Tia’s War Now In Paperback!!

Hi, folks! Long time no see :).

I’m stepping back in for a moment to share the news that Tia’s War, my last erotic romance novel is now available in paperback! I’m super excited that it now has a physical presence as well as a virtual one. I didn’t think any of my erotic romance novels would make it onto bookstore shelves, especially since my books tend to have more of an “eastern” aesthetic – since that is what’s in my bones, having been nursed on Bollywood and chai – and incorporate spiritual elements into the erotic romance. I can’t write about sex and sensuality and eroticism without also writing about the emotions, thoughts, spiritual flow, and psychology that accompany them. Spirituality and sexuality are two sides of the same coin. Why else would every religion on the planet try so hard to control sexuality? It’s a direct link to Spirit.

If you haven’t had a chance to read Tia’s War yet, please get a copy! If you’ve already read it, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed it!!

I will be stopping in again soon. I’ve missed this space.

 

Guest Post: Mera Green Haathi

Mera Green Haathi
short fiction by guest contributor, Sonia
(originally published here)

Hanging from its tail on the coat nail, smudged into a tattered knob,
I found it again the other day. The green elephant that used to sit on
our window sill and watch us have sex. Every night for three months,
it would sit next to our bed — a preening green at the time — and
watch us, mouth open, trunk quivering.

Eyes oblong, dark circles — surprised, it would frequently climb down
and try to join. More than once, I would find it lodged between our
bodies, squashed and blushing. I would always take the time to put it
back first, before going back to brushing your hair and kissing your
face. Our four-legged peeping Tom. Our own, personal pervert.

We made jokes about it. We demanded to know why it looked so innocent
every time its trunk tickled my back and nudged your breast when you
were expecting the tip of my tongue and I was expecting yours. Instead
I would feel a furry softness that would make me giggle inside your
surprised mouth. And for you, it would make the skin around the nipple
pucker, inviting me to take you into my mouth. We wanted to know how
it is that we repeatedly found it thus, shameless. Riding our wave,
tumbling with our rhythm until we were obliged to make it a part of
our bodies, let it play a role in our story.

It had no partner, of course. There was your over-sized watch sitting
next to it, uninterested and ticking its disapproval. On the far
corner of the window sill was my prim, white ring box — chipped, it
had a faded pink orchid painted on the top. Pretty, but alas, no rings
inside. Just cushion, empty of any promises or proposals. After all,
my green elephant was only a small, furry stuffed animal — eternally
surprised by its own sexuality, its ache. So in desperation, it looked
to us humans to caress its trunk and play with its long, harmlessly
soft teeth that knew how to prick nonetheless.

And of course, it liked to watch.

It liked to watch the humans dancing below. We knew it got turned on
by our sweat, our gasping need for each other. Paavum. Poor thing. How
does one live without making love every night, lying in your lover’s
arms, sighing into their neck? It was therefore understandable that
the green elephant would leap to the chance, and press itself onto our
bodies, interrupt our rituals. We never thought to put it away, turn
it around, leave us in our peace. We were generous with our
lovemaking.

How could we deny each other’s solace to our friend? All it wanted was
to play. How could we say no? Lips and tongue freely given and taken.
We learned to see each other’s bodies as geographical spaces really,
not biology — your belly-button told me I was home.

In our bodies, we chartered not only each other’s pleasure, but also
our own. I came to know your lobes by the one silver loop hooked
through your ear. I know how your earrings taste. The familiar, metal
taste signaled for me how to reach a place that let me hear you suck
in your breath. Sharp, as if you cut yourself on my skin which has
become warm and shiny. I know what to do when I hear it. I know to
wait until I hear it. I know it is time to make you writhe. That sound
is how I know to touch your nipples softly while I kiss the dip of
your pelvic bone. A chaste kiss, using only my lips. My tongue comes
later. And that too unexpectedly. In the middle of kissing you, I will
tire of your discourteous mouth and my tongue will want the inside of
limbs, softer more yielding skin.

Damn you, I know what you look like when you come. Eyes shut, mouth
surprised. I know the profundity of your post-coital fugue state. So
does my green elephant. We hold this information furtively, guarded in
our knowledge.

The day you left me, I threw the green elephant at you. It fell,
shocked, on its side — unused to us looming above it. Its legs thrown
up in defense. I pleaded with you and said, “Please, I cannot keep
this and I cannot throw it away. Take it from me.”

I said, “Please don’t go.” My green elephant heard me beg, heard me
fall on my knees, heard me break. When you grabbed it off the floor,
it hid inside your pants pocket, stuffed with fear.

For weeks after my green elephant stopped watching us make love, I
would remember it and cry deep into the night. My grief was an open,
raw wound for all to see, to look away from — to cringe at. By the
time, you owned the green elephant alone, without me in your life, it
had lost its bright green color and had become a gray, dingy thing.
Its fur was no longer smoothed down daily. No one spoke to it. You
looked away every time you saw it, and it wasn’t uncommon for you to
stack books or tea-kettles carelessly on top, hiding it from view.
Ashamed of its puzzled vertigo. It could never quite stand on its own
four feet anymore, it had to lean on walls like a fake elephant.

Much later, unable to bear it any longer, I called you and made my
demands. I wanted my green elephant back. Abruptly, cruelly, you said,
you didn’t know where it was. Back bent, trunk folded up, I imagined
it lying — forgotten under some too-heavy sofa cushion misshaping its
too-soft teeth. Crazed, I screamed over and over again.

I was being unreasonable. You tried to tell me. It’s only an elephant,
stop this drama, this natak. I couldn’t. I shook at the thought of it
lying discarded on top of dirty laundry or used dishes or worse,
terribly alone in the corner of some empty room — out of place and
lost.

You better find it.

You did.

Some time later, I came to own my green haathi again. Hanging
forlornly from a nail, I took it down and greeted it with care. I
tried to pry straight its trunk and its coiled tail. “Hi, my friend” I
was glad to see that it still held inside all of our shared secrets.
But I stopped myself from asking what was new. I could tell from its
shining eyes that I wouldn’t want to know.

Sonia currently lives in New York City. She is a writer and some of her stuff makes it to her blog, Cellar Door. She was living in India until recently, working with sexuality, human rights and health.

Guest Post: Sleepless

Sleepless

by guest contributor, Briar Rose

My wants are dangerous things; they make me crazy, make me stupid. I want you. I can’t help myself, although I should know better. You are everything I swore I’d never want again. There is nothing between us: no bond, no connection, nothing real. But somehow the thought of having you keeps me up at night. I fantasize about your lips, your tongue, your fingers. Stroking, flicking, delving deep. I want you to touch me, taste me, make me feel. You scare me. Your body, yes, but wanting you scares me even more. One moment is all we’ve had; a moment that was all about you and even that I’m starting to crave. Behind the closed door of a dingy bathroom stall in a crowded speakeasy, my mouth working on you bringing you to climax, as a curious onlooker tries to gaze through the slit in the door. The memory makes me cringe, not because of your blatant disregard for public spaces, but because of my willingness to do anything to make you mine. It isn’t about emotions because there is nothing between us; words like chemistry and cosmic pull are inadequate to describe what I feel when I lose the battle and my thoughts drift to you. I need you to fantasize about my lips, my tongue, my fingers. Caressing, licking, squeezing. But more than that I want to know that you want me; that you want me to touch you, taste you, make you feel. It’s stupid, I know. You don’t owe me anything. Trust me I know. It doesn’t change what I want. The aide’s d’amour don’t help. They’re a poor substitute and make me wish for their human reality. I keep reminding myself that there are reasons I’m trying to wait; ones that are genuine and valid. And yet even knowing about the inevitable pain that is forever a part of every intimate experience is no longer enough to keep me from wanting. I don’t want to want you because wanting you is dangerous.

 

Briar Rose makes no qualms about her love for all things erotic and  takes perverse pleasure in being a Muslim girl with a penchant for passion. She has been exploring sensuality since her early teens when she first started reading authors like Sidney Sheldon, though she quickly graduated to the likes of Anais Nin, Anne Rice, and the Marquis de Sade. Since then she has developed her curiosity and the itch into a distinct craft, meshing the creativity of fiction with the realism of non-fiction, so if you ever have a conversation with her, chances are it’ll eventually lead to talking about sex. Be forewarned–you may just end up on her blog.

Guest Post: My Spicy “Wagina”

My Spicy “Wagina”

by Zara Khan

The first time I heard the word vagina was in my seventh grade biology class.  Sex education was the topic and all of us school kids squirmed with excitement and embarrassment in our seats as the teacher explained reproduction.  It was there amidst a chaos of words like copulation and procreation and ovulation that vagina first fell upon my ears.  Until then, as crazy as it sounds, I simply had not heard the word.  I knew I had one, but it was my “pishy” place.  Put blatantly folks, my brown lips were a pee tunnel, a place

that only came to mind in the bathroom.  After my biology class, I would think of vagina clinically for years.  Dangling somewhere between “pishy” place and science, it would take me several moon cycles before I ventured between the deep dark folds to experience an orgasm and taste the glistening sweetness of my wet chutney.

My family’s originally from Pakistan, and they immigrated to America in the 1970’s when I was a baby with a baby vagina.  I grew up in L.A., and at home my parents never mentioned the word vagina to my sister and I.  In fact, we operated as though thoughts of sex and body parts didn’t exist.  They were simply not a part of the human experience.  If someone blurted out the word sex by mistake one would think it was a fobbish pronunciation of the number six.  And if my parents had said the word vagina, it would have been pronounced “wagina”.  I’m so convinced of this pronunciation that every time I see my naked body in the mirror the word “wagina” intuitively pops into my mind.  I picture my parents in matching green shalvar kameezes dancing arm in arm and singing the word over and over again in unison.  It’s very disturbing.  They’re smiling so broadly I think of Lucy and Ethel on the I Love Lucy show.     It’s at this point I consider going back into therapy.

Anyway, it’s not entirely their fault.  I was a prude since birth, one of those annoying good girls who loves everything and everybody.  A kid hits me on the school playground and I’d say, “I’m sorry.”  A friend asks for my opinion on her atrocious new haircut and I’d say, “You look fantastic.”  An Aunty tells me I’ve gained weight and I’d laugh maniacally like she’d just delivered a compliment.  Such has been my weakness.  People call the monthly bleed “the curse”.  For me the curse has been over-niceness.  In high school if my hands accidentally brushed against my vaginal region while towel drying my body after a shower, I’d say, “Excuse me.”

As you can see, I was bound to be a late bloomer.

Bloom I did, however.  I’ve recently come to love my brown, wet, slimy, and spicy vagina.  Yes!  Masala her up with a little cumin and turmeric and VAH!  She tastes divine.  My husband tells me so.

As a kid and teenager I never poked or prodded my vagina, and the few boys I was intimate with were never offered admission.  I would have made a good security guard at a movie theatre, preventing kids from going into “R” rated movies.  Anyway, I just didn’t understand fingering, and to be honest I still don’t.  My vagina was where I peed, or so I thought quite ignorantly.  It never occurred to me to stick a finger into it to find my clit.  If only I knew I had the power to get myself off!

My first masturbation experience—I mean first serious non-prudish attempt—occurred during my junior year in college.  By this time most men are masturbation gurus, but I was just beginning.  I had recently read about the joys of masturbation in some sex book and had started dating a guy I liked very much.  And I wanted to howl.  To experience the big “O”.  To make my “wagina” scream “VAH!”  So I decided it was time for some self-pleasure and practical exploration.  I decided to try one night on my bed in a house I rented with two other students.   I shut the door to my bedroom and turned off the lights.  I lit a candle and played a Sade CD.  I threw on a silk white night shirt.  I put on a pair of black high heels.  (Yes, I was a cliché waiting to happen).  I got into my twin-size bed.  I had just taken a shower and smothered my body with some heavily perfumed and cheap lotion and this began irritating my heavily allergic nose.  So I had to pause and blow my nose, which could have ruined the perfect and supposed sophistication of the moment, but I didn’t let it.  Then I finally lay back and read some erotica.  When I was sufficiently aroused, I tossed the book aside and slid a nervous hand down my stomach, past my pelvis and between my legs.  I had the urge to laugh but suppressed it.  I stroked my hair then dipped between my lips where it was wet and warm.  I tried poking around for a few minutes but couldn’t get a vibe going.  “Yukh!” I screamed impatiently instead of “Vah!”  It was all slimy and gross.  I got distracted and irritable.  The sexual fantasy I’d been nurturing in my mind began to fade.  Suddenly my mom’s big serious head popped into my head:

“Don’t play with your ‘wagina’!” she yelled.

“Go away!” I screamed.

“You dirty girl!” my mother retorted.

Then my dad’s smiling face appeared.  “Vhat’s going on, baytay?” he said cheerfully.

“Shit!” my mind howled.  “Nothing, Dad,” I muttered aloud to the empty room, throwing a blanket over my half naked body.

That was it.  The moment was ruined and I couldn’t continue.  I turned in frustration on to my right side and faced the room.  My eyes fell onto my small bookshelf near the bed.  The spine of my small Quran stuck out to me and then came the guilt and weirdness about wanting to play with myself.  “God must masturbate?” I said out loud.  “Does God have a vagina?” I continued.  “Does she shave it?  Does hers smell like seashells?  Does God own a silk negligee and thong underwear? Does she?!!”

Finally I pulled myself together.  “Some things are better left unasked,” a saner part of me advised.

I got up, changed into sweats, and went looking for some ice cream.  And that was that.

* * *

The big “O” did eventually come for me however, but the first time wasn’t through masturbation.  My boyfriend was over one night and we were messing around in my bedroom listening to The Cranberries and he went down my body kissing me with small tender kisses:  he started with my lips, then my neck, my breasts, my stomach, and before I knew it, he was between my legs, his tongue gently tracing the raw flesh of my vagina.  I’d never let anyone do that before.

“What are you doing down there?” I squirmed.  I was embarrassed yet curious.  It was like being back in my seventh grade biology class, knowing the subject at hand was of interest but there was something wrong about enjoying it.  But here I was, an unmarried desi woman, lying on a bed with my white boyfriend, and who was about to deliver the first taste of divine pleasure I had never dared experienced.  His tongue continued to trace my vagina and soon my tense legs began to relax.  How can he like this? I thought to myself.  It’s so smelly . . . so gross . . . so brown . . . and it’s a “wagina”!

“Hush!” the desi diva in me whispered.  I submitted and my legs relaxed.  And oooooh baby did I relax.  And then I knew it was going to happen.  I felt the wildness, the irresistible dirtiness, the divine freeness of my weightless legs, parted from east to west for my man, yes, but more for me.  Then the sirens began to ring and the room began to spin and I was there, sitting in a first class seat on an airplane, sipping a martini, and twirling in the midst of my BIG FAT “O”!  And I knew when I screamed, “Oh my God!” that this REALLY was a sacred experience.  I thought of my bookshelf, the Quran still sitting on my shelf nearby, and I knew God wanted me to have this orgasm because God is a woman and her orgasm is a form of prayer.  So I was going to let my man lick my spicy “wagina” while I thought of the turmeric and cumin swimming in my rich brown blood.

And oooooooooooh!

And ahhhhhhhhhhh!

ummmmmmmmm!

yessssssssssssssss!

And please don’t stop!

VAH!

I let out a scream.  It was more a cry of pleasure than a scream.  My vagina was on fire and the fire had burned my guilt and I felt free.  Then, for the first time in my life, my vagina began to sing, and this is what came out:

. . . pehli pehli baar dehkha ahisa jalva

Hoi! ahisa jalva

yeh larki hain ya shola

yeh larki hain ya shola . . .

* * *

And afterwards, while my man held me, how I laughed and cried and laughed.  I thought of the emptiness of my orgasm-less past in the swell of the years behind me.  And I thought of the spread of years to come, full of sweet pleasures and unexpected silsilas.  And yes, masturbate I do now, and I know how to make myself come.  It’s a routine sacred ritual I practice, an essential part of my worship.  And I think of the word “wagina” less as a derogatory mark of my flawed heritage, or my fobbish parents, but as a celebration of my own spicy brown skin.  The word “wagina” is a sound and the sound is a river and the river is a gift.  And my gift is the proud, strong, beautiful and searching women in my life, both from the east and west, who celebrate the importance of the sacred “O”, as their sexual richness and the cosmic circle of all womankind.  We deserve pleasure.  It’s what makes us whole, a full circle, the multicultural cosmic “O”.

Zara Khan lives and writes in California

Yonis Make the News!

Check out this lovely interview in The Week, featuring two of the Yonis (including yours truly)!

Here is an excerpt:

“If our relationship with sex has been troubled, then our association with erotica, the art of combining sensuality and language, has certainly been dysfunctional. It was only two years ago that the Indian publishing industry actually put out an anthology of erotic stories (Electric Feather). Today, the scenario is vastly changed. Publishing house Zubaan is working on an erotic anthology of its own, which will hit the stands early next year. Urmilla Deshpande’s Slither: Carnal Prose, a collection of stories, which, in her own words, has sexuality at its core, was released this September to some fairly decent reviews.

And then there are the erotic blogs, written in a frank, fearless manner, revelling in the joys of sensuality, sexuality and physicality by intelligent, independent and articulate women and some men.”

Go read the rest!