The ornate fringe of kadamba flowers weighed down the balaposh with their fragrance and hid my smile of secret delight as his feet rubbed the neem-chameli payals at my ankles and got caught in them...

The ornate fringe of kadamba flowers weighed down the balaposh with their fragrance and hid my smile of secret delight as his feet rubbed the neem-chameli payals at my ankles and got caught in them so that he had to be gentle to free his toes lest the garland tear and with it the last bastion of lajja that held the temple of my soul from his fervid, almost impossibly passionate, worship. My breasts heaved with cautious longing, the pebbled pyramids of zari bordering my kacholi straining to contain their demand as I held my breath with anticipation, both anxious and amative at the same time. I could feel his ringed fingers undo my khnopa, the tightly wound bands of juin and bel kuris scattering like soft, scented hail across my warm shoulders on which they melted into the essence of a naba-dampati’s first night of love. Now, his hand traced imaginary maps around my bare waist, drawing circles within circles till it reached the cleft of my alta-tinted buttocks where began a tingling of sensation that set afire my heart, the heat of irresistible importunate desire burning through skin and cloth and gold. His startled fingers drew away sharply, unused to such intensity, such a shameless outburst of eagerness, so soon, so close. I turned towards him ; looked him in the eye ---- now flickering with known answers to unasked need, now shy to speak them in the only language of the moment ---- and parted my lips in a smile to allay his sweet hesitation. He knew then: I was as fearless in love as I was in life. The next morning, I gathered the still ecstatic neem-chameli from my tattered floral anklets and a bright sunflower, the insignia of the dynasty, from a vase where a cluster of them had been witness to the night’s war of love. I had won comprehensively and, as the spoils of battle, amassed every blossom and bud as a testimonial to my victory to make into this guinea-gold jhumka-pasha that would remind me and every woman from my time and beyond of the art of love and our supremacy in the making of it. It’s not an ornament for newlyweds only but for all you who seek to relive the romance of Phool-Sajja not as a mere memory but with the entirety of sensuousness and beauty of the actual night in the truth of your present, and in so doing, rekindle, revive or just add to the wondrous relationship of love you share with your life-partner.