The fitting room was private — Aditi had requested that specifically when she booked the appointment. She needed a sari blouse for her sister’s wedding, and her sister had insisted on this particular tailor in Chandni Chowk, a man named Imran whose reputation for precise, flattering cuts had a two-month waiting list and a clientele that included half the socialites in Delhi.
“He will make you look like you were poured into the fabric,” her sister had said. “Trust me.”
Aditi had imagined an older man with glasses and a measuring tape draped around his neck, the kind of uncle-ji figure who would call her “beta” and cluck disapprovingly at her posture. What she got was a man in his mid-thirties with elegant hands, dark curly hair pushed back from a face that was all cheekbones and quiet intensity, and eyes that assessed her body with a professional detachment that was, annoyingly, more arousing than any compliment she had received in recent memory.
His workshop occupied the upper floor of a narrow building, reached by a steep staircase that smelled of old wood and starch. The room itself was a revelation — bolts of fabric lined the walls in cascading color, silks and chiffons and brocades catching the light from tall windows that overlooked the chaos of Chandni Chowk below. A ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, stirring the air, which carried the scent of pressed cotton, tailor’s chalk, and something faintly woody — sandalwood, perhaps, or cedar from the old almirahs where he stored his finest fabrics.
“Stand naturally,” he said, unrolling his tape with a practiced flick of his wrist. “Most women pose when they are being measured. They pull in their stomachs, straighten their spines, hold themselves the way they think they should look. It gives me the wrong numbers. I need your real body, not your imagined one.”
She relaxed her shoulders, feeling oddly vulnerable and oddly safe at the same time, and he began. The measurements were clinical, efficient, utterly professional. Shoulder width. Bust. Under-bust. Waist. The tape moved with the precision of a ritual, his fingers barely touching her through the thin fabric of her kurta. And yet. Every point of near-contact registered on her skin like a small electric shock, a pulse of awareness that radiated outward from wherever his hands almost-touched. She was acutely aware of his proximity — the scent of pressed cotton and that woody undertone growing stronger when he leaned close, the warmth radiating from his hands like heat from a banked fire, the way he murmured numbers under his breath like a private language only he and the fabric understood.
“Arms up slightly,” he said, measuring the curve from her shoulder to her wrist. His fingers grazed her inner arm — that tender, rarely-touched strip of skin between elbow and wrist — and she shivered. The shiver ran through her like a current, visible enough that the fabric of her kurta trembled.
“Cold?” he asked, without looking up. His voice was neutral, careful, but she caught the slight pause in his hands.
“No.” The word came out quieter than she intended.
He looked up then. Their eyes met, and something passed between them — an acknowledgment, quick and honest, that this was not entirely about a blouse. That the air between them had weight and temperature and texture, and they were both aware of it. His eyes were dark amber in the window light, flecked with gold, and they held hers for a beat longer than professionalism permitted.
He cleared his throat and returned to his measurements. Professional. Precise. And increasingly impossible to experience as merely professional. When he measured her back — standing behind her, the tape stretched across her shoulder blades — she could feel his breath on the nape of her neck, warm and steady, and she closed her eyes.
“You can come for the fitting next Thursday,” he said when he was finished, winding the tape around his hand in a practiced coil. “I will have a muslin prototype ready.”
She thought about him every day that week. Not obsessively, but persistently — the way a melody lodges in the mind and surfaces at unexpected moments. While brushing her teeth. While stuck in traffic on the Outer Ring Road. While lying in bed at night, her hand resting on her stomach, remembering the almost-touch of his fingers and the warmth they carried.
The fitting for the muslin prototype came the following Thursday. She returned to the same private room, climbing those narrow stairs with a heartbeat that quickened with each step. The prototype blouse hung on a mannequin — raw white muslin, pinned together with silver pins, waiting for her body to give it shape and meaning.
She changed behind the screen, her fingers clumsy with the buttons of her kurta. The muslin blouse was cool against her skin, smelling of fresh fabric and chalk, and it fit close — close enough to feel like an embrace, loose enough to need his hands to perfect it.
She emerged, and he walked around her slowly, assessing, his eyes moving over her body with an attention that made her feel simultaneously examined and desired. It was a gaze that saw everything — the way the fabric pulled at the dart, the slight gap at the neckline, the way the muslin draped across her breasts — and wanted to correct it, and wanted to touch it, and was trying to keep those two impulses separate.
“The dart here needs to come in,” he said, placing his fingertips on her ribcage just below the curve of her breast. His touch was light, technical, and devastating. “May I pin?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice. Her throat was dry. Her skin was electric.
He stood close — close enough that she could feel his breath on her collarbone, warm and rhythmic, close enough to count his eyelashes if she looked down — and pinched the fabric, adjusting the fit with pins he held between his lips. His knuckles brushed the curve of her breast through the muslin, a contact so light it might have been accidental, and she inhaled sharply. The sound filled the quiet room. He froze.
“I—” he started, taking the pins from his mouth. His voice was rough.
“Do not apologize,” she said quietly. She could hear her own heartbeat, loud in her ears like a tabla. “And do not stop.”
The pins dropped from his fingers, scattering on the wooden floor with tiny metallic sounds like rainfall. His hands, which had been holding the fabric with professional restraint, flattened against her ribcage — deliberately now, not accidentally. She could feel the warmth of his palms through the thin muslin, could feel the slight tremor in his fingers, and the tremor undid her more than confidence would have. She turned to face him, and the look in his eyes was no longer professional. It was hungry and uncertain and asking a question.
She answered by pulling him forward by his collar and kissing him. His mouth tasted of cardamom chai, warm and sweet, and he kissed her back with a careful intensity that gradually deepened, his hands sliding from her ribcage to her waist, pulling her closer until the muslin blouse was pressed between their bodies.
The muslin blouse came off much faster than it went on — he unfastened it with the same deft, precise fingers that had pinned it, though now those fingers lingered on each inch of skin they revealed. His workshop, behind the fitting room, had a wide cutting table covered in fabric bolts and a chaise longue upholstered in old burgundy velvet where clients waited. She discovered it was surprisingly comfortable when he laid her across it, his mouth tracing a path down her neck, between her breasts, along the strip of bare skin above her waistband.
His hands — those precise, elegant hands that could cut fabric to a millimeter tolerance — explored her body with the same exactness applied to a very different purpose. He found her contours, her curves, the places where she tensed and the places where she melted, and he adjusted his approach with each response, as if she were the most important commission he had ever received. When he touched her inner thigh, she whispered his name, and he repeated hers back — a call and response as old as desire itself.
The light through the tall windows shifted from afternoon gold to evening amber as they moved together on the velvet chaise, surrounded by silk and cotton and the faint smell of chalk and pressed linen. The sounds of Chandni Chowk drifted up — vendors calling, rickshaw bells, the distant azaan from a nearby mosque — a city continuing its business while they conducted theirs.
She came apart beneath those hands, her fingers gripping the velvet, her back arching, the orgasm moving through her like fabric through a sewing machine — precise, rhythmic, building to a tension that released in a long, shuddering exhale. It felt like a garment that had been custom-made for her body — exact, beautiful, and precisely the right fit.
Afterward, she lay on the chaise while he leaned against the cutting table, both of them slightly disheveled, slightly breathless, slightly disbelieving. The ceiling fan turned lazily above them. The evening light painted everything in warm amber. She could smell him on her skin — sandalwood and chalk and warm cotton — and she did not want to wash it off.
“The blouse,” she said, tracing a pattern on the velvet with her fingertip. “Will it still be ready by Saturday?”
He laughed — a rich, surprised sound that crinkled the corners of his eyes, a sound she decided she wanted to hear again, frequently, and for a long time. “I might need another fitting.”
“I was hoping you would say that.”
She dressed slowly, watching him watch her, and the watching felt almost as intimate as the touching. At the door, she paused. “Same time Thursday?”
He picked up a pin from the floor and held it up, catching the last of the light. “I will clear my schedule.”
You Might Also Enjoy
- The Flat Tire: Stranded on the Highway of Desire
- The Midnight Call
- The Wedding Reception: A Toast That Led to Trouble
- The Business Trip: What Happens in the Conference Hotel