Pinky and the Pure Kudi

More years ago than I care to remember, my friend Parminder—Pinky to his friends—tired of the long, lonely nights he spent with only his penis for company. He decided, as even the wisest of us sometimes do in moments of madness, to get married.

But in Jesustan, as every fool knows, there are no Pure Kudis—women with immaculate, never-before-used vaginas to whose caresses a man’s first love might be entrusted. But even in saada watan, things are not what they used to be. Not every Kudi can any longer be counted on to be Pure. Just as some our own have adopted the execrable habit of wiping their bottoms with toilet paper, many Kudis have become utterly indiscriminate in who they let past the door.

A test was needed to reliably determine which Kudis were Pure, as reliably as pigs can sniff out shit.

I soon hit on a brilliant idea. When Pinky would visit the homes of the applicants who would respond to his advertisement in the Punjabi Tribune, he would be offered tea, samosas and jalebis. He would then ask for a moment along with the girl to determine her desires, and taking advantage of this time, whip out his qilli. If she knew what it was, she quite obviously wasn’t no Pure Kudi. No green card for her.

And so it happened at the first home: tea, samosas, and jalebis. And then, having taken the Kudi aside for a minute, Pinky whipped out his penis—and got a mighty slap across his face for his pains. He came out and gave me a huge hug. “She seemed like a really nice girl”, Pinky said, “if it hadn’t been for your test, I would never have realised wasn’t no Pure Kudi”.

And so it happened at the second home: tea, samosas, and jalebis. And again, having taken the Kudi aside for a minute, Pinky whipped out his penis—and again got a mighty slap across his face for his pains. And again, he came out and gave me a huge hug. “She seemed like a really nice girl”, Pinky said, “if it hadn’t been for your test, I would never have realised wasn’t no Pure Kudi”.

And so it happened at the third home. And the fourth home. And the one hundred and fifty-fourth home.

Pinky’s world had turned dark. But across the Ravi and across the Beas, beyond the marshes of Maand and the swamps of the Satluj, was one last Kudi on whom Pinky had yet to call. He arrived there with no hope in heart. But this time, when he whipped out his penis, things were different. “I’ve no idea what that is”, the Kudi said, puzzled, “perhaps it’s a toy”?

With Pure-Kudi-Beloved-Wife at his side, Pinky went to Mussoorie for their honeymoon. There, on the red satin sheets of their heart-shaped bed, laid out under the mirrored ceiling, he pulled down his pyjama to reveal once more to Beloved Wife his magnificent penis. “This is no toy, my love”, said Pinky, his chest swelling with pride, “this is a true, asli-ghiyo manly-man penis”.

“A penis”, she muttered? “No, my love, the shoemaker’s son had a penis; this is just a toy”.


ONCE I finished wiping his brains off my very nice Armani jacket, I completely forgot about poor, poor Pinky. Until last week, when Ms. P.—no relative, I assure you, of the deceased—rang the doorbell.

She was in search—surprise, surprise—of loot. Generally, I’m quite content to fork out cash to pretty young women; it is, after all, an investment. Ms. P., a good Pure Kudi who was often seen in the company of a loutish Lala who imported pressure-cookers from Karol Bagh, had never seemed like a target. But now she was asking for money, which of course changed everything. In my highly subtle, ingenious way, I asked what might be in it for me.

“Ten percent of gross”, Ms. P said, without batting an eyelid “if you get your hands off my boobs right now”.

Lala-ji, it turned out, was good to go: he’d proposed marriage with the special kind of desperation that Desi men are given to when they think they’ve found a fuckable edition of their Mummy-ji. But while Ms. P been driving him insane with desire, playing the Pure Kudi to such effect that even I had been fooled, she’d in fact been banging the proverbial cook, cleaner, driver and maali. If Lala-ji found out her vagina wasn’t in factory-packaging, there would be hell to pay: no post-divorce 50 percent of the $ 2.6 million apartment in Chicago; not even the teeniest, weeniest sliver of alimony.

Ms. P.’s progress hinged on an $ 1800 surgical procedure called revirgination—a process that, as I understand it, is not dissimilar to retreading a tire, or, more accurately, that that wonderful Desi car-mechanic technique of sticking a metal sleeve inside an exhaust pipe to make the silencer last longer. Basically, Ms. P. would walk into the doctor’s clinic a battle-fatigued slut and just two hours later emerge as virginal as Mother Mary, with a hymen to prove it

While Desis and Arabs are major source of revenue at revirgination practices across north America, the fashion is catching among Jesustan’s natives. Last year, San Antonio resident Jeanette Yarborough went public about a very special, and very painful, gift she’d decided to give her husband on his fortieth birthday—her reconstructed virginity. According to a top Canadian plastic surgery practice, “hymen restoration has become one of the most popular cosmetic surgical procedures for women in Toronto, and around the world”. Most also opt for “designer vagina” frills, like tightening up childbirth-loosened canals, or the cosmetic trimming of enlarged labia.

Marco Pelosi, a New Jersey-based plastic surgeon who performs ten hymenoplasties a month, says much of his custom comes from “affluent upper-class ladies coming in from Manhattan, getting ready for a second-honeymoon cruise or something like that. Or some women had a disappointing time the first time they were deflowered and now they have found someone special they would really like to give it up to”. He didn’t say, but should have: “found some chutiya who is willing to pay them a fuck-load of money to satisfy some perverse fantasy”.

Brown people are, predictably enough, irate about the deception that revirgination enables . A court in France recently annulled the marriage of a west Asian manwhose bride turned out to be a retread. But hymen reconstruction has also aroused the ire of the Lashkar-e-Jesus, which is terrified that science could liberate sin of its consequences. One Lashkar-e-Jesus website argues that “God’s forgiveness is founded on our willingness to admit our sin and not cover up. People who hide their sin will not prosper but those who admit their sin and leave it behind, receive God’s mercy”.

Most Jesustanis, though, claim that they are unconcerned with questions of virginity. I am sceptical about this claim, not only because people are willing to spend I have yet to hear a native father discuss his daughter’s deflowering with anything other than alarm. I’ve been to coming-out parties, graduation parties, engagement parties—but no My-Beti-Just-Fucked-The-Pimply-Gandoo-Up-The-Street Party. At campuses across the country, there are vocal "rebel virgin" movements, which claim that premarital sex is the root cause of many hideous problems—an interesting inversion the pre-seventeenth century notion that delayed sexual activity was the cause of the anaemia-related disorder chlorosis.

Immaculate hymens just as in my beloved watan, are treasured commodities. Promiscuity is a vice. Mother Mary Zindabad. Mary Magdalene Murdabad.

But just why are men, exceptionally among all species, so concerned with the insides of women’s vaginas?

For decades, shrink-types have peddled all sort of spurious theories about our virginity-privileging behaviours. Some claim it has to do with the male desire to ensure genetic propagation; others that its rooted in the notion of women as property. Still others attribute it to cultural particularities.

Bakwaas!

As every man knows but none will confess to, our craving for virgins has nothing to do with either biology or cultured. It is rooted, instead, in garden-variety fear. Its simple: if Pure Kudi hasn’t had the opportunity to take a few test drives, she has no way of knowing if she’s got a Maruti or a Ferrari. If she doesn’t know, she can’t choose. And men like it that way.

Science suggests that while virgin-seeking men might be chutiyas, they aren’t actually stupid. A study by Joan Kahn and Katherine London determined that women who were sexually active prior to their marriages had a considerably higher risk of breaking up than virgin brides (where they actually found virgin brides to populate their model, I am uncertain; I’ve yet to meet even one). Being English-medium types, Kahn and London used very large number of words to explain this phenomenon. All of them boiled down to this: if Pure Kudi drives car ‘X’, ‘Y’ and ‘Z’, she will buy the one she likes the best. Two out of three men will lose out, and we can’t have that.

For the system to work, of course, Pinky has to make sure that Pure Kudi doesn’t ever get even go window shopping. It is a brutal business, involving constant stocking up on war supplies like Burkhas, nylon saris and kerosene.

Endless fear is the price of security. But then, as Jeanette Yarborough might have said in secret, no pain, no gain.