“Yes, home. Do you think I live in the jungle?”
“No, I mean… Who are you afraid of at home? Your husband?”
“Husband? You think I’m an old crone?”
“Yes – no wait! I mean no.”
“You are just too much!”
“Why?”
“Never mind why. Forget it.”
“Well, okay then.”
“You’re quick to surrender.”
“That’s because everything I say ruffles your feathers. If I tease you, you can’t handle it. If I compliment you, you can’t handle it either.”
“Okay, but do I sound like an old crone to you?”
“No, you sound like a very sweet little teenage girl.”
“I’m not a teenager anymore, not since last month. I’m twenty, okay? I’m doing my masters.”
“Is that so?”
“What, you don’t believe me?”
“No, but if you’re a twenty-year-old student, how come you’re involved with Gopi?”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“Won’t your family be furious?”
“Do you think I’m stupid to tell them when I’m going to Neelankarai with him?”
“Oh, so you go there with him?”
“Yes I do.”
“Long journey, isn’t it?”
“Well, I begin from home at eight in the morning and return in the evening. It’s just like a college day. Now, for the last time: are you going to hand over the phone to Gopi or not?”
“Which part of ‘Gopi is not here’ do you not understand?”
“Oh, to hell with you!”
“Hey, hey, hey! You don’t need to curse me!”
“Alright, have a good life then.”
There phone never rang again.
When Gopalakrishnan got his head back into the game, he realized that he’d reached Karukkurichi instead of Pudukudi. Pudukudi is a place that is perched in between Kutralam and Karukkurichi. “Pudukudi,” meaning “new settlement” was a misnomer as the 250-acre expanse did have historical mileage. Krishna’s estate was situated there, bordered by the Western Ghats and speckled with five-thousand odd infirm coconut trees.
A second car arrived moments later. The man who emerged from the steel and glass, Pichappa, was going to have a fortune fall into his lap.
“We used to swim and play in the lake,” Krishna reminisced and Pichappa listened. “There was water in it then.” His voice was heavy with sadness when he said, “My grandfather bought this land, but it’s been uncared for. In a year, with maintenance, this tract could yield ten lakhs, but in Chennai, I can make the same amount in a mere ten days.”
Pichappa and Krishna surveyed the land before them.
“The entire tract is yours for fifty lakhs,” Krishna said, and a royal realm was sold for chickenfeed. He returned to his friends. “Once upon a time, this place teemed with snakes by the thousands, but now, you won’t find even one.”
“Why?” I asked.
Krishna extended his hand. I looked in the indicated direction and behold! There was a pride of about a hundred peacocks.
The males strutted about with their lofty gait, tails fanned out, while the peahens, like silly little girls seduced by the rich sight, pursued them.
Krishna’s smile was tinged with sarcasm. He had seen this before.
Boys of five usually play with trucks and roll in sand-pits. I was an anomalous child. I was different. When I was five, I began to masturbate regularly. I didn’t know that there was a word for rubbing your genitals. “It was only when I entered college that I realized it was a bad word, that it was not something you speak of in polite society,” I told Anjali.
“It was the same with me,” Anjali said. “Until I went to college, I never had any idea about self-pleasure. I thought it had something to do with experiencing God. Do you know when I finally figured out what masturbation was all about? The boys had nicknamed our institution ‘Brinjal College.’ I didn’t get what brinjals had to do with anything. Then, one of my friends told me that a girl in the college hostel had tried to pleasure herself using a brinjal that got stuck inside her love-tunnel when the stalk broke. She needed to go to a doctor to get the thing out.”
“Every women’s college has its own share of dirty stories, sweetheart,” I told her. “During my freshman year in EVR Periyar College in Trichy, I’d heard that one of the girls masturbated with a test tube that broke inside her vagina and tore it. Everyone with a dick in Trichy came to know this story. But for all you know, the story was probably cooked up by some depraved youth who’d been binge-reading porn.
“There is no dearth of stories, Anjali. After failing my pre-university tests, I wandered aimlessly like a nomad for two whole years, doing re-sits in April and October for the exams I’d flunked. I’d flunked five exams – Tamil, English, Math, Physics and Chemistry. I passed Tamil that October. The next year, I got through English in April and the dreaded trio of Math, Physics and Chemistry in October.
“It was during my wandering years that I got initiated into drinking, whoring and all else. But hold your imagination right there! The prohibition law was in effect in Tamil Nadu then, but once you crossed Vettar and there is Vanjur from where Pondicherry Union started. In Vanjur, toddy, arrack and wine shops operated and flourished without the slightest hitch and in large numbers. There was this chap called Robert from Vanjur. He was a huge volleyball player who made me look like a pygmy, but he was harmless. Robert’s father was a wealthy man and the owner of a wine shop. He had built his son a cottage in Vanjur. It was in this cottage that Siva and I had downed our maiden bottles of beer. Robert brought two bottles – one for himself and the other for Siva and me to share as it was our first time. He promised to buy us another bottle if we liked it. I despised it, so Robert and Siva finished the bottle between themselves. Another time, Robert asked us if we would like to try opium. It was the color of tar. You had to take a cherry-sized amount, press it against the roof of your mouth and wait for it to dissolve, drinking tea all the while. Even a bitter gourd was mild when compared to this! I was introduced to nilavembu kashayam much later in life, but opium was by far the bitterest drug I had ever done. For three whole days, I lay in Robert’s cottage, lost to the world. After that incident, I abandoned my experiments with intoxicants. It was only in Delhi that I got reacquainted with liquor, but I steered clear of opium and LSD. I did smoke ganja for a few days, but that toxic trip did not agree with me. At times, I would feel like I’d lost an arm, and if I tried to walk, I felt like I was walking on air. One day, a fellow smoker told me, ‘It’s nice to eat a little sugar after smoking ganja.’ Some of the sugar fell to the floor when I took a pinch. Each crystal seemed to shine like a polished diamond. Ganja really magnifies and exaggerates your sensory perceptions. A person who smokes it timidly screams in terror and whoever smokes it confidently starts guffawing like a madman. A sad smoker will wail like an infant and a happy one will lapse into a profound graveyard silence. It’s like being demonically possessed. That’s why I stopped using.”
I had a friend called Ganesh who told me the most interesting stories when he returned home from Jamal Mohammed College. All his stories were picaresque love and lust stories. All of his stories involved Stella, a seventeen year old Anglo-Indian girl who wore skirts.
(Just so you know, women in the shanties of Tamil Nadu don’t bother to wear panties. When we first saw underclothes on display in shops, Siva informed me that only hookers wore them. Village women don’t wear bras either. I asked a village man why this was the state of affairs and he told me that any man would ask a woman who wanted to wear a bra who she wanted to impress with her figure. If this was their take on bras, I wonder what they would have to say for panties. This happened in 2014, but Stella’s story belongs to the ‘70s.)
This is w
hat Ganesh told me.
“Stella was fair like a daisy. Her thighs were so smooth that your hand would just slip on them.”
“Where? Up? Down?”
“Every which way, Udhaya. They’d go to that sweet spot between her thighs too. There was no love, it was all sex. She was a little nymphomaniac.”
“At seventeen?”
“Age is of no import in such matters. She had no father and lived with her mother who had the hots for me. Mother and daughter looked like sisters. The mother often went out of town, and when she did, I would bolt to her house. She would receive me stark naked at the door and embrace and kiss me. For her, doing it in the 69 position was like playing kitchen. We took long baths together in the tub and even made love in it. One day, she wanted me to piss all over her face…”
“What the fuck are you even on about?”
“There’s nothing I consider taboo in sex. There was only one problem. She was not satisfied with me alone and wanted at least two other men to have sex with.”
One day, when Siva and I went to meet Ganesh in Trichy, we checked ourselves into a lodge in Palakkarai before heading to his hostel. He wasn’t too pleased to see us. When we enquired about Stella, he brushed us off.
“Stella is not the same person she used to be,” he complained. “She’s acting all strange and she barely speaks ten words to me.”
“But you were telling me that everything was going great last week!” I said. “Sixty-nine and doggy-style and all…”
The cat was out of the bag when Ganesh’s hostel mates told us that Stella was only a figment of Ganesh’s overactive imagination. He’d tried to feed them all his Stella-stories but none of them bought his crap. One day, Ganesh said he needed a room urgently to have sex with Stella as her pussy was on fire.
“Why all these days it happened only at her house. Now what?”
“Stella’s mother isn’t moving anywhere and we need a room urgently.”
A group of students who had rented a house let him have it for a few hours. Among the students in that particular group was a boy like Kokkarakko. While the rest of his housemates went for a matinee show, this fellow hid on the terrace of a shop in front of the house. From two to six, Ganesh was alone in the house, jacking off to Sarojadevi romances. No Stella came to see him and the poor spy baked in the sun like a brick for four hours. When the housemates returned, Ganesh started entertaining them with unbelievable stories about his session with Stella that afternoon, but the spy chimed in with the truth and poor shamefaced Ganesh had to face their wrath for taking them for a ride.
We were so disappointed when we realized that Ganesh had lied and that Stella had never existed. We’d traveled all the way from Nagore to Trichy just to meet an imaginary person. Siva recommended we go to Thanjavur since the devadasis had lived there during the Maratha period. Although the pottukattu ceremony had been abolished in 1947, they still lived there, clinging to the remnants of their past. The next problem was how to identify a devadasi’s house. Well, you just needed a rickshawala. Let’s go!
We got to Thanjavur by bus. It was 9 p.m. when we reached. Siva briefed a sixty-something shoeless rickshawala who didn’t seem to care that his lungi had been tied to expose his knee-length underwear.
Since Siva was stout, the rickshawala was able to drive his vehicle only by jumping on his seat and pressing down hard on the pedal.
He stopped outside a hut and I was stunned to see four or five people in a queue outside it.
“Don’t worry about all these old geezers,” said the rickshawala. “They won’t take very long. All of them will be done in no more than an hour. Take your time. I’ll wait for you both.”
I was flabbergasted. I had to wait in a queue to have my first sex?
“Siva,” I hissed. “I don’t feel good about this. Let’s just go.”
Siva followed me back to the rickshaw where he made more enquiries about the dasis.
“Alright,” the rickshawala said. “I’ll take you to a dasi, but I hope your purse is as big as your hopes.”
Siva had enough money on him.
He parked his rikshaw at the mouth of a street and demanded his share.
“Knock the fifth door on the right,” he said, “and enter paradise.”
Siva padded to the door like a cat and knocked softly. No one answered. He knocked louder and a terrifying male voice boomed, “Who on earth is it? Do you know what time it is?” We galloped like madmen from that street to the bus stand. During our mad dash, we’d also noticed that the rickshawala had taken off.
It was Anjali who put an end to my endless quest which began at that young age. When all you need is available around the corner, why go searching elsewhere? When you have eaten your fill, why force yourself to eat more? Why pour into a cup that is already filled to the brim? Only those men who have not tasted nectar like Anjali’s will settle for dishwater. If every man found the woman of his dreams, then the fashion industry, yellow magazines and brothels would vanish overnight.
(Even if you eat to your heart’s content, you take ginger juice to digest it, don’t you? My lovers are like ginger juice.
Kokkarakko)
4 – How Kokkarakko Spends his Nights
Kokkarakko sleeps only after 1 a.m., after drinking booze and sexting women. This usually happens when he’s outside Chennai. In under two minutes, he would go from “hello baby” to “suck your nipples” and “lick your cunt.” He was guaranteed a sweet slumber only after two solid hours of raw talk. When one of his babes calls him the next day, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about her or her call. The poor woman will make at least fifty-something calls before giving up. That night, alone again, he finds himself another woman.
“They just keep coming to me,” he says, “and all in ten minutes or less. I feel sorry for them, you know?”
I couldn’t help thinking of the rich man in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.
Chapter Ten
All This Talk of Sex
“I challenge you to write a novel with no sex in it,” Anjali told me one day. How is that even possible? How can I, a depraved man for the better part of my life, not write about sex? During my womanless days, when masturbation was my only recourse, I thought of the Nereis worm.
Nereis worms live in the deepest part of the ocean. Every month, on full-moon nights, the penetrating moonlight draws the worms to the surface where they mate. The fish linger just below the surface, lying in wait for their food. On such nights, you’d find the seagulls hovering above the ocean, anticipating a hearty feed of fish. Fishermen, more than delighted to see the entire round face of the moon, gaily take their boats and nets out to sea. Another interesting point to note is that the Nereis worms, when they ascend to the surface to mate, form a circle that is one whole kilometer in circumference. I have often climaxed visualizing these creatures fabricating themselves into a circle in order to mate.
We, the great human species, talk about time and space like we are so conscious of them, but we are not seasonal breeders concerned about where we play the mating game. Animals always mate in particular seasons and they don’t do it just anywhere. Cranes travel from Yakutia to China to mate. Now tell me, will a man come to India all the way from Australia just to mate? A person once trapped a hundred birds – fifty males and fifty females – to study their breeding habits. During breeding season, he kept them caged, but there was no mating as the cage was a cramped, non-ideal place for mating. In a desperate effort to escape the cage, the birds kept flinging their bodies against it until all their feathers fell out, until their strength gave out and they died.
The women I bed enjoy multiple orgasms and they can’t seem to get enough of my love-muscle. Nithya Karma Vidhi made it possible.As a young boy, I learned it from Somasundaram who was a devotee of Vallalar.
Vallalar wrote a book in which he explains what and w
hat not a man should eat, what he should use to clean his teeth, how he should shit, how he should sleep and how he should conduct himself. With maybe a couple of exceptions, I follow his every injunction. For instance, I wake up before sunrise to meditate, and that is the equal of two hours of sleep; it energizes and ensures longevity.
Vallalar asserts that ejaculation can be delayed through a certain technique of breath-control where the person neither suppresses his breath nor releases it in short puffs, but inhales deeply and allows his breath to “flow in the middle.” This way, he can guarantee himself satisfactory sex all the time. (If there’s aught else you want to know about the best way to breathe when having sex, there’s Thirumoolar the saint to help you).
All my knowledge of sex, however, was futile as it didn’t help me with stubborn Perundevi who closed her legs after a few years.
I think Vallalar, who said that sex once in four days is “excessive,” should be blamed for Perundevi’s abstinence as I fucked her close to four times a day. Vallalar, I’m sure, indoctrinated her against sex itself and influenced her to start living like a sanyasin.
In Anjali’s case, I didn’t feel sated even when we had twice the amount of sex I had with Perundevi. Every time I touched her, I never felt the same thing. She felt new, fresh and different every single time and I felt like a badly starved beast – and a badly starved beast digs right in without an ounce of concern for table etiquette. In other less cryptic words, I got down to business without any foreplay. I realized that Anjali seemed to want it that way too. When she saw me, she would spread her arms like an angel to embrace me and spread her legs shortly after like an impish little slut to let me in. My lips would brush her earlobes and from there travel to the nape of her neck. When I kissed her there, she gasped, a tremor running through her body. This, I discovered, was one of her erogenous zones.
I usually took her unawares, kissing her sweet spot when she was cooking in the kitchen or pottering in the bedroom. Desire would well up between her legs like rainclouds in a clear sky. Before she had the chance to get two words out of her mouth, I would start working around her love-tunnel, kissing her furiously. How she would cry out, begging me to stop! I would show no mercy, continuing wildly till she climaxed, screaming my name.
Marginal Man Page 20