Daily Times

MUMBAI – Sunny Leone’s meeting with her first boyfriend is really charming and full of cute love moments. He uses to flatter her with love letters that were folded into little squares and stuck to the locker of her high school in Michigan, USA.

The incident where her father caught her kissing a boy. “That’s the most horrible experience you can have with your dad,” she says as a introduction to discussing an e-book of short stories, Sweet Dreams, which she has written.

One of the biggest indicators of the popularity of Leone came at the end of last year when Google announced that she was the most searched personality of India in 2015.

Leone has penned 12 stories, of which seven are being released at an introductory price of Rs 49.50 till the end of the month. After that the price will double.

The stories are meant for the Indian market, large sections of which are, perhaps, still not entirely comfortable with the idea of reading erotica for erotica’s sake — at least not in public. Leone talks about working hard to make the stories “culturally relatable”. Most of the stories play safe — they feature consenting adults, who are respectful of each other.

Leone says, “Every woman fantasizes about getting in a relationship with a man that she really likes, but it’s also wonderful to have that develop into something more. I love the idea of a man who, even if he is attracted to you, is willing to wait for you. He respects you as a woman and wants to do everything right and is such a gentleman.”

Explicit words that usually pepper such narratives have been elided. “I didn’t want it to get so uncomfortable for readers that they would think ‘I don’t know if I want to continue’,” she says. As for her first love — did the paternal interruption kill it? “No one can tell me what to do. The relationship ended later, only when we moved out and I gradually lost touch with him,” she says. She still has the letters. “They were just so sweet,” she further added.