Soumya recalls an office event and tells us about what sex on the beach meant. Find out. Strewn with wit and humour, an exclusive for Different Truths.

Those days I was heading the Delhi branch for our company and my wife was heading to Mumbai.

A marketing conference was to be held in Mumbai, always a popular venue, and my wife was to host it, Goa being in her territory.

But our boss suggested that I should take care of the food, beverages and entertainment.

That meant going to the site a few days earlier and staying on after to clear bills, thus getting to spend a week at a five-star resort, in Goa, with my wife at company expense, causing much heartburn among our colleagues.

Anyway, I made a deal with the hotel that for a fixed reasonable price there will be unlimited food and drinks, convincing them that a large proportion of vegetarians and teetotalers will keep the bill down, and most of the heavy drinkers cannot discern between good whisky and the cheaper average ones. This saved the major headache of keeping tabs.

The party was to be on the poolside, in the open, right on the beach.

Also, a portion of the hall where the live band played was to be cordoned off exclusively for us, so at no extra cost music and DJ was arranged.

As a final icing I urged them to have the cocktail sex on the beach on the menu.

The barman protested that our budget cannot cover the fancy cocktail. I clarified that as no one would know what it tasted like, as long as it was colourful, alcoholic, and served with a tiny umbrella and a straw, and called sex on the beach, everyone would be satisfied.

It worked like magic. From rare social drinkers of wine or beer to hard core whisky drinkers, even some teetotalers all went for this cocktail.

Even the ladies, who rarely drank in public, went for this when I sent across a tray to their table, probably mistaking it for a mocktail.

A riotous time was had by all, and several normally serious senior executives hit the dance floor.

I could see that some of the ladies were keen to shake a leg but were too timid to take the plunge. So, I committed another sacrilege, by inviting our lady director for a dance.

Surprised and pleased, she sportingly accepted, and was soon followed by all the other ladies including my wife, and I had a gala time dancing with them all by turns, earning undiluted hatred from my less quick thinking or daring male colleagues.

The night ended very late, with both the hard-core drinkers and the new initiates in very high spirits, including according to legend our very serious CVO.

I assigned various waiters the job of escorting the more sozzled colleagues to their rooms, and saw my boss off personally, before getting into bed myself for a well-earned rest.

But the night wasn’t over yet. I was called out immediately saying that there’s been an accident.

I ran out with visions of our champion tipplers having drowned in the pool or swept into the sea, but fortunately it was less drastic, our poor teetotaler director out on an after-dinner walk had stepped on someone’s abandoned wine glass and cut his foot.

A doctor arrived and soon he was taken care of, though in some pain. He was extremely sporting about the whole thing, blaming himself and bearing his pain stoically.

After everything was over, I pointed out that the only sober person in the whole team was the only one who met with an accident and suggested to him that the lesson from all this was that, when in Goa, and sex on the beach was available, it is extremely unwise to decline it

The other fallout was that I became the default host whenever a conference was being arranged and more frequently than not it was held in Goa.

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Soumya Mukherjee

Soumya Mukherjee is an alumnus of St Stephens College and Delhi School of Economics. He earns his daily bread by working for a PSU Insurance company, and lectures for peanuts. His other passions, family, friends, films, travel, food, trekking, wildlife, music, theater, and occasionally, writing. He has been published in many national newspapers of repute. He has published his first novel, Memories, a novella, hopefully, the first of his many books. He blogs as well.

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