Kamala laughed and began to remove the other boot. "And I've always heard that feringhi think everything can be put in books. You probably mean the Kama Sutra. Whoever told you about it has probably never seen it. Of course I have it, and I can tell you it is one of the great frauds of India. It was compiled by a musty scholar named Vatsyayana, who obviously knew nothing about giving pleasure, and simply copied things here and there from much older books. It's amusing, perhaps, but it's also pedantic and ignorant. It's certainly not sensuous, and the reason is he knew nothing about desire. He probably had none. He only knew how to make lists of things, like ways of biting and scratching during love play, but he had no idea why these are exciting."
She stroked the other foot very lightly along the arch with her long red fingernail, and again a bolt of sensation shot through him.
"I'm beginning to see your point."
"I don't think you understand anything yet. Did you know the pleasure, the power, the beauty possible in your music on the very first day you touched a string of this instrument?"
"I knew there was something in music that moved me, but I wasn't sure what it was."
"And now, many years later, you know." She shifted next to him and began unfastening the bells on her ankles. They chimed gently as she carefully laid them aside. Then she opened a small silver box she had brought and placed a red dot in the middle of her forehead, just below the pendant jewel.
"I sense the first stirrings of kama inside me now. The awakening of desire. And because I feel it, I know you must feel it too." She loosened his doublet and pushed him gently against the bolster. The notes of the flute wound through the dark air around them. Kamala listened a moment in silence, then slowly rose off the bolster.
She stood before him, holding his gaze with her eyes, and pulled away the heavy, jeweled belt at the waist of her dance sari. She dropped it at his feet, never averting her eyes. Then she made a half turn and twisted her hip gracefully into a voluptuous bulge. The silk clung even tighter to the statuesque curve of her legs as she crossed her feet with an almost ceremonial deliberation. Wordlessly she slowly drew the silk end of the sari from across her shoulder and let it drop before her, revealing the curve of a perfectly spherical breast. Seen from behind her body was fixed in a perfect double curve, a sensuous "S" whose top was the full line of her half-revealed breast and whose bottom was the rounded edge of her hip.
In those few simple motions she had transmuted her body, as though through some deep cultural memory, into an ancient fertility totem, a prayer for the bounty of the human loins. It was, Hawksworth suddenly realized, a pose identical to that of a statue he'd seen in a mossy temple in Mandu, on the way north from Burhanpur. It was the essence of the female principle, sharing with the earth itself the power of life. That stone goddess had automatically stirred his desire, as it had the desire of man thousands of years before, as it was meant to do. Now it stood before him.
Before he could move, she turned again and swept up the pleats of silk that comprised the front of her sari. She whipped the loose ends of silk about her head once, twice, and magically it seemed to evaporate from her body. All that remained was a small drape of silk about her waist, held in place by a thin band of jade.