Nadia: Desire Exposed

The studio smelled of linseed oil, turpentine, and the ghost of last night’s rain. Sunlight slanted through the high north windows, catching on half-finished canvases and the dust motes that danced like slow fireflies. Ahmed had been up since dawn, scraping cadmium red from a palette knife, trying to scrub the memory of soft skin and impossible tightness from his mind. It wasn’t working.

A knock (three measured raps) cut through the scrape of metal on wood. Ahmed knew the rhythm. Eruj.

He opened the door to find his old friend filling the frame, Panama hat tilted low, a bottle of Black Label tucked beneath one arm like contraband scripture. Eruj’s smile was slow, conspiratorial, the same one he wore when they’d smuggled hash from Peshawar in the hollowed-out spine of a Ghalib diwan twenty years earlier.

“Thought you might need fortification,” Eruj said, stepping inside without waiting for invitation. He set the bottle on a paint-spattered table, unscrewed the cap, and took a long pull straight from the neck. “To new masterpieces.”

Ahmed watched him, puzzled. “You came to gloat or to collect?”

“Both.” Eruj wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and passed the bottle. “Tell me about my daughter.”

Ahmed took the whisky but didn’t drink. He studied Eruj (really studied him). The man was fifty-three, still handsome in the way of old matinee idols, hair silvering at the temples, eyes sharp as a falcon’s. There was no anger in them, no paternal thunder. Only curiosity and a faint, almost boyish envy.

“You told me to take her,” Ahmed said carefully. “Last night, in the veranda, when the others were arguing about Neruda. You said, ‘Take Nadia to bed, Ahmed. She’s restless.’ I thought you were drunk.”

“I was drunk,” Eruj admitted, grinning. “But I meant every word. If someone doesn’t break her in properly, she’ll end up with some fumbling cousin who’ll leave her bored and bitter. Better you. You know what you’re doing.”

Ahmed drank then. The whisky tasted of smoke and complicity. “You’re not jealous?”

Eruj laughed, a short bark. “Jealousy is for men who fear losing what they never truly owned. I lost the right to possess her the day her mother walked out.” He took the bottle back, drank again. “Maybe a little envious. The girl’s a storm. I’d have liked to ride it once, in another life. But this is better. Vicarious.”

Ahmed leaned back against a workbench, the edge biting into his hips. “You’re pimping your daughter to your best friend.”

“I’m curating her education.” Eruj’s tone was mild, but steel lay beneath. “She’ll have lovers (dozens, probably). Better the first one knows how to make her scream. Better he reports back.”

Ahmed exhaled through his nose. “And if I refuse?”

Eruj’s grin widened. “You won’t. You already did it. And you’ll do it again.”

Ahmed couldn’t deny it. The memory of Nadia’s body (tight, trembling, impossibly responsive) flashed behind his eyes. He took another pull from the bottle. “She was… extraordinary.”

Eruj’s eyes glittered. “Details, yaar. I’m a publisher. I traffic in details.”

Ahmed set the bottle down, wiped his hands on a rag already stiff with paint. He started with the small things (the way Nadia’s breath had hitched when he’d closed her bedroom door, the tremor in her thighs when he’d traced the seam of her shalwar). He spoke of the emerald kurti clinging to damp skin, the impossible tightness that had made him pause, afraid he’d hurt her. He left nothing out: the single finger that had taken an eternity to ease inside, the way she’d clenched around it like a fist, the broken sound she’d made when she came (half sob, half prayer).

Eruj listened without interruption, eyes half-lidded, whisky bottle cradled in his lap. When Ahmed described the moment he’d pushed fully into her, the way her nails had carved crescents into his shoulders, Eruj made a low, appreciative sound.

“Virgin,” he said, almost to himself. “I wondered. Rubina swears the girl’s untouched, but servants gossip.”

“She was.” Ahmed’s voice roughened. “Still is, in every way that matters. She’s curious, Eruj. Hungry. But innocent enough that every touch felt like the first sin in Eden.”

Eruj chuckled. “And you played Satan beautifully.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Tell me how she tastes.”

Ahmed hesitated. This was crossing a line even their decades of friendship hadn’t mapped. But Eruj’s gaze was steady, expectant, and the whisky had loosened something in Ahmed’s chest.

“Like salt and honey,” he said at last. “Like the moment before rain when the air’s so thick you can bite it. When I kissed her (lower), she was trembling so hard I thought she’d shatter. But she didn’t. She opened for me like a secret.”

Eruj closed his eyes, savoring the image. “Good. Next time, make her beg for it.”

Ahmed’s brows lifted. “Next time?”

“Of course.” Eruj took another swig, passed the bottle back. “You think I’d let my greatest investment go to waste? Nadia needs refinement, Ahmed. You’re the chisel. I’m the marble.”

Ahmed laughed, short and sharp. “You’re a devil, Eruj.”

“No. I’m a father who understands his daughter better than she understands herself.” He rose, moved to a canvas propped against the wall (a study of a woman’s back, spine arched, sheet slipping to reveal the swell of a hip). The skin tone was Nadia’s exact shade of moonlit ivory.

“You started this before last night,” Eruj observed.

“I started it the first time she served me chai when she was sixteen. Kept it hidden.” Ahmed’s fingers brushed the dry paint. “Now it feels prophetic.”

Eruj clapped him on the shoulder. “Finish it. But first, listen.”

He outlined a syllabus with the precision of a military campaign. Next visit: teach her to use her mouth (slow, reverent, until she learns power resides in restraint). After that: the roof under starlight, her back against the water tank, legs wrapped around his waist while the city sleeps below. Then the studio (let her watch him paint her while he’s still inside her, mirror on the easel so she sees what he sees).

“Variety,” Eruj said, draining the last of the whisky. “Texture. Never let her predict. Boredom is the only real sin.”

Ahmed’s pulse thudded in his ears. “And when she wants more than I can give?”

Eruj’s eyes glittered. “Then you’ll give her the world on a leash. Paris. Florence. A studio of her own when she’s ready. But always, always, she comes back to Lahore. To us.”

Us. The word hung between them like incense.

Ahmed studied the empty bottle. “You’re serious.”

“Deadly.” Eruj buttoned his coat. “One more thing. When she’s ready (and you’ll know), bring her here during the day. Let her watch you work. Let her see how obsession looks when it’s aimed at her. That’s when lust becomes art.”

He left as quietly as he’d come, the door snicking shut behind him. Ahmed stood alone amid the smell of paint and possibility. On the table, the empty whisky bottle gleamed like a spent cartridge.

That afternoon, he began a new canvas. Larger. Life-sized. He mixed flesh tones with the same cadmium red he’d left on Nadia’s dressing table, adding hints of ultramarine to shadow the hollows he’d kissed. The figure took shape slowly (hips flared, waist nipped, one arm raised as if reaching for something just out of frame).

He worked until dusk, until his shoulders ached and the light failed. Only then did he step back. The woman on the canvas was unmistakable. Not just Nadia’s body, but her defiance (the tilt of chin, the dare in half-lidded eyes).

Ahmed lit a cigarette, watched the smoke curl toward the skylight. He thought of Eruj’s instructions, of the syllabus of sins yet to be committed. Lust coiled low in his belly, familiar and fierce. No affection, no devotion (just hunger, sharpened by the knowledge that every moan, every gasp, would be reported back to the man who’d ordered it).

His hand moved to the palette, added a touch of burnt umber to the shadow beneath her breast. The color of bruising. The color of ownership.

Outside, the city’s noise rose and fell like surf. Ahmed stubbed out the cigarette, capped his brushes. Tomorrow, he decided, he would send Nadia a note. Not paint this time. A single jasmine flower pressed between the pages of Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems. On the flyleaf, in his spidery script:

For the girl who burns. Come to the studio Thursday. Bring nothing but yourself. -A

He sealed it with wax the color of dried blood, addressed it in care of the maid who could be bribed with a smile and a five-rupee note. Then he poured himself a finger of turpentine to clean his brushes and toasted the empty room.

“To curation,” he said aloud.

The canvas watched him with Nadia’s eyes, already knowing what came next.

(Word count: 2001)