I Committed a Sin - Chapter 1

I Committed a Sin

Chapter 1

An Acquaintance

     It was one of those dreadful evenings. One that had to be spent with no fruitful flirt.

     I stretched myself, feeling weird. Honestly, I thought, who would go on draining all their preciously earned, or more appropriately, painfully gathered pennies into something mundane as this. The thought brought a chuckle. If the moment of enlightenment had been on its way in advance by an hour, it might have served better.

     I raised my head to look over the wooden section that bounded my cabin to see if I was caught laughing insanely by anyone. Then, wearily, my eyes were drawn back to the lower right corner of the monitor again. It was 7.50. Ten more minutes like the fifty I had spent and then I would be perfectly safe in the hands of my latent virtue. But even the last of the moments was not going to give up on me that easily. Particularly this time, with loose coins jingling in my pocket every time I shifted to inform me of their abundance, it was going to be a tough job playing good boy. The back of my mind was nagging at me that one more hour was affordable and, without question, welcome.

     I leaned back on the wall, letting out a sigh. Should another hour be wasted? I found myself pondering over useless thoughts: the toil I had to endure to go behind every penny that was in my pocket; The insanity of doing all that, like a mad man, for the sole purpose of wasting it all on this cafe's owner. Useless thoughts. All so because they never went beyond thinking. They stayed there, tinkered guilt in helpless moments as these, yet brought no productive effect in anything immoral I did. Conscience was nonexistent during my perversion and an added burden when I was 'sober'.

     Time for a last try. I straightened up. The screen in front of me was littered with chat windows of various sizes, their top left corners showing different names.

     For the past few weeks this had been the way my computer screen usually appeared. All white with pop-up windows strewn about like a stack of photographs slipped accidentally from an envelope and on to the floor. Online chatting, as I had recently found out at the cost of my sanity, was something too tempting to let you ponder over the aesthetics of your screen. The funny idea of chatting had intruded very quietly in my life, like a seemingly innocuous virus gaining advent into a computer, and made possible the stuff I would not have imagined in my wildest dreams in the twenty one long years of my life. Within hardly a month, Kanna, an innocent, reserved boy in the college had turned into Kanna, a perverted, flirting scum in the Internet.

     I would not have believed it if someone had told me two months back that I would go astray like this in no time at all, let alone starting the dreadful course with the search of a website.

     "I love Hi2"- I could see someone called Nalla Paiyan posting in the barely visible spaces of the public chat screen from between the pop-up chat windows. Damn him!

     It was five to eight.

     I was still new to this one, Nithya net cafe. The name always made me smile, be it when I caught it on the sign above the entrance or in some indigenous folder in any computer inside. It was another different story. I liked the cafe, though it was far from qualified to be called my favorite. It was so small, making room for only 6 compartments if I remembered correctly. It could be no match for Friends net cafe, only a walk away. Friends was my first choice when it came to Internet browsing. It had more cabins, more space, and more privacy. As today, I came here only when all the cabins in Friends were full to the brim. This one was not half bad. It was good if the stench of fresh paint and wood did not disturb you too much. Better if you could turn a blind eye at the junk of computer equipment they had piled up in the corners and between unused cabins. Even better if you thought the cramped spaces under the cabins presented a decent room for you to stretch your legs. My obsession for browsing had managed to keep me oblivious of all those discomforts.

     I started my next wave of invites. This time I was not going to play good boy. Since every girl in the list had turned down my polite call to chat, I was going to call them to something else. I typed in the same sentence in every window - "Shall we chat dirty?"

     This again was a deteriorating progress. Once I explored chatting, in no time at all I was led into a course I had not trodden on before. I came face to face with another form of chatting, one that stimulated your sexual feelings. Not that sex was new to me. I had had my own ways of using Internet for my sexual pleasure before. But this was new. And, soon, I found out this was more real and seductive.

     I had always bragged about myself, claiming that I never thought of women being inferior in any way to men; that women, in my view, were never objects of sexual pleasure and they were as much human and living as men were. That was before I started chatting. I would not accuse others in the site for my perversion, though sex chat was not uncommon in Hi2World. I should have known better. Yet, you would not always recognize a bog before you stamp your feet down on it so hard that it pulled you down. I knew I was halfway through the sinking process, and I pretended well that I was far from recognizing it.

     The initial excitement of getting a girl to talk something that I had never dreamt of, not even in my wildest dreams, was so intense. It occupied the whole of my mind to such an extent that I did not wait long to fill the monitors in my college with the litters of chat boxes. Twice did I end up in furtive, virtual sexual encounters with partners I did not know more than ten minutes, oblivious of the the rebuke my good boy image would suffer if this scandal started reeking. I was completely losing my mind.

     Before I knew it my window was full again. I had added boxes profusely, obsessively typing in the same sentence with a smiling emoticon added in at times, that they were piled up in stacks only with their edges showing as awkward projections. Most of them were blinking. I fought the urge to peek at all of them the soonest I could.

     That was the most unsettling part of the site's design. The chat windows started to blink within seconds once you volunteered to chat with some girl, say X. Your face would become all teeth. You grabbed hold of your mouse fretfully and clicked on the box, waiting for X to wish 'hi' all too gaily back. But all you looked at was a machine generated sentence stretched across the display in blue letters. X has closed the private chat window!!! It was the response from your recipient the window acknowledged to you, not if it was a positive response or otherwise. If a girl responded with a chat, it showed her response; if she spat on you, it showed you a decent written equivalent of her spittle.

     I prayed frantically for some valid response among those deceptive twinkles. Two or three of them should be some response. Or at least one. I did not bother about them being unwelcome or curt. God, I badly needed a response.

     Not that I had entirely given up being decent with girls. Sure enough, being anonymous gave me independence. Savoring that independence, one that had nothing else to check or bar it or confine it within any boundaries, with no one to draw any lines, let alone to check if I crossed them, I soon found out the ways I could play by keeping myself in the dark. Nobody was going to bawl out on me. Or to find me for what I was.

     When I entered the college as a fresh man, the chairman of my college had some general advice for the underdogs. He was an irritable man who always wanted the world to like what he liked. A haughty, imperious bloke. He babbled a lot on that ceremony which highlighted the fresh opening of our college, but only one of his advises from that day recurred every time my chatting elicited guilt. Everyone was good as long as there was someone else around to look over. It was true to the core. Once your tethers slackened, you went astray.

     I never allowed myself to be entirely succumbed to immorality. Even after I had found out the darker side of the site that I could freely venture through, there was sufficient virtue left inside me to think twice whenever I talked with a stranger. I opened every window with a greet to talk friendly. Yet, inwardly, I longed for the girl to not answer me with the same cordiality, so that I could use her arrogance in ignoring me as an excuse for bringing up a sex chat. To my astonishment, sometimes the girls who did not respond for a decent chat were the first to adapt to my switching the subject. But whenever a girl was generous enough to answer me friendly when I said a 'hi', I surprised myself by realizing that girls could be good friends too and shoving sex off the chart. Still, I did not develop any persisting relationships, perverted or otherwise, from chatting in Hi2World.

     I set out doing the last thing of my present session. I started closing off the windows that had been opened moments ago. Every time one window vanished to reveal the contents of the next, that same blazing blue sentence followed my 'shall we chat dirty?'. 'Anitha', or 'Malini', or 'Priya', or whoever the hell it was, 'has closed your private chat window'. Most of the blinking windows were closed and I was at the point of closing the browser altogether when I came across that one precious reply. 'Yes'.

     It was as though the lights that held my senses and blazed inside me until now suddenly suffered a power cut and went off. And like a computer still surviving the power cut with the help of an UPS, all that remained now inside me was my carnal hunger. I forgot completely about my dilemma of having to stay or leave, as if that single reply was a magical spell that lifted odds of the former to immeasurably higher stands that I had no traces of the latter left behind in my head. I shifted in my seat, completely enjoying myself. One whole hour is left for me to savor this golden moment of exhilaration. I looked at her name. It was Suji. I started typing in.

     "Hi, Shall we have a sex chat?"

     "Yes."

     "Very well then, what is your name?"

     "Sujitha."

     "Where are you from?"

     "Does it matter?"

     "I just asked.."

     "Let's say I just can't answer that."

     "What did I ask to get angry about?"

     "Well, saying my location is not a part of what I signed up for."

     Her tone irritated me. It encouraged me to talk dead dirty with her all the same. This rude, overpowering woman deserved that. Girls. Just because boys yearned to talk with them, they felt as though they were super-humans and could play puppeteers with guys. I was beginning to strongly suspect if she was sincere in the revelation of her name. Perhaps it was fake too. I held my anger and started to talk soothingly with false affection.

     Soon I was regretting my decision to stay back for the sake of this girl. She was more arrogant than I had imagined. I had had sex chats earlier but none had ever been as horrible as this one. It was me who did all the talking. She kept saying 'hmm's. It looked like she had said yes by chance when I asked her for dirty chat. She was in no way qualified for erotic chatting. Her way of conversation did not elicit any sort of excitement or thrill within me, let alone turning me on. As a foreplay to dig deeper into earnest sexual activity I cooked up imaginary situations those needed her assistance to move further. I received none, just the blank 'hmm's. All that I got were one word, rarely two word, acknowledgments for my statements, curt replies for my questions. Adding up to my plight, her responses were maddeningly quick, indicating that she did not avoid me after all, but just playing the good girl while I was proclaiming myself a degenerate with every word I typed. I got outraged at one point when it appeared to me like tale-telling where I told her about the details of sexual intercourse like a father telling a story and she, like a girl, was nodding at the story, not showing the slightest sign of enjoying the new knowledge she was being revealed with.

     "Why did you tell me yes when I asked if we could chat dirty?"

     "Because I wanted to."

     "Wanted to what?"

     "To do what you wanted us to do."

     "What the hell did I want us to do?"

     "I won't tell. You know what." I gritted my teeth. The nerve in her!

     "The way you talk does not seem so."

     "Does not seem how?"

     "Don't play innocent with me, all right? We are supposed to chat erotic. Just go back and see if any of what you have talked all along has any hint of eroticity in it." Thanks to my two month long typing training four years earlier, I had no problems typing in my thoughts in detail and with such rapidity as I would have talked them out.

     "I do not know how to talk so."

     "Don't you know how to do sex, then?"

     "No."

     I was nearly overcome by the urge to close the window. She was playing fool with me.

     "Don't lie to me."

     "I don't lie."

     "So I should believe you have no idea how to do sex?"

     "Yes."

     I still did not want to let go of her. Besides, she was the only one in the bunch to have given any credit to my words. And, damn, I was not yet sated.

     "Ok, good then. Let me teach you how to do that."

     "Okay."

     So I played the fool for her. I talked with her now in a pacifying tone on the pretext of teaching her how to do sex. A funny diffidence seemed to have crept into my words. I would have spoken readily about any shit if I had known she were equally prepared to contribute. That was the way I started the chat. But now, something held me back. I choked, figuratively, whenever I uttered the less-spoken swear words those were integral for building up the mood in a dirty chat. Still, I could not disguise faked ecstasy for long. After a few more minutes, the way she replied made me think I was molesting some child into sexual abuse. I was beginning to suspect if she was sincere in her statement of not knowing about sexual intercourse.

     "Hey, you really don't know that?"

     "No, I told you."

     "But you should be quite some girl to not know about sex at twenty."

     "Really, I don't."

     "The way I told you about that, you felt anything strange about your body?"

     "Well, some things I felt, yes."

     "Am I the first person in your life to talk with you about the details?"

     "Yes."

     "Won't your friends chat with you about these? About guys, and all?"

     "I have few friends. I am alone in my home and none the better in college."

     "Then why did you accept my call to talk dirty?"

     "I just wanted to know about that. I have turned down many who asked me that and thought why not give you a chance for a change."

     A ray of reason streaked through my mind. If indeed it had been her intention to talk sex, why should she pretend to be a good girl now, anyway? She would certainly know that I would not lend any credibility to that idea after she admitting to talk dirty with me in the first place. The equations did not match. She should have started this, then, for any of two reasons: She must have thought of me as an idiot, a randy fiend, whose self-assertive dominion over girls as though they were nothing but dolls that should play along with his fancy had to be curbed and retaliated with persistent prods of her stubborn chastity, and thus I should be taught a lesson while being buoyant with my false concupiscence she had created with her assent; or she should be no different from what she claimed herself to be; an innocent, sexually ignorant teenager.

     The odds were in favor of the former by a degree much too far. Yet, she did seem to be the arrogant type, mind you, she could have been a helluva lot nastier thanks to my intention. But the second part of my conclusion, the one assuming her to be too virtuous to have any knowledge of sex to the least, was disturbing. How could anyone step into their twenties without knowing how to fuck? As celibate as many spinsters in Southern India are, not knowing about the act was still too far-fetched to believe.

     She was winning though. She had made me have second thoughts about her. I forced myself to believe her now. Perhaps there were people, girls, who had heard about sex, were preached it was a sin(unless exercised after marriage), but knew nothing of the details and procedure. Perhaps, they used to wonder about what happened after a villain scooped up an innocent, screaming, wriggling girl over his shoulders and went inside bedroom and closed the door in a 90's tamil movie, or what made the girl's yell climb to a crescendo from inside the room. Perhaps they were too coy and righteous that they abstained from listening to what their fellow girls talked as soon as the S-word turned up. Perhaps, there were some daft guys who lined up these possibilities and wished to believe them. Perhaps.

     I thought of the second possibility on serious grounds, incidentally. What if, she indeed were a baby girl who knew nothing about making out? Then I should be feeling sorry. Suddenly, I felt sorry for luring her into this. If she did not know what it meant to make love to your partner, she was better off not knowing the vicious thing. Suddenly, like a lightning flare, I found myself having shed all of my randy thoughts and feeling a deep pang of guilt. I was on the process of spoiling a good girl (I did not realize that I had dropped the 'if she really was one' part so easily). I had been telling her nasty stuff. I did not know if she were noble or not. But if she was free from the clutches of carnal need and thirst, she did not deserve to know them just yet.

     "I'm sorry, Suji."

     "Sorry, why?"

     "For talking sex with you."

     "But I volunteered."

     "I know. You volunteered, yes. But for the past half an hour, when I was blabbering all that sexual nonsense, not for a moment did you enjoy it. I know that. Don't say that at least for a moment while we were talking, you did not think you should not have started this. I have this bad feeling that I led an innocent girl into something she ought not know by this means." I meant that.

     "It's ok."

     A funny thought crossed my mind for a brief moment. If she was true, I was the man who introduced her to sex. How weird would it be, if I indeed were the man who gave her a walk through the practice of sex as her husband? I knew it was a far-fetched idea, but it brought me a smile. What if it happened? We might not even know our identities if it happened by chance. And if we knew, how would our faces look? I thought of saying this to her but thought better of it.

     "You can walk away if you want." I typed in.

     "Okay."

     There was a moment of awkward silence. For some reason, I could not finish the conversation just like that. Considering my intention with which I started the conversation, she was of no use to me anymore. She did not allow me the pleasure that I had asked her for, nor the satisfaction my youth demanded. Yet, she had succeeded in making an impression of herself. For the first time since we started talking, I appreciated the human being in her, all to my astonishment, suddenly inconsiderate of her gender. With that enlightenment, my mind yearned for atonement.

     "Suji."

     "Yeah."

     "I'm very sorry."

     "It's okay."

     "For the past few days, I have been deeply upset with something happened in my life. Would you mind if I shared it with you?"

     "Go ahead."

     The annoying tone in her replies unsettled me. She would not budge yet. From her perspective, I was a pervert who had asked for a sex chat and that could not be undone. She would think I was unstable, which I was, and not to be trusted. If I were a girl of the sort who wanted to be respected as a human being, and not an object of sexual fantasy, I would be on my guard with a fellow like this. Her reasons would not be much different. I deserve it, I thought.

     "I had a friend in my college, Suji. I do not go into details about her, but I can honestly say that we were very good friends. Not the best, but still, good. Our friendship was nothing much to talk of here. It was never intimate. Her home was near mine and I would go on asking her for practical notes, observation and you know, stuff. She is a very good girl. I've always liked her. She also liked me as a good friend, enjoyed the liberty to tease me sometimes. Maybe, more often."

     I was typing all of it as it streamed in torrents out of me. In the back of my mind, I knew Suji would think of this attempt as a measure for redeeming myself in her eyes and gaining back her trust, which was not completely inaccurate. Still, this was something that had been locked away in my mind for sometime now. A thought that had lodged comfortably in my conscience, prodding me time and again, fighting its way loftily against draining itself into oblivion. Now that I had found someone for venting this with no harm for the person involved, I let it all out.

     "But something happened some days back, Suji. I have no idea how it could have slithered into my brain, but somehow it has. The very damn thing that led me into talking all this bullshit to you now started pointing out to me that she was not just my friend, but a girl. Dirty things started to occupy my mind and to my complete surprise, the randy thoughts started to climb so tremendously that in a few days time, I was overcome with too much guilt to look at her in the eyes, let alone talk with her."

     "How could it happen to you all of a sudden?"

     "Honestly, I have no idea. But I distinctly remember the day she started to occupy my dreams in an entirely different way. It was the day we had our department's symposium in our college. All the girls wore sari to attend the function that day. I don't know how it could have contributed to my delineation, because when I saw her in sari, I thought nothing different of her. She looked different, yes, but I don't remember now of having thought of her as inducing then. Besides, she was not a girl to whom you are always attracted to in a sexual sense. Just a plain-looking, good girl. But, that night saw the first occurrence of my vile thoughts."

     "This is bad. You should not do this to her. She trusts you."

     She was voicing the same thing that had been reverberating inside my head ever since the situation arose. But, she was not aware of the another voice inside me that had proved to be more imperious at times to such an extent that it rendered the former's presence imperceptible.

     "I know. That's what bothers me. And I did something even more stupid."

     "What is that?"

     "I told her how I felt about her."

     "What!?!"

     Even through the typed words, I could discern her startle. And for the very first time in the conversation, she typed in a second message without any comment from my part.

     "Are you mad? What did you tell her?"

     "I told her that I was thinking bad about her. That I did not deserve to be friends with her anymore."

     "What did she say?"

     "She became so depressed. I guess, the idea of someone she trusted debasing her like this was too much for her to take. She said that she had cried on my revelation. After all, I have seen her stand against adverse situations with a straight face where most of the girls would have crumpled. Even I cried when I told her the harsh truth. But what good is in crying if you knew you were frail to the point of doing the mistake again with all your heart. I regret saying her that. I overlooked the impact my confession-I thought of it pretty much a confession-would have on her, of how miserable it would be for her to hear a guy saying she was too much of a sexual dish to talk friendly. For the next few days both of us hardly faced each other. I have no idea how much this bothers her, but for me, everyday it is eating me up. Every time I catch a glimpse of her, I feel the urge to go and apologize to her. We have decided not to talk thereafter. There was, however, one instance when I talked with her over phone and we solidified our pact of not talking thereafter. The pact still holds."

     When I finished, I became acutely aware of how much noise my keyboard had made. It was surprising how easily everything flowed out of you if someone listened. I never had any second thoughts about sharing this with Suji with her being an anonymous person. She would be making no damage to anybody with the knowledge. For her, it was just a curious blabber of a sexual lunatic that would be abraded into nothingness by more pressing issues of her life in no time at all.

     "Don't betray her confidence in you. Don't do this."

     "The situation now is past all that crap, Suji. I have let slip to her my feelings toward her. She would not trust me any more even if I go behind her saying that I was a changed man. Besides, I would not complain it. I won't trust myself. I talk with you now as though I am a sane being, but soon enough I will change into something else."

     "Don't do this."

     I glanced at the time. To my shock, I had no more than a minute left. I was talking with her for one complete hour. The account holdings were too scarce to extend the time any later. I looked at the chat. Suji had been good. She was different from anything that had ever happened to me in Hi2World. Seldom had I switched over to a general conversation with a girl from erotic chat, and even then, I had never opened my mind so truthfully to one. I grimaced, the pang of guilt the chat had elicited resurging.

     "Thanks for hearing this all out, Suji. I have been keeping this from even my closest friends. Glad that you heard it."

     "Don't do this to her. Don't betray her."

     "Yeah, let us see if I could manage that. Thanks Suji. I'm leaving now."

     "Don't do this to her. Don't betray."

     It was comical to see her repeating the words like that in chat screen, as though the repetition was going to enlighten me all of a sudden. I smiled, and closed the window. With a forlorn thought, very different from the one I used to have if I had not found a girl to flirt with, I rose.

     I paid the money. How much of my dad's hard earned money would have been wasted like this, I thought. Spending money on Internet cafes dated back a long time for me. No fewer than a thousand bucks would have been spent on worthless cafe managers. I stepped out of the cafe. It was just eight. I was not going home any earlier than ten. I unlocked my bicycle deciding to ride it over to Arun's.

     I could not help thinking about the recent conversation I had had with Suji. I knew very well that I would hear no more of her.