Marginal Man

by Charu Nivedita

  His friends told him many things about Nellore girls. They were fiery creatures who couldn’t be approached without first having handed over the money and they were very particular about who slept with them – they wouldn’t just do it with anyone. On hearing this talk, Kokkarakko challenged his friends, saying he’d screw her without paying her a paisa. When the second friend finished, our harami went in. The woman had been drinking. He discovered that she knew only Telugu but could understand a handful of Tamil and English words. Kokkarakko tried to make his intention known by speaking an odd-sounding mixture of English, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and unofficial sign language.

  “Look, see, ikkada fuck nahi – no fucking, only drinking, only eating. You, me friends. Dosth, teek hai? Dosth, dosth, we all dosth. Life enjoy. Biryani, drinking enjoy karo. Fuck nahi. Ikkada no touching. Me your friend. Me your dosth. Dosth, dosth, jolly, jolly, enjoy, enjoy.”

  He kept talking like this and touched her shoulder lightly. She had finished three rounds and did not object, so he shifted his hand to her thigh. Still she didn’t protest. He didn’t stop talking. (“Jolly, jolly. No fuck, fuck nahi. Only touching.”)

  She suddenly interrupted him saying, “Kannamittu, kannamittu.”

  He didn’t understand. For a moment, he was wondering whether she’d fallen in love with him because of the way he’d stroked her. She kept repeating the word. What did she mean? Did she want him to kiss her on the cheek? When he brought his face close to hers, she pointed at a spot below his waist and said the word again, articulating every syllable. Then it dawned on him. She wanted him to wear a condom. He immediately slipped one on, and, rubbing his dick against her thigh, he said, “Only here, no fuck. Only here.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Akkada no, ikkada only,” he said, pointing to her thighs.

  Suddenly, he penetrated her and finished his job. She did nothing to prevent him.

  Before she left, she said something to him in Telugu laughingly. He didn’t understand what she said, but the words “ikkada” and “akkada”occurred. What could she have meant? Probably: “You scoundrel! You tricked me with your ikkada, akkada.”

  Kokkarakko and a friend went to a luxury hotel which specialized in high-class prostitution. Three thousand bucks for two hours. The friend who went in first walked out in twenty minutes. When asked why he came out so quickly, he said, “According to the woman, we are only allowed one shot even though we’re paying for two hours.”

  It is precisely this kind of challenge that stimulates Kokkarakko. He went inside and began talking to the woman and stroking her. “This is what I’ve been wanting to do for a long time,” he said as he masturbated. He went and took a shower and returned for an extended session of foreplay. After an hour and a half, he began to have sex with the woman. As he had masturbated earlier, it took him longer than usual to climax. In this manner, our harami managed to make his two hours with the prostitute worth his while. The whore was furious when he finished. “I’ve never seen anyone like you, you fucker!”

  Kokkarakko had a rubber snake that could easily pass for the real thing.

  One of his friends from his hometown would make a beeline to the toilet whenever he visited him. Kokkarakko was thoroughly fed up of this and wanted to put a stop to it. When he heard his friend would be arriving at five in the morning, he left the snake in the toilet. His friend, as usual, rushed to the toilet as soon as he arrived but came running out immediately like he’d seen a ghost. He called the police station and shouted nothing but, “Police! Police!”

  “He forgot he had to call the fire station and he called the cops!” Kokkarakko said, laughing like a hyena.

  He was once stopped on the highway by the cops who were inspecting vehicles for bombs. The cop asked him to get out of the car and when he put his head inside the window to check for bombs, he saw the snake. Scared out of his wits, he withdrew his head immediately, hitting it against the frame of the window. When he realized it was only a rubber snake, he sternly admonished Kokkarakko for endangering public peace.

  Kokkarakko calls cars coffins.

  “I’ve taken the coffin out. It’s ready. Shall we go?”

  “Why take an auto? We can just go in the coffin.”

  Even his wife, a simpleminded woman, was not spared from his eccentricities. One day, Kokkarakko and I were in Coorg, playing golf. It was the first time he was playing the game. Golf, I must say, is the most difficult sport I’ve ever played. Swinging the club five times is more exhausting than running a 1000 m race. The club doesn’t hit the ball – it only mows the grass.

  People were sniggering at Kokkarakko who was mowing grass for about an hour. As he was thus engaged, he had a call from his wife. He tells her that he is playing golf, whereupon the woman asks him, “Are you playing well?” This was how naïve she was.

  Anjali asked me about Kokkarakko’s wife one day.

  “She’s a dumb one, isn’t she?”

  “How would you know?”

  “Haramis like Kokkarakko tend to choose such women.”

  When I told this to Kokkarakko, he said, “Even if they are clever, haramis take them and turn them into dummies. When they are dumb, they don’t have problems with our harami lifestyles and everyone is happy.”

  Imagine how a woman like that would have been frightened by his talk about coffins!

  “Look at it this way,” he told her. “If we travel by car, there could be an accident and we could die. But if we travel in a coffin, will there be an accident? Have you ever heard of a coffin that has been in an accident?”

  One day, he called her from the airport.

  She asked him, “Has that thing – whatever you call it – left?”

  “You mean the flying coffin? Not yet.”

  Need I say more?

  Once, Kokkarakko wrote something nice about me on Facebook. This is what he wrote about my death at the end of the post:

  When Udhaya dies, he will have no bank balance. Provided that he has no quarrel with any of his longtime readers, they will dispose of the body. If not, some new readers will come together and dispose of the corpse. If Udhaya knew he were to die tomorrow, he would post something like this on his blog:

  I bid goodbye.

  As I am going to die at four p.m. tomorrow, I request my friends who wish to meet me for the last time to come at three thirty. It’s been my long-term wish to go on my last journey in a luxury coffin and I request one of my readers to incur the costs and build me a grandiose coffin. There’s no time for me to order and customize it and I’m not giving anyone my account number for the cash transfer.

  Readers who come for the funeral may pool money to buy Rémy Martin.

  One person can buy some real good chicken, fry it and bring it along for the celebration.

  Usually, nobody takes good pictures – any pictures – of me when I attend festivals and events. Readers with good cameras who are planning to attend this grand celebration may take lots of pictures of ME alone. Take a nice picture of my smiling corpse, because, even after I die, I wish to live in the hearts of women.

  When I read these paragraphs of my last message, my eyes misted and I let people know I was moved in the comments.

  Immediately, a friend asked me, “Udhaya, did you read the post from bottom to top? Is that why you’re crying?”

  This was my reply to him: “Dear brother, I would like to inform you that I know the Mrutyanjaya mantra. Here it is: ‘O fragrant and three-eyed god who protects this world, I bow before you; just as the ripened cucumber parts from its stem, I attain completion from death.’”

  One who knows the Mrutyanjaya mantra will not fear death. And only in sex do I go from bottom to top, not in other matters.

  Methinks there is a connection between sex-heavy writing and Thanjavur. This kind of writing, like a tree, fruit or soil type, is particular to the
region. Are you aware that the dozen writers who brazenly write about sex all hail from Thanjavur? Pasitha Maanidam, the only Tamil novel featuring homosexuality, was written by Karicharan Kunju from Kumbakonam. T. Janakiraman, all of whose novels revolve around sex, is also from the same place. So are K. P. Rajagopalan and Thanjai Prakash.

  In sex, people usually proceed from top to bottom. Okay, that sounded vague and boring and meaningless. Consider this sequence instead:

  Top meets bottom

  Top meets top

  Bottom meets bottom

  Bottom meets top.

  Understood? No? Fine, I’ll explain.

  Top = mouth

  Bottom = genitals

  Do you get it now? No? Ugh!

  Listen carefully now.

  When Anjali and I begin to have sex, my mouth and her vagina meet – top meets bottom. After a lot of foreplay, my mouth will suddenly seek hers – top meets top. Then, bottom meets bottom. (I’m sure you understand what that means.) When I’m about to climax, I withdraw my penis and shove it into her mouth – bottom meets top. All this is possible only when the two lovers are of the same mind and when they have the same degree of passion. Try doing this with a woman who comes home tired after work. All you’ll end up getting is a couple of blows and a couple of kicks.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Lesbian Mothers and Whorish Wives

  As I neared the end of my novel, I decided to pay Siva one more visit. On reaching my home town, I met Kamal, Siva’s brother and enquired about him. He said, “Siva looks like and talks like a wise man, but you have no idea how we suffer because, in truth, he is a madman. Our neighbors complain that he throws stones at their houses. When I asked him why, he said, ‘They are all whores. They are spying on me. Those bitches are trying to seduce me.’ He says all kinds of nasty things. I think he went crazy because some woman jilted him. He has scribbled all over the walls of his room that this woman is a whore and that woman is a whore and so on. When I requested him to seek treatment, he beat me. He even beat our mother once. I can take you to his place, but you’ll have to enter yourself and at your own risk. He will fly into a rage if he sees me. The best thing would be for you to just look at him without his knowledge. Come and meet me at three in the afternoon.”

  Siva lived in an outhouse that adjoined the main house. The entrance that opened into the street had been permanently locked. Kamal took me to the back door and told me to peek through the hole in it.

  What he’d told me was true. Siva had scrawled all sorts of obscenities on the wall abusing women. The word “whore” occurred often. I no longer doubted that Siva was a psycho. He lay asleep on an easy chair. It was while I was reading the rantings of his diseased mind that I experienced one of the biggest shocks of my life.

  Siva and I had had a misunderstanding once due to which we’d fallen out with each other and lost touch for a long time. I was working in Delhi and had gone home during the holidays. Siva was jobless and in dire straits. He kept saying he’d be leaving for the Gulf shortly.

  Out of the blue, he said, “Udhaya, you won’t get angry if I ask you something, will you?”

  “No,” I assured him.

  “People here are saying your mother is a lesbian,” he said. “Have you confronted her about this?”

  We did not contact each other after this incident.

  Another time, when Nalini and I were living in Pondicherry, he came to visit and started telling me about his privation in Qatar. After he left, Nalini said, “Your friend must never come near our house again.” When I asked her why, she said, “When I gave him a mug of coffee, he squeezed my hand deliberately.”

  Then I remembered the question he’d asked me before he left: “Your wife is a nice sort, isn’t she?” There was a hint of wickedness in his tone. I didn’t reply. After that, I decided to have nothing more to do with him.

  My eyes lingered on the words scribbled on the walls in a clear hand:

  Udhaya’s mother is a lesbian.

  Udhaya’s wife is a whore.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  A Climax

  “What is it, dearest Anjali? Did my writing sound false? Did it make you sound like a liar? Hear me, not even God would be able to find a grain of dishonesty in you! My only concern is that your talk only revolves around your friends and acquaintances.”

  The day I left Paris for Chennai, Anjali was unable to see me off at the airport as it would have interfered with her plans with Suresh. We did, however, have a little rendezvous at a park. That was when and where I made known and clear my concern for her.

  “Let me not argue with you, Anjali. I am a changed person.”

  “I’ve lost count of how many times you’ve said that to me, Udhaya, but I have done well to remember that you never deliver what you promise.”

  “No, Anjali! I do want to change. I had a friend once who smoked like a chimney. The day he decided he wanted to quit, he reiterated his decision like a mantra one-hundred times daily. He vehemently announced his decision to kick the habit and ended up making good his resolution. So, maybe if I keep telling you with confidence that I am a changed person, I will be a changed person someday.”

  “Let’s see,” she said dryly. “In your novel, you did not spare even Lord Ayyappan, but you let Kokkarakko go scot-free. Why? Because he’s your friend?”

  “His existence is punishment enough to him. Anjali’s voice was a billion in unison. Anjali is every Indian woman. Didn’t I tell you that, after Nalini and I had separated, I raised my daughter single-handedly for two years? I met her recently. It had been fifteen long years. She narrated to me, at length, all the circumstances that befell her and inspired the plot of my next novel.”

  “You never once told me what she said.”

  I sighed.

  “What she told me sounded exactly like your story, only it unfolded in a different place. Like you, she recited a familiar litany of names – the names of my friends, writers and readers of world literature – and with a shadow of hate darkening her face, said she wanted nothing but to bash them unconscious. I was shocked to hear this, but even more so when she confided to me that most of them had taken sexual advantage of her. When I asked her why she hadn’t told me this earlier, she said, ‘I neither knew nor understood what was happening to me then. I do now.’

  “Now Anjali, what will wordy Kokkarakko have to say? Would he call my next novel, my daughter’s story of sexual abuse, pulp fiction? Pray tell, is there another way to tell stories like hers and yours?”

  Indeed, I feel I share points of similarity with Dostoevsky’s nameless narrator in White Nights. We both live solitary, womanless lives. He meets Nostenga, a woman pining for her lover. Their feelings for each other intensify as the former writes and the latter narrates her story. He falls for her, but her lover returns and she leaves with him.

  “Doesn’t Kokkarakko know that Anjali has no other lover? When I read his letter, I remembered a proverb that was taken quite seriously in the village: Ozhathavan veedu paazh. – That house shall fall apart whither lovers do not fuck.

  “Oh Udhaya, let’s save the literary discussions for phone conversation, but tell me,” she said, “what punishment does the character Udhaya deserve?”

  I was sitting on the bench and she was standing with her arms crossed over her chest. An impish smile spread across her face. When I leaned in (expecting a kiss), she yanked down her blouse, baring her breasts to me.

  I teased her from the airport.

  ‘I never expected you to do something like that in public. Rascal. Are you a Tamil woman? Shame on you...’

  ‘You are the one who spoilt me. Shame on YOU...

  ‘By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask. Did you read Kokkarakko’s letter? I’m assuming he had a lot of niceties to convey. Are you going to reply to him?”

  �
�I did read his letter and can very well reply to his every sentence in paragraphs, but I am not going to. Why should I waste ink over that male chauvinist pig? You needn’t worry about him either. And do just one more thing for me.”

  “What?”

  “Come and kiss me!”

  Chapter Twenty three

  Another Climax

  From Kokkarakko to the Reader.

  Anjali calls me a male chauvinist pig, but there is no such thing as a male chauvinist or a female victim any longer. Power-play is ancient history.

  Today, when a woman demands her rights, the whole world hears. But why, oh why, must her tales of woe, theatrics and tears come to her assistance when she does? Why is she so attached to her past like a child to the umbilical cord? Why does she drag the weight of it around like a ball chained to her ankle? Why does she use her misfortunes as tokens of sympathy?

  I have nothing personal against Anjali and I don’t think she is a bad person. However, I do know that she is a very stupid person, and her stupidity is often mistranslated as innocence. It is not. If you consider Anjali’s life and her account of it, your estimate of her stupidity will commensurate with mine. According to her, there is no one in her life with a grain of goodness – her mother is a bad woman; her father is a bad man; the other guy, what’s his name, is a scoundrel – a bad man; the nurses are cruel – bad people; Suresh is indifferent – hence he is bad! Even the nature is cruel to her. Think of the desert storm in Arizona! Thank God! She wasn’t assigned many pages in this novel; she would scorn everything under the sun!

  For Anjali, Udhaya’s badness – yes, Dear Reader, she spares no one – pales in comparison with all and everything else that is bad in the world. It wasn’t long before her good graces for him became scarce. After all, Udhaya did become a bad person in the climax of the novel, prompting Anjali to say that he never delivered what he promised! But by what whimsical standards does Anjali judge? The incapability to deal with people and a jaundiced view of the world are the telling signs of mental instability. “Every person in my life has been bad, every circumstance in my life has been sad!” Boo-hoo! Anjali, take a look around you where so many men are starving. Your Udhaya is among them – lying with hunger-pangs gnawing at the walls of his stomach in the park, feeding on grass like a cow, while next to him, a mangy dog is eating sun-dried human feces. Do you know of any woman who has starved in like manner?