The yackety-yak continued until we were all tired.
While my friends were as calm as still water in their deep and peaceful slumbers, I was tossing and turning like a man with restless legs syndrome. Who knew that thoughts of a goat could rob a man of his night’s sleep?
Chapter Seven
1 – Becoming Music
Sex with Anjali produces two predominant rhythmic states. One is meditativeness; the other, music. Meditativeness is a bite-sized sampler of death. Sex isn’t dissimilar. With music, the destruction of self happens a little differently. We lose our sense of self and become one with the other. Anjali is my “other.”
Try listening to Femme adieu in a silent spot with your eyes closed. You’ll hear the voice of God speak to you in Serge Lama’s moving prayer.
Beethoven’s Bagatelles – I’ve listened to them all and every time they play, I remember Anjali’s beautiful neck and the countless kisses I’ve pressed to it.
Our post-coital routine involves Anjali resting her head on my chest as we listen to Dire Straits’ Sultans of Swing or Carlos Santana’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
There are many songs and compositions I love, but Anjali, when I enter her, we become music, our bodies harmonizing with each other.
2 – Still Naughty, Twenty Years post Forty
Even if you are about to rip this book in half down the spine and toss it into the gutter, this section, I’m sure, will be your money’s worth.
In the Indian society, geezerhood begins at forty. The Indian man who is thirty-nine going on forty begins to believe he’s at death’s doorstep. He worries himself sick – so sick he gives himself cardiac problems by the time he’s fifty. If he’s not a heart patient, he’s definitely got to be diabetic, and that might cost him an eye, a toe, or even a leg. The loss of a toe would alter a man’s gait entirely. Then, he starts popping pills for blood pressure. The repercussions are so dreadful they’re almost unspeakable. These nasty little pills boil down his penile vigor. This is something I’ve experienced. Men and women lothe to talk about it. (After all, what woman would open up about her husband’s malfunctioning member?) Middle-age health and wellness as a social issue aside, I had my own two reasons for wanting to retrieve my lost youth. The first reason was, of course, Anjali. Sixty had to be in lockstep with thirty. Second, the society wished death of old age and sickness upon me. Cultural fundamentalists were baying for my blood like a pack of rabid dogs. In the face of such a ferocious attack, a man of my age would drop dead from cardiac failure, or he would throw himself off a cliff. Either outcome would spell victory for my enemies.
To steel myself, I had recourse to two things – ancient Indian herbs and God.
The first thing I did was search out kaya kalpa herbs. Kaya – the ageing body – was subjected to therapies that brought about rejuvenation – kalpa.
Thoothuvalai is one of the most potent kalpa herbs. A chutney made of sautéed thoothuvalai leaves, black pepper, a few sambar shallots and garlic is a great restorer of virility. The flowers of the thoothuvalai, when dried in shade, powdered and consumed with milk, can also have the same effect.For Indian remedies to work, you need to follow the routine for a mandala, which is forty-eight days.
Consuming nine leaves of black tulsi – the Indian basil –, three pods of country garlic, and a half-inch slice of ginger before going to bed reduced my cholesterol levels considerably.
For enhanced sexual pleasure, you can try any of the following concoctions depending on the availability of the ingredients. Try them, and you’ll never have to shamefacedly ask the druggist for the blue pill again.
•A tea made with sun-dried hibiscus flowers
•Mahua flowers boiled in milk
•Poppy seeds soaked overnight
•Powdered cumin and wood apple bark sautéed in ghee
•A chutney containing ponnanganni keerai, Indian spinach, agathi keerai, a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of ghee
I’ve been taking these herbs mandala after mandala.
As a rule of thumb, the bitterer the herb, the stronger an aphrodisiac it is.
Chewing betel an hour before intercourse delays your orgasm. You can make a slave of any woman in bed with that kind of an advantage.
3 – Snakes in the Grass
In the Nagore shanty where I grew up, snakes outnumbered the people and ghosts outnumbered the snakes. Every other death there was attributed to ghost attacks or snakebites. The shamans helped with the evil spirits and the siriya nangai plant helped with the snakes.
A siriya nangai plant at the door is a No Entry sign that snakes heed. It’s hardly possible to spy snakes in urban areas these days. Traditional snake-catchers now work as construction laborers. If, perchance, you encounter a snake-catcher, ask him about the primacy of this plant to his now extinct profession. The sight of the siriya nangai plant to a snake is like the sight of the switch to a badly behaved child. Without fuss or hiss, the snake would docilely crawl into the snake-catcher’s wicker basket. In a fight unto death between a snake and a mongoose, the latter, when badly injured and on the verge of defeat, will scurry to the nearest siriya nangai bush, have a good roll and return to emerge victorious.
Of the three thousand odd species of snakes in the world, India is home to about three hundred of which thirty could be found in Nagore alone. The posh chunk of the town in the east and the agraharam in the west were mostly free of snakes. The cremation and the lands skirting it were snake pits. If you found yourself in the crosshairs of the deadly King Cobra, the banded krait, the Russell’s viper or the saw-scaled viper, you’d only have to pray they kill you quickly.
When snakes were sighted in our slums, they were not killed; they were worshipped. When a snake entered my house, my mother would speak to it like it were a naughty child. “Now, be a good boy and crawl back home, will you? Are you hungry? Alright, go now, and I’ll be with you in a little bit with some eggs and milk.” The snake would quietly slink away.
A King Cobra was not called a snake; people called it “the good one.” While there were people who admired these noble reptiles, there were also morons who killed them. Mother would attribute the occasional death in the field to the human folly of treating the snake as an enemy. With snakes too, love begets love. My mother firmly believed that snakes attacked only the evil stock. I remember two incidents in our village that validated her belief.
There was a woman named Adilakshmi who was in the illicit liquor and ganja trade. Her husband was a drunkard and her lover, Purushottam, was the operator of a local chit-fund. The affair was common knowledge, but neither did a finger point at nor a tongue wag against it. When the lovers had a violent fallout over finances, tidings of their scrap reached every nook and cranny of the village. Things came to a head when the two enraged lovers tried to gut each other in full public view. The furious woman sought her alcoholic husband’s help in her quest for revenge. “If you are indeed a man, bring me Purushottam’s head,” she said, throwing the gauntlet of manly honor at him. The husband duly discharged his wife’s order and triumphantly placed Purushottam’s hacked head at her feet. This act of husbandly obedience and “manliness” earned him a lifetime in prison. Adilakshmi helped herself to another moneyman. Shortly, she was found dead, bitten by a snake.
The next incident unfolded in the riverside village of Nalloor where a moneyed youth called Balakrishnan molested Poonkodi, a Dalit girl. A complaint was lodged in the Nagapattinam police station and the village panchayat was convened to adjudicate.
It was a time when upper-caste men were able to terrorize Dalit women openly and unrestrictedly. Their crimes against these women went unpunished as the police force too was packed with members of higher castes. However, the superintendent of police, during the time of this incident, was a respectable North Indian man with no stakes in the caste game. He brokered peace, and, keeping the young
girl’s honor in mind, had Balakrishnan marry her in the police station. The wedding made headlines in the local newspapers. After a week, Balakrishnan took Poonkodi to a farmhouse where a mob of men were waiting to have their turn with her. Poonkodi was held captive there for ten days and gang-raped.
“You complained about me to the police, didn’t you? A hundred of us have fucked you over the past ten days. Take a good look at yourself and go name a hundred names to the police now, you whore!” Balakrishnan said.
Battered, bruised and half-dead, Poonkodi returned to her parents’ home, told all, and thrust her hand into the snake pit. Shortly afterwards, her parents took their own lives. What happened thereafter has become the stuff of legends in Nalloor.
Incredibly, Balakrishnan was found dead of snakebite in the same farmhouse where the gang-rape took place. Rumor had it that he got his desserts while he was on top of a woman. The next day, his father dropped dead. One by one, all the men who had raped Poonkodi started getting bitten by snakes like it was the destiny of every upper-caste man to die of snakebite. Snakes attacked them in every place you could possibly think of – the cinema hall, the bus station, wardrobes and rivers. One fellow was bitten on his backside while taking a dump. The panic-stricken upper-caste folks began to flee the village. It is believed that the snakes avenged Poonkodi by taking down every single man who had raped her. I must have been fifteen years old then.
The story of Balakrishnan, Poonkodi and the avenging snakes is still told in the village like it happened the day before.
4 – Fear of the Enemy
A snake can send an army into a tizzy, but can go into a tizzy itself at the sight of siriya nangai and vellerukku plants. Vellerukku also has health benefits, but it should not be consumed without professional advice. The plant is like a knife which is useful in the hands of a surgeon and destructive in the hands of a killer. The nature of the plant depends on the nature of the soil in which it takes root. If the plant is found in a place where evil roams, the evil affects the plant as well.
I don’t think I need to explain what evil forces are, but if you care for an example, I can damn well give you one. Many Indian politicians are evil forces. Each politician has a death grip on a town or a city, his little fiefdom, where his word is law. Neither collector nor commissioner can function without these puppet-masters. If they ruffle a politician’s feathers, they are given a few blows in the face and a transfer to the middle of nowhere. In the worst possible scenario, he gets killed.
There used to be a Man Friday called Bhagavati Balu in Madurai who was the right hand man of a self-proclaimed leader. He was involved in murders, kangaroo courts and kidnappings. By virtue of his Man Friday status, he had the authorities wrapped around his pinky and was hence immunized against the law.
Once, a government official raped a female employee who was his subordinate. Most women choose to keep their lips sealed when they are sexually assaulted, but this one went to the cops. Meanwhile, the rapist approached Bhagavati Balu – BB – to “take care of” the situation. BB asked one of his second fiddles to make a call to the D2 Police Station. The assistant commissioner there was a North Indian called Srivastava.
“It has come to my knowledge that a woman has come to your station to file a rape case,” he said. “You are not to register that complaint. Do you hear me?”
“How do you expect me to do something like that? It’s a rape case for God’s sake and the victim herself has made the complaint. Besides, who are you to tell me how to do my job?” asked the assistant commissioner.
“If you don’t do as you’re told, I’ll slap you with a transfer to some miserable shithole. Do you know who you’re messing with? You’re just a dog from up north. You dare to defy someone who has pledged his life in this game of local politics? Just do as I say if you know what’s good for you. You know what happened to your predecessor, don’t you? Or do you need a reminder? If you don’t, just do the needful.”
Srivastava remained silent once the call was over. He knew full well what had happened to the assistant commissioner before him. BB had come to the station and slapped him in the presence of his colleagues. Nobody knows what transpired between them after the slap, but the AC and his family had committed suicide by poisoning. The investigation hit a dead end and the case went cold. Several such mysterious deaths had occurred in the town. Srivastava had a young wife and a daughter. After the threatening phone call, he laid low and eventually managed to get transferred back to the north.
BB used to be a vegetable vendor with a pushcart, but his fortunes started to climb once he entered politics. He was an eccentric devotee of Chottanikkara Bhagavati, featuring her name – sometimes more than once – in every sentence of his. He paid the goddess a monthly visit at Chottanikkara. Perhaps it was she who was responsible for his unbelievable rise to power in the political arena.
He was recently arrested on suspicion of terrorist links with a group of Pakistanis, and treason. During his arrest, he tried to win over the police officers.
“Anney, anney, you all know that I’m incapable of such things,” he said, a note of pleading in his voice.
They were amazed to think that this was the man who had marched into the station like he owned it and slapped the erstwhile assistant commissioner.
As they pushed him into the cop car, he bellowed with fiery eyes, “Chottanikkara Bhagavati will strike down those who have falsely accused me!”
I once sighted BB at Chottanikkara. After going to Sabarimala, I decided to visit Chottanikkara on the advice of Rajan Panickar, an acquaintance and conduct a Mahishasura Mardini puja for twenty-one days. The pilgrim need only pay the temple priests who would conduct the puja on his behalf. So BB hands over seven hundred and fifteen rupees to the priest and leaves. Performing this puja destroys one’s foes. I wonder how the goddess chooses who to destroy when the petitioner himself is a shatru – an enemy – to all the human beings he wishes destruction upon and more. I’d like to think that his arrest was her design.
Chapter eight
Trivial Troubles in Lovers’ Paradise
Love is a wondrous thing and an affliction at the same time. It becomes an affliction when the fear of losing it starts taking over your mind. When Anjali is with me, I feel like I am in possession of a priceless treasure. Her absence drives me to sickness and despair.
Morning, at 9, she would send me a bonjour over the phone. It would be 5.30 a.m. at Paris. Speaking of a French greeting, what I love most about Paris is the Seine. If you suffix an “ng” sound to the end of the word Seine (pronounced “sen”), you’ll turn it into sein, the French word for breast. But we digress…
I grew so accustomed to Anjali’s morning message that I became restless the day it didn’t come even after 11. I rattled my brains and worried myself silly for two hours. I wondered, Should I call her? Should I text her? But what if someone else picks up the phone or reads my message? Where the fuck was she and what the fuck was she doing that she couldn’t send me my morning wish? Was she okay? Was she in trouble? Questions buzzed in my brain like a billion bees. My anger reached a fever pitch. I was only ten seconds shy of exploding when her bonjour arrived. It was 12. I slowly cooled down and regained my sanity, but only temporarily.
“Why the delay?” I queried.
It emerged that her cousin Venkat had come visiting and had been toying with her phone.
“He’ll be gone tomorrow,” Anjali assured me.
She’d mentioned this accursed cousin Venkat in the past. Her explanation roused my anger. So, all it took to delay her message was an insignificant relative? Motherfucker.
Anjali’s circumstantially enforced state of silence scrambled my brains albeit it was just for a few hours. I could focus on nothing during those wretched hours. That period of non-correspondence was new and frightful.
Every time I fell in love, I managed to write a novel. I can
not claim with any certainty that it was a mere coincidence, or that a romance-creativity causality was at work. However, the completion of each novel was unerringly succeeded by the beginning of a real-life tragedy. Some fuck-up or the other over the course of writing the novel would put a full stop to my relationship. But this novel, I am pretty sure, will have a happy ending. Moreover, my romances of the yesteryears, when considered in retrospect, seem like amateur stage productions with the most farcical scripts when in comparison with my relationship with Anjali. What Anjali and I had was true love – an absolute union of mind and soul.
Hey there! It’s Kokkarakko. Rremember me? Of course you do. I’m plotting my entry – an invasion of sorts – here. I hope I don’t disturb the furniture too much. But I’ll spice things up, trust me. Udhaya, who knows as much about compartmentalizing his writing as an ass knows about the scriptures, is a trainwreck waiting to happen. I’ve seen him tie himself up in knots when readers ask him about his writing style and his lifestyle at literary fests. Many of his readers find his high-pitched explanations radically convincing. But he can’t hoodwink me. I shall return for comic relief at the same juncture in his next novel when he holds forth on true love and creativity. Let me beat a retreat for now.
I cursed myself for acting like an attention-seeking teenager and working myself into a frenzy over a delayed text message. Dickheadery of the highest order! And this was only a few hours. Imagine what would become of me if the non-communication lasted longer than a day. Some more self-loathing followed. Had I turned into a gutless idiot who overanalyzed and feared the future?
Marginal Man Page 17