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THE DEVELOPER
1
– I really want you to do it, at least once.
– Ollie, you know why I can’t do that.
– I’m hygienic, you know.
– It’s not about your asshole, I’ve already told you that. It’s about my immunity, which is at a historic low right now.
– You can wash my asshole yourself if you like – with all the Dettol in the world, with all the Germinator, with all the Clorox Lemon Scent Disinfectant Wipes and Surf and Vim and Colin and Ezee and Robin Liquid and all the whatever else powerful cleansing agents and germ-killing agents you like, but I want you to lick the rim of my anus just once. You promised me before marriage that you will. It’s been seven days since we got married. I can’t wait any longer.
– Honey, this is the very tongue with which I send prayers to Guruvayurappa every morning. I can’t lick assholes with it.
– Assholes? It’s just one asshole – your own wife’s own asshole! Don’t be an asshole now, c’mon, lick it.
– Babes, I’ve had typhoid three times already.
– Is that my problem?
– Don’t you care?
– I do, honey, that’s why I let you come in my mouth every single time and as much as you wanted AND I swallow every single drop every single time just the way you like it. But you’re refusing to do this one small thing for me. The real question here is, do you care?
– I’ve been categorically warned by registered medical practitioners that I may not survive a fourth battle with Salmonella typhi.
– They are quacks. Typhoid is curable; you are not in Sub-Saharan Africa. C’mon, suck my ass.
– Baby, I can suck any other part of your body but I can’t suck your ass.
– Okay, then suck my pussy.
– I meant your ass and pussy, your nether regions basically.
– You won’t suck my ass, you won’t suck my pussy. What will you suck?
– Your tits?
– My tits have been sucked to death. You have two choices: suck my ass or suck my pussy.
– I’m sorry, babes, it’s too messy down there. I can’t.
– Okay, then, fuck you.
– Where are you going?
– To a man who will consider it an honour and a privilege to lick a woman’s asshole.
– Listen, just listen to me honey—
– I should have guessed it when I saw you rinse your mouth after kissing me. You’re a fucking hypofuckinchondriac.
– No one’s ever called me that before. You’re insulting me now.
– You need help. See a psycho before you speak to me again. Goodbye.
2
He fell back on the bed, his penis and balls shaking their heads sadly as he did so. If they could speak, they would have told him it was no big deal. But they remained mute. He was convinced he was right to try and enforce basic self-preservation measures. How else could he protect himself from the malevolent micro-organisms that were undoubtedly resident in her nether regions, doing nothing much in particular – just surfing the net and watching TV and generally keeping a low profile and biding their time and waiting for a juicy substrate to come their way that they can pile on to, and what if his lips or tongue or teeth happened to be the human petri dish that this particular community of malevolent micro-organisms had been waiting all their lives for in her asshole and pussy and they jumped on his tongue while it was, say, rapidly ululating in her vaginal opening, say, or palpitating her clitoris, say, then it was only a matter of time before bradycardia and leucopenia and hepatosplenomegaly set in, leading in due course to peritonitis and finally to encephalitis, cholecystitis, endocarditis and ostetitis, and no amount of compensatory fellatio that she might do for him can undo the suffering and pain culminating in a tortuous mortality triggered by something he had felt pressured into doing just to please her whim and fancy. This was basically why he’d been avoiding going down on her. But she had been unwilling to listen or understand and had even, in some sort of petty retaliation, on the previous three occasions they had achieved congress, refused to let him come in her mouth or eyes or even on her belly and instead forced him to wear a condom. Why shouldn’t he, she’d said, if he was so afraid of catching a disease from her. And he would have had no problem with that except his penis did not like condoms. Soon as it came in contact with rubber it lay down its tools and went on strike, making him shrink and cringe and droop in humiliation and slink away from the bed and go back to his laptop and hunt for another lucrative piece of real estate to launch another massive luxury housing project.
3
To put the whole messy cunnilingus fiasco out of his system, the developer went on a road trip to the hills. After nine hours of non-stop driving, he stopped at a nice little bend on a winding, scenic, mountainous road that offered a breathtaking vista of a waterfall on one side, a pristine river with transparent green water on the other, a broad, luxuriant meadow with lush vegetation on the third side, and pine-covered hills on the fourth side. Plus it was very quiet too, and with naturally air-conditioned air whose purity gave him an instant high. As he stood leaning on his car’s rear, gazing at this divine beauty of river-waterfall-hill-meadow-pure air, he was overcome by an all-powerful urge to – for want of a better word – go down on it, and lick the asshole of the river and suck the balls of the waterfall and nuzzle the pubic growth of the meadow. Nature was the ultimate woman, it was hygienic, too. He will go down on her, he decided, and he will fuck her like a man. And that’s how he got the inspiration to construct, on this very spot – which many centuries back was the very spot where Babur had had simultaneous anal intercourse with two Himachali courtesans and cut off their tongues post-coitus so they wouldn’t be able to babble anything to anyone either about the Emperor’s whereabouts or the dimensions of His Majesty’s less-than-impressive member – the state’s most well-known water-park-cum-amusement park-cum-holiday resort. He named it Poori Paani (a reverse pun on the popular HAIRian delicacy known as Paani Poori), and it’s now a chain of seventeen establishments, every one of them built on the banks of sixteen different rivers in different parts of the subcontinent.
One of the unique architectural innovations of the Poori Paani chain of water-park-cum-amusement park-cum-holiday resorts, an innovation made possible by their characteristic location amid hill, river, meadow, waterfall, was that the river functioned as a parking lot for eight months of the year, and as an adventure sport venue during the monsoon season, thereby contributing directly to revenue instead of remaining just a decorative accessory to Poori Paani. And during the rainy months, when the river filled up with water, making it a dangerous place for parking, the surrounding hilltops, flattened by the developer for this very purpose, turned into parking lots, with the drive up the hillside serving as another scenic outing for the visiting guests.
It was at the swimming pool of one such Poori Paani establishment that the developer met Sabzi’s disappeared wife (SDW), who had caused a minor stampede among the resort guests by lounging in a deckchair in a bikini – at that moment, the only Indian woman to do so within a 700-km radius.
3
To impress SDW, who was a 900-year-old vampire that had seen everything there was to see in the world, was not easy. One day, SDW complained to the developer about the lack of public conveniences for women in Indian cities. This set off a chain of thoughts in the head of the developer that eventually culminated in his resolve to build the mother of all public conveniences, dedicated to Bharatiya Nari.1 So he signed a deal with Takealeak Inc. to build for them, on a 400-acre plot of land in the city centre, not far from the Gandhi Memorial, the Taj Mahal of Shauchalays. It would be the world’s largest public convenience, built of marble, and topped with a tower that would be taller than Toronto’s CN Tower. It would be a holy monument to nature’s call that would commemorate the sacred function performed by public conveniences, a structure that, by sacralizing what has been unjustly profaned, would inspire
an avalanche of public toilet constructions in every nook and corner of the country, and just as there are places of religious worship – often nothing more than a hollow block of concrete with vermillion marks on it – in even the remotest of jungles and the backwardest of hamlets, there would be at the bare minimum at least one public toilet per 100 sq. yards of HAIR territory.
As the PM was a huge public toilet aficionado, the developer got all clearances in no time. When the 1,200-metre tall, 232-floor monument, christened Susu Towers,2 and fabricated in the developer’s five factories in Bangladesh and shipped to the site and assembled by imported Japanese-made android workers, was completed in a record 180 days and unveiled on Women’s Day in 2022, it was hailed by the international media as the Eighth Wonder of the Postmodern World. It was indeed the eighth wonder of the postmodern world because the developer had taken pains to incorporate architectural elements of all the seven wonders of the ancient world, as well six of the seven wonders of the modern world, into Susu Towers, with the only modern wonder failing to find a place in the monument being the Golden Gate, which couldn’t be helped because there was no water body or geographical depression of any reasonable depth or span to suspend a suspension bridge across within the Susu Towers complex without it ending up looking silly and immodest.
But the Susu Towers had an aluminium alloy dome modelled on the dome of the Taj Mahal, and on top of the dome, impaled on the spire projecting from the dome was an exact-scale reproduction, moulded in blast-resistant carbon fibre, of the Pyramid of Khufu, and delicately poised on the pointed tip of the exact-scale reproduction of the Pyramid of Khufu was a gold-coated tin pineapple inspired by the golden pineapple of the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing. The prefabricated columns in the 150-acre Ladies were modelled on the Coliseum while those in the 130-acre Gents were inspired by the Parthenon. The frescoes on the ceiling, the mural on the walls, the floor mosaics and the chandeliers were photocopies of those in the Hagia Sophia, while the basement parking recalled the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa. The forty-acre garden featured stone benches and expressionistic installations that were very obviously tributes to Stonehenge while the nineteen-km-long perimeter wall of the entire Susu Towers complex had gateways, battlements and signal towers just like the Great Wall of China and even had Chinese-looking androids from the ITBP manning it to make the resemblance to the Great Wall even more complete.
Needless to say, Susu Towers became an international tourist attraction overnight. It broke several records in record time. To list just a few at random: Susu Towers is the youngest ever monument in the history of human civilization to be declared a United Nations Heritage Monument; it attracts more than 70,000 visitors a day – every single one of whom either urinate or pass stool in it – a record that no other monument can claim; not only is it the world’s largest public convenience, it is the only one to have separate toilets/toilet areas for seven different species: humans, of course, but also specially designated excretory zones for dogs, cats, cows, pigeons, crows, as well as a separate high security enclosure of luxury toilets for the exclusive use of CEOs and VVVIPs; on any given weekday, it processes, on average, 50,000 litres of urine and 200 tons of faeces3 – a world record for any human construction anywhere in the universe; the shrine located in the Pyramid on the twenty-second floor of the Susu Towers is the only shrine in the world dedicated to the Susumata, the goddess in charge of the health of the excretory organs and the patron deity of urologists, nephrologists, proctologists, and all those suffering from piles, UTI, constipation, enuresis, incontinence, and all other ailments pertaining to excretory organs, and so in a very short span of time it became the world’s second-largest pilgrimage site after Mecca-Medina, with piles patients and dialysis-dependents and haemorrhoid-afflicted of every religion and race and nationality flocking to Susu Towers to pray to Susumata and seek her blessings, with thousands of healthy pilgrims too making the trip from different corners of the world to pray that their kidneys and gall bladders remain healthy and stone-free till their last breath, etc.
The developer became an international celebrity overnight. He was interviewed by celebrity interviewers, hosted by celebrity hosts, feted by celebrity chefs, and screwed by celebrity screws. He spent a memorable night partying with Donald Trump Jr on his brand-new 2k short ton Espen Oeino equipped with two 1800-cc Yamaha Waverunners and a 700-cc Yamaha jetski in the artificial lake in the Gobi Desert. He got a free pass to watch the Wimbledon women’s final at Wimbledon and was, in turn, watched watching the Wimbledon’s women’s final at Wimbledon by millions of TV viewers around the world. He became a syndicated columnist with Project Syndicate and his column on the pragmatics as well as the metaphysics of urine, faeces and their socio-cultural dynamics, titled Philosophical Excretions, was printed by 12,000 publications around the world. His collection of autobiographical essays, Piss for Peace, moved into the New York Times bestseller list three days before publication and hasn’t moved out yet, having sold 10 million copies at last count. He was nominated to judge game shows, to judge Miss India, Miss World, Miss Universe, Miss Israel, Miss Palestine (the only human being ever to judge both Miss Israel and Miss Palestine contests, that too in the same year), Miss Iraq and Miss Kurdish Refugee contests, to be part of the jury at Cannes, Toronto and Turin4 film festivals, to the World Economic Forum at Davos, where his speech on the elective affinity between Gaia, the Earth Goddess, and Susumata, the Goddess of Excretory Functions, and how the salvation of humanity lay in keeping these two goddesses happy and satisfied, received a rousing, unending applause that went on for fifteen minutes and went viral on Facebook and twitter and was quoted on the front pages and provoked admiring op-eds besides being translated into 172 languages and published as a coffee table book with every paragraph illustrated with artistically shot photographs of Susu Towers and the developer himself, and he became the first Indian to be awarded, in the same calendar year, the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan and the Bharat Ratna, and the first human being ever to be awarded the Magsaysay Award and the Nobel Peace Prize in the same fiscal year. In one year, the developer was the chief guest at 1,342 functions – an average of 3.67 chief guest appearances a day – a world record that still stands. After the publication of Piss for Peace, he also appeared at seventy-two different literary festivals around the world (the Edinburgh and Jaipur festivals four times each, Ulaanbaatar and Buson litfests thrice, and Khartoum and Ajdabiya litfests twice) and gave TED talks that broke the then existing record for YouTube views by half a million. The documentary made on his life by Channel 9 won the Academy Award for the Best Documentary on a living biographical subject from the domain of real estate and excretion.