Rochelle Potkar

Narain always had a semi-hard on, when Munika was around.        

   

When he first saw her, his eyes were filled with pleasure. She had the most delicious-looking breasts he had ever seen on a woman. A supple 38 D cup size for sure. Only after he had gorged enough on those vivacious mounds, taking care not to appear like a letch, did his eyes veer toward her navel peeping from her sari, teasing him from a distance. Her narrow waist led his eyes to her thighs amidst her sari pleats, and then to her firm pair of plump buttocks. Those, too, were ample when compared to the other women he had seen around, those that somehow suited Munika’s slightly broader frame.

 

Sometimes even the thought of her body was enough for him. Her bow-shaped rogue-painted pout, bordered in pink-fuchsia tempted him as strongly as did her kohl-rimmed eyes, lightly rouged cheeks or slender nose! Concentrating on only one part of her was not fair, he chided himself with Faustian pleasure. A woman’s eyes were the first indicators of how she felt. If he kept his gaze on them, he was sure she would let go of her secret thoughts that could seep through her lashes and entrap him even further.

 

The next day, his eyes were taunted with the palpable sight of her soft-skinned neck. She had probably dabbed perfume on either side of it because his nose teased with the stray thoughts of nuzzling into her nape so strongly that he had to exit the room, his hands itching for a soft grip.

 

They would watch each other often across the silence of his small drawing room that had a large dining table in the middle, used as a study table. He knew he would have to go slow with thinking of what lay beneath her blouse that dipped into a valley in the most delectable karp reduction symbol he had ever seen.

 

There was a lot at stake.

 

Munika was his sister’s friend and not a best friend who would easily forgive. She was his sister’s friend in the manner of being an acquaintance, and an acquaintance in the manner of being a senior– one year ahead, and a senior in a manner of being a mentor. She and his sister researched and churned out material for their theses late into the nights on the advantage of analysis of algorithms over computability theory in theoretical computer science.

 

She was accessible. Not too far. Probably available.

 

“You do like to dress well....” he said one day to her, smiling softly, trying to keep his words and hardness in check.

 

She greeted his remark with a blush shying into her books with deeper attention.

 

He couldn’t upset the apple cart. Neither his sister’s Ph.D nor her mentor’s, even though he was hauling breath beneath his quickening chest-beats every time. He thought of intelligent women like Munika - so much of smartness coupled with beauty. Had he found The Female Utopia?

 

Talk to them and get a taste of their worldviews, then taste their femininity with other senses, he mused. Not that he could easily execute the second stage of his thought process. He was merely stuck on the first and that’s why the latter felt hypnotically more alluring. When was he going to get to her? How much longer? Was she aware of him in that sense? Did his drooping eyes convey what his arrested tongue could not?

 

He would sometimes assist the two of them in their studies before he headed to the Institute of Mathematics Research, where he worked on Topology. A math scientist himself he intricately studied curves, surfaces, and objects in a plane and three-dimensional spaces. Maybe he studied them out of the Institute too. He liked shapes anywhere. Oh, didn’t he? The properties of objects preserved through continuous deformation by twisting, bending, stretching, but not tearing, where a circle could be an ellipse, a sphere an ellipsoid. Topology, the study of knots.

 

At the Institute, he and his fellow researcher were working on topologizing broken DNA strands. It was just ten years ago in the 80’s that the applications of knot theory in molecular biology were evolved. DNA, formed by pairs of molecular strands in a double helix, could become tangled, knotted or broken, which made it difficult for it to carry out functions, and biochemists were looking to determine how enzymes could remodel or manipulate DNA.

 

Topologists like Narain now used the knot theory and the Tangle Model to deduce mathematically how broken strands could be bound in a process called Site-Specific Recombination, using calculus of rational tangles and linking numbers.