The First Massage

The first time I went for a massage, I was a nervous wreck, waiting for my turn. I was sitting on the porch of an old Mysore home-turned-spa, tapping my feet, wondering whether I should just abandon the attempt and save myself from the ordeal. It’s not that I didn’t want to have a massage. But the idea of a stranger’s hands all over me was why I hadn’t had one. How could touch like that be platonic? In my head there couldn’t be any reason to be practically naked in front of another person in a secluded space other than intimacy. And then I thought about whether I preferred the stranger to be a man or a woman. First I thought man, then woman, then man again. Nope, definitely not a man. The more I thought about it the more I was sure that what I really wanted was to flee.

But I was with friends who liked getting massages. I didn’t want to be the prude of the group so I steadied my nerves. The receptionist asked us what type of massage we wanted. The booklet we were given was longer than the menu cards of restaurants that serve South Indian, North Indian, Chinese and Chats. I didn’t think there could be so many massages but my friends knew exactly what they wanted. They paid for a full-body-deep-tissue and I thought no way José. I didn’t understand the difference between Swedish, Thai, Hot-stone and a bunch of other Japanese and Chinese ones. What I did know was that it wouldn’t be full-body so I went with what appeared to be an option furthest away from my nether regions. Deep-tissue, shoulder and legs only.

Soon it was my turn and I found that my massage therapist would be a woman. I was trying to process how I felt about that and I detected a whiff of relief but it was still overpowered by the desire to bolt. I was ushered into a room that had a single bed with some items on it. She told me to take off my clothes and went out. I took off my t-shirt and figured that that would be enough because I was wearing shorts and I had said only shoulder and legs. There was a translucent item in a packet that I didn’t know what to do with so she when she came back, I held it above my head and asked her if that’s where I was meant to wear it.

She raised her eyebrows and said, ‘No sir, that is panties’.

‘Oh ok’, I mumbled, reminding myself that I would never have to see her again.

I suppose it was a testament to her professionalism that she didn’t break character but even so, every flaw in my body became magnified. I had to wear a baggy translucent diaper as a woman who thought I was a moron massaged me. She left the room for a second time and I changed into the damn thing. Before she came back, I was on my stomach, my face buried in my arms and into the canvas.

For the first five minutes, I held onto shame and embarrassment. And then, I’m not sure how, but it dissipated. Maybe because I had tried to look at the brighter side. Hey, at least I didn’t actually put the baggy diaper on my head in front of her, right? I had just asked. It had looked like a shower cap. Although come to think of it, shower caps don’t usually have two large holes.

The massage was also not as weird as I thought it would be. It turned out that I could experience bare-body touching outside intimacy. The body knows that massage touching is different. And once I told myself that it was alright to be thought of as a moron, I began to relax.

This lasted until I learned that according to deep-tissue lore, your bum is a part of your legs. Everything that I had just dealt with made a comeback and I was about to register my protest beginning with an ‘umm…’ when she asked me to hold her hands. Distracted by the command, I raised my hands hoping to find hers without being able to see them. She found mine, held them in turn and yanked me up. I rose like a terrified cobra forced to raise its hood and made an involuntary sound that I can best describe as a suppressed hiccup. When she released me after a few seconds, my protest was dead.

Since then I have been to a couple of the seemingly hundreds of massage spas that have mushroomed across Bangalore. I’ve been back to the one in Mysore and had a full-body massage. They even assigned me the same woman. But there is something to be said about lying flat on your stomach in a baggy diaper and thinking, ‘To hell with it’.