4 – Bienvenido a Barcelona!
I was walking alone in the neighborhood of El Raval, Barcelona. Ten years ago the Spaniards called this place Barrio Chino (Chinatown) although there was no Chinese presence there. They called it Chinatown because a significant number of Indians and Pakistanis had made home there.
“How do you know so much about Europe, sitting in your rat’s corner in India?” María asked me.
“You see Maríalita, that is my problem. France, Spain and the Arabian world and everything related to them seems all too familiar to me. I find myself thinking more of Tangiers and Barcelona than the place where I was born and raised. There’s this music composer guy back home in Tamil Nadu. The Tamils worship and adore him much like a God. His music is to them what football is to Latinos. If there’s something you should see, it’s my peeps back home swaying and swooning and getting maudlin to his music at this Chennai pub every Thursday. But it just doesn’t strike a chord with me. Though I write in Tamil and speak in Tamil, and he also writes in Tamil and sings in Tamil, he just doesn’t move me. But when I hear the name Umm Kulthum, my pulse quickens. Listening to “Alf Leila wa Leila” transports my soul to the highest heaven. The woman has enraptured me. Whenever I hear her voice, I feel that Egypt is my motherland too.”
Hers is the kind of music where intoxication and passion rise and rise like froth in a glass of absinthe. “Alf Leila wa Leila” should be every human being’s love song, regardless of which country he chooses to call home.
María began to sing softly, “Ya habeebi… ya… habeebi… ya… habeebi…
“Fi leilate hobi hilwa bi alfi Leila iw Leila iw Leila, alfi Leila iw Leila, alfi Leila iw Leila, alfi Leila iw Leila, alfi Leila iw Leila…
“Bikolli ilomr gowa ilomri Eih, ghair lailah zayyi illeilah zayyi illeilah…”
Dear reader, these words on paper cannot render you intoxicated. Hear them sung from the lips of Umm Kulthum and you will be electrified with passion and gripped by emotion.
Chinatown was also called the “Evil of Barcelona.” The air held the smells of the night before. The narrow streets, less than six feet wide, reminded me of Shahjahanabad in old Delhi. But these roads were lifeless unlike the hustling and bustling ones in Shahjahanabad. Now and then, whores leaning down from the balconies would stretch out their arms and call out, “Indoo, Indoo!” They recognized that I was an Indian at first sight. I walked past Chinatown and made my way towards Las Ramblas and the sheer beauty of it filled me with anger and sadness. I wondered why, just why, in every foreign country, only the localities inhabited by the Indians and the Pakistanis were characterized by filth and foul stenches.
In Europe, the walkways are often as wide as the roads and they are a delight. In Las Ramblas, there was a girl with canvas and easel, a man who stood completely still, moving ever so slightly only when someone gave him money. There was yet another fellow sporting huge feathered wings and long curved horns with an owl perched on his forearm. But it was the greasepainted clown who brought my biggest grouse with Indians to the fore. When I review his antics, it was obvious that he was performing his routine within measure, never overstepping certain boundaries. He poked fun at everyone. He walked beside an African and did a ridiculous imitation of a break dance. The African laughed gamely with everyone else instead of launching into a tirade against racist stereotyping. The clown then began to follow a pretty girl who was clueless of his pursuit. When she discovered him, she burst out laughing. Then he approached a car that had stopped at a signal, swung onto the bonnet with a neat sideways movement and blew flirtatious kisses at the couple inside. He took a hat from a bald old man’s head and put it on his own. When he was nearing the boundary line, he tossed the hat back to its owner. What he did next was hilarious: he walked up to a young man, jumped onto his chest and pretended to smooch him. If this had happened on a street in India, the police would have been cracking skulls. In Las Ramblas, it was all entertainment. If you kept your cool with the clown and clowned around with him for a bit, then both of you won. But if you were a hotheaded spoilsport, you lost. The clown was clinging to the man like a monkey. Do you know what the other man did? He grasped the clown firmly to his chest, pushed him against the wall, and rocked his hips back and forth like he was making out with him! People were doubled over or on their knees laughing. It saddened me that I wasn’t born here and that I couldn’t live here. I made my way to Hassan’s house. He was the person I’d come all the way to Las Ramblas to meet.
Hassan was from Morocco and was Maria’s friend. Before she introduced us, she told me that I’d never meet another specimen like him, like ever. He was a cabaret dancer in a ladies’ club. I’d heard of male prostitutes and gigolos, but a male cabaret dancer was something new to me. His routine featured a striptease where he slowly and sensuously peeled off his clothes one by one. Once he was naked, there would be a catfight to rule which of them would get to give him a blowjob. “I don’t know how much Viagra he takes. He has to satisfy every last female present there, you know,” María said, feeling bad for him.
5 – The Changing and the Unchanging
It had been forty years since my feet had walked the roads of Thanjavur. Forty years is a terribly long time in the life of a human being.
I was twenty; Mekhala was thirteen. She started menstruating shortly after our first kiss. Our physical relationship continued even after that but when I moved to Delhi at the age of twenty-three, I forgot all about her. My life was totally consumed by reading, writing and films.
There was once a wrestler called Urangavilli who was very devoted to his wife, Ponnachi. He held a parasol over her head to shield her from the sun whenever she went out; he never walked beside her as he wished to always behold her face – which meant he walked backwards. He was the laughing stock of the whole town but he couldn’t care less.
One day Ramanuja, the Vaishnavite saint, came to town and witnessed this spectacle. When he was informed of Urangavilli’s steadfast devotion to his wife, he told his disciples, “I have long been seeking a man like him who will be able to serve me well. Have him brought to me.”
When the wrestler was brought before him, Ramanuja asked him, “Why do you do as a slave would do for your wife?”
“If you were in my place,” said the wrestler, “you’d do the same. Her eyes are so beautiful. I’ve never seen a pair of eyes alike to them in beauty.”
“What will you do if I were to show you a more beautiful pair of eyes?” asked Ramanuja.
“I shall devote my life to the owner of those eyes,” said the wrestler.
Ramanuja showed him the eyes of Lord Vishnu and thence Urangavilli became a devoted servant of Ramanuja.
My story is not very different from Urangavilli’s. My mind that had been besotted with Mekhala when I was in Thanjavur was now lustily craving literature and film in which pursuits I spent most of my time, eventually forgetting about Mekhala and Thanjavur.
After some years I met a woman and began living with her. Before this woman, I never once mulled over Mekhala, so why am I swamped with memories of her now? My past life was being resurrected in my memory.
I was amazed to find that not even a signpost had changed in my hometown. It was like I’d returned to the same Thanjavur of my youth. My aunt’s house where I had stayed during my college days was located in an alley near the temple. As you entered the street, there was a house belonging to a family that raised cows. It was a tableau preserved down the passage of years, unmolested by the hands of time – the house, the cows, the man at the table with two pails beside him, selling milk. This man was probably the son of the man who’d been selling when I was a youth there.
Chapter Five
1 – Ohghaaaaaad!
If you do not know where Honduras is, I suggest you dig out your school atlas. Do you know of the things that happen there? Do you know about the lives people lead there? H
ave you ever heard of Roberto Sosa, the poet? Don’t fret if you knew little to nothing. I won’t chide you for it. After all, Honduras isn’t exactly your ex-lover’s bedroom for you to break your head over what goes on there. The army was responsible for treacherous murders during the 80s when they were in power. When Sosa’s poetry was declared treasonous, he fled to Nicaragua, fearing assassination. In Tamil Nadu, the situation is worse: it is not really the government that creates problems but the fascist cultural outfits on the fringe.
I adore women and I love talking to them, especially on the internet. It isn’t unusual for me to spend hours in the virtual company of women; not only is it pleasurable, but also it doesn’t cost a dime. Another perk is that all parties involved can fantasize and masturbate to their hearts’ content. I have seen the semen of other men – and left some of my own – on the floors, keyboards and computer screens of internet cafés whose owners take the trouble to print and paste warnings on the walls to folks who log on to adult websites. It is also not unusual, in our day and age, to find men convincingly posing as women to lure women into their lair. Why would a knave like me miss out on such pleasures?
It might interest you – or disgust you – to know that I have written an entire novel based on my escapades in online chatrooms. In my defense, there was an element of social service involved. I have, on at least six occasions, saved ageing spinsters from oleander seeds, their razor blades and the noose. There was this unemployed Tamil woman living in the U. S. of A. Her parents had returned home to India for a month. She stayed behind as she was job-hunting. Twenty-nine, lonely and depressed, she had no outlet for her sexual desires. She was forced to remain intact as the Tamil community would have doused her in gasoline and dropped a match on her if she dared to engage in premarital sex. It would be scandal to even express her desires. Which woman – which Tamil woman – would openly say that she wanted and needed sex? She was in this suffocating situation when we got entangled with each other in the virtual world. I befriended her and it was our frequent chat sessions that kept her from jumping off the ledge. Our chats lasted for five to six hours, sometimes even fifteen without a break. At the end of each day’s chat, we would masturbate, looking at each other and pouring our hearts out even then.
I never once met her in person. After she married, I lost touch with her. Our conversations would later become the raw material for my erotic novel. What else could I do to memorialize our short-lived romance? I use my own life as raw material for my writing, so why stew over fairness and ethics when a wiser one than I has said that all is fair in love and war? Writing should be exempt from such moral considerations. Moreover, the woman used me too. She had confessed, however, that if not for all our erotic conversations, she would have lost her wits, fallen to pieces, and ended her life. She talked frequently of suicide. After her, I developed an aversion to online sex chats. Chatrooms are full of all that is superficial and untrue – men and women expressing love and lust in flat, shallow, unimaginative language. There’s not really much of a difference between the sex chat of an American man and a Japanese woman, an Eskimo and a pygmy, or a Tamil man and a Tamil woman – it’s just “baby” and “sexy” and “dick” and “pussy” and “hot” and “wet” and lots of oohs and aahs, that’s all.
There was this other woman from Kerala. Our chats soon got wild with topics like incest and orgies cropping up. But despite all my efforts and my pleas, she refused to part with her phone number. It turned out that she was well-acquainted with my work. Turns out that she was a man and also a close friend of mine. Imagine my plight and my embarrassment when I thought of how we’d had virtual sex and spoken of incest. It had all been a masturbatory fantasy and he played along. The bastard had me believing he had boobs and a cunt because he knew how to channel his “inner woman” or whatever his secret was.
Around this time, another woman’s messages kept popping up. I’ve got to say she was persistent. Whenever I booted my laptop, her messages would be at the top. I was impressed. What woman devotes such a ridiculous amount of time to the pursuit of a man she has never met? Either she wanted a human pillow to cry on and blow snot into like the Tamil-American female or she was a con like my male friend had been. Or maybe she had her own motives. She succeeded in getting what she wanted as her relentless pursuit wore me down. I responded to her. At that point in time, I was not in a relationship with Anjali and was living in a state of extreme sexual deprivation. Little did I know that responding to this woman would bring about a tragic denouement.
Once she had me in her thrall, she persuaded me to give her my phone number. I did, and that triggered a barrage of phone calls every five minutes. She begged me to send her an autographed book of mine and sent me her address.
After noticing the startling frequency of the phone calls, Perundevi asked, “Who is this girl?”
“Some deranged maniac.”
“How did she get your number?”
“My number isn’t that difficult to find.”
After a few days, when the phone calls became unbearable, I sent her an angry mail: Who are you? What right do you have to constantly harass me with calls? Do you think you can take such liberties just because you’re a woman? What do you really want from me?
The woman responded by posting full transcripts of all our online conversations, embellished with outrageous smut that I was supposed to have said. As she was playing innocent victim, she’d edited out many of her own dirty statements so that I appeared all the more degenerate. Was she really a woman? I began to suspect the male friend who had duped me. The several thousand comments that flooded in more or less seemed to say: “He is an obscene pervert who gets a kick out of harassing women; he is a psychopath who should be bound and flogged.” Some wished for my death, others threatened to kill me; some wanted me imprisoned, others wanted me exiled. I received at least fifty hate-mails every day. Some of my correspondents, in very colorful language, expressed the desire to mutilate my wife, strip my sister and fuck my mother.
Later there were some people who suggested I should publish my version of events since the girl had seriously disfigured my reputation. How could I? There were two people involved in the affair, but only one person had been exposed for all the world to spit shame on. I didn’t even know the name or the face behind the messages. In this shadow play, if both of us had remained shadows, it would have been a mere puppet show, but instead, one person was real and the other was a shadow. How could a real person confront a shadow?
There is so much a nameless, a faceless and a genderless person could do in the virtual world.
One of my notable shortcomings is my inability to be tactful in worldly matters. When Nalini and I separated, I was homeless because of my stupidity. The two properties and a house that I had bought with the money I had saved were in Nalini’s name. What’s more, I introduced her to Marx, Engels and Bakunin, and then to Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Like an educated fool, I explained to her how the structure of a family was akin to that of a prison and gave her R. D. Laing’s The Politics of Family to read. Not much after that, she announced, “I don’t need you anymore. In fact, I don’t need a man in my life at all. A dildo will suffice.” And she divorced me.
I wasn’t bothered by the divorce. I too was beyond doubt that a dildo could satisfy Nalini more than my dick ever did. What was of immediate concern was the fact that I was homeless. I asked Nalini to give me one of the three properties. “You won’t get two pins from me, you miserable dog! Get out of my sight and out of my house!” she barked. Attempts to speak to her over the phone to resolve the issue only worsened matters. “Behenchod! I’ll see to it that you rot like a corpse in jail if you dare call me again,” she thundered. Slowly, I reconciled myself to the fact that the immovable assets that were once mine were mine no longer.
Now, you may ask how I can be uncertain of a person’s gender when I’ve spoken to them over the phone. Let me tell you
, mischief-makers determined to trap someone will move heaven and earth if need be.
One day, I got a call from Balu’s phone. “Hello Udhaya,” said a very husky female voice that would give any man a boner, “I’m your fan and I’m crazy in love with you.” I was casually walking down a busy street. Her voice was so enticing that I hurried to a quiet spot to hear more of it. She told me her name was Mala, a Tamil girl from Goa. She was twenty-four and had met Bala and Kittappa when they drove up there to have some naughty fun. But how did she get her hands on Balu’s phone? Apparently, the two men had gone down to the beach and she’d chosen to remain in the room, drinking. She’d chanced on my number while fiddling with Balu’s phone. It must have been around ten in the morning.
“Do you drink in the morning?” I asked her.
“If it’s a holiday…”
“How many rounds so far?”
“Four. Smirnoff.”
The conversation jumped from liquor to sex. She was sleeping with both of them.
“If you come and join too… ooh, I’m getting wet just thinking about it! But you know what the problem is? Indians suck at group sex. They pretend they’re too shy to look at a bra strap, let alone more than one naked body minus their own. Foreigners are the real deal, man. Once, three men with huge…”
I do not wish for any reader to double over and puke, so I will refrain from writing the rest of what she told me.
It alarmed me that she considered this apt first-conversation material. She must have read my mind because she said, “You think I’m a wench but I’m actually a software engineer.”
Who was this woman? Was she speaking the truth or was this all bluff and fantasy? And how did she get hold of Balu’s phone so easily?
At the end of the conversation, she gave me her phone number and told me she was looking forward to meeting me in Goa. When Balu returned to Chennai, I asked him about Mala. He confirmed everything she’d told me. He also added, “One Mala is equal to a hundred women.”
Marginal Man Page 13