“It’s so hot in here,” she said, tugging at her T-shirt.

He gulped.

“Do you mind if I take this off?” she asked with an innocent expression, coyly tilting her head to one side.

“No,” he squeaked.

She grasped the ends of her T-shirt and pulled it up an inch, ever so slowly.

“You would like that, wouldn’t you?” she said huskily, eyes smiling seductively at him.

“Yes… I mean… no…er,” he stammered.

“Come over here, you naughty boy!” she grabbed his face and pressed her full lips onto his, pushing him back onto the bed.

“Ahhh….that feels good,” he moaned, his senses blurring at this onslaught of pleasure.

She broke off mid-kiss and ran her wet tongue over his lips.

“Wow,” he mumbled dizzily. “That feels good…”

She then ran her tongue over his nose.

“Er..that feels… weird,” he said, but she didn’t stop.

“Wait a minute,” he said. She was now furiously licking his face.

“WAIT!”

The world around him abruptly dissolved. The ornate ceiling gave way to one with a cheap whitewash, the posh 5-star hotel suite shrunk to his 10 by 10 dingy hostel room, and the hot goddess over him transformed into the dorm stray Tommy.

Dheeman leapt from his bed in panic.

“WHAT THE F**K!!!!” he screamed.

Tommy barked excitedly in reply, wagging his tail furiously.

Dheeman looked at the frolicking dog in disbelief. He sighed.

He looked around his room, at the pale walls with cheap paint peeling off at several spots in rectangles, a painful reminder of the times when his proud collection of erotic wallpapers of Pamela Anderson, Megan Fox, Sunny Leone and several other stars still adorned his walls.

He sighed again.

“Goddamn porn ban,” he muttered.

He rubbed his groggy eyes, opened his door, bent to pick up the day’s copy of the newspaper, and looked up to find his neighbor Achal standing at his doorstep, yawning and rubbing his belly, a most unappetizing sight early in the day.

“Slept well?” he asked cheerfully.

Dheeman looked at him sullenly.

“Same problem again, eh?” he laughed.

“Screw you,” replied Dheeman.

“Are you coming to the guest lecture by Laxman Patil?”

“Who?”

“Arey, that MLA. Should be fun.I am managing the event, so I should be able to get you front-row seats. Come along na!”

“I have better things to do.”

“Like what?” he asked, with a sly smile.

Dheeman slammed the door at his annoying neighbour.

“Use your imagination,” Achal guffawed from behind the door.

“A**hole,” Dheeman muttered.

He sat cross legged on his bed, and unfolded the newspaper. He felt the paper between his thumb and forefinger, and shook his head. The paper quality sucked. Poor Times of India, the ban had hit them the hardest. Circulation had plummeted by 50% within a month, and it was still going South. Readers simply did not want to risk committing the non-bailable offence. Bloody risk-averse Indians. Well, he wasn’t about to abandon them though. He had immense confidence in his favourite daily, and he knew they’d deliver sooner or later.

‘Poonam Pandey declares bankruptcy‘, blared a headline.

I knew it, he thought. He quickly folded and unfolded the paper to center the news item on the sheet and scanned the article with a practised eye for a picture of the actress. Instead a high quality picture of an empty wallet stared back at him.

“What the..,” he blurted, open-mouthed.

He quickly leafed through the paper for other promising headlines. ‘Sherlyn Chopra poses for Playboy again’ had a close-up pic of Hugh Hefner. ‘Bipasha Basu says she’s still not over John Abraham’ had a pic of a broken heart. ‘IPL 7, glitzier than ever!’ had a full length pic of Rajeev Shukla in all his bellied glory.

He flung the paper in disgust. “Might as well subscribe to The Hindu,” he grumbled.

After muttering to himself restlessly, he put on a T-shirt, locked his dorm room, and took a walk to the Chor Bazaar just outside his campus.

“Imagination, huh? Nothing like a good old cheesy novel to encourage some,” he thought, as he scanned the reams of second hand books carelessly strewn all over the shop.

“Ah,” he said, as his eyes zeroed in on a title. “How much is that?” he asked the shopkeeper, pointing at it. The shopkeeper followed his finger, and reached out to pick ‘One night in a call center’ from the shelf.

“750 bucks,” he replied.

Dheeman’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. “WHAT???? Are you fricking kidding me?”

The shopkeeper shrugged. “Take it or leave it. This is in high demand these days,” he said, putting the book back into the shelf.

“I’ll take that,” said someone behind Dheeman.

“In fact, I’ll take the entire Chetan Bhagat collection,” he said and shoved five 1000 rupee notes at the shopkeeper.

“See what I mean?” smiled the shopkeeper at Dheeman, and handed out a bunch of books to the guy behind Dheeman.

“You can keep this,” the buyer said, pushing back ‘What young India wants’ at the shopkeeper, before disappearing just as quickly as he’d appeared.

The shopkeeper stared at the book for a second, and turned to Dheeman. “I could give you this for a 50 though. Want it?”

Dheeman threw him a searing glare, and turned to plod back to his dorm.

Back in his room, Dheeman switched his computer on, and clicked on Google Chrome. The website defaulted to dailymotion dot com. He clicked on a thumbnail and the browser went blank, with the following message at the top “Forbidden! You don’t have permission to access this page. Contact your administrator for further details.”

Benumbed, Dheeman closed the browser, and clicked through the folders on his hard disk in slow motion. A folder ‘Documentary’ in C:\Windows\System32\Assignments\ aroused his interest for a second until he clicked on it to find that it actually contained a documentary. He dropped his head on the keyboard and lay there motionless.

There was a knock on his door. “Yo Dheeman,” said a familiar voice.

Dheeman groaned.

“What now?” he spat, creaking open the door a foot, to find Achal peering at him.

“You are missing the lecture. It is awesome!” said Achal.

“I don’t give a shit.”

“Just thought I’d let you know in case you wanted to come. There’s still half an hour to go.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” said Dheeman, preparimg to shut the door.

“Okay, okay, wait. That’s not the real reason I came,” said Achal.

“Huh?”

“I brought you something… stole it rather. We have to return it within half an hour before he realizes it is missing.”

“What is it?”

“The MLA’s smartphone,” he whispered.

Dheeman looked blankly at Achal for a second, before realization struck him. He squealed in delight, threw the door open and leapt to hug his friend.

(Idea and storyline by Ashwin Kumar)