CHAPTER 8Unlike the dance tamboo, the stocks were open to everyone. That reassured me…I mean, if it wasn’t “adults only” then there couldn’t be any nudity or anything, so my wife couldn’t go too far…right?

The stocks themselves were in a grassy compound with tamboos to the sides and rear and a barrier at the front for the crowd to stand behind. That meant that whoever was in the stocks could be easily seen by the crowd, but only from the front. The significance of that escaped me at first.

The crowd was already five deep along the barrier, but I pushed my way to the front. By the time I got there, the raja had already untied Nandini’s wrists and one of his sipahi had lifted the top part of the stocks. I saw Nandini look at the three semi-circles her neck and wrists would rest in and gulp. I waved to her frantically from the crowd, but she didn’t seem to see me, and there was so much cheering going on that my frantic cries were lost.

Nandini slowly bent forward at the waist and placed her neck into the middle hole, then her wrists into the two smaller ones at the sides. Immediately, the sipahi closed the top half and locked it, trapping her in position. Helpless. The wood base of the stocks went right down to the ground, hiding all of her except her head and hands.

“Ladies!” said the raja. “Gentlemen! You are here today to bear witness to insaf being served! This harlot has conspired to assassinate her king!”

The crowd gasped, delighted.

“No doubt her plan was use her charms to seduce my guards before she killed me in my sleep,” said the raja.

The men in the crowd roared, and there were a few ribald comments about my wife’s “charms”. They were middle managers and IT professionals, men who wouldn’t dream of provoking a lawsuit by making a sexist comment to a woman. After years of frustration, they’d been freed for one day to live in Olde Worlde Delhi, where women were vaishyaes and harlots and had no rights, and they were damn well going to make the most of it. And hey, the woman in the stocks was probably an actress, right? She wouldn’t mind.

“Teach her a lesson, sire!” yelled the men.

“How do you think we should punish her?” the raja asked the crowd.

The men stared at my wife, bent over and helpless, her cleavage readily displayed to them by her position.

“Spank her!” yelled first one, then another and another.

I saw Nandini draw in a huge gasp of shock, even though she’d known what was going to happen. “N—No!” she said, her eyes wide. “No! Please!”

There was a shift in mood when they heard her plead. Every man except me leaned forward over the barrier, mouths hungry, teeth gleaming. “Spank her!” they chanted. “Spank her, spank her!” And though the word they were using was spank, I knew that it wasn’t the word in their minds. I saw wives and girlfriends roll their eyes at the way their men folk were behaving, but they did nothing to stop it. Let him get it out of his system, they must have thought. She’s only some bimbo actress.