I wheeled my suitcase out of the New Delhi Oberoi Hotel, numb from a three-day publishers’ conference and more than ready for the three days of letting down and experiencing that I’d added on to my itinerary. I was checked out of the Oberoi, though, as nice as it was. I didn’t want any of my hoped-for experiencing to be mixed in with meeting any of the people who’d attended the conference with me. I was following the whispered directions of Chet. We shared a fetish that neither of us could speak of in New York and I wasn’t brave enough to act on there. Chet was braver than I was and had been after me to let loose even there. He’d made the fetish sound so intriguing.

“Small size, yielding, vulnerable, smooth skin, flexibility. They take instruction well. And the Asian boys ... so satisfying,” he’d said. He was the only one of the two of us with the experience, though. I envied him.

When he’d heard I was going to this international conference in India, he was all suggestions.

Per Chet’s suggestion, I wheeled my suitcase past the rank of hotel cars in front of the Oberoi and around the block where there was another line of beat-up old cars of the independent cab drivers. Most of the drivers were out of their cabs and congregating by one, leaning into the taxi’s fenders—perhaps the only manner in which the fender was remaining on the car—smoking and jawing with each other.

I picked out my driver by the look of him, not with any reference to the estimation of the endurance of his vehicle. The guy I picked—he couldn’t have been more than sixteen, but I knew enough about India not to ask if he had a license or even that he was permitted to being driving his cab—was a beautiful, slender, berry-brown young man with a dazzling smile and an unruly head of jet-black hair, with a couple of locks dipping down over his sparkling, jet-black eyes.

“Taxi, mister? I take you anywhere you want to go. Cheap. Fast.”

Ah, good, I thought, he spoke understandable English. Most here spoke English as well, if not better, than I did. But they weren’t all understandable by an American. It was we, the Americans, who were insular in that regard, not others in the world.

“Yes, please,” said, and I hardly had the words out before he had the trunk of his taxi open and my suitcase stowed away. The trunk lid came down, and there it was. I was his captive now. From the look of him, I think I could live with being his captive.

If only he were a couple of years younger. But, then, if I wasn’t brave enough to go with this fetish interest, maybe...

“Enter, handsome sir,” he said, opening the rear door of the cab. I got the impression that he was the one who would have to open it—that I couldn’t have figured out how to get it open as beat up as it was on the outside. “I take you to the Meena Bazaar, yes? Very good tail there, sir.”

“Take me to the LaLit Hotel, on Connaught Place, please,” I said. The Oberoi was a five-star hotel, but so was the LaLit. The difference, other than I needed a change of venue for the experiences I hoped to have, was that the LaLit was a gay-owned hotel, with a gay bar and nightclub in it. It was another recommendation by Chet. “Do you know where that is?”

“Yes, of course,” the youth said, giving me a new assessment look that told me that he, indeed, knew where and what the LaLit was. “My name is Jeet,” he added. “How long will you be in Delhi?”

“Three more days,” I said, after I’d gotten inside the cab. It was cramped for an American, especially one who worked out and maintained a muscular body as I did, striving to hang onto some semblance of youth and fitness into my thirty-fifth year, but the inside of the taxi wasn’t the shambles that the outside was, which had more the aspect of bumper cars than conveyance.

Once Jeet got in the front seat, I saw him turn a photograph around on his sun visor. It had been a pinup of a busty South Asian woman in just a bikini bottom. It was turned to a beefy guy in just a bikini bottom. I found that amusing. The driver obviously adjusted to his assessment of his fare.

“Three days. You stay with Jeet then. I know all of the places. You want a man—European man or Indian man? You English or American?”

“American,” I said. “Just the hotel, thank you.” He’d cut right to the chase. From the hotel reference, or was he able to assess me from the look of me and the look I’d given him when I picked him out from the rest of those leaning on the taxi? Was he gay too? Was it a man I wanted? No, certainly not a man, having come this far and been primed by Chet. I could get a man in New York—I had gotten men in New York before Chet started encouraging me to branch out with my fetishes. No, I wouldn’t say and I didn’t want to even think it, but what I wanted was a boy. If Jeet was sixteen or older, he wouldn’t quite do—not now that I was here and primed to pursue the issue. Still, he was a beautiful boy. I hadn’t even had these thoughts, though, until Chet had brought them up, sensing my hidden interest—which matched his actual activity.

“You want a boy?” he asked, persistent, and when I didn’t answer that from the backseat, he said, a bit under his breath, “or a dog?”

“No, not an animal of any kind,” I said, quite hurriedly. “Just the hotel, please.”

And then we were there. It wasn’t that long a drive from the Oberoi to the LaLit, even in the godawful traffic of this South Asian city. I handed over appreciably more than Jeet told me the ride cost. He smiled and said, “I will stay nearby. I will take you wherever you want to go. I will show you a good time and make sure that no one cheats you. No questions, no worries. Jeet is your man. You want instruction on the male Kama Sutra? Jeet’s your man.”

I would prefer that Jeet be my boy and that he be a couple of years younger—fourteen ideally. Chet and I had spent several evenings looking over the offerings on the Internet, including a few boys Chet could talk about in graphic and biblical terms. Fourteen seemed to be what would do it for me. Not that anything had been done about it yet.

Chet had been quite explicit about India being my opportunity.

The LaLit Hotel unabashedly hosted a gay bar and strip club, Kitty Su, which I went to that evening. The place was crowded and I got a lot of attention. There weren’t that many non-Indians in the place that evening. I wasn’t really in tune with cruising bars, though, so I drifted around with a drink in hand and smiled at those who smiled at me. I danced a bit on the dance floor with other men, some of them quite attractive, drifting in and out to move with me, often suggestively so. The club had several rooms, which became more intimate as you moved through them to the club’s inner sanctum. As the evening progress, I moved into the core of the place. I was looking for someone very young, but, unsurprisingly, the clientele couldn’t be as young as I was looking for.

The strippers could appear so, though, and one or two of them did like decidedly boyish as I reached the inner sanctum of the club where thong-clad young men—and, it looked, younger than men—languidly danced the poles and came off the stage from time to time to give a lap dance here and there.

It was my fortunate to receive such a lap dance—and from a small, beautifully formed young guy who looked to be in his teens. It was a form of heaven. It also was a form of torture. I’d never been in such a position before. The boy came right down off the stage, with a spotlight following him, and crouched over my lap, rubbing his thong pouch against my crotch, with all of the men around us egging him on. Most embarrassing is that I looked over toward the doors to the kitchen area off the room and saw that the taxi driver, Jeet, was standing there, in the doorway, and grinning at me.

The situation, the rawness and the arousal and unfamiliarity of it—added to the fantasy I had about the whole fetish thing when I came to India—got the best of me, and, before the dancer laughed and danced his way back on stage, I creamed myself in my briefs. It was like I was a silly boy again with some sort of wet dream.

As soon as I could gracefully withdraw, I did so. In the lobby of the hotel, I found Jeet, still grinning, standing between me and the bank of elevators.

“Come with me,” he said. “I will take you where you can live your fantasies.”

“No ... thank you, Jeet,” I said. “I think I’ve had enough for tonight. I want to do some sightseeing tomorrow—the Red Fort and maybe go to Agra for the Taj Mahal—and I really should get some sleep.” What I really needed to do was to go to my room, get out of these sticky briefs I’d come in, take a shower, and regroup on why I thought I was here trying to have sexual experiences I’d never had before. Was I too old for this? Was thirty-five over the hill? Was something wrong with me to be turned on by the desire to have sex with someone much less than half my age? I bet the stripper in the Kitty Su was less than half my age.

“Yes, well, tomorrow I’ll be back at 9:30 in the morning to take you to the Red Fort,” Jeet said. “We are very close to it here—and I’ll take you to Agra and Taj Mahal. And I’ll take you to so much more in Agra. And I know what you want. I know what you want to do.”

I started to say that wasn’t what I meant. I wasn’t engaging his sightseeing services for the next day any more than I wanted to hire him to take me cruising tonight. Well, I did, but I was all mixed up, and I’d creamed my shorts ... and this just wasn’t working out as I imagined.

I couldn’t say any of that, though, because as soon as Jeet had said he’d take me sightseeing the next day, he’d turned and was gone. I hesitated, intending to go after him and tell him I didn’t want his help, but just then the elevator arrived, and, sighing, I boarded it.

Upstairs, in my room, I stripped down and took a shower. After drying off, I put on the terrycloth robe I found hanging on the back of the bathroom door—nothing else—and went into the bedroom, sat at the foot of the bed, and fiddled with the TV on the wall opposite that. This being a gay-owned hotel, with a gay nightclub in it, I wasn’t surprised to find a couple of TV channels with gay male porn films running. I’d found packets of condoms and tubes of lube in the nightstand too. When I did, I wondered if they charged for the use of those and, if so, how much. I did find they were listed on the beverage charge list, and my eyebrows went up at what they cost. Of course, this was a five-star hotel even if it was in India, and it was quite a special service.