Monsoon Ecstasy – V. Rao and V. Kohli.

And Lo! The Curse was broken! Monsoon made peace with the lands of Delhi! The kingdom lay drenched in its delightful marvels. The sky goldened up at its edges. And there, standing by the open window, with startled raindrops in her hair and a perky rhythm up her sleeve, she said- Oh Life!! :)
*****
She looked down from her Balcony. The city had turned into a lake. Every one was so happy despite the inconvenience of travelling in the rain. Some people wore a happy smile on their face. Other’s celebrated it as Holi–this meant that celebrations were quickly turning into a massive water-splashing, mud-slinging orgy. It was not often that people got a legitimate excuse to indulge in such a big grope-fest. Joy Oh Joy.
Meanwhile, a hippopotamus, which had waded in from a close-by river, was happily munching a bunch of floating cauliflowers–they must have belonged to some nearby vegetable vendor..
*****
It was an unusual sight. There was much activity and all seemed occupied with it. Wild animals were floating about and so were unclaimed vegetables.
The landscape was changing. From drenched it was turning to flooded.
People were stalled under asbestos sheets. Dogs barked. Cats climbed up buildings.
Her hair still held those raindrops from the window. Her eyes were gaping at the lazy Hippo. She suddenly turned away from the window.
“There’s a basket of freshly baked cookies on the Ground Floor.” She thought.
Her teeth stood clenched over a nervous fingernail.
*****
“Am I hallucinating?”, she asked herself. “Could it really be a basket of freshly baked cookies?” “After a while, she convinced herself that they were actually freshly baked cookies. (Henceforth, we use the acronym “FBC” for
“Freshly Baked Cookies–its kinda tedious to keep writing “freshly baked cookies” over and over again).
Her mouth watered at the thought of biting into the FBC. She thought of the FBC creating waves of dopamine induced ecstasy in her brain. Then the low decibel moans, the feeling of complete bliss. “FBC, here I come!”, she said aloud. She was still nervous though: after all, what if the hungry hippo also liked FBC? What if he had spotted the basket too? Would it be worth it to get into a fight with a hungry hippo over some silly FBC?
“Look, stop panicking”, she told herself a litte sternly. “That Hippo has been munching on floating cauliflowers and god-knows-what-else the whole day. He is unlikely to be hungry now. Just stay focussed on the ‘dopamine and the low decibel moans’ part, and you should be just fine.”
She made her way down via the staircase. There was no other way to get down because the elevator was out of order. But she really didn’t mind making the effort as she was rather preoccupied with her strong desire for FBC. She reached the ground floor. She spotted the basket about 20 meters away from where she was, and could hardly control her excitement as she waded towards it through the murky water.
Finally, she reached it. The basket was in her hand. She took one cookie from it and ever-so-gently, bit into it.
Oh My! Oh My Lord!!……….. O damn. They are soggy. :(
The cookies were totally ruined.
The FBC had built up so much excitement, but the end result was horribly soggy cookies – what an anticlimax. How could she have overlooked it? After all, it HAD been raining cats and dogs – the FBC were bound to be wet and soggy. Her crazy euphoria about the FBC had clouded her rational mind. Damn.
“Now what to do?”, she thought. She was still desperate about getting her hands on some fresh, tasty, and very importantly, CRUNCHY cookies.
She thought, “There is a bakery about a kilometre away. But it is very late and dark now. Plus, the city has become a lake with all that water. Even if the shop was closed, I could always break in and steal some cookies, but how would I wade so far?”. Just then, she caught sight of the Hungry Hippo. It was quite close-by. The Hippo was half submerged–only the upper body was visible. The Hippo somehow looked quite benign from that distance. It looked like it could not hurt a little fly. And she was desperate for some FBC. Heck forget fresh, even just old baked cookies (OBC) would do right now. (note: OBC not to be confused with “other backward classes”)
She then had a brainwave: she decided to approach the Hippo and then coax him into ferrying her to the Bakery. “Perhaps I’ve gone crazy, yet I have this gut feeling that this is going to work out. I can ask him if I can sit on his
back and if he can take me to the Bakery.”
So, she waded towards the Hippo. The following conversation ensues between them:
Girlie: “Ahemmmmm. Hello.”
Hippo: “Grummmmmmmmmmm” (Possible Hippo sound, with no well defined meaning – perhaps something similar to our word, “Hmm”)
Girlie: “Hey there”
Hippo: “Grummmmmmmmmmm. Myself Herbie”
Girlie was tempted to say something that a lot of boys had tried with her: “Myself Girlie. Do you want to do FRAENDSIP with me ?” But better sense prevailed, and she refrained from that. Also, she suddenly realised that she could speak Hippo Language. Crazy!!!! Maybe she could speak Hippo language for a reason. Maybe it was all destined. Maybe the meaning of her life was soon going to become clear.
Girlie: “Hi Herbie, I’m Girlie. How are you?”
Herbie: “Fine. Grummmmmmmmmmmmmm.”
Girlie: “That’s good. OK Herbie, I’ll get straight to the point. The thing this that I have been fantasising about FBC…” …
Herbie: “FBC? What the FuNK is that?”
Girlie: “Oh sorry! FBC is short for freshly baked cookies”
Herbie: “I see.” (slightly contemplative “I see” :) )
Girlie: “So the thing is that there is a shop that should have some cookies. But the shop is a little far away, and I dont think I can make my way there all alone through this water. So…. I was wondering………….Ummmm”
Herbie: “What you wondering?”
Girlie: “Umm, if you could ferry me to the bakery”
Herbie: “Look Girlie, I would like to help you, but you know I’m not exactly a taxi service. Moreover, I’m sorry to sound selfish, but what’s in it for me? I don’t like cookies.”
Girlie: “OK, but you do like cauliflowers, don’t you? I saw you devouring a whole bunch a few hours back. You seemed to be really relishing them.”
Herbie: “True. They really were quite delectable. Also they had the right aroma and crunchiness. Mmmmm.”………
Girlie: “So heres the deal. I know the city well, and I could direct you to the vegetable mart. But first, you have to take me to the bakery. What do you say?”
Herbie: “OK, but Girlie, I hope you’re not deceiving me. If you are, I might treat you like I treated those cauliflowers, and make a meal out of you. “
Girlie: “Don’t worry, Herbie. I won’t let you down”.
Herbie: “OK, lets go. Climb onto my back and lead the way”

What adventures are in store for Herbie and Girlie? And what conversations are they going to have?
Tune in soon, to another episode of “Monsoon Ecstasy”. :)

The Maharajah and the Estate Agent – By J. Watson and V. Kohli

A tale — of love, revenge, Voodoo, mysticism, and sufficiently kinky sex — set against the backdrop of the Indian IT industry.

Here’s something really fun that a friend and I have been writing. It has developed considerably, and is still a work in progress.. more sections will be added later. A glorious piece of literature for your viewing pleasure!

The Basic Plot.
The Maharaja’s daughter was back in India after completing her studies at an IVY–league college in America. Subsequently, she set up a software company in Bangalore. A rival company soon realised the threat of their new competitor. That company recruited an evil snake charmer and a libidinous sage; they worked together to hatch an insidious plot to mentally enslave the Maharaja’s daughter using voodoo, hypnosis, and a software specially developed by the rival company.
The two crooks had bigger plans though; they had set their sights on the Maharaja’s fortune…

****
The plan hatched by the evil duo could only work if a special voodoo doll and a vial of cobra venom was placed in Princess Noor’s house (Noor was the Maharaja’s daughter’s name). One day, when Noor was in office, the evil snake charmer sneaked into her house and hid a voodoo doll and the vial of venom deep inside a kitchen cupboard. He kept them behind the tuna-fish cans because, according to the ancient Indian book of Occult, the potency of evil spells increased when in the presence of fish (clearly establishing that the evil spirits and possibly also the occultists, were well aware of the benefits of Omega-3 fatty acids).
The spells began to take effect. Slowly but surely. Evil forces infiltrated every nook and cranny of the house. Gradually Princess Noor’s behavioural patterns began to change: she was less vivacious, head-strong and decisive with every passing day. The people at office could sense this change yet failed to understand why Noor had become like this.
The most concerned person was Noor’s man-friend, Zaheer. He was a Moroccan gym-instructor by profession. Tall, dark, handsome, muscular, and dashing; such adjectives however, hardly did full justice to the hunky Adonis that he was. Even staunchly heterosexual men sometimes had doubts about their sexual orientation, just by looking at Zaheer once.
Zaheer knew that something was wrong with Noor: she has never before been so pallid and submissive and utterly unresponsive to his dexterous love-making. He repeatedly asked her if something was wrong or if there was another man (or woman) in her life. He was pretty sure though that the latter would not be the case though: after all, he knew he was this awesome Moroccan mating machine. He knew that raw sexuality oozed from every known orifice of his body. Noor repeatedly denied anything was wrong with her. Then one day, Zaheer heard Noor muttering, your wish is my command, master, in her sleep. The pieces finally started to fit: Zaheer intuited that someone or something was exercising mind control over Noor. Zaheer smacked his fist into the open palm of his other hand. He had to get to the bottom of this. But how? He hadn’t a clue.
Despondent about his predicament, he turned to Ashok, who exercised at his gym and was also a friend of his.
Ashok was a good hearted and jocular guy. He was a zoologist by profession, travelling to universities all over the world to deliver lectures. Ashok’s area of expertise was on reptiles–poisonous snakes in particular.

****

Princess Noor was dreaming.
She dreamt she was swimming in a beautiful turquoise lagoon. Minnows darted around her and the sunlight played on the serene waters. Birds twittered and she felt at one with the nature all around her. She had never felt so contented in her life. She thought of her busy job running an IT company and chuckled at her own foolishness.. why waste her energy on such a craven capitalist venture? She had left all that behind now.

She leisurely swam through the water, with long, graceful strokes. All of a sudden she felt herself being sucked downwards! She gasped a lungful of air but then she was underwater and sinking! She felt the water pulling on her body, she flipped and flailed and….
waggled her flippers and flicked her tail and was swimming once more. She had turned into a dolphin! She emitted an ultrasonic signal in sheer glee, raced along, broke the surface of the water, performed an enormous summersault and dived back below the surface. How marvellous it was to be a majestic creature of the sea.
But then Princess Noor the dolphin began to feel peckish. In fact she felt a ravenous hunger grow inside of her! Tuna was what she needed…. a lovely helping of tuna-fish…

****
Zaheer and Ashok met up at the The Tavern, which was a pub close to where Ashok lived. Zaheer quickly told Ashok the story so far: Noor’s sudden change in behaviour, her listlessness, lack of carnal desire, and the wish is your command muttering in sleep. Ashok had been quietly listening quietly all this while, occasionally taking a sip of his beer.
He was a dark-skinned, fuzzy-haired, and bespectacled guy of medium height. He talked fast and with a slight south Indian accent. Ashok was the kind of guy you could turn to if you needed someone to just hear you out patiently. He was kind-hearted and sympathetic by nature, and he was a scientist, so he was good at figuring things out – exactly the kind of friend Zaheer needed right now

‘I am sorry to hear all that you’ve been going through, Zaheer’, said Ashok. ‘Don’t lose your spirits though; I am sure we will work something out. Are you sure that she isn’t just depressed, or stressed with work or undergoing trauma or things like that? You must first rule out the usual suspects – that’s how I perform my experiments in the Lab. Sometimes things go wrong, but most of the time there is a simple enough answer, that surely had been staring at me in the face all along.’

‘Look Ashok, if something was wrong with her personal or professional life, I would have been the first to know. She doesn’t hide a single thing from me.’, replied Zaheer.
Ashok looked unblinkingly at Zaheer for a few moments; then he focussed at his beer glass, rotating it slowly by holding it at the rim. He was clearly deep in thought. After doing this for about half a minute, he finally spoke.
‘We could look into another thing, Zaheer. This conversation never happened, OK?. If this came out, I would be the laughing stock of the entire scientific community’
‘You have my word, Ashok’, Zaheer said solemnly.

‘Hmm’. After a pause, he resumed, ‘Look Zaheer, I am a scientist by profession and believe in rationality and that sort of thing. But I have grown up in India and that too in a household that was very spiritually inclined. There have been things on occasions that I have seen with my own eyes; things that to this date -and not due to lack of trying- I haven’t been able to explain scientifically. This has caused me many sleepless nights: most of the times I was able to explain to my family in a reasonable way how their religious rituals and superstitions were stupid. Yet there have been about three or four occasions where I myself was flummoxed.’ Ashok took out his spectacles and with his finger wiped his brow, which by now had accumulated droplets of sweat on it. Clearly Ashok’s recapitulation had brought back some stressful things.

‘We are in India my friend; a place where even our grand science can sometimes meet its match’, he chuckled. ‘See Zaheer, the point behind this little story of mine has been to tell you that there may be supernatural elements behind this change you see in Noor. It could be a spell or Voodoo. But to make sure I will have you come and see your house. Maybe there’s a foreign object there that is making all this work.’
Zaheer suddenly was full of hope and vigour. ‘When could you come, Ashok? I really, really could do with your help on this.’
‘How about now’, said Ashok.

‘That would be awesome!! Man, I love you Ashok. You’re the best!!!’
Ashok gulped down the remaining beer, paid and thanked the congenial bartender, and then they made their way to Zaheer’s house.

****
Meanwhile, Noor’s dream had taken a bizarre turn. The sage was well aware of the Princess’s dream sequence, as he had actually been the one orchestrating the whole thing with his divine powers. Unfortunately or fortunately for Noor, our sage wasn’t very ‘pure’ in his thinking. Years of penance had given him crazy powers, yet he had never been very good at controlling his desire for kinky sex. Therefore, our libidinous sage decided to enter Noor’s dream, disguised as a alpha male dolphin..
Now this dolphin had one trump card up his sleeve that would ensure the success of his conquest over Noor- the-dolphin: an ultrasonic whistle, that drove female dolphins nuts with desire. One 5 second ultrasonic whistle by the horny sage-dolphin, and female dolphins would be making a frenzied dash for him from corners of the sea, near and far, and literally beg him to ravage them out of their aquatic and mammalian sensibilities.
But of course, Sage soon blew the whistle. Now Noor the dolphin, who was foraging for tuna, suddenly abandoned her task. She could already feel the surge of primeval feelings, rocking her like a hapless boat that was lost in a stormy sea. That a storm could feel so intense was a fact hithero unknown to her.

(Viewer discretion is advised for the succeeding paragraph)

Noor the dolphin–who as we had mentioned earlier had gone absolutely potty with ‘desire’–found the sage-dolphin ’sitting in an amorous way’ on a coral reef.

They exchanged suggestive glances.

(fast forward)

He dallied with her.

(fast forward)

His exploration of her was more precise than an atomic clock.

(fast forward)

Her exploration of him was desultory but efficacious.

(fast forward)

His flaming torch illuminated her moist cavern.

(fast forward)

His flaming torch illuminated her moist cavern.

(fast forward)
His flaming torch illuminated her moist cavern.
.
.
.
.
.
(fast forward)
Crescendo of braying sounds, miasma of bodily fluids diffusing into the water, and, salivating jellyfish who ‘happened’ to be watching the entire episode. Soon after, they were serene; both felt one, with each other as well as with the universe at large. The coral reef was a place of happiness and ebulliently fluttering butterflies (who were obviously wearing scuba diving gear, considering that we are at the bottom of the ocean)

****
As they approached Zaheer’s house, Ashok’s mind was whirling. What could Noor’s strange behaviour mean? The scientist inside him wanted to believe there was a rational explanation for it..perhaps she was just plain nuts. But he could not shake off the feeling there was something untoward about the whole business. Suddenly he felt scared. ‘Zaheer’, he whispered suddenly, ‘I think it unwise to enter the house straight away. Let us hide in this bush in your garden and stake your house out for a short while. Observation is the primary tool of science.’

‘Oh, alright’, said Zaheer, and they scuttled behind the nearest bush.

But it was quite a small bush, and the men huddled close together to fit behind it. Ashok could feel Zaheer breathing into his ear. Suddenly he felt strangely horny. But it was not an unfamiliar feeling. If he was honest, he often felt that way in the Moroccan sex machine’s presence. The truth was, he wouldn’t mind giving Zaheer one.

Ashok could feel his manhood performing summersaults inside his slightly tight underwear. And what a giddy sensation that created. Damn you Zaheer, thought Ashok, it’s hardly nice (and incidentally also ‘nicely hard’) to feel like this. Ashok wondered how Zaheer would react if he were to start stroking his thigh or stuff his tongue into Zaheer’s ear, or the any of the dozens of other erogenous activities that Vogue Magazine often recommended in their how to please her in bed sections. But would doing so mean that Zaheer would harbour hard feelings towards him (as least in his mind, if not in more physical sections of his aaahsum body? (awesome even) Also Zaheer was under a lot of stress because of Noor, so there was no telling how he would react to such advances.
Ashok oscillated between doing the prudent thing which was to control himself, and, wanting to park his throbbing missile inside some cosy niche of Zaheer’s.

Just then,a loud crashing sound came from inside the house. It shook both of them, and definitely got Ashok out of his horny state. Ultimately is was fear that proved to be Ashok’s cold shower.

To Be Continued…

An excerpt from a romance novel of the future.

The Raging Heart.- Willyum SexPeer.

The night was still young; the clear black firmament was dotted with a thousand twinkling objects. The moon was conspicuous in its absence and yet there wasn’t even a whisper of a cloud. Jane realised that it was a no-moon night, annoyed at herself that she had been a bit slow on the uptake with respect to this fact. She left the bedroom door open to allow the cool gentle breeze to waft in and watched as the curtains of the doors became pneumatic and drifted into the room with gay abandon and bounciness. Realising that Max would be here any minute, she quickly got into bed, making sure that the sheets looked naturally untidy and a bit crumpled. She then closed her eyes and proceeded to put a dreamy and blissful expression on her face.

.…..

(In the interest of brevity, we have omitted two passages and have taken the liberty of proceeding directly to the ‘meatier’ parts, which are significantly more germane to the issue of elucidating the nature and style of romance writing in the not-so-distant future)

…..

There she lay, almost naked and bashful under Max’s gaze. He surveyed her, with hunger in his heart and saliva wetting his mouth as his gaze shifted lazily from one feature to the next of her perfectly sculpted body; it had a curvaceous topography with a quality of seamlessness to it. What he was experiencing was something that could be best described by a pedestrian and aesthetically unappealing expression- he felt horny. Max soon realised with a sense of irritation that there were pressing matters to be dealt with first. This was the first time that he had come across a 128-bit encryption chastity belt. Cracking the security on this one would require luck as well as ingenuity, he thought. Jane meanwhile looked on with playful amusement at Max, who was tinkering furiously with the controls of the chastity belt and simultaneously running a decryption algorithm on his personal computer. The wearing of the contraption had been motivated by Jane’s desire to infuse an air of teasing naughtiness and novelty into something that would otherwise have been a highly predictable episode. The sense of urgency evident on his face and the eagerness with which he went about this task made her feel wanted. After about a minute or so Max let out a jubilant cry; he had succeeded in his task.

.…..

Max went about kissing her supple body with a near-surgical mastery, but his mind was not free from the doubts and questions that usually plagued him on occasions such as these. They had known each other for three months now and this was already not the first such encounter between them. Why did some people subscribe to the notion that sex was somehow a natural act of a ‘certain kind’ of love or that it was a natural progression of it? Why could these people not understand that love and the manifestations of sexual desire were two at-times-intertwined yet distinct threads? Why was not this dichotomy evident to people, who instead thought of the matter as involving a different genre of love altogether? This irrational and forced mixing of love and its manifestations with the act of sex disturbed Max greatly. He of course understood why such views were still largely prevalent in society: they were attributable to chronic ignorance, coupled with a thinking trapped within aesthetics. The latter was deep seated in the psychology of people; it would find its roots in the large scale permeation of aesthetical notions, of those things in their culture which betrayed their organism. It was the kind of thinking that was aimed at burying uncomfortable allusions to the animal, to the machine. Aesthetics would usher in a sophisticated way of being, which would establish our superiority over the brute. Max himself had often sought refuge in this structure of aesthetics; indeed all of us have done so. A lot of this structure wasn’t unacceptable to him. After all if someone was to excuse himself to use the toilet he could say so in that way, he wouldn’t need to say that he wanted to go shit himself. A girl wouldn’t have to refer to her period as ‘a time of menstruating’. Indeed in these cases there would be no need to invoke bodily and unaesthetic imagery in the mind of the listening audience since the usage of indirect terminology would suffice in making clear what was implied and there would be little or no ambiguity, and certainly no subterfuge. The terminologies pertaining to physical relations and sex however disturbed him considerably as there was definite subterfuge involved in allusions to the act, which had created rosy delusions among people. ‘Romantic love’, ‘in love’, ‘making love’, ‘lovers’, ‘physical love’; ‘love life’– each of these terms was fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies. Clearly love itself was a complex set of attributes. The mysteries of love, even after so many centuries of human history, still weren’t unlocked completely — and not because of not trying, one might add. Love was used in so many contexts, and was sometimes used to imply sensorial pleasure rather than something emotional. An instance of such usage: the statement, I love food. Such usage would only serve to cause more obfuscation as far as the understanding of love was concerned. Experience told us that love for someone (or something) would subsume experiences such as concerns for their well-being; feelings of affection towards them; the desire to see them happy; and, the feeling of happiness or joy experienced by the one that loved. But what was the one thing missing in the other loves but present in this romantic love?  Clearly the elements of physical and/or sexual desire; romantic love couldn’t exist in someones mind, or between two (or more) people, without this defining element. Naming the phenomenon romantic love was the first step in the direction of obfuscation: by calling it so, the implication was that it was a different type of love, as opposed to the truth, that it was a complex amalgamation of two fundamentally different forces — love and sexuality. How come, wondered Max, no one felt the need to allude to friends’ love of one another by the use of special or vague terminology, given of course that love actually existed between them. The answer again was to do with aesthetics. In the case of friends, the aesthetics — of purity, of the un-mechanical, of unselfish behaviour and self-sacrifice — that the emotion of love stood for, had already been attained. There was no need to use any other expression that symbolised purity or unselfishness, as this had already been established by the fact of their love for one another. But love coupled with sexual desire would change the situation drastically. Now one would have to worry about foreplay and blood-filled genitalia and secretion of body fluids and erect penises being thrust in and out of vaginas. Thus a need to borrow the aesthetic of love would become paramount, so as to not allude to such imagery; the animal, the machine, must be concealed under a beautiful veil. But that was exactly what Max had a problem with. The adherence to aesthetics must not come at the cost of subverting the truth. The eschewing of ugliness is acceptable, but what shouldn’t be acceptable is the replacement of something by a beautiful delusion. Where lies the danger, one could ask? The danger lies in deception. The danger lies in prevarication. The danger lies in the perversity of such a delusion. There is danger in referring to semen as love-juice or perhaps calling snot love-mucous, unless of course one is being ironic. Calling a spade a watermelon is ultimately a dangerous thing.

The reason that an abridged version of these thoughts reverberated in Max’s mind when he was with Jane was because, although she had a streak of sexual naughtiness in her, a large part of her was steeped in these dangerous aesthetical notions. This had often left him in a dilemma- should he alter his natural ‘love-making’ style to match her conceptions of the act? For this purpose, Max had sometimes toyed with inventing the concept of the number of thrusts per minute (TPM). A lower TPM uniformly distributed throughout the entire duration of the act interspersed with some tender kissing and sweet utterances, even though not fitting his notion of maintaining or increasing pleasure, would simulate the romantic experience that Jane wanted. Of course a very low TPM would prove to be problematic; the abnegation of pleasure would become torture for both parties. Furthermore, both parties would have to deal with farcical imagery akin to that of a precious lance being kept in a safe deposit box. So optimisation clearly was the key word.

Many of Max’s friends had at first vehemently opposed his view about sex being an act of desire and not love. Some of them would argue that this could not be the case as the sex had felt different when they had been in a loving relationship. Max would then explain to them that love had the propensity to alter the overall feeling and complexion of the act. Love could ensure that the sex happened in the liberating atmosphere of trust and security. Love could bring about a certain gentleness to intercourse; it could make the act more temperate. But the crucial detail was that when the want for sex was mutual, Love during intercourse was generally the more passive onlooker while Desire displayed its dominance. Love waited in the shadows for Desire to be extinguished, yet Love may have been gracious beforehand in lending some aestheticism to Desire. Max often gave people the following analogy to substantiate his point- Imagine two people who love each other playing chess. Now the fact that they love each other may change the overall experience of the game. It may alter the competitive spirit, the will to maintain a reputation or perhaps even the importance of winning. But the rules of chess would remain the same. The game of chess would not in any way incorporate love into its nature. Love would always remain extrinsic to chess.

…..

Jane watched with eager anticipation as Max put on his condom. The breeze from the outside that pervaded the room caused his manhood to sway gently. Max later regretted using a lubrication coefficient of 2.5; it had proved to be on the lower side. He detested even the slightest squeakiness.

End.

Mrs. Sippy Mon Amour

The lack of direction in her brisk movements caused a flurry and had infiltrated the calm of the Saturday morning. She seemed to be looking for something inside her house. Another few minutes of futile search passed and she could not control herself any longer. “Raemmoo”, shrieked Miss Sippy , “Where have you kept those blasted yellow pages” ? Raemmoo at once stopped dusting the furniture and being the efficient worker that he was, took no longer than a minute to fish out the crumbly book. Miss Sippy heaved a sigh of relief and began rummaging through its pages. The object of her search was Paparazzi for hire. An explanation is probably in order at this juncture. What had happened was that the last time that she had attended such a glamourous, high society gathering (which was not a very long time ago), the Paparazzi media present at the party had for some inconceivable reason excluded her from their photographs. This turned out to be a traumatic experience when she failed to see her photographs in the fashion columns of various newspapers the following day. After she had recovered from that blow, Miss Sippy swore to herself that the next time, she would be the one who would conduct the hiring of the photographers so that such tragic incidents would not intersect her path again. She called them up and an intense period of haggling over the rates of hire ensued after which an amicable settlement was reached. She replaced the receiver feeling contented. But contentment has a penchant for not lasting long. Miss Sippy suddenly realized that she hadn’t a single outfit suitable for the party that night (If Raemmoo’s verdict is to be believed, he swears that she has three overflowing closets containing every kind of party wear. Nevertheless for the time being, we set aside Raemmoo’s statement as rumour).

Having eaten her lunch, she told Raemmoo to shine her leather shoes like new since she intended to wear them later that night. After that she set out on her quest for a suitable outfit. She told her chauffeur to drive straight down to a boutique called The Emperor’s New Clothes. This shop catered to the upper strata of society (not that they said so but the prices made it evident). Miss Sippy sifted through the rows of clothes for over half an hour yet nothing really caught her eye. A little dejected, she left for another of her favourite boutiques which was just around the corner. Adiposia Fittings, as it was called specialized in exciting leather wear. Miss Sippy fondly reminisced her last purchase from this shop- a beautiful leather shirt with a woolly mammoth printed on it, and trousers to match which boasted of protruding antelope horns on either side of the waist. What a hit that outfit had been. So transfixed to her recollections was she that she did not realize how awkward her facial expression looked to a bystander.
In fifteen minutes she had set her heart on a brown leather shirt dotted with heart shaped mirrors. Another added advantage was that the pair of trousers that came with it had a built in glass holder. This meant that she could now gesticulate wildly with her hands as well as have a swig of alcohol every now and then. Miss Sippy was for that moment in awe of Science.

With all her shopping requirements met with, Miss Sippy desired a nice cup of coffee. She headed straight for Brewtus, an Italian chain of coffee houses which had sprung up all over the city. When she entered the place, the people in her immediate vicinity started to look a little confused, owing to the fact that the aroma from their respective coffee cups had temporarily ceased to emanate. One coffee drinker sitting nearby pondered, “If she were a bit nearer to me, then one whiff of her fragrance might have been more fatal than seductive”.
She went up to the counter, awkwardly bumping into a man in from of her. His modesty violated, the man’s jaw literally dropped like one of those old fashioned cash registers opening with a ‘cling’. “And not too much cream on my coffee Sweety, I am on a diet”, added Miss Sippy after she had ordered it.

It was around nine in the evening. Miss Sippy opened her bathroom cabinet and took out a half used tube of Deca-Dent toothpaste and brushed her teeth vigorously with it. After that she took a shower and put on her newly acquired dress. She then set out for the party (The time frames of these events have been accelerated to avoid monotony and also to discourage the reader from accusing the writer of banality).

The venue for the occasion was Mr and Mrs Rao’s grand house. When she reached there, the house was already swarming with familiar faces. The décor of the house was most tasteful, with golden chandeliers and large solid brass statuettes adorning the corners. We must not forget those snarling leopards, stuffed to the core, which gave the house its unique ambience. Mrs Rao greeted Miss Sippy warmly and admired her outfit, talking about it at length. The house was buzzing with activity with disco music and heavy traffic around the bar. She decided to get herself a gin. On her way to the bar, she bumped into a minister friend of hers. The minister was busy in conversation with some important people. Miss Sippy kissed the air around the minister’s cheeks and this gesture was reciprocated with equal fervour. After exchanging a few pleasantries with him and his friends, Miss Sippy continued on her journey to the bar. She was happy that she had made acquaintance with some of the city’s most powerful people and was glad that she had practiced her smile in front of the mirror for over half an hour. Foresight, she often told her close friends, had always been one of her strong points. She also spotted the photographers who she had dealt with earlier that day. She smiled and winked at them and they winked back. Miss Sippy was now quite confident of being a hit tomorrow in the newspapers.
A few gins down and Miss Sippy decided to sit down in a relatively quiet spot and enjoy the party from a distance . This was a good idea since she was not entirely in control of herself. Earlier in the party, she had noticed that many people had been carrying the new Gyrato cellular phones, quite a rage these days. The phones are to be strapped on to the posterior of the waist. So every time the phone rings, it makes the fleshy parts quiver, sending the owner as well as the audience into raptures.
While Miss Sippy dreams about owning the Gyrato phone, we travel to another corner where a man is talking about Picasso and we foresee a bout of infectious laughter. “Cubism is great”, to which another man quips , “ Which reminds me, where are the ice cubes for my Whisky”?

End.

The Storm.

It was about 1 a.m. on the 23^rd of January and I lay in bed contemplating sleep. This was surprising since I was infamous for being a prolific sleeper and it was one of those rare occasions when it was refusing to come naturally. I was probably preoccupied with the unusual weather patterns that had been circulating throughout the northern region. Delhi’s weather had taken a most bizarre turn just the day before. It had been cold and intermittently drizzly for the most part, with the mercury taking a plunge in the day. There hadn’t been a single minute of sunshine and the murkiness had permeated within. I remembered that at some point of this gloomy day, three seemingly unrelated words: ‘England’, ‘bad weather’ and ‘anemic rock music’ felt intuitively connected. At 1:15 a.m., the skies fulminated for the first time and these were accompanied by bright flashes, momentarily lighting up the room through a grilled window pane located above the door that led to the balcony. The thunder caused the rain to briefly intensify as was evident from the increased level of sound. Then a powerful rumble made the hollow balcony railing resonate producing low pitched vibrations. It was at this juncture that I sat up and decided to so something more constructive.

For a long time now I had been thinking of recording a spate of the rather strange events that had unfolded over the past couple of years but somehow had never felt motivated enough to do so. Somehow the prevailing weather proved to be a potent catalyst. I decided that the time had arrived to pen my thoughts on the troubling events of the past and in doing so hopefully lay the matter to rest, once and for all.

I merely propose to present my fragmented recollections of the events that had occurred and the human elements behind them. The choice of deeming the recollections as truth or fiction ultimately can rest only with the reader.

Things started going wrong in our home about two years ago. My mother and sister were the other two family members living in the house at that time. It was well into the monsoons in Delhi when ‘holes’ first started appearing in various fabrics in the house. The word ‘hole’ does not aptly signify what we witnessed in the fabrics and does call for further elaboration. While in some clothes it did seem that some insect or animal had bitten through the fabric, the damage appeared far more sinister in other cases. For instance, the cloth covering the sofa set was frayed in a way that one could easily see the individual fibres of the cloth. What was even more peculiar was that the fabric would crumble to some kind of a powdery form just by gently rubbing it with ones fingertips. An occurrence such as this appearing totally out of the blue is bound to spook even the more rational beings among us, at least in the first instance. After the initial shock subsides, one tries to get a firm grip on reality and usually the best way to do so is to try to explain by one method or another the cause of that which has transpired. It is interesting to note how varied and creative the reasoning can be depending on the school of thought one belongs to. This is especially true in the Indian context where stuff like mysticism and spiritualism is deep seated. They happen to be an intrinsic part of our mythological legacy: one need only go through a little of the Mahabharata or other tales of gods, demons, spirits etc to get a flavour of this.

It was not as if what happened was an isolated incident. Every now and then, my mother or sister would discover a new hole in another kurta or bedspread. I would say that my mother’s nerves were the hardest hit primarily because she was quite devout and also a bit superstitious. The saving grace was that she wasn’t sanctimonious in the least.

At home opinions were divided on the issue. Despite being unable to pin down the exact cause of these holes, I maintained the scientific line. I continued to blame it on an unknown monsoonal insect or some pest that possibly was residing in our dhobi’s shack. To be quite honest though, I wasn’t entirely convinced by my own explanations. The troubling detail was that my clothes were virtually untouched in the first wave of ‘attacks’. But I kept my misgivings private for the sake of my own sanity as well as that of others. Meanwhile my mother had been making her own enquiries from friends and relatives. She even went to ‘holy’ men, good people who possessed tantrik vidya (knowledge of ancient Hindu sorcery). After a while she was convinced that there were supernatural forces behind the strange holes. My sister’s reaction to this whole episode was at least in the beginning that of mild bewilderment. She was always so busy working in her office that she hadn’t the time to get properly spooked. Also the both of us were skeptical of this tantrik bit. This helped us to remain relatively indifferent to the issue. I would try to keep my mother calm by telling her that damage to old clothes was merely a good excuse to buy new ones.

This whole episode came to an end after a period of about four months. The damage to fabric ceased abruptly. My mother claimed that it had been her efforts that had drawn the whole matter to a close. She had been given certain ‘holy’ incenses which she would burn in the house on a daily basis. She would also play an audio tape of the Mahamrityunjaya, a very powerful set of mantras which are believed to provide victory over death. It is often used in rituals to save a person in mortal danger. Needless to say, her supernatural solution did not fit in my scheme of reasoning but I have to admit that its timing was uncanny. It was almost as it someone had switched on the light in a dark room.

After months of no such incident, the memories of the holes started to fade away and calm was restored in our house. Darkness loses its grip on us when we turn on the light. But it is also true that the electricity can let one down especially in a place like Delhi and then darkness can without any prior notice once again reign supreme. Sure enough, the calm did not last long.

The next twist in this tale took place last year on raksha bandhan. At this point my sister was no longer a resident of the house. She had gone abroad to work on an assignment. On raksha bandhan, my mother’s brother and his wife expressed their desire to come and visit us. They said that it would be a good excuse to meet and also that my mother could perform the ceremony of tying a thread to her brother’s wrist. This festival is widely celebrated in India and it is a common practice for men to go and visit their sisters on this occasion. The reason that it is strange in our context is that ties are particularly frosty with my uncle and aunt. Nevertheless we reciprocated their gesture in good faith and the meeting passed of quite cordially. The only reason I introduce the reader to such a highly trivial and mindless domesticity is because all this is germane to the sinister issues at play. The day after raksha bandhan unquestionably proved the evil intentions of my uncle and aunt or at least one of them. My mother recollected how curious my aunt had been about the newly installed kitchen cabinets. My aunt had been snooping around the kitchen even after my mother had gone into the living room to join my uncle. Mother was suspicious and uneasy about it. That day she made a detailed inspection of the cabinets with the maid’s help. Now comes the eerie part. One particular shelf in the cabinet is stocked with different kinds of alcohol. My mother unearthed a perforated lemon from behind one of the bottles. It had quite clearly been put there by my aunt and in a way so as to avoid detection. To me, all that this incident proved was the malicious intent of the family members in question. It did not prove in any way whether their actions then or in the past had been effectual. In other words there was no proof of them being behind the holes. I have to admit though that I was spooked by the sheer eeriness of that incident. I can only speculate on the symbolism of the perforated lemon and surmise that it could portend evil in some form. This presumption would probably explain the reason behind placing it in the vicinity of alcohol. Alcohol could in a way be considered as something impure and due to this feature may in some twisted fashion somehow facilitate the invocation of evil.

It was and still is a matter of consternation why any one would resort to something so bizarre in the first place. The lemon incident appeared to be a desperate measure to harm us in a most peculiar manner conceivable. However their motive behind wanting to harm us was all too easy to conceive. There is a large family inheritance at stake and my mother and uncle are to be the only two legal beneficiaries of it. Also my uncle hasn’t held a job in more than a decade and does not really have any other means of subsistence and neither does he really care for one now. His disposition is exactly like that of a man eating tiger: once it gets used to easy killing there is no looking back at the days of toiling for food. However it also has to be said that my uncle is nothing more than a puppet in this show. My aunt is the person pulling the strings from behind the scenes. He is the actor and she, the director. Her skill as a strategist is as formidable as it is praiseworthy.

People generally say that money is the root of all evil. This statement is rather euphemistic since evil lurks in the recesses of the human mind and hence it is we who are the root. Evil just eventually finds a vent.

About three months after the lemon incident, the holes emerged once more. The difference this time was that some of my clothes got damaged too. Mother was by then engulfed by fear and a bit of paranoia had also started to set in. I myself became increasingly doubtful of the scientific line and felt a general sense of uneasiness. The damage was still sporadic and all we could do was to wait until the next such occurrence with a sense of nervous anticipation.

But this time it was not just a question of holes. Another eerie event was about to unfold and would prove according to me to be the eeriest of the lot.

My mother had started to sometimes complain of an odour in her bedroom. When I asked her to explain the odour, she said that it smelt of country liquor. Since I had been unable to smell anything unusual first, I dismissed the claim as a figment of her imagination. Paranoia can help conjure up anything, I thought. Then one fine day the moment of truth arrived. My mother called me into her room and asked me if I could smell anything. Albeit on previous occasions it had been a false alarm as far as I was concerned, this occasion was different. I definitely smelt something and answered her in the affirmative. She then asked me, ‘Well, what does it smell like’. I could already see the triumphal smile forming on her face. The answer was obvious to me as well and I just couldn’t control the sheepish grin when I blurted out, ‘Country liquor’. Something inside me shattered with the same sound as a stainless steel plate crashing to the marbled floor of my kitchen with that nerve rattling clamour. However I still felt that it was not a good time to tell my mother how I felt. I told her that is was simply the smell of some fermenting fruit that she had kept in the room and then subsequently had forgotten about. I also insinuated at the possibility of the smell wafting from outside. I knew in my mind though that all those scenarios were almost impossible given the nature of the smell. The troubling facts that negated them were firstly, that the smell always emanated only from my mother’s room and secondly, that the smell was of a transient nature. It would come and go as it pleased. Lastly we were unable to find any fermenting object even after a thorough inspection of the room. We were also were unable to pinpoint the exact source of the smell. It would seem to be coming from everywhere and nowhere in particular. I consciously refrained from thinking about all that it could mean especially in connection with the incident in which the lemon was placed next to the alcohol.

These are all the pertinent details and quite frankly I am at a loss of words to dissect them any further. There has been a temporary lull in this kind of activity. I am sure though that it will not last long. This is only the lull before the next big storm.

End.