Ways of Dying

On the day he died, my friend Dr. J’s uncle had stepped out of his village home in Kerala for a crap. He felt the warm, tender caresses of a fine morning turd beginning to slither its way out of his innards – and then he felt no more. An enormous jackfruit fell from the tree that shaded his labours, smack bang on to the top of his head. And that was that.

At the funeral, I have no doubt, they had a lot to talk about.

Bar the odd hurricane – and even Beloved Leader cannot be counted on to be incompetent all of the time – the death of a Jesustani is for the most part a placid affair. Some, to be sure, are shot dead by demented juveniles or run over by drunks, but this, in terms of its conversational value, is much the same as departing this world laid out on a hospital bed. We Hindustanis, by contrast, die deaths of infinite variety: we are splattered on the sidewalk by Blue Line buses; eaten by leopards; knocked off motorcycles by runaway pigs; murdered by criminal tribes who rob only on full moon nights and defecate over the bodies of their victims. Even our diseases – Japanese Encephalitis or Leprosy or Cerebral Tuberculosis – have wide and colourful arrays of symptoms adequate to satisfy the most jaded of mourners.

And so, to compensate for the utter lifelessness of the manner of their death, the Jesustanis are getting to work on the means used to dispose of their mortal remains.

One method which is spreading like wildfire is advertised as offering the opportunity to be reborn as a flower. A less delicate way of putting it, of course, is that your body is turned into dung. Invented by a Swedish biologist named Susanne Wiigh, who learned early in her life that the Jesustani will pay almost anything for something that is both European-designed and of no practical use whatsoever, the method in essence consists of immersing corpses in a liquid nitrogen bath. At -200 degrees centigrade, the body turns brittle. A mechanical vibrator then breaks it into a pink-beige powder, which relatives scatter amongst the shrubbery. “For me”, Ms. Wiigh told The Washington Post last year, “its really romantic. It smells good. It feels like gold”.

Which makes you wonder just what Ms. Wiigh gets up to on Lyr, the romantic island resort on which she lives.

Only cutting-edge cremations, of course, end with dear old Uncle K. being dumped amidst the dahlias to be peed on by George the Cat or Emma the Dog. In Georgia, Florida and Texas, you can for a mere matter of $ 1,950 arrange to have yourself interred in a plot of land in a manner that is completely eco-friendly. Instead of a normal coffin (which would have set you back some $ 5,650) you have your body packaged in a biodegradable container – known to desis as a cardboard box – and carted off to the nearest bit of vacant forest. It all seems fairly romantic until it gets slushy, because then the box melts away and the congealed body starts to drip into the neighbourhood aquifers. If you’re smart, of course, you’ll do the dirty in a suitably distant city and even if you can’t, well, $ 3,700 will pay for enough single malt for you not to ever have to drink water again.

Even the manifest risks of ecological burials, though, haven’t been able to stop the flood of customers lining up to be disposed off in a planet-friendly way. Some places in Canada, or so I’m told by my mostly-addled informant, are demanding that the bio-degradable casket be further encased in a concrete cave, which begs the question of why anyone would indulge in this kind of silliness in the first place. Why not just burn the damn bodies, you might ask? Well, that would be a simple, sensible answer and for that very reason tens of thousands of Jesustanis have been protesting against cremations. Despite a mass of evidence to the contrary – Mary Roach, the author of that mind-boggling masterpiece Stiff, asserts that the pollution caused by an average crematorium isn’t that different from what is emitted from a restaurant grill – protests against crematoria have been mounting across Jesustan.

Is there an alternative?

Indianapolis-based Waste Reduction Inc. has a solution: a machine that might be described as a tissue digester. It uses giant pressure cookers to execute a process known as alkaline hydrolysis, which has been shown to liquefy a 700 kilogram cow into 35 kilograms of bone remnants and 1500 litres of a solution of water, sugar and fat within eight hours. The bones can easily be turned into dust; the solution into fertiliser or soap. Unlike traditional methods used to dispose of corpses, which can leave behind the Prions which cause dangerous conditions like Mad Cow Disease, Scrapie and Chronic Wasting Disease, tissue digestion generates products which are completely sterile. Problem is, no one seems to have thought of using alkaline hydrolysis on human corpses – although there is more than a little evidence that dead people are of greater danger to the health of humankind than dead cows.

It doesn’t take much to see just how much at variance all this is with our own attitudes to the transition to the next life: we bury our dead, burn them, leave them to rot on the streets, feed them to crocodiles or, where inconvenient ex-girlfriends are involved, stick them into the nearest tandoor. All this, though, is the consequence of mere necessity. Even in those parts of des where peculiar means are used to get rid of the dead – the Tibetans, for example, grind up corpses into keema which is fed to the local vultures – it is an act of desperation, in this case a reaction to the unfortunate habit corpses have of refusing to decay at high altitudes. And so we might laugh at the Jesustanis, and mock them. In fact, the truth is that great empires have always understood the value of life and reflected that in the ways in which they handle their dead. The Egyptians embalmed bodies; the ancient Babylonians and Persians stuck them into jars of honey and wax. We can build all the nuclear bombs and long-range missiles we like, but we will never be King until someone sets up a tissue digester in Greater Kailash II and we can mournfully watch Mrs. Khanna dissolve inside it.

Field-Marshal M. and His Mummy-Ji

My darling friend Field-Marshal M., mard-e-awwal, shahenshah-e-mardangi (i.e. Real Man), has Jesustani feminists – along with those back home in des, of course – all atwitter. In a moment, I suspect, of single malt-fuelled candour, Field-Marshal M. claimed that women in des were arranging have themselves raped in order to be able to claim few million rupees in compensation loot and asylum in Canada.

Now, a lot has been said on the subject but no-one has pointed the finger of blame True North: it is all his Mummy-Ji’s fault.

How Now, I Hear You Cry! Fear Not I Shall Reply. Anon. Sabr, little ones, a few minor points of order, first.

To begin with, Field-Marshall M. isn’t right, but he will be, one of these days, if all these NGO types keep at it. As Kerala’s former Chief Minister, that good and great progressive EK Nayanar, once pointed out, women in des are raped with about the same frequency as government employees drink tea, which is all the time. If this is going to happen anyway, you may as well get something out of it. Given that life for desi women is fairly unliveable, the day isn’t far when women have themselves wheeled through Lajpat Nagar market laid out stark naked on vegetable carts, shouting ‘le lo, le lo’.

Second, Field-Marshal M., as his Mummy-Ji will tell you, didn’t mean to be insulting. His remarks reflect, rather, his legitimate resentment that every E-grade churi now has a free pass to Toronto while he, a man of such obvious merit, remains stuck in Islamabad. Its no secret that, what with large hairy Pathans setting off bombs under his buttocks ever third day, the Field-Marshal would love to escape his beloved watan. His problem is that no one will have him unless, of course, he manages to get himself raped, and even the mujahideen aren’t willing to sacrifice quite that much to enter the gates of heaven.

If Field-Marshall M. listened to me, instead of those low-life darbaris he chooses to patronise, I’d have shown him a way out. You see, Bonobo pygmy chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, use sex as a means of social bonding. Arousal isn’t the primary issue; showing gratitude is. Offer a Bonobo a banana and, as a Tanzanian friend who visited a wildlife park near Kinshasa recently found out, it will promptly offer nookie by way of thanks. All the Field-Marshall needs to do is fly to Kinshasa armed with a banana, feed the chimpanzees, and then wiggle his backside suggestively.

Making sure, of course, that there are four male witnesses to witness what will follow – and that the sounds he makes suggest pain, not pleasure.

And there’s the rub: he’ll like it, because it will be his most fevered wish come true.

You see, I’ve been thinking of late about the curious character of desi manhood. My Jesustani friend Ms. P., who is married to my Hindustani friend Mr. M (no relative of the manly-e-kaiser Field-Marshal) recently claimed that eight out of ten hetrosexual desi men are in fact closet homosexuals, and the other two out of ten are confused. I would have offered to put the theory to the test if Ms. P. wasn’t such a hideous majh, but before I could think up another means of empirically testing the proposition, her whining was seconded by a large number of mems.

Truth is, most Hindustani men never recover from being weaned. Mummy-Ji’s humongous tits are an overwhelming, life-long obsession. Try, if you don’t believe me, to refer casually to a desi man’s mother as hideous bitch, and see what happens. Soon after Munna is yanked away screaming from Mummy-Ji’s tits, he gets a pacifier in the form of a khoti. Now, the scheme sometimes falls apart at this point – vanaspati never tastes as good as asli ghee after all, and in the rare cases that it does, the asli ghee usually evicts the vanaspati, taking recourse to the time-tested two-litres-of-kerosene-and-a-nylon-sari method. Most often, though, the vanaspati reconciles itself to a second-class existence, sad but resigned to the fact that Husband-Ji hankers after ghee. Her turn, after all, will come.

Point is, when Munna gets down to putting his penis to use for purposes other than making pee-pee, he is stalked by the spectre of Mummy-Ji. His desire brings with a hideous darkness, guilt and remorse. Some desi men try and hide the scarlet stain on their soul through heavy-duty promiscuity, but this camouflage, like lipstick on a pig, hides nothing. Field-Marshal M. clearly suffers from an advanced form of Mummy-Ji fixation. Note that his mother, known to her friends as Bitch-in-Chief-Ji, tenderly reads the day’s newspapers to him each morning. Note that Mrs. M. does not. Note that Bitch-in-Chief-Ji accompanies him on long trips to New Delhi. Note that Mrs. M. stays at home and dusts the war trophies. Note that Field Marshal M. and Bitch-in-Chief-Ji have long conversations about life and the universe. Short of banging his mommy – like a demented brat in Lucknow was recently reported to have done – he couldn’t be more intimate with her.

Now, the Jesustani Mom might, like Mummy-Ji, also be demented, but her neurosis are of a very, very, very different order. Just last year, Patricia Johnson of Hermitage, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to a prison term after doing a strip-tease act for her thirteen year old son and three of his friends on the occasion of his birthday party. Apparently, the go-carts the kids had planned to take for a spin hadn’t showed up, and Ms. Johnson decided to provide alternate entertainment instead. She claimed it was all the fault of booze and pills, of course, but in vino veritas, as we all know. Point is, drip-fed on pop-psychology and easy-instalments plastic surgery, the Jesustani Mom seeks to make sex normal: to bring it out of the closet, along with the vacuum cleaner and clean sheets. Her enthusiasm for the project might be excessive, but at least it is all out there in the open.

No freedom from the closet for the Field Marshal, then. One of these days, someone is going to have to do the world a favour, and find a large hairy man willing to bugger him violently. The only other escape from Mummy-Ji, I fear, will be nuclear war.

Trivial Pursuits

If you ever happen to be passing by the inner lanes of Nizamuddin just short of dawn, you might hear a desperate, heart-rending chirping: it is the sound of chicken realizing their karmic destiny and beginning their journey towards becoming tikka.

It was with not a little nostalgia that I responded to similar saliva-inducing twittering last week, emanating from inside the forbidding walls of the Smithsonian Institution. I still had a quarter of the bottle of Napoleon VSOP with which the night had begun left, but food was not to be found for love, for money, or by begging. So I walked inside, hoping not unreasonably that some fellow desi might be preparing breakfast.. What I saw shocked me sober, which takes some doing: the sound was not of pre-tikka chicken, but of dozens of parrots in the throes of having thermometers stuck up their buttocks.

Now why on earth would anyone be doing such a thing?

I wanted to know, of course, but no one would tell me until I threatened to dial 911. Knowing full well that zoophilia is frowned on in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian’s scientists finally talked. A great epidemic, I was told, was sweeping our planet, an answer to which had eluded the best scientific minds of Jesustan for years. At the end of last year, the last known example of the Po’o-uli, a bird discovered three decades ago, died in captivity. Thirteen other species of a type of bird known as the Hawaiian honeycreeper had also become instinct. Apparently, a form of malaria transmitted by mosquitoes which had made their way to Hawaii from East Asia was responsible for the decimation of these birds.

Jesustan’s scientists, who like their fellow countrymen seem to have trouble comprehending that the appropriate place for beast, fowl and wives is inside a tandoor, wept at this great calamity. Eric VanderWerf, of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, described the loss of the Po’o-uli as a tragedy similar to the destruction of “the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel”. George Fenwick, President of American Bird Conservancy, went one further, claiming the extinction of the Po’o-uli was “a global tragedy which is being ignored”. So they coughed up a few million dollars, and brought in the world’s leading authority on avian malaria, the Fabulous Dr. F., Ph.D, to find a solution.

Dr. F was a little reticent about discussing her work with me, despite my obvious charms and the offer of what was left of the Napoleon VSOP. I do not blame her, for the task she had been handed involved a certain, well, indelicate procedure. As all Hindustanis know, the principal symptom of malaria is a fever. For the Fabulous Dr. F to test the efficacy of her remedies, she had to be able to know whether the fever of her avian patients had diminished after her minstrations. Now, it is no use telling a bird, even if it is born in Jesustan and might therefore be expected to be English-medium, to open its mouth and say ‘aaaa…’.

And so there was just one thing to do, although Dr. F. did assure me she had done her best to choose birds which actually liked having thermometers rammed up their buttocks.

To us Hindustanis, of course, this smacks of excess. Sod birds: we’re for the most part unconcerned even about children dying because of Japanese encephalitis or tuberculosis or chronic malnutrition. Apart from that depressing rag Frontline, I haven’t come anyone whinging about what is in fact euthanasia, albeit involuntary. But the Jesustani, you must understand, isn’t moved by compassion either. You’re no more likely to catch Eric VanderWerf complaining about Japanese encephalitis than most desis, nor about Beloved Leader’s unfortunate enthusiasm for bombing half the planet.

Truth is, Jesustani science has become a trivial pursuit. Try raising funding for finding a cheap, one-shot cure for tuberculosis. Or real malaria, the kind people get in the third world. On the other hand, think of some suitably bizarre project, ideally involving rocks on a distant planet, and the loot will come rolling in.

An excessive assessment?

In 2003, scientists at Paignton Zoo attempted to test what is called the infinite monkey theorem, which states that there is a miniscule probability that the text of Hamlet could be assembled at random. The logical is as follows: ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalisation, and assuming a uniform distribution of letters, a monkey has one chance in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has one chance in 676 of typing the first two letters, and one chance in 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376, of typing the first twenty. To test the math, the good scientists left a keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques for a month. As might have been predicted with no great scientific training, the beasts produced five pages consisting of little other than the letter ‘s’, in addition to which they destroyed the keyboard with a stone, and proceeded to urinate and defecate upon it.

The monkeys, I’m sure you’ll agree, had a point. Most Jesustani science, sadly, doesn’t.