Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee

the good, faithful, passed-over boy comes to the rescue of the virtuous but slightly too proud and headstrong girl, who allows herself to be compromised, but not fatally. Maybe this was her punishment for not taking Nirmal Gupta seriously enough, for underestimating that little letter he'd tried to write before the poison took over. She would say a prayer, "
Ram, Ram,
" and Ram in one of his many forms would rescue her. She turned away and stared briefly at the dead slabs of concrete, but Subodh Mitra's hand on her chin pulled her back, hard.
    "Look at me when I'm talking!" he commanded. "I asked around. I know about you and your so-called professor."
    "You're crazy. Take me home immediately, Mr. Mitra."
    "I did my research. We still have ninety minutes, and we've got some negotiating to do first."
    "Don't even think—"
    She started to speak, but with a flick of his hand, he slapped her. Not hard, but not an idle tap, either. He unhooked the bra and assessed her breasts. She tried again to cover herself, but he pulled her arms down. "Not much there," he said.
    She began to cry, but tears wouldn't come. She knew his hands were on her breasts, pulling hard, then weighing them, like small guavas, and she thought of all the girls she'd envied, the mango-breasted, the melon-breasted, and suddenly the stench of decaying mango penetrated the closed windows, and she could see the husks of fallen mangoes all about the abandoned huts and around the car.
    A voice that seemed to issue from deep in the forest commanded, "Do me!" and when she came back to her senses, there was Mr. Mitra with his trousers unzipped, and a pale, tapered thing standing up like a candle in his hand, a thing she knew of but had never seen, a long, tan, vaguely reptilian creature with a tiny mouth where its head should be. In her panic she felt a brief wave of compassion for him; this couldn't be the real Mr. Mitra, but the result of some unfortunate invasion; he'd been possessed by a demon—but before she could study it further, Mr. Mitra's spare hand brought her head crashing down upon it, and she could hear him command, "Open that big mouth of yours..." He pulled her head up when she gagged, then down by the hair, pumping her head until she was able to do it herself, and his voice died out into a hum and she had to catch her breath, had to find a way to stop the gagging and the roaring in her ears. When his hand loosened from the back of her head, she was able to roll off and to see what she had done, the mess that was spewing over his pants and her sari, and he grabbed a handful of her sari to wipe himself and the steering wheel, even the window, cursing her all the time for leaving him at just the instant, humiliating him in such a way, ruining his suit, his borrowed car, even her sari. "You bitch, you bitch," he said, along with Bangla words she didn't know.
    She stared down at the bra and sari pooled in her lap and tried to cover her breasts. She asked, almost in a whisper, as though to ask was to plant the notion, "Are you going to kill me?" He was still using the ends of her sari to clean himself. She remembered a hugely advertised Hindi movie from years back,
Jism,
and when she'd asked some boys in class what the word meant—she, the top girl in English, and they the simpleton sons of clerks and shopkeepers—they said they'd be happy to demonstrate.
    "Don't be stupid. I'm going to marry you," he said. "Your father almost begged me."
    If there had been any way of cleaning her mouth, she would have done it. If she'd had a can of bug spray, she would have swallowed it. When she conjured the image of what she'd done, all she could do was vomit, and she did so in her lap.
    "Now," he said. "You know what you have to do." Wordlessly, looking through the steamed-up window at the twisted metal spikes, he pulled her panties down.

    BACK AT THE house she had to run from the car, through the parlor, directly to the bathroom.
    She could hear Subodh in the front