One sunny afternoon in Detroit...

“NEVER a dull moment,” my beloved Grand-Mummy-ji used to cluck as she attempted to detach my Pujya but exceedingly perverse Grand-Papa-ji from yet another screaming, terrified village wench, “never a dull moment.”

Last Friday, I was peaceably laying around in the winter sun at a friend’s house near Detroit, rubbing olive oil into my uncoiled python-like but (as you know) slightly battle-fatigued qilli – the thing us mard-e-awwal types do while the begums are busy with the coconut-oil-and-champi stuff. All of a sudden, the pleasant suburban quiet of Ferndale was shattered by the sound of breaking glass, followed by loud moaning and a police siren.

One of the neighbours, a runt named Richard Dotson, had it turned out broken into the local dry-cleaners. Dotson, it transpired, had been driven mad by lust – no, not by the sight of my qilli, but that of a mannequin dressed in a black-and-white French maid’s uniform and placed in the shop window. The police arrived as he was humping the mannequin, and away he was dragged to the friendly neighbourhood asylum. Of course, it is all very unsavoury; I have advised my friend, Ms. A.-ji, not to ask her Mummy-ji over for a vacation from Des until the dust settles.

It turned out the poor fellow had done this six times before over the last thirteen years , and will now more likely than not get a life sentence. To my mind, this seems quite unreasonable. In my beloved Hindustan, it is rare for the police to even inconvenience men who rape and murder children, let alone mannequins (judging by the way things are going, it won’t be long before the Prime Minister starts inviting paedophiles for dialogue on their problems as long as they promise not to bugger infants in the interim, but that’s another story)

Khair, in my beautiful watan, we don’t have the Dotson Problem. Not because our men are not sexual deviants, of course, but because our societies have been carefully designed to meet their needs in a non-judgmental, user-friendly fashion. Desi women are trained from early childhood to lie prostate in bed without twitching a finger or moving a lip, so even the most fastidious mannequin-fetishist has no need to leave home in search of gratification. Bang, bang, bang, and then the mannequin goes off and makes you chai, what more could you possibly ask for?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m as partial as the next man to French maids, especially if can’t demand you do the dishes and won’t ask to get married. But I draw the line at mannequins, not the least because it seems, well…

Unnatural?

As I pondered Dotson’s sad fate – and the tragic character of Desi marriages – I discovered that mannequin fetishism had a long and honourable history; indeed, there was much to commend it. From antiquity, philosophers have known and written of Pygmalionism, so named for Ovid’s sculptor, who fell in love with a statue. In art and in photography, Pygmalionism has been celebrated with abandon.

Sailors have long used what the French called the dame de voyage, or wife of passage, a cloth doll sewn provided on board ship to stop the staff from buggering each other senseless. The Germany Navy manufactured the first modern fuckable mannequins in the 1930s, followed in short order by the Japanese for use aboard their submarines. By the 1950s, the first commercial sex-mannequin, the alarmingly Barbie-like Bild Lilli Doll was on sale in Germany.

Nowadays, there’s a flourishing market for sex mannequins (I’m told they’re particularly popular in Japan, where there’s even a rental service for what the thimble-dicks for some inexplicable reason call ‘Dutch Wives.’) At the absolute bottom of the market, there are $ 50 inflatable vinyl dolls modelled on my Class IX English teacher Mrs. Martins. Those with a little more discernment than Mr. Martins can buy $ 200 water-filled latex sex-mannequins with hair, hands and feet.

Finally, for true aficionados, there are $8,000+ asli ghee silicone models, which can even be made to resemble real-life lust objects like Urmila Matondkar, Juliette Lewis, or even, if you’re a really sick demented freak, Mrs. Martins. Perhaps the best-known of these mannequins is Abyss Creations’ Real Doll, but a new company called CybOrgasMatrix is claiming that its product, which uses an elastic gel with a strong shape memory, as well as a pelvic thrust motor and built in eight-channel audio, is far superior.

After my horrific experiences with the memsahib fauj over the last few months, I’m going to stick with olive oil and onanism for some time to come. But who knows where I might next turn? “Everyone needs a bosom for a pillow,” sang that wonderfully-eccentric underground band Cornershop a decade ago, “mine’s on the 45.” Their ode to vinyl, I’m discovering, had more meanings than I had at first contemplated.