Rohan was nineteen and stupid in the way only small-town boys are stupid — the good-looking kind of stupid, the kind that walks into a room with his chin up because everybody back in Gorakhpur had been telling him since he was fourteen that he had a face for the camera.
He had a face like a girl's, if you squinted. Soft jaw. No beard worth the name. Skin so smooth the barber in his lane used to joke about it. Long lashes. Wide, wet, trusting eyes. And a body like a whip — five-foot-seven, forty-eight kilos, all ribs and narrow hips and long thin legs he didn't know what to do with. His mother had stitched his one good shirt. His father had pawned a gold chain to buy him a second-class ticket to Mumbai.
He had three hundred rupees, a photograph of himself in a yellow shirt, and a phone number a cousin of a cousin had given him. *Bunty Kapoor. Assistant. Big director's office. Andheri West.*
The office was on the third floor of a building with a broken lift and a laminated poster of a 2011 film. Bunty Kapoor was forty-two, fat around the neck, wearing a black polo two sizes small and a watch that cost more than Rohan's family's house.
"Oi, come, come, come." He didn't look up from his phone for the first ten seconds. Then he did, and something in his face changed — a small click, like a lock opening. "Ah. Yeah. Hmm."
He made Rohan stand in the middle of the room. Turn. Walk to the door and come back. Lift his shirt. Turn again.
"You're very smooth," Bunty said softly. *Very* smooth. He said it like he was talking about a piece of fruit he was thinking of buying. "Smooth works in Bollywood. But — " he leaned back, " — smooth alone isn't enough. Are you *committed*?"
"Sir, I'll do anything."
"Anything?"
"Anything, sir."
Bunty smiled. "Then take your clothes off."
Rohan had heard about this. Every boy from his town had heard about this. He had rehearsed being cool about it on the train. He still fumbled his shirt buttons, got his foot stuck in his jeans, and stood there in his underwear with his ears burning while Bunty looked at him the way a mechanic looks at an engine.
"Underwear too."
The underwear came off. Bunty got up, walked around him once, and laid one fat hand flat on Rohan's stomach. Warm, damp palm. Rohan's whole body broke out in goosebumps.
"So smooth," Bunty murmured, almost to himself. The hand slid down. "Look, this is the most important thing in casting. This — " his fingers closed around Rohan's soft cock and gave it one slow stroke — "this is your audition. Understand?"
"Yes, sir."
Bunty worked him hard with the bored efficiency of a man shelling peas. Rohan's knees went soft. He was fully up in thirty seconds, standing there blushing, and Bunty looked down at it and made a face like he'd tasted something sour.
"It's small."
Rohan's face fell. "Sir—"
"It's small, but it'll do. Small gets the job done if the boy is *cooperative*." He let go, wiped his hand on his polo, and sat back down. "Shooting starts in a week. Two scenes. Hero's friend. You'll be ready?"
"Sir, absolutely ready!"
"Then do one thing. Stay here tonight. There's a guest room. Workshop starts tomorrow."
The guest room was a mattress on the floor of the office's back room, a ceiling fan that clicked, and a bathroom with no bucket. Rohan lay there that night grinning at the ceiling, texting his mother that he'd got the work, that it was happening, that she should tell everybody in the lane.
At eleven-thirty the door opened.
—
Bunty came in with a glass of whiskey and no shirt, and the door clicked shut behind him. He didn't ask. He set the glass on the floor, sat down on the edge of the mattress, and pulled Rohan's jeans off his legs in two yanks.
"Sir—"
"Shut up."
He rolled Rohan onto his stomach. Spat on two fingers. Rohan felt them go in and his whole spine arched like a bowstring and he made a sound he had never made in his life.
"Ah — ah, sir, *sir* — "
"Shh. Relax. You're tight. First time it hurts, then it feels good. Happens to everyone."
It did hurt. It hurt like a burn and Rohan bit the bedsheet and his eyes went wet and Bunty just kept at it, working him open with a slow, patient, businesslike rhythm, muttering under his breath — *yeah, yeah, good, look, look how good.* And then something shifted, some angle changed, and the burn turned into a hot rolling shock that made Rohan's cock jump and dribble onto the mattress.
"There. See? See how good?" Bunty laughed, breathing hard now. "This is Bollywood, kid. *This* is it."
He got on top and pushed in properly and Rohan screamed into the bedsheet. Bunty fucked him in short, heavy, grunting strokes, his belly slapping Rohan's back, one hand fisted in Rohan's hair, pulling his head up off the mattress. The fan clicked. Somebody's TV played through the wall. Rohan came without touching himself, a mess spurting under him, and Bunty kept going another four minutes and then shoved in deep and emptied himself with a long shuddering groan, holding Rohan's hips so tight he left bruises shaped like fingers.
Then he rolled off, lit a cigarette, and said the sentence that would define the rest of Rohan's life:
"You're wasted on girls. Become a shemale. Take hormones. Goods like you sell in this market."
Rohan lay in the wet patch, ass throbbing, and said, "Sir, when's the shooting?"
Bunty blew smoke at the ceiling. "Shooting? We'll see."
—
The shooting never came. What came instead was a doctor in Oshiwara with a beard and a dirty clinic and a drawer full of ampoules, and a monthly bill Bunty paid with the air of a man doing you an enormous favour.
Estrogen. And a little something else in a separate syringe that kept Rohan's dick thick and heavy-hanging even as everything else changed.
The first thing was the skin — it went from smooth to *luminous*, almost translucent, like the inside of a wrist. Then the ache in his chest. Then the small hard knots under his nipples that made him gasp when the bedsheet brushed them, and then the knots became swelling, and then the swelling became tits — proper ones, round and firm and sore, and every single man who came to Bunty's office that month got a grope of them "to check the progress."
His hips spread. His thighs touched. The fat redistributed itself in ways that made him stare at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror for an hour, half-horrified, half-hard.
At seven months he had tits like a girl and legs like a dancer and a soft little belly and the same face, only now it was *stunning* — the jaw a little softer, the lips plumper, the eyes huge.
And he still had a cock. Bigger than before, actually, hanging fat and pink between his thighs, always half-full, always leaking.
He started wearing kurtis. Then a nose pin. Then kajal, because Bunty said so. Then the name.
"Nothing's going to happen with Rohan," Bunty said one night, in bed, hand on Rohan's chest. "Rohan sounds like a boy. You're **Rani** now. Got it?"
"Rani," Rohan repeated, and something in his chest went tight and warm and *right*, and he cried a little, and Bunty pretended not to notice.
By the tenth month Rohan-the-boy was gone and Rani was working Lokhandwala.
—
She was not an escort in the cheap sense. Bunty had standards, or at least a business model. Rani went to launches, to private parties in Versova, to the top-floor flats of men who owned car showrooms and men who flew in from Dubai every six weeks. She wore saris with no blouse under the pallu at parties. She had a laugh she'd taught herself, low and dirty, and a walk that stopped traffic.
And she was *good* at it. That was the thing nobody had told her. She was good at reading a man's breathing, at knowing within ninety seconds whether he wanted to be sucked off slow and worshipped or bent over and hammered like a rented animal. She was good at the little hum she made when she took a cock all the way down, the way it made men grab her hair. She was good at the filth — the low dirty talk, the *"harder, you bastard, harder, tear it,"* the way she looked up through her lashes and said *"thank you, sir"* when they came.
She was twenty thousand a night and never short of nights.
But the money wasn't the reason she kept going. The reason was that she had begun to like watching it happen to other boys.
Smooth boys. Village boys. Boys who got off a train at Lokmanya Tilak with a hundred rupees and a photograph and a cousin's cousin's number, and who sat in her drawing room with their knees pressed together and their eyes enormous, and who she could see — could *smell* — were about to be ruined exactly the way she had been ruined, and who wanted it, and didn't know yet that they wanted it.
—
Sonu was eighteen and came from a village near Sitapur. Bunty had sent him to her, and took a cut.
He was smooth like a shaved almond. Not a hair on him anywhere, not even the shadow of a moustache. Big frightened eyes. Wrists you could circle with a thumb and a finger. He sat on her sofa and could not stop staring at her tits through her sari.
Rani poured him tea she had no intention of letting him drink.
"What do you do back in the village?"
"Farming, didi."
"Don't call me didi." She sat down beside him, close, her thigh against his. "Call me Rani."
"Rani," he whispered.
"Say it again. Let's hear it."
"Rani."
"There. You say it nicely." Her hand came up and her thumb dragged across his lower lip, and she watched his pupils blow out. "Did Bunty tell you what I do?"
"Yeah… I mean, sort of."
"Sort of? Fine. I'll tell you properly." She leaned in. "I *fuck* for money, Sonu. All night, any way, as much as the man wants. And one day you'll do it too. But first — " she smiled, " — first you have to learn from me."
He nodded so fast his neck cricked.
"Take your clothes off."
He stood and peeled off his shirt and his pants and stood in his vest and underwear with his hands flapping uselessly at his sides, and Rani looked at him for a long, unhurried moment. Smooth chest. Tiny dark nipples. A flat, flat stomach. And under the underwear, a thin nervous tent already darkening at the tip.
"Underwear too. And put your hands behind your back. No touching in front. If a hand comes forward, you get the cane."
The underwear came down and his cock sprang up and slapped his own belly and he made a small pained noise.
"How fast you got hard," Rani said, delighted. "Did it happen in front of Bunty too?"
"Y-yeah — Rani — when sir looked at me, then — "
"Then what?"
"Then… it got hard."
"Without touching?"
"Without touching."
Rani laughed out loud. "You're exactly me. A year ago. Exactly." She stood, untied her sari, let it fall, and stood there in nothing but her blouse and a thin petticoat, and watched Sonu's face do something complicated. "Look. Look at my tits. They're real. Touch them."
He touched them like they were hot.
"Harder. Squeeze. Play with the nipples." He did, and she let her head fall back and moaned, and his cock twitched so hard it visibly jerked. "There. See your dick? See how it's leaking. Look down — it's dripping on the floor, you shameless thing."
She pushed him down onto his knees and put her crotch against his mouth, and he mouthed at her through the petticoat like a starving thing until she dragged it aside and put her actual cunt on his face.
"Tongue. Inside. Deeper. Yes — yes, *yes*, like that, you bastard, just like that." She rode his face standing up, one hand fisted in his hair, and came in under three minutes, thighs clamping, and Sonu came too, all over the floor, without a hand on himself, just from the pressure of her heel against his balls.
Rani looked down at the mess, then down at him, breathing hard, cheeks wet with her.
"Once and you're done?" she said. "Shameless. You're new so it's allowed. Learn to hold it from now on." She yanked him up by the hair. "Now be a dog. On all fours."
He went down on all fours. She got the strap-on from the drawer — matte black, seven inches — and she spat on it and stroked it like it was her own, and Sonu looked back over his shoulder and his eyes went wide as plates.
"Rani — Rani, that — "
"That what? It's big?" She knelt behind him and pressed the head against his hole. "Yeah, it's big. And you're small. That's the whole point." She pushed.
He screamed. His arms buckled. She caught him around the waist and held him up and pushed again, slow, steady, remorseless, until her hips met his ass and he was sobbing with his forehead on the floor.
"Crying doesn't help, Sonu. Everyone cries. Then it gets better." She started moving. "Then it feels *good*. Watch."
She found the angle and he found the noise — that same helpless, wounded, unbelieving noise she had made on a mattress in a back room in Andheri at nineteen years old, and when she heard it she nearly cried herself.
"There," she said, throat tight. "See? Told you."
She fucked him for fifteen minutes, hard, one hand flat between his shoulder blades, then reached around and took his cock and jerked it in time with her thrusts until he came a second time, a thin shuddering spurt that left him hanging limp and glassy-eyed and shaking.
Then she pulled out, unbuckled the strap-on, and lay down beside him on the floor with her tits against his back.
"Two clients from tomorrow," she said into his neck. "One small, one big. You start with the small one. The big one in the third week." She kissed the knob of his spine. "A year and you'll have your own flat. Two years and a car. Three years and you'll forget me."
Sonu turned his face sideways on the floor and looked at her with one wet eye.
"Bollywood?" he croaked.
Rani laughed, and it was the saddest laugh she had.
"What about Bollywood, baby," she said. "Sometimes they even shoot something."
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