My name is Aahan, I am a 42-year-old Indian-English man. I live in Birmingham now, having spent my childhood split between Mumbai, London and Portsmouth. My parents are both Indian but spent sufficient time abroad to be considered expats, largely due to my father’s business interests.
Aahan means, depending on who you ask, ‘dawn’, ‘morning’ or ‘sunrise’. I was named this as I was born at 4.30am in a London hospital right as the sun rose.
My connection to the morning continued, however. I have always been an early riser, which was both a blessing and curse as a child. On school days it was a benefit, as I was cheerful and sunny at the early start.
However, on weekends and during vacations it greatly frustrated my parents and my nanny. My nanny was hired to take care of my siblings and I, and she would slap our legs very hard when we mildly misbehaved. If we were in major trouble, she would refer us to our mother or father for the cane.
Therefore, my early rising was the cause of many slappings and canings – I would cavort around at 5am, waking my siblings and parents, then end up with sore legs. The punishments never stopped me from repeating this behaviour, however.
Obviously, my schools in England had no beatings, but the boarding school I attended in Mumbai had no such qualms. Beatings were expected, not only from the masters but also the older boys. The cane – often more a switch or club retrieved from a tree on the school grounds – was applied liberally to hands, calves, thighs and bottoms. Some masters applied it to the child’s bare bottom, while others maintained some degree of dignity.
When I was 15, I received a formal, bare bottom caning from the headmaster for cheating in an examination – were it not for my previously excellent academic record, I would have been expelled. After that thrashing, my bottom was rigid with welts for a week.
Nevertheless, I somehow always liked getting into trouble. I found the process of being scolded and punished deeply erotic from a young age. Nanny last slapped my legs when I was 13, because she caught me masturbating after my father had caned me for the act. Her stinging palm over the welts already on my thighs was too much for me to bear, and I ejaculated in my pants. After that, she didn’t hit me, instead banishing me to my room when I misbehaved.
My most vivid memory of early childhood involved a vacation within India somewhere when I was around five. It was early morning, and both I and some other neighbourhood children and toddlers were all running around in the cool morning air entirely naked. This wasn’t unheard of – nudity of small children isn’t too unusual, after all – but what came next was.
The father of one little boy came outside, took the boy by the wrist, shouted at him for something, then put him across his knee for a spanking right there on their front porch. The other kids scattered but I stayed and watched, fascinated. I was only familiar with leg slaps and canings, and this punishment seemed far more interesting.
Once he was done with his son, the father sent the boy inside with a further hard slap to the bottom, before turning to me and grabbing my own wrist. He said: “You like watching, do you? I will show you what happens to little peepers.” Then he spanked me too.
My bottom burned under the man’s hard palm and I squirmed over his lap, but I found the experience tremendously exciting. As he smacked and smacked my little bare bottom, the sun came out from behind the clouds and I felt the warmth of it shine against my skin as this experienced father spanked a different kind of warmth into me. It is a very precious memory, even today.
Contributor: Aahan