Early memories can be deceptive and all my recollections of Pakistan bear the hazy patina of uncorroborated nostalgia mingled with fantasy. But I think I recall the fuzzy, slightly prickly sensation of a fat tongue lying passively on top of mine as I pressed my sweaty face against a little boy’s face—our cook’s son, the Bengali boy to whom I was devoted—eyes determinedly screwed up in a mime of filmi passion meant to be vaguely reminiscent of a Bollywood actress. I have a vague memory, detail-less, of touchings and explorations. I’ve retained no images of anything as anatomically distinct as a slender nut-brown shelled-acorn penis or a tiny triangular nub of clitoris between tiny plump cushions of paler flesh. But I think I recall occasional flashes of sensation, of a nice warm feeling between the legs, a bit like needing to pee, and more intense sensations that provoked a feeling somewhere halfway between a tickle and tingle and made us giggle. Those are my earliest evocations of the erotic.
The next clear memory of the sexual I have is of me, probably aged nine, in Scotland now, at sex ed class in primary school, watching as a video was projected onto a screen in front of a squirm of schoolchildren. As I saw the cartoon man in the film place a swollen sausage inside the cartoon woman’s pee hole there was a moment of shock as the realisation flashed through my mind: that was how babies were made. I squealed like a piglet in disgust. I would never do anything like that when I grew up. Who would want to?
