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Another chapter of an 85000 word novel. This will be the last chapter posted as the story in its entirety can now be found published as an ebook on Lulu
The Inferior
by
Kurt Steiner
Chapter Twenty-Three
Rajiv & Anya
“How cringingly embarrassing for him,” an amused Rajiv laughed as he listened to Anya describe the events of the past hour. “He actually cried out your name?”
“Five times, by my reckoning,” she confirmed.
His protégé’s facility for simple calculation ensuring he laughed harder.
“My timing was perfect,” she congratulated herself. “I was sure he took to his bed earlier to do something more than just “Read. Suspicions I confirmed by a few evenings spent listening at his bedroom door.”
Rajiv was still chuckling.
“Knowing the time was right, it was not too difficult to sneak into the room unobserved with my tea tray and watch as he reached crisis – not, you understand, that there was tea in the pot anyway.”
Had Rajiv been able to see her he would have noticed how her head shook from side-to-side with wonderment.
“It was the most amazing moment of my life,” she told him breathlessly. Simply recalling the event threatening to bring her to another crisis. “My older, handsome, oh so superior, Master was masturbating. Over me! What a comedown for such a racist dog.”
Her accompanying laughter was downright evil.
In Calcutta too, Rajiv was also amused, though more by the fact a young woman with the body possessed by his protégé could be surprised at such a response from a man - knowing how frequently and with how much fervour he himself had paid her the self-same compliment.
She was still laughing when her mentor’s words took the wind from her sails:
“He will, of course, now ask you to leave.”
The charged silence greeting his assertion coming as no surprise to Rajiv.
“What are you saying?” she asked, finally, recovering enough to find her voice.
“It is simple enough, Anya,” he explained. “Though his spirits are low, his male pride remains intact. It will, in fact, be the last thing to go. The final barrier standing between you and total ownership. But, as of this moment, he remains in receipt of enough self-regard to be shamed by what you witnessed. Believe me, his next move will be to take the easy way out and ask you to leave his home and his employment.”
“No!” she protested, appalled and mortified at such an eventuality; that all her planning, hard work and dreams, could go up in smoke so easily. “You are mistaken, Rajiv. He already kneels before me twice a week to polish my shoes and suck my toes before giving me a pedicure. Today I even had him hand wash my soiled pantyhose for the first time.”
On screen, Rajiv was shaking his head.
“Do not delude yourself, Anya,” he warned. “It is not the shoes, feet and pantyhose of Anya Jalav your master attends but a fictional memsahib who is part of a game you play.”
“But…”
“There are no buts, Anya. You have made solid progress, yes, but he remains some way from the servile canine you intend him to be.”
“But he depends on me for so much,” Anya protested, anger and fear rising in unison. “He does not lift a finger for himself and seems incapable of doing so. I have made myself indispensable to him. Food, laundry, cleaning, even accounts; all these responsibilities he had ceded to me. He wants for nothing. Where would he find another to do the same?”
On the screen before her, Rajiv was again shaking his head ruefully.
“You will find domestic service agencies the world over inundated with the resumes of ‘Indispensable” servants, my dear,” he corrected her, discarding Santayana this time to bastardise George Bernard Shaw instead.
Not, he knew, that it made any appreciable difference.
The assertion would have angered her no matter who he plagiarised.
Having no understanding of what the word meant cutting no ice either.
“Calm yourself, Anya, and hear me out,” he went on, adopting his most dulcet tones in a charm offensive. “I said: he will ask you to leave. Not that you will go.”
“How can I possibly stay if he asks me to…?”
“If you contain your anger and listen to your friend without interrupting it is possible your question might be answered.”
Cornwall fell silent for a few seconds, until:
“Well?” she snapped.
Still amused, he shook his head at her demand.
“I’m listening,” she reminded him. “Or is your silence just an attempt on your part to cover what you know to be a mistake?”
“Anya, Anya!” he chided. “You are not very gracious to a friend who has only your best interests at heart. However, I shall, this once, overlook your ingratitude and…”
“Get on with it, I hope,” she finished for him; yet more evidence, if he required it, of the hot-headedness walking hand-in-hand with youth.
“Youth” itself that went on to add:
“I am very angry with you, Rajiv. You mentioned nothing of this when you advised me to walk in on him.”
Rajiv waited for the storm to break.
“Had you done so,” she railed at him, “I might have had second thoughts before I agreed to such a thing. You are the one, after all, who prattles on and on about the value of ‘Patience’”
“Anya, Anya,” he tut-tutted, “have you so little faith in your uncle Rajiv?”
“Faith is hard earned,” she reminded him.
Adding, as if by way of a threat:
“But very easily withdrawn.”
He laughed good-naturedly at her attempt to intimidate him, knowing -as he did- that this latest “Mini-crisis” would soon be resolved.
“Then I shall restore what you appear to have momentarily lost,” he told her, voice assured and even.
In Cornwall, she waited; biting into a lip with growing irritation.
“Within the next hour or so,” he began finally, “the telephone connecting you to the house will ring and he will ask you to go over.”
“Yes?” she asked. “So?”
“You will,” he went on, “find your “Master” waiting for you.”
“Obviously… Get on with it.”
Rajiv chuckled, genuinely amused by her reaction, prior to becoming serious:
“Before he has a chance to say anything, this is what I want you to tell him…”
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