Indian Rapunzel
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

My family are Hindu rather than Sikh but I knew Jasprit as another Indian boy attending our high school a year behind me. But because I took a year off for travel, we started college at the same time.

To some extent I ignored him as I did many others of my own ethnicity. I was a person who wanted to be an American rather than an American of Indian heritage, or whatever they might call me. I ate steak, although it horrified my Hindu parents who considered cattle sacred animals. I played baseball and as I am not so small, I even made a good effort at football, rather than soccer. If anybody asked me where I was from, I would say: “Here. I’m American”.

Jasprit was like others who would approach me as if I was a member of their “club” when I did not really want to be. I would always say something polite but dismissive. I didn’t want to anything other than an American.

I called myself Wade, although that is not my name. It sounds about as American as you can get. Newly arrived Indians can have a problem with W and call me “Vade”. I would correct them curtly. I did not want to mix with those guys. I am not racist or anything - I am just a believer in assimilation.

I also decided to get involved in hunting. Guns and shooting them are more American even that steak and football. I have to say that I turned out to be a shitty shot, but I would take the time to go into the hills on my own and enjoy the wilderness our great country has to offer.

I was only interested in white girls, although I did date a Chinese-American girl once. I would tell myself that I did not find darker women attractive, but that was a lie. My preferred online porn involved Indian women, especially Indian women with long hair.

People like Jasprit seemed like the opposite of me. As a Sikh he wore a turban – what Sikhs call a pagri. He was following a tradition, but it made him stick out as an outsider. Americans don’t wear turbans. He would also have grown a beard as a Sikh but he had only some whiskers on his chin, his cheeks and his upper lip that just made his face look dirty. Anybody else would not have bothered with such a pathetic effort and shaved, but he was simply following the directives of his faith.

To make it worse, Jasprit’s turban was very big, and the reason for that became clear when you saw him without it and with his hair in the less formal bun covering cloth or patka. He simply had way too much hair.

I confess that I have got a thing about long hair – long glossy black hair. Women with long hair that is. But I could not help wondering what Jasprit’s hair looked like, or even what it felt like to the touch. In the world we live in you can get arrested for touching a woman’s hair, but what about a guy? You can pat a guy on the head or even grab his man bun, just for a bit of fun.

I have to say that it got to be a bit of a fixation. I decided that I would invite him around to my place for a drink one evening after classes.

“People think that because I wear a turban I cannot drink alcohol,” he said. “I suppose that they think I am Muslim.” I had to smile. He was just so naïve I found it endearing.

“How long is your hair?” I said. “Why don’t you take off you turban and let me see.”

He did not do it straight away. I started him on some bourbon with a just a splash of coke. I needed to get him relaxed.

“You are just so American,” he said. It was like he felt that he could not be that. With a turban he could not be. It is like a big neon light on your head saying: “I am not one of you”. How could he not see that?

He was a little drunk when he finally took his turban off and let his hair down. He said that he should comb it, but he had not brought a comb.

“I actually have a hairbrush which I bought for my girlfriend,” I said. That was a lie. I had bought it for just this moment, so I could watch him brush that hair

I honestly thought that I was going to faint. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I wanted to touch it, to stroke it, but how was I going to do that?

I had bought something to put in his drink. I regretted it the moment I got it home. I told myself that I was not going to use it on poor innocent Jasprit. But as I looked at his back with that hair hanging down, I knew what I had to do.

“It’s pretty long,” I said. “I will fix us another drink. Bottoms up!”

It is a shitty thing to do, but the moment that he lost consciousness I just lost all control. I stroked that hair; I buried my face in that hair; before I knew it, my cock was out and I was jacking off, winding the hair around it, with skin of my cock straining and the purple veins filled to bursting.

I would have cum all over that hair if I had not had a moment of sanity to point the tip into my hand. Even then the eruption drilled into my palm with force.

And when I saw his sleeping face it seemed suddenly way worse. It seemed gay. That stupid beard was the only thing that marked him as male, and I had masturbated over a man. I felt disgusted with myself. There seemed no way to fix this.

What I did to try was something cruel. I went across the hall to the room of a girl I knew, and I took out a tube of her depilatory cream and I smeared it all over Jasprit’s “beard”. I knew how much he wanted a beard to go with his turban, but it was just not working for him, and now those whiskers seem to have no purpose other than to mark me as a faggot. That was something that I could not stomach.

Once that was done, shaving the rest of his body seemed easy. I would call it a joke. Every guy who passes out from drinking too much has to expect a few practical jokes. I suppose that my only concern was that he might never want to see me again. That would mean that I could never play with that beautiful hair. So that night I made sure that I did. I jacked off again, and then again, over that hair, until my balls were empty.

I fell asleep. I dreamed that I was following a girl running down a beach. Her long black hair was shimmering in the sun behind her. She was wearing an orange bikini. I caught up with her and spun her around. She had big dark eyes and Jasprit’s face, and a full bushy beard! I woke up in a cold sweat.

He was gone. It was morning and Jasprit had woken and left without waking me. There had been no chance for me to explain the inexplicable, and that was a relief. I just decided that I would forget that it ever happened – all of it.

I saw Jasprit at class. He had a turban on but without that fuzz on his face he hardly looked male at all. He was looking down the whole time as if ashamed. I felt terrible.

I decided that I needed to go to him and talk.

“Hey. I am sorry about last night, Jaz, things got out of hand.” I was careful not to say who was responsible. I knew, but it seemed in that moment that he might not think it was me.

“People have told me that I look better without the beard,” he said. “Maybe I should lose the hair and turban as well?”

I felt like crying out: “The turban yes, but not the hair! No, no, not the hair!”

Instead I said: “Don’t do anything rash. Maybe we can find a way for you to try being non-Indian for a while without making such a sacrifice, if that is what you want?”

“I have always been true to my faith, but I would like to be like you for a few days, and not be seen as a foreigner in my own country.”

“Tomorrow is Saturday,” I reminded him. “Why don’t you come around to my place in the morning and we will look to see how you can spend the weekend with me as two dark Americans.”

“That would be nice he said. As he walked away, I looked at him differently. I knew what was hidden in that turban of his: Possibly the most beautiful thing in the world – that wonderful dark hair. It seemed like a crime that it should not be on display hanging down his back, like it was in my apartment.

I felt like the prince in that fairytale, but it was a turban rather than a tower. “Jasprit, Jasprit, let down your hair.” I and I will climb up it, its glossy silky strands between my fingers as I ascend, slipping occasionally to lose my face in the shiny curtain, all the way to the top.

He wore a turban around to my place but I told him to take it off. He seemed happy. He was looking forward to a weekend where he could be somebody else.

“The hair is going to be a problem,” he said. I have tried putting it up in a large cap, but it will just not fit.

“It’s too full and thick,” I agreed. “But it would be wrong to cut it, so we are just going to have to make adjustments to the rest of you. Take off your shirt. I have something for you to wear.

When he saw it he just laughed out loud.

“You’re kidding,” he exclaimed. “That is a women’s skivvy top and a dress!” Which was exactly what it was.

“In this you will be invisible,” I said

“You’re crazy,” he said. “People will notice. People will stare.”

I said: “I can’t believe it is you talking. People do notice. People do stare, and they sneer too. Looking at you in that turban, and what you thought was a beard. You are prepared to walk the streets looking like an oddity to almost everybody, and I am telling you that in this you will look like an oddity to almost nobody.”

I was firm with him and I think he was partly puzzled and partly afraid. He took the skivvy and put it on. When he pulled the hair out from the neck of the skivvy I almost came in my pants.

“I am only doing this to see if you are right,” he said, pulling the dress up. “I don’t look enough like a girl to pull this off.”

“That is why our first stop is going to be the beauty shop for a makeover.”

Alright, I confess I had made some plans for that too, in the hope that Jasprit would say yes. I was pleased with myself for picking that he would.

“Your hair is so beautiful, but with a face like yours you really should wear it up,” the beautician said. “Let me arrange something casual but captivating and then we can brush those eyebrow and wok on that face. Are you looking for a darker or a lighter complexion?”

“Lighter,” I said. Sometimes I wish I had that option. My skin is not so dark, but sometimes I wish it was not dark at all.

I told Jasprit that we were going from there have lunch together, but he dared not look up as he sat in the car. He must have known that he looked nothing like a man anymore.

“Why did you make me do this?” He sounded more depressed than angry.

“We are going to have lunch at the Texas BBQ joint,” I said. “You can have chicken if you like, but we are going to be two Americans. And because you look like a girl you will need to have a girl’s name.”

“You mean like Jaseena?”

“Hell no. Not an Indian name. An American girl’s name, like Marilou or Bethany.”

“Those are awful names!” It was a pout. She looked great.

“So stick with Jasmin. I call you Jaz anyway.”

“Jasmin is an Indian name,” she said. And she was right. But nobody really knows that.

They showed us to a table and the waiter kept calling her “Ma’am”. But there was nothing that could be done. She had to force a smile. It evaporated when she caught me smiling at her.

In the style of Texas BBQ there were long tables and we sat beside one another. It allowed me to admire her hair better, piled up and with the nape of her neck showing and two loose tendrils on either side of her face. But another couple sat down opposite us.

“Hi, I’m Luke and this is my wife Amber,” the man across from me said. “This is our first time at this joint. What about you all?”

“I’m Wade,” I said. “I have been here before, but it is Jasmin’s first time here.” She was still looking down, making her false eyelashes look so obvious.

“Have you ever been down to Texas to have the real thing?” he asked. He seemed keen to talk. My companion was not.

“I have been fixing to go down there but can never find the time. What about you?” I asked.

“It all looks very unhealthy,” said his wife Amber. “Don’t you think so …. Jasmin?”

Now she was in a spot. I was about to say that she had a bad throat or something, but before I could a female voice beside me said: “I’m going to have the chicken. Men will never understand the battles we fight to keep a good figure.”

Jasmin’s head was up, and she was talking, … and I mean she. I was amazed. I looked at her in profile with that strong straight nose and that small chin, and the eyelashes and that beautiful hair piled up on her head, and I felt my heart jump.

They say that the heart is the organ of love. That seems so stupid. It is a blood pump. The brain is the centre of all emotion. So why does the heart do that? Why do those feelings come out of the chest when the brain knows that those feelings are homosexual and perverted? Sure, orgasms live in the groin, behind your prick, but this was in my heart.

She talked and our new temporary friends Luke and Amber talked, but the words meant nothing. It was just the music of her voice and the beauty of her painted lips, as she finally patted them delicately with a napkin marking the end of our meal.

“Nice to meet you both,” said Amber. “And may I say that you make a beautiful couple.”

Jaz smiled as if to confirm it. But as soon as we were out the door Jasprit was back and very upset.

“Can you take me home?” he said. “This is a nightmare. It is so humiliating. They thought we were together, like, I was your girlfriend.”

“Where is the humiliation - I told you that nobody would pick you,” I said. “We were just two Americans, having a BBQ lunch. They never asked you where you were from. They assumed you were just American. That is how it feels.”

“I guess it was different,” he said. “But I have had enough.”

“I am not driving you back,” I said. It was not enough for me. I did not want him to change back. “You said that you would spend the day with me and that means the afternoon and evening as well.”

We stopped. Our reflections had appeared in the window of a darkened store. “I hate this dress. You have no taste.” It was her voice again. She was back. “If I am going out again I am not wearing this. And you will have to buy something. You are having me wear a dress, but I am not going to pay for it.”

Honestly, I was so glad to hear her voice I would have bought her anything.

We went for a walk in the park to help digest my large meal – she had only picked at her chicken. I felt that we should be holding hands. We would be if she really was a girl, but she was not one.

She undid her hair. I felt my cock jump in my pants as she shook it out. I fell behind her a little so I could just stare at it. I know this sounds weird, but I have explained my fascination, and now it was real and right in front of me.

I drove her drove her back into the city center and we walked down a shopping street. She looked in a few windows and went into a few stores. It took her a while before she found what she was looking for.

It was black. She said that it made her skin look more pale – less Indian. It was a wrap dress which hugged the artificial figure her underwear had created, without revealing it, and it was short. Very short.

It was almost as if she was saying to me: ‘You want me to dress like a woman, then this is a woman’. Her legs looked great. She looked great. And she knew it. She stood in the store posing in front of the mirror. She parted her hair in the middle. She pouted at the mirror. I was getting so hard I thought my cock might tear its way out of my pants

“Is this what you want?” she said. It was like she was accusing me of turning her into some kind of vamp, which I suppose I was guilty of. But I did not feel guilty. I only felt lustful.

Somewhere in all of this I seemed to have given up wrestling with my conscience and my own sexuality. I desired sexy women with long hair, not men. To me, she was not a man, but to the extent she was I simply did not care. I wanted her and I did not care what was under that dress. I would fuck it, so long as my hands or my face were in that hair.

So we went for a drink and then we had dinner. She spent the whole time hamming it up. She had bought a pair of shoes with a heel, and she made a point of getting up from the table and sashaying (that has to be the right word) to the Ladies Room. I suppose it was a way of saying that this was all my doing … which it was.

I had to get up too and go to the rest room too, but just as much out of frustration. I stared at myself in the mirror and I may have even aid out loud: “What the fuck are you doing?”

But when I came back to the table there was a guy talking to my Jaz. I was about to storm over there but I stopped myself. It was like: ‘This is not a real woman but I bet he doesn’t know that … maybe I should tell him’. I walked over slowly. I didn’t even acknowledge the guy. I just pretended he wasn’t there.

I only caught his last words to her: “So maybe I will hear from you?” And then to me: “You’re a lucky guy.”

I did not say it, but I wanted to: ‘Fuck you’.

I said: “Okay, so it’s been fun, but let’s call it a night. I will drive you home.”

“Really? So soon? I thought we might go dancing? Then maybe around to your place? I could brush my hair and you could watch. You could imagine that I was Jasmine.”

I felt like an idiot, which was just what she wanted. So I drove her home in silence. I jacked off in the shower and I went to bed. Was it her in my fantasy? She never looked around. I never wanted her to, in case she was Jaz. Just her hair shimmering like a silk curtain.

If I dreaded see Jaz turn up to class in his stupid turban then I should have been relieved, but he was not there and I was not relieved. He was not there the following day either. I began to wonder if the whole that had driven him into a tail spin, or if somebody had thought that he was a woman, found out he was not, and had done something terrible.

It was weeks before I saw him again, in a shampoo advertisement.

It was him alright. I even recognized the Sikh bangle on his wrist – yet another stupid custom that you can get away with if you have a long black beard, but not while wearing a stuffed bra and drop earrings.

Apparently the guy in the restaurant was some director of commercials. He had told her that her hair was the most beautiful he had ever seen and that he would have given her a job even before he saw her face.

She does not look anything like that now. She has cut her hair a little and it is colored and worn with curls these days. And there is no stuffing in the bra, which I guess means that Jasprit is long gone.

She is completing her studies off campus while she works as a model and an actress on commercials. She looks so hot. Her hair looks great too, but somehow not quite as good as I saw it that first time, tumbling out that turban and then brushed to a blinding sheen right in front of my eyes.

I have been out with girls since, some with hair as long as Jaz’s hair, but somehow it is just not the same. It seems to me it is like the fascination with virgins. In sex I don’t really understand a woman with experience should be thought less of, but hair like hers viewed by a man like me for the first time – that is special.

I don’t think I have ever had an orgasm like that since.

The End

Maryanne Peters 2021

Author's Note: I really should have asked Rose top help me format these images to make them look a bit better. They are all of the same Bollywood actress but I have forgotten her name.