Central India

“Extraordinary,” said Fiona, looking at the temple complex. It stood in a jungle clearing, only a short walk from the railway line that crossed the continent from Bombay to Calcutta. This made it a popular spot with trans-subcontinental tourists, who often spent a few hours here admiring the ancient buildings while the train was refueled at the nearby station, and the drivers at their lunch. “How old did you say it was?”

“Nobody knows,” said Miss Clarabelle Strappe, headmistress at St. Hilaria’s Finishing School For Respectable Young Ladies, who happened to be taking an educational trip across India, together with her class of rambunctious eighteen-year-old British schoolgirls. The keen-eyed, raven-haired martinet, with spectacles perched on the bridge of her nose, a permanently condescending expression and her hair wound into a ruthlessly tight bun, scrutinised the carvings that adorned the temple walls with a shocked expression on her face.

“I can’t possibly let the girls view these,” she said, sternly. “It would be most inappropriate.”

“Why, miss?” said Charlotte, a smug young aristocratic blonde.

“The carvings,” said Miss Strappe, stiffly, “are of unclad ladies.”

“But, miss,” pointed out Florence, a curly-haired West Indian girl, “we’re ladies, and we see each other unclad all the time.”

“That’s different,” said Miss Strappe.

“Why?” said Penny, a tomboyish Irish redhead.

“The ladies in these carvings are unclad in public,” said Miss Strappe. “As you can see, there are hundreds of tourists with cameras here, all taking pictures of the ladies.”

“Is that why they’re blushing?” said Charlotte, studying one of the carvings with careful attention. It was exquisitely carved from polished black soapstone, three dimensional, erotically intertwined in a complex knot of bodies with a dozen other ladies, so lifelike it almost seemed to squirm under her gaze. “You can tell from their expressions they’re embarrassed.”

“Probably,” said Miss Strappe. “According to my research, this is, after all, the temple of Lajjita, an extremely ancient and forgotten Hindu goddess of, specifically, naked female embarrassment.”

“Really?”

“There’s a god for everything in India. Do you know the story of Krishna stealing the gopis’ clothes?”

“Of course.”

“The story goes that she was the proudest of the gopis, and the most beautiful. She refused to bow naked before Krishna, claiming that she was far too dignified to humble herself in front of any man, even a god. Krishna only smiled, and told her such nobility of spirit ought to be rewarded.”

“So he made her into a goddess?”

“A permanently embarrassed, naked goddess, never again to be clothed until she grovels before him and apologises for her insolence. And he made her dance naked all around the universe, to the music of his pipes, for a length of time so long that we don’t have a word for it in English. Some say she is dancing still.”

“But who on earth would worship such a goddess?”

“It’s said that, from time to time, Krishna chooses maidens who have struck his fancy to serve as her priestesses. Only the proudest and most beautiful girls will do.”

“How peculiar,” said Fiona, as they strolled across the temple complex, underneath the blue Indian sky. Jungle greenery pressed in from all sides. Vines twined over some of the carvings in an oddly lascivious manner, encircling thighs and breasts as the girls’ stone faces seemed to silently plead for help. “Embarrassment’s a funny thing, isn’t it? I’ve never thought about it all that carefully before.”

“I find it most unpleasant,” said Miss Strappe, coldly. “I am headmistress of a ladies’ boarding school, after all, and the girls will have their pranks.”

“Girls will be girls,” said Fiona, thoughts drifting back to her own boarding-school days, and some of the amusing tricks she’d played on their own stern teachers.

Like the time she’d crept into the French mistress’ room and stolen all her dainty lace culottes! She’d stuffed all the delicate garments under the mattress of Edmund, a shy young man who by bureaucratic accident had found himself the only male student at St. Whimsical’s Academy for the Production of Gallant Females. Miss Beaubois, blaming him for the theft, had confiscated his wardrobe, and left him with nothing to wear to class but the frilly ladies’ knickers for a full calendar month. The knickers quite failed to conceal his erections, a reality of which he was frequently reminded by Fiona and the rest of the girls in Class 4-A.

Of course, Edmund had gotten his own back. He’d sent Fiona, and all the other girls in Class 4-A, fake invitations to take part as models in a fashion show in London, and contrived to strand them in Piccadilly Circus in nothing but exceedingly skimpy and sexy Parisian lingerie, which the blushing girls discovered as they sprinted erratically across the rainy city was full of itching powder.

How dreadfully blush-making it had been to find oneself obliged to peel off one’s scanty, embroidered, near-translucent bra and panties in the middle of Soho, before the theatre crowds, and find oneself left with nothing but one’s soft white hands to hide one’s naked shame. And they’d all been arrested, of course, and marched across London in handcuffs, and had their pictures published in all the papers, and sentenced to a month in a ladies’ reformatory with horrid working-class bunkmates.

“Why,” she said, aloud, “I’ve actually found myself embarrassed and naked in public rather a lot, now that I think about it. And so has every other woman I know. Isn’t that strange?”

“It is in exceedingly poor taste,” said Miss Strappe, as the two girls came to a room at the heart of the temple where a large nude statue of Lajjita herself was on display. The goddess loomed above the crowd of tourists, her impossibly perfect hourglass figure carved in exquisite detail, her nipples and vulva clearly visible, a shocked expression on her face, as if she’d just that moment stepped out of the bath and found herself caught in front of dozens of cameras. “As is that.”

“You don’t like it?” said Fiona, as the schoolgirls all giggled and pointed at the naked goddess. A stone podium jutted from the floor in front of it, illuminated by a shaft of light from an octagonal hole in the ceiling.

“One ought not to find amusement in the misfortune of others.”

“But isn’t that sort of what amusement is, when you think about it?”

“I never think about it,” said Miss Strappe, who, almost without knowing it, had begun walking towards the podium. “Wait, what is this? What’s happening? Stop!” She unlaced her bodice as she spoke, and allowed her severe grey dress to slither to the floor. “No! This is indecent! Turn away at once! Do the honourable thing!”

“Look,” said Charlotte, pointing, as a very red-faced headmistress clambered up onto the podium, closely documented by the portable cameras of the assembled horde of tourists. “Miss Strappe’s got frilly knickers on!”

“No I don’t!” wailed Miss Strappe, who was very obviously wearing skimpy lace-trimmed French lingerie, recently purchased on a trip through Paris. It outlined her delicious curves, letting the shadow of her areola and her pubic bush peek through the transparent fabric, creating an amusing contrast with her spectacles and tightly-wound hair. Her hands fumbled for the clasp of her bra.

“Do you feel pretty in your frilly knickers, Miss Strappe?” asked Florence, politely.

“She must do,” said Penny. “That’s probably why she bought them.”

“But she’s taking them off now. Why would she take off her frilly knickers if they made her feel pretty?”

“Oh, look. She’s putting them back on.”

Miss Strappe, now entirely bereft of clothing and dignity, wearing her frilly French knickers on top of her head, regarded the crowd in mortified horror, roses blazing in her pretty cheeks as her hips began to shimmy, and her arms began to twine in a lascivious temple dance. She would have sworn she didn’t know a single step of any Indian dance. But there she was, dancing away, naked with her panties on her head and all the people in the wide temple hall laughing and taking pictures.

“Miss Strappe,” laughed Charlotte, taking lots of pictures with a borrowed camera as the other schoolgirls pointed and cackled at their headmistress’ shame. “You’ve got no clothes on, Miss Strappe! How unladylike!”