cafes in Mumbai and is the co-editor of Neesah Magazine.Born in small town Kalyan, Rochelle craved big city only to realize that Bombay was a small town in a large world.Her video poems and haibun may be found at: http://www.youtube.com/user/rochellepotkar. Her Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/Rochelle-Potkar/e/B00GD8EH02. Her twitter handle: @rochellepotkar. Her facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/AuthorRochelleShe blogs at: www.rochellepotkar.com.

Book preview

To Shekhar & keya, Mai, Aaee & Baba

The Arithmetic of Breasts and Other Stories

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Rochelle Potkar

Cover design by Erin Lark

ISBN 13: 9789351749004

Published in India

by 20Notebooks Press

This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior permission from the author.

Table of Contents

Story 1 - The arithmetic of breasts

Story 2 - The room with a sea-view

Story 3 - Sky park

Story 4 - Dr. Love

Story 5 - The scent of a conscience

Story 6 - A place they call scary

Story ½ - Our lovers

Story ½ - The troll on Page 16

Story 7 - What men want

Story 1. The arithmetic of breasts

Narain always had a semi-hardon when Munika was around.

She had the most delicious-looking breasts he had ever seen on a woman. A supple 38 D cup size for sure. Only after his eyes had gorged enough on those juicy mounds, taking care not to appear like a letch, did they veer towards her navel peeping from her sari, teasing him from a distance.

Her narrow waist led his eyes to her thighs beneath her sari pleats, and then to her firm pair of plump buttocks. Those too were ample when compared to the other women he had seen around, and they somehow suited Munika’s slightly broader frame.

Sometimes even the thought of her face was enough. Her bow-shaped, rouge-painted pout, bordered in pink-fuchsia tempted him as strongly as her kohl-rimmed eyes, lightly rouged cheeks, or slender nose.

Concentrating on only one part of her was not fair, he chided himself with Faustian pleasure. A woman’s eyes were the first indicators of how she felt. If he kept his gaze on them, he was sure she would let her secret thoughts seep through her lashes and entrap him even further.

The next day, the sight of her soft-skinned neck taunted him. She had probably dabbed perfume on either side of it because his nose was teased with stray thoughts of nuzzling into her nape so strongly and palpably that he had to exit the room, his hands itching for a soft grip.

They would watch each other often across the silence of his small drawing room with the large dining table between them doubling as a study table. He knew he would have to go slow with imagining what lay beneath her blouse that dipped into a valley in the most delectable vertical karp reduction symbol he had ever seen.

There was a lot at stake.

Munika was his sister’s friend, and not a best friend who would forgive easily. She was his sister’s friend in the manner of being an acquaintance, and an acquaintance in the manner of being a senior—one year ahead—and a senior in the manner of being a mentor. She and his sister researched and churned out material for their theses late into the night on the advantage of analysis of algorithms over computability theory in theoretical computer science.

She was accessible. Not too far. Probably available.

You do like to dress well, he said one day to her, smiling softly, trying to keep his words and hardness in check.

She greeted his remark with a blush, shying into her books with deeper attention.

He couldn’t upset the apple cart. Neither his sister’s PhD nor her mentor’s, even though he was hauling breath beneath his quickening chest-beats every time. He thought of intelligent women like Munika—so much smartness coupled with beauty. Had he found The Female Utopia?

Talk to them and get a taste of their worldview, then taste their femininity with other senses, he mused. Not that he could easily execute the second stage of his thought process. He was stuck on the first and that’s why the latter felt hypnotically more alluring.

When was he going to get to her? How much longer? Was she aware of him in that sense? Did his drooping eyes convey what his arrested tongue could not?

He sometimes assisted the two of them in their studies before he headed to the Institute of Mathematics Research, where he worked on topology. A math scientist himself, he intricately studied curves, surfaces, objects in a plane, and three-dimensional spaces. Maybe he studied them outside the institute too. He liked shapes anywhere. Oh, didn’t he? The properties of objects preserved through continuous deformation by twisting, bending, stretching, but not tearing, where a circle could be an ellipse, a sphere an ellipsoid. Topology, the study of knots.

At the institute, he and his fellow researcher were working on topologizing broken DNA strands. The applications of knot theory in molecular biology had evolved just 10 years earlier in the 80’s. DNA formed by pairs of molecular strands in a double helix could become tangled, knotted, or broken, which made it difficult for it to carry out functions, and biochemists were looking to determine how enzymes could remodel or manipulate DNA.

Topologists like Narain now used the knot theory and the tangle model to deduce mathematically how broken strands could be bound in a process called site-specific recombination, using calculus of rational tangles and linking numbers.

But when he and his fellow researcher needed a coffee or smoke break, they would talk about the shape that almost ruled the world. The female shape.

Desmond Morris says that the round shape of a woman's breasts evolved as a sexual-attraction counterpart to the buttocks,’ his friend would muse, ‘A frontal, secondary sex characteristic to encourage face-to-face copulation in the missionary position for the upright, bipedal human being.

But what if I still want the rear-entry position? Narain asked and they laughed, snuffing out their cigarettes, and going back to work.

Through noon until late evening, he would immerse himself in calculus, thereafter heading home, hoping to catch the girls arching their tired backs, cracking their knuckles over reams of working papers, or clicking their pens over epiphanies of logical equivalents, micro-architecture, and data structures in computer science.

He would walk past the drawing room with just the right gaze at Munika, whose lips would part, perhaps, in quick realization that he had arrived home. Sometimes, she would draw her lower lip into the sharpness of her teeth while trying to concentrate, and he would chuckle over this in his bedroom as he drew away his clothes and showered off his work tiredness, getting into casual wear.

This routine of theirs had gone on for long when one day, his sister had an exam and he, a day off. Munika came by for some last minute referencing. These simple events fused like strips of a Penrose triangle, and he found himself sitting across from her with his Sisyphean microscopic gaze over her lovely dunes held in the lace calligraphy of her humble bra and a pink cotton blouse underneath the sheer print of a light mauve sari.

When their silences grew like a deafening drone, they entered into softly-shaped discussions of this and that at the end of which he hinted if she would accept a dinner outing with him. He could hardly remember what she said because he sensed her affirmation much before in the way her nipples grew taut, perhaps like crazy raisins under her blouse. She had watched him watch her, and they blushed; his ears burning hot, her chest heaving.

They met for one dinner and then, the next. On most dates, Narain would be quiet and starkly preoccupied, making Munika wonder if she had said something wrong or was a bore. The noise of the restaurants—upmarket clink and swish or downmarket ebb and din —would always be louder than their fidgety talk and punctuated silences. How disembodied noise was yet how fairly it intruded, Munika would think, watching Narain’s replies, which were only in his gazes.

For him what started when they were dining—the brushing of his hand against hers or a bit of unabashed footsie—continued and concluded only in bed, alone against the nakedness of palm over the smooth rigidness of cock. Then, it was the