An Indecent Offer

When a long time friend of mine moved into the ground floor house of the apartment where I lived on the first floor, I was joyed, and when he hired a good-looking maid to run their daily cleaning chores, I was over-joyed. I thought I could at least spend my idle time ogling at her. The fact the maid was married and had a four-year-old kid did not feature as a deterrent.

Since my friend and his wife were working in software firms far off on the other side of the city, they left for work early in the morning. One day when I happened to come home early, I saw the maid’s son sitting on the steps of my friend’s house with the door closed behind him. He was licking a large cone of ice-cream. I saw my friend’s car parked in his regular parking space. A beautiful maid and a young beast locked inside! I put two and two together and the combination was an incredible story of cotton and fire. I knew him too well to think otherwise. I thought the bugger would have changed after marriage, but apparently, he had not.

Though I could figure out what could be happening inside, I just wanted to know what the boy’s version of the event was. When asked, he said in Kannada, which translated to: “mother and uncle cleaning the cupboard. Mother told me I may get dust allergy and asked me to wait outside”.

I could not resist paying my friend a visit in the evening once the maid was gone after her day’s work. I made it look like a casual visit, but could not hang on to my act for long. I plainly asked him what he was doing with the maid with the door locked. He didn’t attempt to hide either. “Just keep quiet, will you?”, and then he made an offer I could not refuse. He said: “You can have her when your wife is away for Christmas vacation. Now it is my turn”. I did my best to conceal the sudden surge of excitement breaking out in my face. I quickly answered, “Let me see”.

The whole conversation went on in a dull, somber, and completely unexciting tone that it sounded like two tired school kids, one asking the other for crayons, and the first kid says the second kid can have it after he finishes his drawing assignment and the second kid simply agrees.

A week later, the boy posted outside the house had already licked away two dozens of ice creams, while his mother and the ‘uncle’ had finished dusting the cupboard and were now dutifully involved in cleaning the bedroom.

Just two days before my wife was due to visit her parents which usually turned out to be a very long vacation, I received a call in the afternoon from my wife. She was frantic and excited, “you know what happened?” she quickly continued, “your friend downstairs…” Oh, the bugger got caught, I guessed. My wife said, “his wife found him sleeping with their maid”. I knew that someday something like this was bound to happen for the bugger was doing far too much ‘sleeping’ on a regular basis.

Wife: “She found the maid’s son sitting outside and eating Chocolate, your friend’s car was parked outside, and she got suspicious, and peeped inside through one of the windows and found them….” I ignored the details, as my thoughts were locked in the word ‘chocolate’. The boy must have got bored with ice creams – after all, who would like to eat ice creams daily in December?

“Why aren’t you saying anything?” my wife cut in. What should I say, my dear wife? Should I say I knew it already, or should I tell you I was at it myself? But I didn’t tell her all these, I just told her, “I’m surprised as much as you are”. Later in the night, she explained to me how the whole incident unfolded and how she came to know of it but thankfully my name never came into the story.

Though I had not made up my mind to make out with the maid, the very thought of the availability of a chance had really excited me. But then the closest-ever chance blown away, I resorted to spending the Christmas days, like every year, in the company of my other useless friends, and sometimes in the elite company of Napoleon* and Caesar*.

P.S: Napoleon and Caesar are liquor brands.

P.S: This is a real incident, but the ‘I’ in the story is not me.