“No, ma’am. I swear.”
Your mom scrolled through the site, comparing the google doc to the website, doing so without reason. Just a look at the first paragraph of each exposed the shameful truth.
“I don’t-“
“Ma’am, I would never lie. It’s against my religion. Never. Never. Never.” His pudgy body jerked about as he crossed and jerked with both his arms at every “Never.” “Never cheat like that. Plagiarize? No.”
“So…” your mom said, her hand on her drifting computer mouse. “It’s just a coincidence that your every word matches every word here, and it’s written at the quality of not only a native English speaker, but of a professor of philosophy?”
“Correct, ma’am.” He looked at her, the whites of his eyes contrasting naturally with his brown skin. “Truth is stranger in fiction.”
“’Than…’” she said, correcting him.
He nodded, not understanding.
She exhaled slowly. “This is the third time,” she said, leaning down to pick up a falling paper, the chest of her white shirt falling forward with the weight it carried. “That’s expulsion.”
“Ma’am. I cannot go back to India, ma’am.”
She came back up, putting the paper on her desk. She looked at him, her eyes a disarming blue, reflective, empathetic. “I know,” she said. “That’s why it was such a shame you did it again. And after I-“
“No ma’am. I did not. I did not.”
She was silent, her smooth leg crossed over the other. It was only the gravity of the situation which kept him from ogling her this time. And she, in feeling the same gravity, perhaps feeling it more than he did, had forgotten about how uncomfortable he had made her with his gaze while she taught class. Though she was becoming used to this, her class, slowly but surely over the years, filling with more and more students from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. They always did that. Just stared. First as individual nodes within a pile of white faces, then as prominent chunks of the auditorium seating, now almost as one unbroken mass, all with their eyes forward, all aimed at various parts of her body, taking each inch of her in as if it were theirs to take. And her, standing there, doing her job with zero recourse.
“And it’s due tonight,” she said, ignoring his asinine excuses.
He could hear the gravity in her every word, the way it weighed on her. And he stood there, only partially registering what he had understood to be the case, that his student visa hung on such a perilous thread, one which he, for no real reason other than laziness, had now cut through the simple act of copy and pasting the words of another. He saw her empathy, and in response, he stared back at her, both with indignation and with puppy dog eyes, or at least what he assumed to be puppy dog eyes.
She looked up at him, seeing a look of madness. But looking past it, she saw him sitting there, on that airplane seat, watching as the Canadian landscape fell from the tires of the plane, falling down below the clouds, into the realm of memories, only for the Indian landscape, itself crowded with bodies, coming back into sight, the real world he would open his eyes too, woken up from his Canadian dream.
She sighed.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I didn’t-“
“Come by my house tonight,” she said, cutting him short again. “I’ll give you the address.”
“Ma’am…”
“We’re going to sit down and write this thing from scratch. I’m going to watch you complete every word, and we’re only going for a rough draft. And if it’s at all legible, you’re getting a C- and I’m passing you. If you plagiarize again…”
“No ma’am, I did not…”
“…it’s somebody else’s problem. I’m warning you to never do it again. This is a chance you’re lucky to get.”
“Yes ma’am, thank you,” he said, his voice unchanged. “I did not cheat. Thank you. Thank you.”
She shook her head, writing down her address on a sticky note. She slid it across her desk. Get there by seven. Bring your own laptop, and please… at least have some idea of what it is you want to write about.” She sucked in breath and exhaled. “Just an idea. That’s all I’m asking for.”
The alarm on her phone went off.
“Yes ma’am. We will write it again. Like I did first. And then you’ll see. I write first time.”
She turned off her alarm and watched as he left her office, out into the busy halls of the University, its classrooms emptying, choking out its halls with faces, the average hue of which was changing with every passing semester. As were the numbers of cases of this sort. Most seemed to learn after one or two strikes, knowing that the third was the end of the rope for them. But your mom, looking out into the passing crowd, every few faces, for fractions of seconds at a time, staring back into her tiny, cramped office where she sat sequestered at its very back wall as if cornered, their eyes like milk in a sea of mud, looking at her, looking through her very clothes, wondered how many more there would be. Just when it was that the rules they were subject to would one day be theirs to create, and because of it, would be theirs to enforce.
She felt a chill, one quite unlike her. She was being silly, she knew she was. She was turning into one of her racist uncles, probably being made more temperamentally conservative and old-fashioned with age. She laughed at herself, gathering her papers for her next class. But just as she was about to step out into those crowded and busy halls, she decided to stand there at her desk and wait. Just for the moving chaos to subside a bit. She felt a bit of anxiety, but she knew her students could stand for her to be a few minutes late. Half of them would be late themselves.
She sat at your kitchen table. The dinner plates, scraped clean, sat next to the sink. You sat on the living room couch, watching a comedy special. Your brother stood in the bathroom, shaving in front of the sink.
“My dad wouldn’t appreciate that. Throwing rice? Not at his son’s wedding,” came from the television. You watched as an Indian-American comedian walked up and down the stage, imitating his father’s Indian accent. “’They’re wasting the food! I told you not to invite white people. How would they feel if we went to their weddings and started throwing mashed potatoes at them?’”
You laughed with the arena audience.
Your mom uncrossed her legs, then recrossed them in the opposite direction. She looked over at the stove to see the time. He was exactly twenty-seven minutes late. She exhaled, playing with her pen between her index and middle finger.
Your brother came out of the washroom, groomed for his date.
Your mom looked up at the side of his face as he fished through the cupboard for a glass.
“You’re keeping the beard I guess…”
“Yup,” he said, nodding without looking at her.
She stared at him for a second. Then she nodded herself, looking down. The image of a hundred bearded faces, all looking down at her, a sea of brown sprinkled with large, milky white eyes.
The doorbell rang, she looked up startled.
Your brother stood at the sink, collecting water in his glass. She looked at him, expecting him to get the door. He looked back at her, the glass lifted to his lips, unmoving.
She got up and went to the door, looking over to see you looking at her over the back of the couch, a large Indian man on the screen.
She opened the door.
Another large Indian man stood before her.
He looked into her eyes, dutifully but without any hint of it at all being genuine. His earlier anxiety must have subsided, because it took all but a few seconds for his gaze to slowly drop to her chest.
She cleared her throat, trying to draw his attention upward, feeling as if she was socializing a child, doing so from scratch. But just as his gaze lifted, your brother brushed past your mom’s shoulder.
“’scuse me, guys,” he said, putting on his shoes.
Your mom’s student introduced himself to your brother. Your brother shook his hand before leaving. As the Indian man walked into the house, your mom watched your brother walk down the driveway with a pep in his step, as a Honda sat on the street, a girl looking out its window at him. Her face pretty, but her tone brown. Her eyes big and white. Your brother smiled as he got into her car.
“Oh, him!” the man said, drawing her attention. She turned to look at him, standing there, staring at the TV. “He’s funny!”
Your mom shut the door.
“He’s from my province.”
You looked over the couch at the strange Indian man, himself looking not too different from the comedian on TV.
“He is cousin.”
“Really?” you said, nearing astonishment.
“Yeah. Everybody in province like cousin.”
“Oh,” you said, disappointment setting in.
Your mom moved back toward the kitchen. “Brought your laptop?” she asked without looking at him.
“Yes,” he said.
You watched as the brown man, following your mom’s milky flesh, disappeared with her into the kitchen.
“Good,” she said.
There was some shuffling. You heard what sounded like a laptop being set down.
“So, I put together a list of possible sources you can start with. What I want is for you to read, internalize, and then to put it in your own wo-“
She stopped suddenly.
“Oh, oh,” he said. “Sorry ma’am.”
The image of a naked woman, her breasts large, her eyes blue, and her foot up in the air, being penetrated by a scowling man, sat on his screen frozen. It was there, waiting as soon as he opened it up.
His brown face blushed red as he clicked off, having to click past multiple windows of similar material. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t… I don’t look at… must be virus.” The last image your mom saw before the desktop popped into being was of the pornstar Ava Addams, her gigantic breasts pressed against the shower glass.
He sat down, trying to conjure an air of professionality, something which would have looked absurd regardless, but which was even more stilted and awkward as his embarrassment stiffened his joints to the point of making him robotic.
He opened up a word file. “Okay,” he said, trying to make his nerves sound like excitement. “Let’s go now.”
Your mom stood there, looking down at him, mortified on his behalf. She then grabbed her chair, and slowly lowered herself to its seat.
When she made contact, her breasts jiggled, and she was shocked, thinking it beyond him in this moment, to see him take a quick look at her chest.
She froze, gritting her teeth, and then, after a quick breath, she moved for her binder, opening it, grabbing her source sheet while he, with very little subtlety, scanned over her body.
“Okay,” she said. “I figured since you took your essay from-“
“No, ma’am, I didn’t.”
“-Rawles, we’ll start with him.”
“Okay. He must be smart guy. I never read before.”
“Uh huh,” she said, sitting on her irritation. “The Veil of Ignorance, let’s start with that one.”
You sat there, staring at the screen, wondering at what your mom’s student was apologizing for, your mind furious with unfortunate imagery.
The comedian stood on the stage, putting the microphone to his lips with a cocky swagger. “But my family always asks me. They say ‘Gurpal, why’d you get into comedy?’ Well, uncle,” he said, moving up the stage with a dramatic pause. “Do you have a better way to meet white women?”
The crowd erupted into laughter.
He looked down at a few faces within it, presumably faces that were blue-eyed and blonde-haired, a devilish smile at the corner of his mouth. He looked down at one face in particular. He shot it a wink.
“Okay,” your mom said. “Good, good. Umm… make sure… just… just wait. Make sure you’re using the right ‘they’re.’”
“Yes, ma’am. I use their.”
“But it’s- stop. Stop. It’s T-H-E-Y-apostraphe-R-E. ‘They’re.’ You understand? Like ‘They are.’ ‘They’re.’”
“Yes, yes, I know. I very good at English.”
She ignored him.
“Very good. You see my paper. Do very hard.”
“Okay,” she said, cutting him short. “So you understand the idea then?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?’
“It’s like you do good so good can happen.”
Your mom was silent for a moment.
“I know, I know.”
“Not exactly,” your mom said, having to reach deep into her empathy beforehand to conjure that much patience. “It means… hmph… that you do good, because if you were the person who needed help, you would want someone to help you.”
He nodded, staring at her.
“You understand?”
“Yes, yes. Understand. Very easy, it’s. You do good because people ask.”
“Well…”
“Do good for lots of people because then lots of people happy.”
“I mean,” she said. “A little bit.” She seemed slightly relieved that he had stumbled upon the utilitarian argument, taking it as a sign that progress was possible. “Okay,” she said. “I don’t know if this will translate, but in the west, we have this thing we call the golden rule. It’s… um… it’s in the middle east too. Do you know Hammurabi?”
“Yes, we learn about in school.”
“Good, good,” she said, her blue eyes lighting up. “Or, in Christianity, Jesus says do good things for people based on what you would like to happen for you.”
“Ahh,” he said.
She looked up from the laptop screen at him, driven by the excitement that he was getting it. As soon as her eyes locked to his, she saw that he wasn’t looking at her. His sights were aimed much lower.
She looked down to see the stark line of her cleavage looking up at herself.
She felt a sudden chill, so quickly it had come that her chair legs scraped the tile when she scooted away from him, though she did so at such a short distance that he hadn’t even noticed. All he noticed was the jiggle of her cleavage as she did.
She noticed that that’s what he saw as she saw them jiggle in her own lower peripheral, and she froze in response, afraid to make any sudden movements, terrified that they would titillate him further. His white eyes were subtly widened within his brown face. His lips were shut, but there was an intensity to them. She could see the tops of her breasts turning pink with embarrassment.
She pointed back at the screen. “Let’s…”
He was still staring.
“Let’s...,” he turned to look at her hand, looking at the screen it was pointing to. “Let’s describe that then,” she said. “About making a lot of people happy.”
“Yes,” he said. “Like Raws.”
Rawls, she corrected him in her mind, not seeing the use in vocalizing it.
She watched as his words came together, mangled and crunched. Her expression flat, her eyes wide like his were a moment ago. But for a very different reason.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s good enough. Just send it to me and you have yourself a C-.”
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks you very much, ma’am. I don’t like do twice for no reason, but I understand.”
She kept her mouth shut.
He sent it, then he stood up, closing his laptop. She looked up at him as he stretched. “Ahhh,” he said. Then he stopped suddenly. His gaze shot down at her. “I uhh, I need to use washroom.”
She stared up at him.
“You have?”
“Oh,” she said. “Of course.” She got up, doing so slowly as to not jiggle in any place she shouldn’t. “Come with me.”
She emerged in the living room, which was now empty, its television screen black, its couch empty, and she moved down the hallway, seeing the silhouette of him and herself in the full-body mirror at its end. As she neared the washroom, she could hear him breathe behind her in the hallway darkness, and she became acutely aware of how near his body was to her own.
She stopped breathing. She felt the door to the bathroom fill her palm. She turned it open.
“Oh,” he said, the light from the bathroom window lighting up his face. “Very nice.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I had my husband refinish it all before his trip.” She put emphasis on the word ‘husband’ so naturally that even she was unaware she did it.
“Oh. He a good taste man.”
He looked through the white surfaces of the room, before his eyes found the mirror, your mom’s full body reflected in it.
Your mom looked back at his big milky white eyes through the same mirror. He glared directly at her body, without shame or subtlety, just taking all of her in.
“He a very good taste man,” he repeated.
She dipped back into the hallway with the strength of her own shuddering. “Okay,” she said. “Just take your time.” She was halfway down the hallway. “Because I’d want you to give me the same courtesy.” She looked at him, her face half-illuminated as she stood at the doorway of the kitchen. Her eyes were wide and reflective, though she knew he didn’t understand the subtle reference to the topic they had just wrote a paper on couched within that statement. She made it for herself. Then she disappeared into the kitchen.
She heard the bathroom door close and she sat down. She waited there, one leg resting over the other, expecting him to be out soon.
After a few moments she began to wonder.
Then she heard the first fart.
She exhaled, looking down at her binder. She turned, looking at the laptop.
Another muffled fart came down the hallway.
She turned to look, scowling at the mouth of the hall. She then looked back at the laptop. She opened it up.
ppffffftttt
She looked at the essay, unspeaking.
“The nature of good is it do good. Very good. And very good is good because I think so. Other think so too.”
pfft
plop
“Good make world go round. No good. No world.”
Fluuussshhhh
pffft
“I do good just to see people smile.”
She breathed in slowly. She looked down, seeing the minimized tab. She slowly slid the cursor down to it. She exhaled. She clicked.
“Angelina titty big Tomb raider,” sat in the google search bar.
She clicked on it, erased it, and then let the cursor settle in the bar, blinking. Below was a list of recent searches. Her eyes scanned over them. “Boob grab.” “Breast exam.” “Nipple licker.” “Fall big boobs.” “How make girl big boobs show.”
pfffffffffffttttttttttttt
“Big boob fall out.” “White girl boob.” “Lots of cum on girl.” “many men cum on girl boob.”
Flusssshhh
Your mom typed in the letter F. “Fun with boob.” “Folgers in cup.” “Fantasy movie.” “Fenix mary.”
Tktktktktkktktkt
tteaarr
She typed in W. “White woman boob.” White woman naked.” “woman naked.” “Wonder woman 1984.” Wonder woman naked.” “Wonder woman boob white.” “White woman how to get.”
tktktktktktktkt
tteaarrr
She sat there for a second. She hit backspace, the list disappeared. She then took in another breath, moving her fingers to the “P” key, her mind furious with thoughts. Thoughts about herself. Thoughts about her profession. Professor.
Her finger sat on the key, ready to press down.
click
eeeerrrrrrrr
Your mom grabbed the laptop lid and pulled it shut. She pushed away from it a little ways and then she began playing with her earing as if she was distracted.
He came into the kitchen, a satisfied grin on his face. “Thank you so much, professor,” he said. “You do favor.” He stuck out his hand. “And it good practice me writing essay twice.”
She looked up into his eager eyes, surprisingly aimed at her own this time, and then she looked down at his hand.
She stood up, running her hands against the hips of her skirt. “Don’t mention it,” she said, adding in her mind an addendum: don’t plagiarize again. But she didn’t. She knew it would be worthless. Pearls to swine.
He stood there with his hand out for a moment longer, until she backed away, not looking at him, pretending to be ignorant of his open palm. As she walked over toward the sink, he moved to his laptop, placing it back within his open bag. As she did, he looked up at her, the back of her head, its long illustrious hair staring back at him, her gaze outside her window at the picket fence of her backyard.
He zipped up his bag, lifting it onto his shoulder slowly, sneakily.
“Okay, thanks again, professor,” he said.
She turned around, forcing out a grin. He moved toward the front of the house. She followed, at a distance.
As he put his shoes on at the door, with her holding it open for him, her body tense with eagerness for him to leave, a laptop AC adapter sat alone on the kitchen chair.
“Again, you the best professor. Very good.”
“Thank you, thank you,” she said, and she watched as he left the house. As soon as he cleared the doorway, she slammed it shut. She rested against it, her chest heaving, her relief immeasurable. She almost regretted the invitation. Regretted helping him. Even regretted not calling up the academic board itself to rat on him when she had her chance. But as she rested there, regaining her bearings, and her sense of home privacy, she took solace in the realization that he hadn’t taken a single glance at her breasts on the way out.
It was probably nothing, but the optimist told her otherwise. Maybe that’s progress.
The adapter sat within the shadow of the kitchen table. Silent.
Your mom sat on her bed, talking to your dad over skype, not just because she wanted to see him again, but because she was waiting for the bathroom to air out. She had went inside with a towel wrapped around her naked body, and at the sudden wall of smell, she had run to the window, spinning its action until it swung as far open as it could go.
She then went back, picking the towel up off the ground, as it had fallen off in her visceral shock. She wrapped it around herself and went to her room.
“Anybody come to visit?” your dad asked, surrounded by moving bodies.
“Flight 708 to Dallas will be leaving in twenty minutes,” came over the speaker.
Your mom stared into your father’s handsome blue eyes. She shook her head slowly. “No,” she said. “Just me and the kids.”
He nodded, then he looked up. “I should get going,” he said. “Line’s getting big. But, um, before I do, I wanted to talk to you about maybe inviting the new neighbors over for when I get back next week. Maybe Friday.”
She stared at the screen.
“What’s their name again? It’s something with a…”
“Patel,” your mom said.
“Yes, Patel,” he said. “Those are the ones. They seem nice.”
Your mom didn’t respond.
“And I can smell the spices wafting out of their front door every morning. We’d be fools to not take advantage of that cooking.”
Your mom didn’t say a word.
“All the other neighbors always invited us over for pot roast and steak. It would be nice to have something a little more exotic.” He looked back at her, his blue eyes widening playfully. “Live a little bit more dangerously.”
She stared back at him.
“Okay?”
She stared at him for a moment. Then she nodded her head. “…sure, honey.”
“Okay babe, gotta go.”
“Bye,” she said, her smile coming back. “I love you.”
“Love you to?” he shot her back his warm smile. It was the last image she saw before the call ended.
She shut her laptop. She looked up at her doorway. “It’s got to smell better now,” she said.
When she went back into the bathroom, she smelled nothing but pine needles and the cucumbers from the neighbor’s garden (the neighbor on the other side).
She smiled.
Her towel met the ground, waiting for her as her trick for cleaning her feet the second she stepped out of the shower.
The sweet air from outside wafted in, anointing her body. She had showered this morning, but something in her now told her she had to do it again. She knew the reason why, but she refused to vocalize it to herself, internally or externally, not liking the thought that would come to her if she did.
The cool air kissed between her butt-cheeks. It was your dad who had told her that her cheeks flared open when she bent over, even slightly, and ever since she would notice the air or water penetrating deeper into that space every time she did. She enjoyed the sensation. The airiness. The sense of being open. Of being free.
He butt-crack looked back at her in the mirror. Her white flesh, unbroken and pink, porcelain too, like some archetypal art, a Germanic beauty which served as the basis for Norse gods of perfection and lovemaking; or, which existed as the constantly running drip of such gods, poured into this reality as evidence of the higher world.
As the warm water kissed, sniffed, and breathed against the sensitivity of her nipples, she rubbed them, washing them of the resin left by a thousand eyes, over five classrooms full, and a dozen more from the faculty.
She had always loved the beach, and she was eager for it as fresh spring slowly crawled into the sweating flesh of another summer. Then one morning, she had seen an article about a man leaning against the changerooms, with his phone shifted beneath the partition. The young girls inside found him when they saw the wall vibrating. They screamed, hearing his grunts, seeing the eye of the phone below them, filming up at their nudity. Bystanders, hearing the scream, ran to see the man jerking off against the structure, doing so as if he lived in a land where no one cared.
No description of the man was given, but your mom knew. She knew more than most, and her face wore the scowl of that knowledge. She had a name for knowledge of that kind once. It was Bigotry.
Her uncles had warned her about these “dark” matters. One of these uncles lusted for big-breasted women himself, having married one half his age (and not-so-attractive to boot). Your mom scoffed at them, at their bigotries and at their hypocrisies. Neither of them showed any incestuous feelings towards her, not even a little, but she always had them in the back of her mind, knowing about the things said about white people and incest, knowing there must have been some truth to it, somewhere, especially in those white people of the more racist persuasion.
It wasn’t until hearing about her student Gurpreet’s marriage, her eyes and voice lighting up with congratulations, only to hear about his bride and how they had met back home.
“She’s my cousin,” he said.
Your mom stood there, leaning forward as if still with the momentum of celebrating. Her mouth fell open.
This meant nothing to her at the time, even when she realized such practices were more common around the world, not just in India, than she had realized. When she had talked with her friends from the Anthropology department and learned that all cultures have incest taboos, but all cultures define incest differently. Your dad scoffed at her story, telling her that cousin in one culture must mean second cousin, or distant friend, not accepting her word, not matter how much she said it, until she caught herself in the bathroom mirror mid-sentence, catching the intensity in her face, almost collapsing from embarrassment. She had recognized that expression. It had looked down at her, eyes wide above a full greying beard, lecturing her about the preferable ways of white culture in between bites of pork chop or mashed potatoes, asking her to pass the gravy all the while.
Alberta, she had thought at the time. I need to get out of here.
She had visited last year. The streets were as white, pink-cheeked, and porcelain, as her body. She looked at herself in the mirror, shocked to feel smugness at her own pink flesh, loving it, preferring it.
She had voted NDP for every election, ever since her first time voting at eighteen. She walked toward that voting booth with an intense duty in her face, imagining a disappointment in her uncles’ eyes. Now, as she stood there, washing herself of the recent moment, washing herself of its indignity, washing herself of her past naivete, it occurred to her that she’d be voting very different come next election.
She looked up into her reflected face, almost not believing herself. She then smiled, recognizing the irony that once she was on this side, the side she had rejected and besmirched for as long as she could remember, she was realizing now that it wasn’t so bad. She leaned down, feeling the warm water reaching to deeper depths inside her butt-crack, and she grabbed the liquid soap.
She came back up, grabbing the luffa, and she smiled to herself as she opened the bottle’s cap.
She didn’t feel guilt for her new mode of suffrage. After all, she was a woman. Many people fought hard for her right to vote. They had no right to take it away from her. She felt a thrill at her sudden evolution, that breaking of the damn which lead to a deluge of transformation.
She squeezed onto the white bottle of soap.
She looked down at the luffa. Its frills looked back up at her, covered in a pure, cleansing white. She brought it to her breast.
Ding dong
Your mom opened the door, initially surprised that someone had come so early in the morning. She expected girl scouts, or jehova’s witnesses, not having time or available change for the former, not having patience for the latter. What she saw standing there, again on her stoup, was the worst of possibilities.
He stood there, looking back at her, milky white eyes in a landscape of chocolate. “Ma’am, ma’am, I’m sorry. I forgot.”
“Yes…” she said, ready to go to the university. Not ready to see him for the entirety of the day, not having to on Fridays (and being thankful every time).
“My plug. For my computer. Forgot or dropped it maybe. Can I?” he motioned into the house.
Your mom jerked her body back, the suddenness of it being a reflection of how much she wanted him gone, but she shut her eyes with regret, realizing had made herself jiggle.
He walked quickly in. He looked around, randomly touching things as if doing so would help him find it what he was looking for. Then he moved directly into the center of the kitchen, stood, looking around, including up at the ceiling fan. Then he looked down onto the chair his hand was rested against. “Oh,” he said. He leaned down grabbing it. He turned around, showing your mom. “Found it.”
She stared at him.
He came walking back, holding it in his hand as if it were a ferocious snake he had just snared and incapacitated. “Thank you ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I always forget.”
She waited for him to clear the doorway, standing at the door so he could, so she could slam it shut, waiting there for him to disappear, only to open it and leave the house when he was finally (mercifully) well out of sight.
“Yes ma’am, I always forgot. I am so embarrass. I need to-“
He stopped suddenly, in place, dramatically, just when he got directly beside her. Your mom backed away, letting go of the door. Her back against the wall.
“Oh,” he said. “I need to use bathroom. Fastly.”
She stared at him.
He stared back.
“Huh?” she said.
“Bathroom. May I please, ma’am?”
She only stared, the shock too sudden for her blood to boil. Instead, she just nodded.
“Oh, thanks ma’am! I be quick.” He turned around and stomped down the hall toward the bathroom. After he was gone, the bathroom door squeaking open and then slamming shut, she looked down at the ground. His charger sat there as a heap on the floor.
She looked down at her watch, thinking that maybe it wasn’t so bad. Her day started late on Friday, and traffic wasn’t so bad as a result. Besides, the majority of her class would be late themsel-
pppfffffftttttttt
For the love of-
plop
After ten minutes or so, the toilet flushed, and though it was the second time, she knew he was finished. Not because of the sound of the tap running, but because there was silence.
She then heard a tinny noise, like something had been knocked over.
She sighed.
He grabbed the shaving cream, placing it upright on the floor next to him.
His sat there, his forward, his palms pointing outward, as he slowly shifted things on the shelf, whether plastic or metallic or glass, out of his way. As he did, he saw it there, pointed a reflective mirror, its eye only visible in reflection. He reached for it, grabbing it, placing it back in his pocket, where it had begun its journey yesterday.
He got up, trembling, after shifting everything back into place. He looked at himself in the mirror. He adjusted his clothes, his face red, both from the effort and from the beating of his heart. He took a deep breath, then he reached for the door.
Your mom saw him come out of the hallways, seemingly exhausted from his movement.
“All done,” he said, putting on a smile as he quickly got closer.
Before she could move, she felt her hand being grabbed.
She looked down to see his brown hand wrapped around her own.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, seeming to have extraordinary levels of gratitude all of the sudden. “You’re my favorite professor, because.”
He turned and left, not even taking a moment to gaze at her chest, not even once.
As she watched him go from the open doorway, she thought about that word: “Professor,” and the letter it started with. “P.” She wiped her hand against the edge of her skirt.
The bathroom door opened. You came inside, yawning. As you stumbled in, your foot hit something and it went clanging against the tiles. You looked down to see your brother’s can of shaving cream. You picked it up and put it back into place on the shelf. It filled a big blank spot which looked empty without it. As you stood up, seeing your face the mirror, it occurred to you: it had been a long time since your brother had used that cream. You lifted your hand, stroking your own brown beard, which was coming in nicely. You smiled.
The school was nearly empty. It always was on Saturday’s, though its doors remained open for any ambitious students to use its resources when needed.
He stood there, opening the doorway to his favorite class, propping it open with the stopper. It was his way of letting the others coming in an hour know that he was there.
He went to the front of the empty auditorium, kneeling to turn on its projector, struggling to figure out how to replace the PC input with his own laptop, and then at figuring it out, struggling to adjust for projection size. As he began getting there, he pulled up a picture of Angelina Jolie, adjusting her on the screen until the image was perfect, crisp and clear and not only life-size, but much bigger than life size. He looked up, admiring the gigantic mass of her breast’s, which loomed over him, ten times their usual mass.
He then heard a noise behind him. He turned to see the first invitee, standing there, eyes wide and white in the landscape of his brown face.
“Good,” he said in Hindi. “Have a seat.”
His classmate nodded, turning to shut the door, afraid of leaving it open.
“Don’t,” he said.
The classmate turned around to look down at him.
“Let’s wait for the others to come.”
The class was eventually full, minus the few straggling seats usually occupied by white students.
They looked at the screen, shifting in place within the relative darkness.
A janitor mopped up outside the shut door, not knowing what was going on inside, or why the instructor was speaking a foreign language. He didn’t care. It wasn’t his problem.
“Are you all ready for today’s lesson?” he asked sarcastically.
They stared back, their eyes big and wide. There was an electricity in the room, silent and invisible, but felt all the same.
“Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”
They were silent as they watched. The video came on.
It was a bathroom. A bathroom cleaner than they had ever seen it.
The auditorium was so silent, unlike it had ever been before, especially in the past few years where voices whispered (and sometimes speaking louder than a whisper) in Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi all through the thick and thin of class, professors’ faces reddening as they raised their voices to be heard by the disinterested throng. Now it was different. A pin could be heard dropping, if it weren’t for the sound of heavy, expectant breathing.
The bathroom door swung open inward. The expectant breathing was replaced by an expectant silence.
And that’s when two bare white feet, soft and spotless, and calves, perfect in shape, came onto screen, as elegant as if the moment were in dance.
There was a sudden stutter in the movement. And then a towel dropped.
The legs ran out of frame.
The ‘instructor’ looked at his class, a smug expression on his face.
There was the sound of some mechanical contraption squeaking and then locking into place. The feminine legs rushed back into frame, their feet bending as the body kneeled down, a hand reaching to grab the discarded towel, along with strands of brown hair, and the underside of gigantic breasts. Before the nipple could be seen, the breasts were heaved upward and out of frame, an airy sucking sound, vague in its intention but universal, coming back from the audience in response.
The instructor smiled. He looked back up at the screen.
Then he moved toward his laptop. “Let me speed it up,” he said.
He went forward a bit, going too far. For a split second, an image, almost subliminally, accompanied by the sound of running water, came into being and then disappeared before it could even be registered. Even still, that flash of pink and beige, of porcelain warmer than the porcelain of the bathroom proper, stuck with them all. They stared up, their mouths open.
“Here,” he said, finding a suitable spot in the runtime.
Within seconds, the door came back open. The feet, their toes pink, came into shot, standing there, as if in wait. Then they moved toward the shower.
As they did, the full body of the woman came into view, the towel wrapped tightly around her, her brown hair falling to the midpoint of her back. No one spoke. They could barely breathe.
There was only a single gasp from the crowd. Otherwise, they remained silent, their eyes open wide, watching.
They held their judgment, every single one of them, minus a few with naivety and faith, assumed it to be some sort of trick, some scene stolen from an American teen sex comedy, the moment too perfect to be real.
And then she turned around.
Her face, swung into view, as it had so many times, usually much smaller as she stood at the bottom of the auditorium, looking up at them. But this time, as she swung around on the screen she usually pointed up toward, her breasts swung with her, free and open, with her nipples pink and exposed.
They stared at her, their eyes running past the nuances and flesh of her body as fluidly as the water did in the video.
This beauty, this icon of perfect Canadian whiteness, the likes of which was but a fever dream back home.
Occasionally some would look down to see their classmate, their “lecturer” for the day, standing where their professor usually would, grinning at them. But they imagined her still standing there, her body wrapped tight, held into place (as was now confirmed by the video, where she moved as one continuous jiggling mass) by the confines of her professional attire.
The video version of her looked back at them at one point, with a warmth that was never there while she stood in class, at least not for a while. It had existed once, but it had faded with every one of them who filled a previously white seat. That warmth that had been familiarity, which was taken from her, one face at a time, as the semesters passed before her.
She bent over to grab soap and a luffa.
They watched her butt cheeks flare open as she did, taking note of it with adoration.
She came back up, pouring soap over herself with a sensuality they had never seen in her before, a sensuality they couldn’t even predicted to exist.
Soap ran over her white body, complimenting it, drowning her pink nipples and black contours, drowning her every nook and curve. They had wondered why she had smelled so nice. Some had speculated that she must bathe everyday. Some scoffed at the idea, that water would be wasted so flippantly in a country with such beautiful supplies of it. But when others made the argument, and made it well in their native tongue, that she had a lot of surface area to keep clean, a lot more than the average woman, more of them were receptive to the thought.
Another of them, one who lived with a white roommate, claimed that his roommate also bathed everyday, despite being skinny and male. That’s when the thought occurred that white people, maybe picking it up from Arabs or Turks, must have had a strong culture of ritual cleanliness, maybe having something to do with keeping their flesh pure, as superstitious as that sounded (they couldn’t afford to put anything past us).
They had discussed all of this openly in your mom’s class, sheltered by their foreign tongue, as she bent down behind the podium, jostling the cables on the projector so it would work properly, their voices only background noise (at least as long as she could convince herself of it).
She popped back up, mid-argument, her tits jiggling from it, her eyes shutting in a sudden cringe at realizing that they were. She waited for the flesh of her chest to settle before beginning speaking.
Her naked body, now caked with soap, existed as a milky reflection within those white eyes, their faces otherwise shrouded in the darkness of the auditorium.
They glared at her now, the way they always had, except this time, she didn’t stand there, her body rigid with self-consciousness. She existed, free and proud of herself, ecstatic in her loneliness, living in a world of the purity of her own flesh, which she apparently enjoyed as much as they did, but for all the wrong reasons.
Her students’ cocks throbbed hard for her, some of them removed from their trackpants or jeans. They had respected her so much, and had desired a way to show it, at least to themselves and to each other.
They loved Canada, had adored white Canadian culture, trying so hard to be a part of it. Trying their very best to make this place their new home, so much so that they cheated and lied to keep themselves here. They held the white woman, both as a beauty and as a self-evident matriarch, in such high esteem, singing their praises in the only way which was socially acceptable in this strange and unforgiving land: by staring.
Many of them were shocked to learn, and found out woefully too late, that randomly grabbing at a white girl’s body, the curves of which were so delightfully exposed for the task, was considered a great sin here. Others (luckily a small few) wished to show their love and adoration with force, running their bodies against the squirming nudity of the white girl in question, only realizing after an extended period of much the same behavior (pleading and shrieking) that something was wrong.
The weirdness of white people, their schizophrenic culture, was perturbing, but it had yet to disillusion them with the land they loved so much. Tales of warning, from one South Asian immigrant to another, became the norm. First to avoid imprisonment, then to avoid deportation, then to avoid being assaulted, and lastly, to avoid being socially ostracized. Each new lesson meant infinite progress, but the last of those four buffers was the hardest to avoid.
Even them, as students, supplicants, looking up to their superior at the front of their class, could feel a strange distance, a discomfort with them in her every nuance and expression, despite their various methods to establish their respect for her.
The uncomfortable thought came to them, especially now in this moment, with your mom’s naked body filling up the fevered extent of their awareness, that a time would come when they could no longer play nice with white people anymore. They dreaded the thought, trying to fight it aside, using your mom’s self-satisfaction and smile to convince themselves. But the thought still came back to them, themselves knowing that she only smiled like that because she thought their dirty eyes weren’t watching her, that her happiness could only exist without theirs to tarnish it, and that somewhere, in the deepest, darkest parts of her white heart, behind her giant and soft bosom, she had wished they had never come at all.
And at this dark reality, tossed about in their minds like fruits being juggled, dark strategies, impulsive and primordial, began to form within them, strategies for one day outnumbering, outmanoeuvring, outperforming, out-earning, and out-voting the white Canadian race came to them, with the final goal of removing the white female from her protection, entitlement, haughtiness; all the things which allowed her to defend herself from the purity of their combined love.
And then, the real harvesting of this land, beyond the wheat of the fields, the buckets of fresh water and maple syrup, could be accomplished. The harvesting of the white Canadian female, siphoned like honey from the hive of her own home.
They dreaded the day when they would no longer have to be as nice as they have so far been.
But they had no reason to ruin their perfect day, perhaps the best in their life, by reflecting on that now.
After all, the video would almost be over, and the after-presentation discussions were always the best part of their impromptu Saturday classes. They learned more on this day than they did the five other days of the week combined.
It was the strangest irony, one which wasn’t lost on them. Your mom taught best without using a single a word. She had other thing to speak for her.
If only they could communicate this to her. But what good would that do? She would never understand. They never do. It would be like casting pearls to swine.
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