by G. Sampath
KINDLY STAY ON THE LINE
Weaponized DNA will soon make nuclear weapons obsolete. No point threatening the whole planet when the objective is to eliminate your evolutionary adversaries and leave intact the resources vital for the survival of the victorious.
When I first began to follow a fitness regimen, it was to keep myself in a geometrically and aesthetically appealing shape. So I did cardio and resistance training basically. And stretches and warm-ups and cool-downs before and after the cardio and resistance training. As I grew older, my fitness goals began to change, and with them, the proportion and quantity of time taken up by different kinds of what may broadly be termed a ‘wellness routine’.
The funda basically is to raise your body temperature to boiling point and then plunge it into ice. This rapid exposure to extremes hardens the muscles, improves the conductivity of the nerves and toughens the bones. Some exercise routines include vitrification, where you inject varying proportions of clay and silica into the epidermis and then glaze them digitally so that your skin is as smooth and hard and beautiful as ceramic. Maya loves running her nails on my digitally glazed vitrified back though I don’t much like the sound produced which reminds me of a water snake crying. If you’ve heard a water snake cry you would know it is not an auditory stimulus conducive to sexual excitation.
I have never dreamt of Jesus my whole life but last night I dreamt that I was afraid that I would dream of Jesus. Now I don’t know if that counts as me dreaming of Jesus or not. If I had not commented prematurely to Sherlyn on how sexy her legs were, I believe we might have gotten to know each other better. My comment that her legs were the best on display at Palolem did not go down well with her for some reason that she never cared to explain. She simply stopped making eye contact with me or responding to any conversational overtures from me in anything but monosyllables.
The BRF have issued an ad online seeking new recruits. The ad says penis-size no bar – implying they’ll enlarge your penis at their expense if they hire you. The ad also says sex no bar. What does that mean? That they’ll be happy to take on trans people? I opened an account at Justendit.com yesterday. But I don’t think I have it in me to kill someone for money. I can’t afford to take on that kind of karma at this stage of my spiritual career.
The hole on my main door lock has been growing bigger and bigger with every passing day. Today the hole was the size of my fist. The key wouldn’t work. So I had to stimulate myself till my cock was big enough and hard enough. Then I inserted it in the lock and luckily the veins on the shaft matched the grooves in the lock and I could open the door. But while turning I ejaculated and the hole is now clogged with my goo. I don’t know if I can use the same lock again. Have to remember to use a condom next time.
My one punch is so powerful your left eye will go and fall in Africa and your right eye will go and fall in Europe. With one kick I can dispatch your bottom to Latin America. My one head-butt will ram your head back into your torso till it emerges on the other side through the soles of your feet.
Your eye which landed in Africa will give sight to a blind Namibian rag-picker in Johannesburg after she picks it up from the drain and slides it into her socket like a Bausch and Lomb. Your left eye will embed itself on the clock tower in Ljubljana and file daily reports on the events unfolding within its visual range. And you will die after you accidentally step on your head.
Apart from the BRF I had applied to three other terrorist organizations. All of them have called me for the preliminary round of testing, which includes a psychological aptitude test, a written test and three rounds of interviews. I had sent all of them the same SOP on ‘Why I want to become a terrorist’, just substituting the name of the organization in each case. BRF in the BRF application became LGBTQQARSTUVWXYZLF in the LGBTQQARSTUVWXYZLF application became Al Faida in the Al Faida application.
The Maoists have taken a 30 per cent stake in NeoCon Inc. and will have direct control over the manufacture of artificial adivasis to populate the forests on Niyamgir. Satya’s sperms are now being exported to fourteen different planets. It is scary to imagine one man’s DNA enjoying such wide inter-galactic traction. To my mind, this represents inbreeding of cosmic proportions and is a recipe for catastrophe. But humanity never learns from its mistakes.
There is life inside a beer bubble. I can tell you this because I lived there for many years. The only problem is getting water supply. When the bubble bursts, the oxygen in the atmosphere turns moody and violent and selfish and you have to get by as an anaerobic for a while.
The car I gifted to Anusha was an Audi A12 and not an Audi A8 as she drunkenly announced at her homecoming party last week. It has detachable Nitrogen boosters for the QOHCs which can take cruising speeds up to 440 kmph. I know she’s not a motorhead or a speed junkie. But she could be a pit babe. Put her in red spandex and micro-minis and you don’t need ignition. That said, unless they lower the qualifying age of the drivers to nineteen months, I don’t see how the cars can get any lighter or go any faster. I sat in a McMerc for the first time when I was twenty-three months and by forty-two months, I was the national under-21 champion.
From an initial time of one hour ten minutes when I was twenty-five – my physical prime, you could say, and I was no competitive athlete or sportsman – my fitness regime expanded to two hours by the time I was thirty, to three hours by the time I was thirty-five, to four hours by the time I was forty, and it was taking up eight hours of my day by the time I turned forty-five. Today, I’m fifty years old, and nearly all my waking time – about sixteen hours – goes into my wellness regimen.
I have to do separate stretches for each individual joint of my body or they start giving trouble. So I begin with shoulder rotations, which take up anywhere between thirty minutes to an hour. The neck, then the upper, middle and lower back, one after the other. Then the wrists and fingers – of either hand in turn. Then the knees, ankles, hips and the glutes. I do the stretches standing, lying on my back, lying on my stomach, squatting, kneeling, prone on one side, prone on the other side. The stretches in all take up about two hours. Then I do three hours of yoga, which are stretches with a specific therapeutic agenda, so to speak. This could be anything from preventing the onset of piles, to slowing down the ageing process, to enhancing libidinal longevity. Then I break for lunch. And after a brief power nap of fifteen minutes, I get back with two hours of cardio, followed by two hours of resistance training. Then a break for coffee and snacks followed by an hour of kick-boxing to develop oft-neglected muscle groups, an hour of pilates to build core strength, and an hour each of tennis and swimming for conditioning. I cool off with two hours of stretches and one hour of transcendental meditation for spiritual fitness. It’s 9 p.m. by the time I’m done and it’s time to have dinner and go to bed. I get my work done over phone when I’m on cardio, usually through the use of my seven assistants, who do most of the living-related chores for me while I focus on my health, fitness and longevity.
That said, my life expectancy dipped 17 per cent after I married Maya. Apparently our synapses were not compatible, nor were our metabolisms. She puked every single day we lived as spouse and spouse. She puked on the new leather upholstery I’d got done for the Volvo. And she puked on my cock while fellating me, which put me off oral sex for several years. Every time a woman took me in her mouth I was so terrified she would puke on my cock the whole point of it was lost somehow. I would be so tense I wouldn’t get hard no matter how hard the fellationer fellated me and she’d end up asking me what was wrong, and before you know it the question would’ve become what was wrong with me.
So before you marry someone make sure your metabolisms and synapses are compatible – they are more important than horoscopes and noses. Noses are very important to the people of my country. Arumugam rejected a bride from HAIRmatrimoney.com because the holes of her nostrils were asymmetrical, with one of them more oval than spherical and the other more spherical than oval, and he was, in turn, rejected b
y a HAIRmatrimony girl he’d liked because she found his nose to be ‘more elongate than Chile and Kerala lined up one behind the other’.
I had to go to the US for re-treading surgery when my fingertips became a complete pattern-less blank after repeated and abrasive contact with touchscreen surfaces and would no longer work on fingerprint-based security access keys. So I had to choose ten designs from among 9.7 billion unique fingerprints for my fingers. As usual I couldn’t make up my mind. I didn’t want the same old repetitive ellipses in abstract expressionist patterns signifying nothing save what a scanner would understand. I settled on a custom-made design – which cost you, of course – that imprinted the complete works of Shakespeare in the form of friction ridges on my fingers. So I had Shakespeare on my fingertips, literally. It was an ideal topic for the dinner table, not to mention a fail-proof conversation-starter with strangers on buses and blind dates. Here’s a typical sample:
– I have Shakespeare on my fingertips.
– Really?
– Yes, literally.
– I see.
At this point I’d offer my loupe to the woman – I never tried it with men – and she would, with an ‘okay, let me humour this weirdo’ expression, take it from me and scan the finger I held up for her: ‘And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas, / Olympus-high, and duck again as low / As hell’s from heaven! If it were now to die, / ’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear / My soul hath her content so absolute / That not another comfort like to this / Succeeds in unknown fate.’ Othello usually does the trick. If the way to a chick’s heart is through Shakespeare, Othello is the Autobahn.
On top of the Notre Dame, you could take a selfie with either the Eiffel Tower or the Sacre Coeur in the background. I hired a French homosexual to take all my selfies for me as I didn’t want to be distracted from my absorption in the experience of Paris by the necessity of having to pictorially document my absorption in the experience of Paris. My homosexual photographer took selfies for tourists only as a hobby, mostly over the weekend, and the French have a notoriously long weekend. His day job was to check on people’s houses after they’d left. He had about forty clients, most of them OCD-sufferers, but also normal healthy individuals. They would tap his name on their cell phone. He’d get a text, which meant he had to go to their home and check whatever they wanted checked. He got paid either on a per-visit basis or had a monthly or quarterly retainership, during which he would do a daily check irrespective of whether or not they summoned him – but the costs were proportionately higher.
More than 50 per cent were anxious about not having locked the main door. Next came the ones who couldn’t remember if they’d turned the gas off, and then the ones who obsessed about the taps, the oven, the heater and so on. I asked how often it happened that a client had actually left his door unlocked or gas on or whatever. He said one in maybe 500 visits.
TRIPLICANE TO TARAMANI
The year is 1996. Or maybe it’s 2036. There’s no way to tell because there is no sky. No clouds in the no-sky. No words either. Nor sounds. No trees. No dogs. No cars. No travellers in the buses that aren’t there. No roads. Nowhere to walk on the roads that aren’t there. No air. No lungs to breathe the air that isn’t there. Yet Partha walks. He walks the city with no names and no streets and no people. He is the only one walking. His eyes the sole proprietor of all the tears in the city. His head the retailer of all the thoughts in the city. His heart the warehouse for all the pain in the city. The city of Madras lives in five words: Partha loves. She loves not. Or you could say: She lives. Partha does not.
She is a poor translation of ‘awa’. ‘Who-she’ would be a poorer translation of ‘yeva-awa’. But for Partha, the key of his being, like the soul of the monster in a Jataka tale, was lost in the folds of the signifier ‘awa’.
It happened like this. One day Partha had gone to see a play. The play was Antigone. It was at a little theatre on a little lane off College Road. Between WCC and Alliance Française. The entrance was next to a dusty banyan tree whose roots split the sidewalk and tripped people. It was the first time Partha was in the vicinity of a play he himself was not acting in. Antigone was She.
I know this is where I describe She’s physical appearance, her family background, her beauty, her whateveritis that makes Partha whatever he would never become forever. But we shall skip that part, if you don’t mind. In any case, she is a composite, as is typically the case. And what she was – in herself, for herself – had as little to do with what she was for her lover as it had to do with what she was for her liver. Or for Partha. Which does not mean that the two are not related. If you live in Besant Nagar or Adyar, you know this already.
After the play, Partha saw her smoking. Not smoking exactly but holding a cigarette. It was the pose, the style, something about the way of being suggested by the relationship between the cigarette and her fingers. Or maybe it was the way the cigarette regarded itself as it smoked. The angle it formed with her wrist, the red tip pointing away from her and, it seemed to him, toward a secret meaning that only he could access. A Gold Flake it was. The smell transported him to a vision of coconut palms swaying in a tropical island bubble-wrapped in a sepia-tinted time of long ago. On the island’s palm-fringed beach a supple form in a hammock lay, humming a melody from his childhood. Immersed in the voice, bathing in its soporific sweetness, he lay on the sand, watching the waves and chewing a twig.
As She brought the cigarette to her lips, the smoke shifted in a lazy haze, a nebulous mass lumbering toward the thick black curls that bracketed her cheeks like spiral staircases. He saw that She was the only possible frame for the portrait of his life. This was not something he realized but a truth that was conveyed to him. What he did realize, when somebody slapped him on the back, was that he’d been holding his breath.
She, Partha found out, was an Ethiraj girl. And because this fiction is based on a true story, may I request you, discerning reader, to chip in with the clichés we live by?
The clichés filled in by you may be summarized as follows: Partha finds that she has a romantically accredited male companion. Male companion holds several advantages of a material nature that our protagonist realizes, or believes, signify joy to She and which significations he shall never be able to either match or surpass. Rather than dedicate himself to acquiring those advantages so as to make of himself a more worthy option for She, Partha decides, brilliantly, that the best way to hang on to his object of desire is to forfeit it in perpetuity. This happens one Wednesday night at 10.17 when he’s crossing the Barber’s Bridge on the Cooum perched on the third step of the 27J footboard. The stench was of a nature and potency as to induce anyone to embrace the other world. The Central Committee of Insurgent Desire which voted on all the major life decisions for Partha was no exception. It unanimously took the decision for him to trade his material-human love for a love that was spiritual-transcendental, forever beyond the reach of the Cooum of material satisfaction.
In his sleep that night Partha assumed the signifier he would become for the rest of his life for the rest of his friends. Years before he would settle down and start a family and take his last breath – all near the Thousand Lights mosque – he became Thousand Lights Parthasarathi.
Partha’s body doesn’t remain idle. It continues to digest food and produce waste matter. New cells are born every day, including spermatozoon. The beard now manifest on his bony face is nothing if not new cells, freshly dead. He makes a difference to the barber in Choolaimedu whose predictions about the next Tamil starlet to commit suicide he misses, sometimes.
The girl who stood behind him in the water lorry queue ate him with her eyes every evening. She worked her silver anklets to make him turn. She glared at the back of his head. One cantankerous night she even spilled water – accidentally, of course – on his feet. But Partha’s hatred of the communal water-collection experience was such that his eyes were pre-emptively shut to the possibility of a soul mate lurking nearby, behind an
orange bucket.
His laughter too wet to combust, Partha carries it in his mouth. It protrudes through his lips like Sherlock’s pipe. Somewhere in his right elbow, ten-millionth of a kilometre under the skin, at precisely ten ’o clock every morning, a thousand atoms of Sodium fuck a thousand atoms of Chlorine.
One afternoon, on his walk from the American Center to the British Council, Partha stops at a roadside palmist on Anna Salai. The palmist has the head of Thiruvalluvar, the body of Mahatma Gandhi and the tail of an armadillo. Partha squats, extends his hands. The palmist strokes his white, nest-like beard and peers at Partha’s right hand for so long he makes the life line uncomfortable. It wriggles and shudders and merges with the heart line which shivers and trembles and twines itself with the head line which squirms and staggers and trips the elaborate treillage holding his future together. In the resulting short-circuit, the whole of Madras burns down. Partha is the sole survivor.
Is this likely? Does it violate the principle of verisimilitude, that a seventeen-year-old boy could cause an entire city to go down in flames?
As a four-year-old, Partha used to walk 800 metres to his school every day. His school was called Little Flower School. For little flowers like himself. Located near the Ashok Pillar in a place called Ashok Nagar. The Ashok in question had died thousands of years ago. He was an emperor and a Buddhist who became a peace activist after killing thousands of people. Or so Partha learnt in school as he grew older and wasn’t a little flower anymore.
Partha was born in a government hospital in Triplicane where his mother had eggplant curry for lunch every single day of her hospitalization until he was born. That is the reason, Partha realized, he hated eggplant for no fault of its.