The English Vice

Minutes before he’d started throwing up over the fabulous Persian carpet in his Manhattan penthouse, my banker-friend K. had promised to take to exercise and clean living in 2009. I’d marvelled at his low cunning—the ability, even when blind drunk, find the words needed to contain his khoti’s righteous morning-after wrath.

It was with some surprise, therefore, that I heard the Bitch-in-Chief, as he fondly calls her, bragging that she’d got him to deliver on his word. B-in-C had the smug air of a woman who has finally beaten a good man into submission. I knew better. Based on the certain knowledge that K. wouldn’t work up sweat on account of anything other than a platoon of naked Uzbek Houris, I asked the B-in-C for his the address of his “gym”—and off I went.

Miss Victoria wasn’t Uzbek—but the minute I laid eyes on her, it was clear just why K. was there. Beautiful, blonde and blessed with a body built for Oriental Contortions no Uzbek Houri could ever have imagined, Miss Victoria cooed in delight at the prospect of having a fine gentleman as myself “exercise” at her establishment. Having relieved me of my credit cards, she signed me in—and swung open the doors to Paradise.

What I saw froze my blood, and shrank my killi to the size of a pea. K., trussed up in a black leather gimp suit, was performing push ups. Each time he failed to drag himself off the floor, one of Miss Victoria’s stunning assistants would, with a languid flick of her arm, horse whip him within an inch of his life. All around, there were men screaming with pain—or was it pleasure? “I ache for the brush of her lips”, K. said, with the helpless air of a man who has crossed the frontiers of all reason, “but I ache for the crack of her whip”.

For the first time, I looked at the name on the registration form Miss Victoria had handed me: Slavercise.

Now, it isn’t as the idea of tying up people and whipping them is alien to my watan. My dear friend, the Maharani of B., took no small small pleasure from flogging the peasants at last year’s mango-harvest time, when the uppity so-and-sos demanded money, will you believe it, to pluck the fruit.

And there’s Muharram, of course. Back in the Pind, they take the whipping stuff seriously. The flagellants would march down the street to the Masjid, each determined to demonstrate their neighbourhood’s abiding grief about the unfortunate events of 680, A.D.

Ya Ali! Ya Husain!, they would rhythmically cry.
Ya Ali, Ya Husain
Jor Sey Kutto Behan Dey Lodon [Hit harder, you sister-fuckers], the flogger-in-chief would shout out periodically, to the shirkers
Ya Ali, Ya Husain
etc. you get the idea.

At first, I thought the existence of Slavercise was a symptom of the Protestant distaste for sloth which runs through Jesustan—a distaste which manifests itself in a veneration of exercise, cold showers and outdoor discomfort that is just as unhealthy as the fat-fetishism I have earlier written on. But on closer inquiry, it turned out that this was a facile analysis.

In my watan, the infliction of pain is what god intended it to be: an instrument of punishment; a means of control. Its experience, be it in the mango orchards or at Muharram, is merely a dress-rehearsal for the larger agony we call life. In Jesustan, though, pain is a choice—an aesthetic of profound spiritual significance.

From Piety to Pornography
We desis have long known that White Master enjoys a strange relationship with the whip: its not for naught, after all, that the urchins on Janpath run after goras with enormous leather hunters in their hands.

Like all good stories, the story of White Master’s and the whip begins a long, long time ago. During the tenth century, historians tell us, flagellation was as core a part of monastic practice as prayer. Indeed, psalms and prayers were often recited as monks and nuns were flogged.

Processions of flagellants also travelled Europe for periods of thirty-three days, enacting the years of Christ’s life. Prophecies of the coming apocalypse were in vogue then, as they are now; the flagellants hoped to reduce their time in Purgatory and to ward off ailments like the plague.

Through whipping the body, one attacked the home of the devil, and thus drove out Lucificer—to the delight of god, the angels, and any deviants who happened to be watching. From various thirteenth century accounts, we learn that the flagellant was often naked, in a ritual remembrance of Adam and Eve in the state of nature. As such, flagellation was a means atoning for Original Sin, and of seeking the intercession of the Virgin through sharing in the pain of Christ’s Passion.

From around the fifteenth century, though, flagellation began into fall out of fashion—in no small part because the Spanish Inquisition deemed the practice heretical and began executing its practitioners. Flagellation was thus driven underground. But this pious act was kept alive by underground orders of gynopygian clerics, mainly Jesuit, who saw it as an essential tool for exorcisms.

Two hundred years later, whipping would have a magnificent revival in that glorious media for society’s most secret secrets—pornography. Much of this revival was inspired by the famous scandal of Catherine Cadiére. In September, 1731, Cadiére was sentenced to death for witchcraft—and then released, to public applause, a month later. Cadiére’s health had been ruined by the plague of 1728, and she began to suffer from what she believed to be possession by the devil. The Jesuit priest Jean-Baptiste Girard, whom she met in 1728, undertook to deliver her from evil—using a whip and his penis. He was later investigated for abuse. In an effort to protect the church in general and the Jesuits in particular, though, Cadiére was tried as a witch.

Divine ecstasy and profane ecstasy—the spiritual experience and the orgasm—were shown to be intimately entwined in the course of this revival. Pornographers of the eighteenth century added the whip to the iconography of the nymphomaniac nun and the debauched Priest—all well known, the English-medium types among you will know, from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer onwards—thus tying together pleasure and desire with pain and punishment. It was, it takes little to see, a uniquely Christian pornography. In popular imagination, the Marquis de Sade is seen as a libertine; his sexuality was, in fact, that of a Christian ascetic.

The English Vice
It was among the Angrez, though, that the tender art of flagellation reached its finest flowering.

In his 2007 work, In Praise of the Whip, Niklaus Largier notes that the widespread upper class embrace of whipping made England the “homeland of flagellant tendencies”. He notes that brothels in continental Europe labelled their flagellation services an “English education”. Flagellation was, the historian Ian Gibson noted in his 1978 classic on sex, shame and beatings in Victorian England, “The English Vice”.

Unique to British flagellation was its very public practice: this was not practice secreted away in the brothel. The author Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote at great length of his fond memories of being whipped at Eton. Eighteenth century English doctors recommended whipping as a therapeutic instrument to treat melancholy, epilepsy, mania, and increase blood flow—which it indisputably does. Whipping, Largier reminds us, was also recommended in nineteenth-century martial guides as an instrument of conjugal intimacy: six of the best, it was widely held, was just what was needed to get the Khoti all hot and sweaty.

Gibson, in the noble cause of seeking to end corporal punishment in British schools, railed against flagellation, arguing in White Master’s whip fetish “as with all sexual perversions, we are dealing with a form of arrested development, with a prephallic fixation that puberty and subsequent experience have been unable to dislodge”.

But is it? Its entirely possible, for example, to argue that many normal heterosexual marriages far exceeded in their pain that so far inflicted by the most hard-wielded whip. Yet, no one characterises marriage as a prephallic fixation.

Khair, we often see whips-and-leather masochism as a furtive activity, hidden away in sordid brothels. In Jesustan, though, it is increasingly occupying its rightful place, sanctioned by history and culture. Slavercise isn’t the only service offering the sweet touch of the whip to enhance your workout; establishments like Stiletto Heel Workout offer competing services. There are clubs and associations like flagellants; one site even offers them the opportunity to put up happy photographs of their holiday flogging experiences.

In Jesustan, it is clear, the pursuit of pain is taken as seriously as the pursuit of happiness (or what passes for it). We have much to learn from White Master in this, as in other things.

All about child sex

“He laughed uproariously when his nanny wagged his cock with her fingers”, wrote the physician Jean Hérouard in his chronicle of the Emperor Louis XIII’s childhood. It was an amusing trick the child seemed to enjoy. Later, Hérouard—physician to Louis’s parents, Henry IV and Marie de Medici—noted that the Emperor-to-be “in high spirits made everybody kiss his cock”.

It is near impossible to be blasé while encountering Louis’ highly sexualised childhood—so ably documented by the social historian Philippe Ariès in 1965. In our world, the conduct of Louis’ caregivers would constitute child abuse, plain and simple. Even someone like me, who can think of few more pleasant ways to pass the time than having a French nanny in a nikki-nikki skirt kissing my killi, has to admit that the thought of her doing so to a three year old is profoundly disturbing.

Part of this has, of course, come about because of a recognition of the scale—and damage—inflicted by child abuse across the world. But part of our loathing for the conflation of the words ‘sex’ and ‘children’ is also historically conditioned. Ever since the nineteenth century, childhood has been reinvented as a space segregated from the adult world by a wall of innocence. In the centuries that have passed since 1604, when Louis was three years old, we have built a culture that sundered childhood from sexuality, Sigmund Freud’s best efforts notwithstanding.

But now, the young of Jesustan are fighting back. With the grim determination of a generation determined to set right a great historical wrong, they are shagging on the beaches, in the mountains, in school toilets, and on their parents brand-new leather sofa-sets. Late last year, Louisiana teenager Brittany Phillips even stabbed her 35 year old boyfriend because he just wouldn't give it to her. Fortunately for middle-aged men, about half of Jesustan’s children will have managed to get laid before they receive a high-school diploma.

To my mind, all is well and as it should be—after all, Dada-ji and Dadi-ji were rolling about in their parent-funded, Pandit-sanctioned manji at the age of fourteen (not always sanctioned; there was the time Nani-ji had a fling with a Pathan dry-fruit seller, which I'm told left idli-dough all over the kitchen walls, but khair, I digress).

Most people in Jesustan, though, don’t agree. Back in April, the situation alarmed President-elect Barack Obama—who will replace Beloved Leader later this year—enough to talk about addressing the problem through a “focus on abstinence, where we are teaching the sacredness of sexuality to our children”.

I’m not sure what he meant by the sacredness of sexuality—personally, I like it as profane as possible, although I must try to do it to plainsong or Vedic chants one of these days—but I suspect the phrase suggests Beloved Leader’s long shadow will be upon us for some time yet.

Back in 1996, Jesustan’s national panchayat authorised an abstinence-only programme to combat teenage pregnancies—a programme that, instead of handing out birth-control pills or just splaying the brats, put up $ 50 million a year for promoting Virginity Pledges (last year, it was up to $ 204 million).

It all began in 1993, when the Southern Baptist Church—beloved of Beloved Leader, and beloved, evidently, of Barack—set up an organisation called True Love Waits. “True Love Waits”, its website states, “encourages moral purity by adhering to biblical principles. This youth-based international campaign utilizes positive peer pressure by encouraging those who make a commitment to refrain from pre-marital sex to challenge their peers to do the same”. By signing its Virginity Pledge, adherents promise to live “with sails raised for revival”—as opposed, presumably, with their penises rampant.

Variants on the Virginity Pledge flourished, all subsidised by public money. For example, an organisation called the Silver Ring Thing issues—no, you dirty-minded bastards, not that—silver rings with Biblical exhortations urging teenagers not to dip their wick in the first available chick. Silver Ring Thing also holds classes explaining “how God can help young people overcome temptation in their daily lives, how to support one another and what to do when tempted to give into sexual pressure”. Sic., I should add, it is pressure: not pleasure.

Last year, though, a study by the Johns Hopkins University demonstrated what any idiot could have told Congress: that you just can’t trump teenage lust. Teenagers who pledged to avoid sex until marriage were as likely to have intercourse as other U.S. adolescents, the survey found. In fact, kids who took the pledge also were less likely to use birth control pills or condoms than those making no promise. Fifty-three percent of the teens in the pledge group said they had engaged in premarital sex compared with 57 percent of those who hadn’t taken the pledge. Eighty two percent percent of those who had taken the oath simply denied five years later that they had ever done so. “The results suggest that the virginity pledge does not change sexual behavior,” wrote author Janet Rosenbaum, just in case anyone had missed the point.

But what is in fact driving teenage sex in the United States? Here, the tale takes a twist

Not long ago, Time broke news of a “pregnancy pact” made by teenage girls at a school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which led to seventeen students—most aged younger than sixteen—ending up expecting babies. Investigators found that the girls had decided to have children together, both in an effort to deflect adult opprobrium—and, evidently, to give their unbearably boring lives some meaning. “Some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were”, Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan told the magazine.

Teenage pregnancies have been rising across Jesustan after having declined from 1991 to 2005. It isn’t just the young and careless who are ending up getting pregnant. Pop star Britney Spears’ sister, Jamie Lynn—star of Nicklodeon’s popular show, Zoey 101—gave birth to a child when she was just seventeen. The hit movie Juno, vested teenage pregnancies with a certain social cachet, as did Knocked Up, a comedy about one-night stands.

What is remarkable, of course, is the Protestant seriousness of purpose with which Jesustan’s children engage in sex: cocks are for procreation, not for play (like for their great-grandmothers but not for Louis’ nurse). Part of this protestant ethic, of course, is deep rooted in Jesustan’s culture: it is not for naught, after all that, that penises are referred to as ‘tools’, women are ‘nailed’, or that this land’s pornography revolves around sex on office tables, doctors’ clinics and farmyards. Even this rebellion, thus, is suffused by the neurosis of the culture which it opposes.

Now, its not my case that having your killi kissed at a tender age liberates you of the sexual neurosis which Mom—or Mummy-ji—inflicted upon you. Louis, notably, grew up ill at ease with women. His married a Spanish princess—who, oddly enough, was known as Anne of Austria—in November, 1715. But their wedding night was a disaster; Louis’ killi thereafter didn’t get anywhere near Anne of Austria until 1619. “He thereafter occasionally managed to sleep with the Queen”, one historian has recorded, “but only from a sense of duty”. (of course, this is true of all married people; the one percent who claim otherwise lie).

My point is only that taboos transform through time—and that what we are seeing compels us to examine the robustness of the rules we have grown up with. The English-medium tabka amongst you will, doubtless, recall the story of the rape of Ganymede, where Zeus abducted the so-named young boy and carried him up to Mount Olympus to be his eternal lover. In the original Greek myth, it needs to be noted, the term “rape” is used in a clinical, value-neutral sense. Everyone concerned was happy at the turn of events—Zeus, of course; Ganymede, too (and even Ganymede’s father, who was for some reason delighted at the thought of his first-born being buggered senseless on them yonder mountains).

For centuries, the myth of Ganymede was a centrepiece of ancient Greece’s well-documented culture of pederasty. On the island of Crete, the historian Ephorus tells us, men would ritually kidnap young men, and take them into the countryside for two months of feasting and fucking. The boys’ families would pretend to resist the abduction but the few that actually did so were scorned. A family that protected its sons was “extremely shameful”, Ephorus explains, “since in effect they are publicly admitting that the boy is unworthy to get such a lover”.

Unless you live in Kandahar or Peshawar, though, it is no longer cool to shag little boys. And unless you live in Jesustan, you will likely get expelled from school if you are caught at it in Class IX B. Since I do not shag little boys, and—alack!— Class IX B is just a frayed memory, I have no issues with either rule. But I do remember wishing Mrs. S., the Sanskrit teacher, would play with my penis. Perhaps it would be pleasant to have a world where that was at least possible.

White Master and His Baubles

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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.

Begums Built For Comfort (But Not For Speed)

M. STAGGERED through my front door, his belly heaving through the gaps in his shirt-front where the buttons had been ripped off.

“Jannatein ladkhadaaein”, he said, reaching for the bottle of Glen Garioch, 1958, I keep for such occasions, filled of course with watered-down turpentine, “the heavens thundered”.

It took me a moment to work out just what he meant. My cryptanalytic skills are, like my powers of deduction, legendary, but it was past two in the morning and the doorbell was still ringing inside my head.

Wisely, I’d taken my time before opening the door. First, in my sleep-induced haze, I’d imagined that the Pathans were at the gates and then that it might be local Habshis in search of my loot. But as I thought through the situation carefully, I realised the Habshis would have kicked the door in instead of ringing the bell and Pathans don’t know what door bells are. And so, putting away the fine assault rifle I’ve taken to stowing under my bed, I opened the door—only to be confronted by the sight of a drunk, sweating Punjabi low-life Lala from Hoshiarpur which, as you will understand, is far more frightening than any Afghan or habshi could possibly be.

Khair, the salient fact was this: after many, many, many years, M.’s penis had been put to work for purposes other than making pee-pee.

Despite the abundance of fuddi in Jesustan, M.’s pursuit of happiness had run into an aesthetic problem. He felt that there is too much haddi on the local kababs and not enough charbi. He would turn away with a shudder when those hoor-like undergraduates jogged by the Ravi Kabab House, clad only in very very nikki chaddian—the very sight which thousands of illegal immigrants from sadda wattan risk their lives to witness, crossing borders stowed away inside container-trucks.

“Built for speed”, he would mutter, “not for comfort”.

Last week, someone put M. out of his misery by pointing him in the direction of a preparatory workshop for the upcoming Los Angeles convention of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. NAAFA believes that the drive to get fat people to shed kilograms, so pervasive in Jesustan, is the outcome of a weight-loss industry conspiracy. In NAAFA’s view, although “95-98% of diets fail over three years, our thin-obsessed society continues to believe that fat people are at fault for their size”.

NAAFA’s convention draws lots of men who like King-Size women, not all of them from Hoshiarpur. Some, like M., just like banging fat Begums—and at the convention, there are plenty in search of men who like to be cosseted in lard, reliving that primal memory of being smothered by their Mummy-ji’s mammas. Others have more complex motives. The convention attracts numbers of Feeders—men who, like Punjabi Mummy-jis, find pleasure feeding their loved ones enormous amounts of food while at once ensuring they remains immobile in bed to avoid burning any more calories than are absolutely necessary.

Every Feeder aspires to get his creations into the 900 Club, which celebrates the world’s fattest people. Carol Yager, who made it to the infamous Jerry Springer Show, weighed an astounding 725 kilograms at the time of her death in 1994. Roselie Bradford of Sellersville measured eight feet wide at her peak, and took up two reinforced king-size beds. When she fell out of bed, rescue workers used an inflatable cushion designed to right overturned cars to get her back into place. Her breasts, if they could be called that, measured over 2.5 meters—which, if word had got around in Punjab, would have brought her thousands of suitors—and her hips carried 90 kilogram bags that hung down her thighs as far as her knees.

Now, it did strike me that this could indeed be a brilliant strategic manoeuvre that even Moriarty would have been hard pressed to come up with—you know, “here darling, have another tub of ice-cream”, and off you go to frolic with the undergraduates while the Head Bitch poisons herself quietly; there’s no kerosene or nylon sari purchase to give away the game.

However, it turns out some folk are genuinely turned on by fat, witness the success of Dimensions magazine. And, of course, the harkatein of M.

In Jesustan, the natives have odd attitudes to fat. You cannot make derogatory remarks about women and the lower race, even Bengalis. You may not praise bride-burning or pederasty. So suffused are the Jesustanis in political correctness that if a leper sat next to them on a train, I suspect they would choke down their nausea and, from sheer shame, stay put.

But there are two sets of people it is safe to mock: the poor and the fat, who in Jesustan, unlike at home, are much of a safeness. Being fat is almost a crime—a crime against a society that valorises the Protestant ethic around which Jesustan is built. If some people in the Mississippi House has its way, the fat will soon be exactly like lepers, shunned by society. In February, Representative W.T. Mayhall, Jr., introduced House Bill 282, which seeks to prohibit restaurants from serving people who are determined to be obese by standards set forth by the Department of Health. Others have demanded that the fat be barred from squeezing themselves into economy-class airline seats; still others that the obese be denied public health services.

All this is a long, long way from home, where the non-English-medium tabka are still proud of the lard that coats their bellies, cardiac risk be damned. In the Pacific Islands, where more people are clinically obese than in any other part of the world, vigorous efforts to stamp out obesity have come to naught. Fat was always considered beautiful in the Islands: a nineteenth century visitor noted that Nauruans “admired big, fat people and put girls on a diet to fatten them and so make them more attractive”. Post second world war canned-food imports made it possible for more people to go on such special diets than ever before. In Mauritania, they even have special fat-farms, where the Moor Arab population employs instructors plumps up prospective bribes and bring them up to the standards of rotundity that are considered desirable.

Fucking Fat or Fucking Thin has been—and ought to be—a simple aesthetic choice. Like everything else in Jesustan, though, it has become a fraught moral and ideological issue.

Up The Tailpipe: A Meditation on Flatulence, Civilisation and the Anal Orifice

THIS November gone by, a Sunderland man stuck a Black Cat Thunderbolt rocket up his tailpipe and, apparently apropos of nothing, set it alight.

“Fuzzy mobile phone footage,” I have it on the authority of no less than USA Today, “shows a blinding white flash and the group of spectators laughing.” “The man, whose injuries include a scorched colon, is still in hospital,” the newspaper reported.

Ejecting bubbling, hissing shards of undigested mirchi ka salan from my innards, as I have been compelled to spend this morning doing, I know just what the Black Cat Thunderbolt must have felt like. I am not laughing. I am contemplating, instead, our civilizational attitudes to flatulence and the anal orifice.


I.
IN my beloved watan, it is considered acceptable to fart as loudly and often as you might wish. Sticking things up your tailpipe, though is deemed a crime, even though nine out of ten desi men are closet bundus.

By contrast, in Jesustan, you may stick almost anything you like up your tailpipe – as the story of the Black Cat Rocket demonstrates. To expel hot air through the anal orifice, though, is to cross the limits all decency.

Consider this passage from Mark Twain’s Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors:

“… ye blody bucanier had got his wind again, and did turn his mind to farting with such villain zeal that presently I was like to choke once more. God damn this windy ruffian and all his breed. I wolde that hell mighte get him.”

Now, I know plenty of Desi women who wolde that hell mighte get him. For the most part, though, their ire has to do with their husbands’ drunken demands to stick things up their tailpipe – not flatulence. In the Jesustani imagination, however, flatulence is almost akin in its horror to paedophilia. It is a perversion so horrific that it may not even be named.

An excessive assessment? Miss Manners, that great chronicler of Jesustan’s mores, tells us that there are Acceptable Noises “such as burping or the sounds accompanying choking, to which the response should come from the noisemaker himself. Society acknowledges that these noises are made from time to time, but does not dignify them with a response. The offender says ‘Excuse me,’ and the subject is considered closed.”

Not so for the Unacceptable Noises. Miss Manners mandates, chillingly, that these “be acknowledged by neither the noisemaker nor the noise recipient, because socially they do not exist.”

II.
MISS Manners' insistence on Omerta has ancient roots in the western tradition. Concerned that Rome’s citizens were poisoning themselves by retaining flatus, the chronicler Suetonius records in The Lives of the Twelve Ceasars, that the Emperor Claudius was compelled to pass a law legalising farting at banquets.

Perhaps the Romans’ deep fear of farting had its origins in Semitic rage against the body. Flavius Josephus reports in The Wars of the Jews that a Roman soldier raised his clothes and farted at the Feast of Unleavened Bread. This profane act so enraged the Jews that it caused a riot in which many thousands were killed.

“Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta,” reads the last line of The Inferno, Chapter XXI: “and he made a trumpet of his buttocks.” For Dante, flatulence denoted a demoniac condition. Similarly, in St. Augustine’s The City of God Against the Pagans, farting was closely intertwined with heresy. Augustine takes jaundiced note of men who “have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at will, so as to produce the effect of singing.”

Farting in fact occupied an honoured role in some cultures at the margins of western civilisation. Irish professional farters, known as braigetori, found mention with other performers and musicians in the 12th century Tech Midchúarda, a diagram of the banqueting hall of Tara. As entertainers, these Flatulists ranked at the lower end of a scale headed by bards.

In the late nineteenth century, Jesustan saw a brief rebellion against the shame-system that had stamped out Fart-Art. While still a child, Frenchman Joseph Pujol discovered that he could suck up water through his arse and then squirt it out several feet. Not surprisingly, Pujol’s comrades-in-arms in the French army found this an entertaining spectacle. He became a part of Moulin Rouge in 1892.

Pujol’s most-applauded act included playing a flute through a rubber tube stuck up his anus, and fart-effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms. He could also blow out a candle from several yards away. Between 1894 and 1904, Pujol refined his act, adding a wide array of new sounds to his repertoire: the calls of farm animals, for example, or a virtuoso impression of the great San Francisco earthquake.

World War I broke Pujol’s heart. He retired from the stage in 1916, and never performed again.

III.
DESPITE many months of research, I have yet to find a Jesustani who is willing to forge art in the crucible of his shame; to transform his flatulence from biological imperative to art. it is tragic, but this probably means the end of Fart-Art: it cannot be outsourced.

My watan will never produce a Pujol, for flatulence, unlike anal penetration, occupies no great place in its imagination. You will never find fart-toys retailing in Lajpat Nagar market, because no one will think there is anything especially funny about the sound - and because there's no call to spend good money on a gadget to produce noises that be had simply by eating nice hot mooli-parantha.

Science, though, offers some hope of freeing farting of the shame that taints it in Jesustan. In 1998, the eminent scientists Michael Zanakis and Philip Femano filed U.S. Patent application 09/088,006, for a fart-powered ballistic missile. Zenkis and Femano’s research enabled them to manufacture a “gas-fired missile and launcher assembly whose missile is composed of a soft head and a tail extending therefrom formed by a piston.”

“To operate the assembly,” the Zanakis-Femano patent application states, “the operator places the inlet tube with its valve open adjacent his anal region from which a colonic gas is discharged. The piston is then withdrawn to a degree producing a negative pressure to inhale the gas into the combustion chamber to intermix with the air therein to create a combustible mixture. The ignitor is then activated to explode the mixture in the chamber and fire the missile into space.”

Our unnamed Sunderland man may yet turn out to be a martyr.

Will Jesustan make spiritual, rather than merely utilitarian, peace with the fart? I doubt it. Both the Jesustani and the Desi, you see, have a deep need to feel shame. Although the Desi feels no shame at farting, his need for guilt is met by loathing his own sexuality. And although the Jesustani feels no shame at sticking things up his tailpipe, his craving for self-loathing is met by his proscription of flatulence.

Shame.

Here, stuck on a pearl-white toilet seat in the heart of Jesustan, with nary a plastic mug of water to cool my burning buttocks, I suddenly feel that I have never left home.

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.

Jesustan Fauj Hai Taiyyar

It is I.

I am back.

I know you missed me, but I was busy. Painfully busy.

Beloved Leader’s ceaseless campaigns to annihilate distant nations faced a stern test some months ago. Sundered cruelly from their men, abandoned to their fate, the women of Jesustan set about a hideous wailing. In the old days, it mattered little, but now what with phones and TV, the ranks threatened to abandon their posts and return home.

Aware that Caesar’s armies and Ceaser's god-ordained order has often been undone in such circumstances, even gentlemen of leisure disinclined to either altruism or vigorous physical activity (such as myself) were compelled to pitch in and do their Patriotic Duty.

Saddey mulk mein ich maujan hi maujhan, wrote the Pakistani poet, jithe vekho faujan hi faujan. Patriotic Duty, which is much the same in any land, was like that only. I cannot tell you how miserable it was: hour after hour after hour of ceaseless in-out, in-out, in-out with Memsahibs who had been reared for years on extra-large size packets of aloo chips in sour cream dip, and having all the while to listen to the strange squeaking sounds made by the springs the natives insist on nailing under their manjis

Oh, the horror, the horror. That spoiled so-and-so Joseph Conrad had no idea what the heart of darkness looks like, and this I can tell you, it most certainly isn't in Africa.

Now, though, I am free, to write (and to nurse what was once my proud manhood, but resembles nothing so much as a gajar as it is being shredded to be turned into halwa .) At the core of my new-found liberty, as with most things in Jesustan, lie technology and entrepreneurship: billions of dollars of investments in research, and thousands of the finest minds in this land, have worked in perfect harmony to set me free.

Long Island-based Create-a-Mate has come up with, well, how do I put this, means to mass-produce gajars, sort of like tractor-and-fertiliser farming versus hothouse organic production [http://www.createamate.com/default.aspx]. Create-a-Mate's new technology calls on women to persuade their lords-and-masters to stick their gajars into a something that looks a lot like a large bowl of idli-batter. Given that their lords-and-masters are, for the most part, either deviants who have always longed to stick their gajars into idli-batter, or total kaddoos who are beyond caring, this is usually not a problem.

Once the batter hardens – ideally with the lord-and-master’s gajar well out of the way by then – out pops a perfect, cast-plastic penis. Egg-like vibrating devices – which, for reasons that escape my imagination, are also available separately – are then inserted into the cast-plastic penis. Zindabad! At one fell swoop, and for just $ 79.95, vibrating eggs extra, the Jesustanis have solved what was threatening to be a debilitating social crisis.

Now all is well. No more loneliness. No more infidelity. “Call it fun, call it sexy, I call it practical,” wrote one Army wife to Create-a-Mate, “My husband is in the service and while he’s away fighting for our country, well … I’m smiling as if he were here!”

So, GI Joe can sleep well in Baghdad, secure in the knowledge that Mrs.Joe is curled up happily with her plastic gajar, contentedly turning the 99-kilo steak she had for dinner into methane as she sleeps snuggled inside the nice, warm duvet. In fact, she can even have the gajar, which comes in chocolate, mocha and vanilla flavours, for desert. I know it is made of plastic, but then so is almost anything else that is sold on the food shelves of Jesustani supermarkets.

Dushman Khabardar, Ab Jesustan Fauj Hai Taiyyar!

Gold Dust, Gastric Acid and True Love

A few days ago, or so the Associated Press claims, a 13-foot Burmese python burst after it apparently tried to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole. The snake was found with the alligator’s hindquarters protruding from its mid-section, which suggests the reptile may have clawed at the python’s stomach as it was being eaten.

To any Hindustani who is or has been married, this situation will seem familiar. Not to the Jesustani, who has been indoctrinated since birth to believe that slowly dissolving in gastric acids is a passionate, fulfilling experience.

It isn’t a coincidence, I’ve long believed, that the world’s greatest film industry grew in this greatest of lands, for the idea of Jesustan is founded on the suspension of disbelief. Among the core fantasies on which the entire edifice rests is the belief that something called True Love exists. Unlike us Hindustanis, Jesustani wage-slaves do not work endless hours merely for the loot. They toil instead for love of their people, love of their planet and love of something called self-realisation. You will never catch a Jesustani soldier admitting he signed up to feed his eleven brothers in Begusarai. He will instead insist that he did so for love of his nation, love of freedom or even love of Beloved Leader. Etcetera.

Most peculiar of all, Jesustanis marry for True Love. Not because to-be Husband-Ji wanted a fat dowry or was sick of the self-loathing caused by masturbating to fantasies about Bhabi-Ji, you see. Nor because Mummy-Jaan and Daddy-Jaan were making to-be Beast-of-Burden-Jaan’s life even more hellish than she imagined a life of servitude to a low-life halwai would be. Not because the condom didn’t work, nor because they were sick of being bitten by mosquitoes while furtively shagging in the North Delhi ridge. In other words, Jesustanis get married for no good reason at all.

The one good thing about this is that it generates a fair amount of high-grade tamasha.

In weeks to come, the United States Supreme Court, no less, will decide the fate of a minor TV star’s claim to her very rich, very stupid and very dead husband’s enormous fortune. In 1991, the senile oil tycoon J Howard Marshall II ran into Anna Nicole Smith – who used to call herself Vickie Hogan before she graced the centre-fold of Playboy magazine and starred in particularly third-rate afternoon TV shows – at a strip club in Texas. Ms. Smith was particularly down and out at the time: so down and out, in fact, that the strip club wouldn’t let her work in the evenings, before prime-time dirty old men, and had given her a slot in the afternoon instead.

We will never know, of course, just what drove J Howard Marshall II into the strip club that particular afternoon. He was, we have been told, also down and out. His wife had died, it is true, and so things were not so bad – but so had his mistress, because of a seizure she suffered while undergoing a facelift surgery. $150,000 down the tube, and nothing to show for it, and in that moment of darkness he bit. Before long, Howard Marshall II was buying Ms. Smith expensive jewellery and cars. He also paid for a pair of magnificent breasts that enabled Ms. Smith pull herself out of the strip club and on to the pages of Playboy.

By 1994, Ms. Smith had become something of a star model for products that needed endorsement by women of a certain age with breasts of a quite different age, notably Guess Jeans. What happened next? True Love, of course.

But Ms. Smith was not the only one who felt True Love for the millionaire. Marshall’s son, Pierce, was less than happy about the marriage, and even more so when his father died eight months later leaving her an enormous fortune. Various courts in Texas have held that the True Love Pierce felt for his father (who hadn’t even bothered to make a mention of the son in his autobiography) was greater than that his father felt for Ms. Smith, and therefore ordered therefore that the loot go to him. Another court in California, though, took a strong dislike for Mr. Pierce and ruled in Ms. Smith’s favour to the tune of $ 500,000,000.00 (sic.). Now, the Supreme Court, no less, will judge these claims.

Other courts have been hard at it too. Just last year, there was the case of Iryna Singerman, whose accountant husband seemed surprised to discover that the 22-year-old mail-order blonde from Ukraine had been banging a mystery millionaire who had given her a gold-coloured Mercedes. If it hadn’t been for self-delusion brought on by blind faith in True Love, the husband would have known this was precisely what accountants, bankers and other dead people ought to expect. And then there was the even sadder case of Richard Foster, a real-estate agent who was for some reason shocked to discover that his wife, having run up an $ 150,000 jewellery bill, decided that it was more fun hanging at Hollywood parties than with an ageing kaddoo.

Its rare you find anyone who sees through this True Love stuff, although my journeys through history led me to at least one Zen Master, the late Peggy Hopkins Joyce.

Born in 1893 to a small town barber in North Carolina, Joyce famously asserted that ”true love was a heavy diamond bracelet, preferably one that arrived with its price tag intact”. After one brief and disastrous marriage for love, she wed the youngest son of a wealthy Washington, D.C., family. Using the seed capital, she engineered another short-lived marriage to the millionaire James Stanley Joyce. It ended in a highly publicised, scandalous divorce, but by then the new Mrs. Joyce had made good. In the spring of 1920 alone, she spent $1 million in a single week, buying $300,000 worth of pearls, a $65,000 Russian sable coat and a $30,000 chinchilla. Three other divorces followed, punctuated by affairs with the likes of Charlie Chaplin. At 60, she entered her last marriage, this time to a bank clerk 20 years her junior: she had, by then, had her fill of travelling, in the words of one biographer, “from adventure to adventure, from country to country, and from man to man”.

I salute her: she was Queen-Ji, woman-e-awwal, chick-e-rustom, because she saw through the scam. In another world and another time, she would have been happy. “What a pity”, said Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, on hearing that the extremely rich, extremely old and extremely stupid widow of his best friend had died the previous day, “she would have been a fine catch the day before”. Thing is, even Christ suffered his agonies for the good of mankind. What's the point of being eaten alive for no reason at all?

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.

A Crime of Passion

Of this I have long been certain: Rabb, our boss in this life as in the next, is a mean-spirited accountant: a third-rate bania, who taketh away with one hand what he giveth with the other.

Consider the facts: he gave White Master an empire and a wild and perverse sex life, but in return, took away his brain. Rabb condemned the Black Man to servitude and squalor, but he gave him an enormous penis. He gave the Japanese Man untold wealth and genius, but a peanut-sized penis. The Hindustani, it is true, was given no wealth, no genius, no empire and above all, no balls, but exceptions, as we all know, just prove the rule.

And the Jesustani?

My tale begins, as do all great true stories, with an unexplained death. A man was found lying dead in the middle of a farm outside the town of Enumclaw, some 45 miles south-east of Seattle – a quiet, colorless kind of place Tamil Brahmin staff at Microsoft choose to incarcerate their brats and their beasts of burden (in English, “wives”; Punjabi, “khotis”).

Detective Bob Smith began his investigations last month. Some facts were immediately became apparent. Mr. X. was dead. And he was stark naked. Apart from these two truths, however, nothing seemed to make sense. A horse stood near the corpse, as did some cows and sheep, but there were no human footmarks leading through the slush towards it. Nor did Mr. X.’s body bear the tell-tale marks of having been shot, strangled, or repeatedly hit over the head with a Dosa-making dish (which is a common form of homicide in Seattle, the result of the wives of the aforesaid Tamil Brahmins finally flipping).

Bob Smith was even more mystified when the forensic tests run on Mr. X.’s dead body came in. It turned out his colon had ruptured, spilling pee-pee into his blood-stream. Pee-Pee, as all Hindustanis know, is meant to be chilled and drunk for health reasons, not to be spilled into the blood stream; Mr. X.’s death had been an agonizing one. The victim did not, however, have any ailment which might have led this distasteful infusion of blood with pee-pee. Massive force had been used to rupture his colon – but it was clearly impossible for any human being to have inflicted this damage.

Bob Smith was, to put it mildly, befuddled: this was clearly a case for his old friend, Sub-Inspector Banta Singh. Banta Singh started, as the Punjab Police are wont to do, by interrogating all of Microsoft’s Hindustani employees, a villainous-looking bunch if there was ever one. Within half an hour of his ministrations beginning, however, they had all confessed to the crime (lack of balls, as I have earlier noted, is a condition endemic amongst Hindustani men). It seemed that the case had again reached a dead end. At this stage, however, Banta Singh’s genius led him to consider the video-camera positioned a few meters from Mr. X.’s body.

With this brilliant act of intuition, the entire case began to unravel. Mr. X., it turned out, had positioned and turned on the video-camera a few minutes before his death, filming his last moments for posterity. Even the most hardened Seattle policemen, the kinds of have seen dozens of Dosa-dish murders, blanched at the spectacle that unfolded before them:

19:17:06 hours: Tape rolls
19:19:08 hours: Mr. X. takes off his clothes.
19:21:02 hours: Mr. X. begins to play with the horse’s penis.
19:23:14 hours: The horse’s penis acquires the size and shape, as horse’s penises are wont to do, of a fire-hose.
19:24:18 hours: Mr. X. inserts the aforesaid fire-hose into his arse [the “tailpipe maneuver”]
19:24:20 hours: Mr. X emits squeals of ecstasy. The horse looks bored.
19:24:21 hours: Mr. X dies of massive colon rupture.
19:24:23 hours: Still bored, the horse wanders off.

Yes, dear readers: Mr. X. had quite literally been fucked to death. The horse was the active partner in an act of passion; Mr. X. the happy recipients of its loving minstrations. This was a crime of passion without parallel in the annals of crimes of passion. Even worse was soon discovered. The entire farm, it turned out, was one vast house of pleasure for zoophiles, inhabited exclusively by animals of a loose moral character. In Enumclaw, the cows were not kept to give milk, nor the chickens to lay eggs or the horses to break furrows. Instead, primped and perfumed by their owner, they seductively mooed and clucked for their customers. Washington state, you see, is one of the few provinces of Jesustan in which sex with animals is not illegal, and the enterprising owner of Passion Farm ran a nation-wide enterprise which took advantage of this legal loop-hole.

What we me learn from this? The Jesustani pervert is admirably law-abiding; this much is clear. And, as I have noted before, he is courageous, only too willing to give his life for love, as Heer did for Ranjha and Romeo for Juliet. Most important, though, the strange story of Passion Farm points us in the direction of the Jesustani’s fatal flaw: he practices both vice and virtue to excess, and does not know when enough is enough.

Is the Jesustani, then, just a Sardar? I leave it to you to decide.