by Manu Joseph
He studies his antique nudity in the mirror. The body is slim and can stand on its head for ten minutes, yet it is hideous somehow. The only deformity of age the body has avoided is in the scalp, which is filled with short sturdy silver hair. His nose has been growing every day, it is now a massive pockmarked asteroid. He wishes there were a video from his youth, not a sex film but of him fully nude, in all his glory, doing something respectable, like watering a plant maybe or performing shirshasana. He asks if he would be devastated if his nude film went public today. Surprisingly, the question does not have a clear answer. The old bastard, too, wants glory.
The creature in the mirror has always been a lonely person, like other old bachelors. Do the lonely deserve sympathy? Some, surely, but most people are lonely because they, too, have rejected people; they have rejected lovers and friends who wished to be with them but were not good enough.
His mind has once again drifted too far from the performing art of Miss Akhila Iyer. What he was arriving at was that her pranks are not farces precisely because they are pranks. A prank is closer to anthropology than a novel and many other things that claim to be.
Miss Iyer’s short film How Feminist Men Have Sex opens with the girl walking down a corridor of a hotel. The camera trails her as it often does in her films. She is in a white shirt and red pants, which surely have a more specific description, and comfortable blue shoes. She stops at a shut door and turns towards the camera.
‘We’re about to meet a top political economist. He even knows what it means. He is from Delhi. As you know, he is also a columnist, television commentator, and a man with a moral compass,’ she says with a deadpan face. This is not the deadpan of a comedian whose seriousness is a part of the act and a foreboding of an approaching joke. The deadpan of Miss Iyer is not frivolous.
‘Last week he published a thoughtful piece titled “Breakfast to Bed: Why Indian Men Should Be Feminists”,’ she goes on about the man with the moral compass, standing at the door of his hotel room. ‘The essay has been read online by over a million people, including men.’
Moments after she rings the doorbell, an elegant middle-aged man opens the door. Gautam Rajan is of a type: high caste, socialist, bearded, alumnus of an American college, champion of equality, beneficiary of inequality, allergic to capitalism, large dams and nationalism. He has called Damodarbhai a ‘fascist’. He probably meant it in a bad way.
Rajan is highly articulate, verbally articulate, a quality that people do not see as charlatan. But the fact is life is complex and mysterious, histories unreliable, all philosophies ambiguous, almost nothing is fully known or understood; can an honest mind ever be articulate?
Rajan is unaware that the recording has begun. Also, he is certainly not familiar with the nature of Miss Iyer’s films or what the young woman is about. She walks into the hotel room and introduces the unseen cameraperson, who is a woman.
‘Akhila,’ Rajan says with a gracious hand on her slender shoulder, ‘how nice to meet you, and how interesting to be you. And how lucky for Indian journalism that bright girls like you from science are flocking to it.’
Miss Iyer gives him a shy smile, lampooning feminine submission. ‘I know I must crack a self-deprecatory joke right now, sir, but I can’t think of one,’ she says. It is an omen but Rajan misses it.
She probably shot the film before she began uploading her works. She probably shot most of her short films before she released any of them so that her subjects would not be forewarned.
Miss Iyer and Rajan are now seated across a coffee table.
‘Start?’ he says with a sideways glance at the camera, which makes him look foolish already.
‘Yes, Mr Rajan.’
‘Please call me Gatz.’
‘Call you what?’
‘Gatz.’
His phone rings. He apologizes, considers the device and kills the call.
‘I see you’ve a Blackberry,’ she says.
‘Yes. I like Blackberry. I’m not an Apple fan.’
‘I used to have a Blackberry, sir.’
‘Everyone did, once.’
‘I had a problem with its keypad. The buttons were so small. Fiddling with it was exactly like searching for my G-spot.’
Rajan issues a cautious smile, but he is yet to suspect the nature of the interview. His phone rings again, and once again he cuts the call. ‘I’ve been on phone all day talking to journalists,’ he says. ‘It’s unusual for me to speak as a feminist. But that’s good, that’s very good.’
‘The journalists are still calling you about your article?’
‘No, no. You’ve not heard the news?’
‘I’m clueless, Mr Rajan.’
He says an incident occurred in the morning. A professor of creative writing has caused a major stir. ‘This jerk said during a panel discussion that he has to just read a short-story submission without knowing who the author is and he would be able to tell if the writer is a woman. Don’t these guys ever stop? How many imbeciles are there in the academic and literary world?’
‘Did he say, Mr Rajan, what makes him identify a female writer so easily?’
Rajan is surprised by the question. ‘No. These guys are never that specific.’
‘Maybe what he meant was that when a short story is deep and brilliant and without gimmicks the author is usually a woman.’
‘That’s not what he meant, I am sure.’
‘The fact, Mr Rajan, that he can identify the author of a work as a woman also means, by default, he can tell if the author is a man. Why aren’t men pissed?’
Rajan throws a quick look at the camera. ‘My dear girl,’ he says, ‘his statement has a specific meaning. There is a context to it. And there is history. There is a tacit insult in this sort of view. And every woman knows what he means.’
‘Every woman?’
‘Every woman.’
‘Three billion women must be a single collective organism.’
His face grows serious, he throws another nervous look at the camera. A gentle smile of incomprehension appears on his face. She stares at him in silence as though expecting him to say more. When he is about to speak and end the bizarre silence, she interrupts him with a question. ‘Mr Rajan, what do you mean when you say you are a feminist?’
He takes a moment. And when he speaks he stresses every syllable. ‘Equality.’ He then repeats it more emphatically, ‘Equality. Unambiguous non-negotiable equality.’
‘Equal to whom? Equal to men? Equal to you? But there must be more to a woman’s life.’
Rajan tries to achieve a graceful nod.
‘Equality and respect,’ he says. ‘Unambiguous non-negotiable respect. When men respect women they are feminists.’
‘Can they watch pole-dancing?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Is a male feminist allowed to watch pole-dancing?’
Rajan rubs his nose. ‘Informed, intelligent men do not objectify women.’
‘Have you, sir, ever objectified a woman?’
‘This is the dumbest question in the world.’
‘It’s the dumbest question in the world because you obviously do objectify women?’
‘I never. Never. Never.’
‘How do you fuck?’
Rajan begins a long glare at the camera. He is not sure yet whether this is a prank. If the interview is genuine and he terminates it, he would look petty, like sensitive Hindu patriots whom he condemns. He is a liberal, and liberals must stay the course of an unpleasant interview. He shifts his stare to Miss Iyer. His paunch begins to rise and fall with every deep breath. ‘I don’t do that…’
‘You don’t bonk?’
‘First of all it’s called “making love”.’
‘Making love.’
‘Yes, making love.’
‘Do you, sir, make love?’
‘I am the kind of man who gets excited by a woman’s intellect, spirit and humour.’
‘As in your lady is sitting on the bed readin
g and you look at her and think, “Oh my adorable lady devouring Roger Penrose.” And you are consumed by an intense respect for her, which makes you very, very hard.’
Miss Iyer shuts her eyes and begins to pant. ‘In the yellow light of the Japanese lampshade that you bought because she was busy, as you see her middle-aged face and sagging neck, you ogle at her deep inner intelligence and wit, and your respect is escalating, and now you’re so hard it’s hurting you.’
Rajan says in a low, shivering voice, ‘What’s going on?’
Miss Iyer rises but her eyes are still shut and she is panting harder. She holds an imaginary body and begins gentle pelvic movements that suggest, in Vaid’s biased perception, doggy sex. ‘“Darling … darling … I so respect you …Tell me something cleverly funny; tell me once again, darling, why did you read Hegelian dialectics upside down.” And your darling moans, “Because, Baby, as a Marxist that’s the only way I can read Hegel right.” You’re in a tizzy now, sir, she is so clever. You’re so, so hard.’
Rajan turns to the camera, which moves back a few feet. ‘Leave,’ he says.
But Miss Iyer goes on, continuing her pelvic action: ‘You say, “Darling, let’s move on to general knowledge. What’s the most common name in Vietnam?” And she says, with a perfect Vietnamese accent, while somehow managing to moan, “Nguyen, Nguyen.” You, sir, rasp, “I respect you so … darling. Next quiz question, honey. What’s the difference between recursion and iteration?”’
Rajan rises. A bird-like sound leaves his lungs.
‘Sir,’ Miss Iyer says, ‘I don’t follow your dialect any more.’
A PRANK NEED not have an objective, but Miss Iyer does. The messages in How Feminist Men Have Sex are simple: the impossibility of sex as a reverential act, and that modern men who claim to be feminists without the experience of living in a female body are frauds; and that an erection is the same hydraulic event in political economists as it is in jackasses.
But Miss Iyer probably has a deeper objective.
Taken together, her many pranks reveal a pattern. Her victims are rich Marxists, socialists, environmentalists, actually anyone in this country who eats salad; also agitators against large dams; foes of genetically modified organisms; summer interns from Columbia School of Journalism who wish to liberate Tibet. They are the foes of Damodarbhai. Philosophical Thugs, that is what they are, like the patriarchs of the Sangh on the other side of the fence. And that is the name of her website. PhilosophicalThugs.com.
5
Around 11 a.m.
THE ATTACK ON her probably did not last more than a minute. After the initial shock, some firemen had rushed to her rescue and pushed the boys away. An old woman, too, charged at the goons with a handful of debris. A small crowd then had a scuffle with the patriots, who wished to leave anyway. As they left they chanted, ‘DaMo. DaMo. DaMo.’ Akhila sat in the compound among the injured whom she had come to help. As she opened her bag and took out the bandages and medicines, people watched her in amusement, which was reasonable. It did look as though she had packed the bag to get thrashed.
There were gashes on her face, arms and back; her T-shirt was torn at the shoulder. This was a good place to get beaten up. There were paramedics at hand who attended to her, and they tried to impress her when they learnt she was a student of neurosurgery. She did feel cheap sponging off what was meant for people whose homes had caved in on them.
Someone gave her a shirt, which she wore over the torn T-shirt. A policeman told her that he would take her to the station on his motorcycle to file a complaint, then drop her home, but she did not want to leave the compound. The cop was relieved when she said she did not wish to file a complaint. ‘Mad boys,’ he said and scooted before she changed her mind. Television journalists asked her for a comment but she refused to talk to them.
The channels must have gone ahead and broadcast the assault anyway, spinning it off as evidence of the newly empowered patriotic thugs. She has been receiving calls and messages from friends. So she has no choice but to call Pa, who is in Bangalore, before he gets to know and his legs begin to vibrate. Poor man, how his women torment him. The first thing she wants to tell him is, ‘I am not Ma, I would never become her. So just don’t have a heart attack.’ But she knows she won’t say that.
When she gets him on the phone she tries to sound casual. ‘So, some goons attacked me.’
He laughs. ‘Academics? Marxists?’
‘This was not on Twitter.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The other sort of thugs. Don’t freak.’
He is speechless. She lets him be.
‘Why?’ he says, finally. ‘Is this about your Damodarbhai thing?’ Then a string of questions. ‘I am flying back,’ he adds.
‘Don’t don’t don’t. There were people who drove them away. I am back home now. I’m going to sleep.’
This man has always been easy to lie to in all the three languages they speak at home. Or do fathers only pretend.
She hopes J does not call. At least not for this. The last thing she wants is to endure the compassionate phone call of a former boyfriend who had claimed to have left her because she was reckless. She is tempted to send him a pre-emptive message, but that would be silly. What a mess even lost love is. She switches off her phone.
She has never been assaulted before. She is surprised that what she feels the most is not fear or anger. Instead she feels stupid, naïve and insulted. She even feels her nation let her down, which is funny because the nation has never pretended to be anything better, it has always been honest, always conveyed to her that it was a place held by men and that she was only encroaching. Her bones hurt, the gashes burn, her spine is stiff and her stomach feels as though it is punctured. But she knows she would be alright soon. She begins to perform some basic yogic poses. Three little girls imitate her, more children gather. There is, finally, laughter.
The firemen have given her a place to sit in their nook near the compound wall. They are amused that she does not wish to leave. They have become friendly. They tell her things they cannot tell others, they tell her that they are now only appearing to search for survivors to keep everyone happy. They really do not believe they would find one. At least not with shovels, rods and ropes. But then there is a development.
THE SOLDIERS ARRIVE and swarm the debris. They are wearing huge military-green headphones, and life-detectors as backpacks on which are printed the words ‘Air Defence Unit’. The soldiers do not look particularly caring but they are clearly capable, and much fitter than the firemen. They are just a dozen, but they would do. They look as though they have stood on the ruins of lives before, several times. They walk around the debris with metre-long probes, hoping to detect a human sound or any other kind of vibration. It is only them on the debris now – the firemen and residents have withdrawn to the sidelines. A silent crowd watches.
The sun is severe now, so the soldiers convert the nook of the firemen into a shed. Like the firemen, the soldiers, too, grow accustomed to her presence. They probably imagine she is one of the injured, which she is in a way.
As the soldiers continue to walk around the rubble with their life-detectors and probes, their novelty ceases and the crowd begins to murmur again. But then a sudden silence falls. The cause is a soldier, and all he has done is stopped his walk on the debris. The other soldiers are in motion.
The soldier stands on a massive slab of concrete. He is still for several seconds, then he adjusts his headphones. He appears to have got some kind of a signal from below. But moments later he resumes his walk, and the murmurs of the crowd rise again. A minute later another soldier stops and the crowd falls silent, but he, too, resumes his walk. This occurs a few times but increasingly around a portion of the debris. The soldiers are beginning to cluster around the slab of concrete, which is a portion of a top-floor ceiling. Yet another soldier stops and raises his arm, probably to ask the crowd to be quiet or to get the attention of other soldiers. There is silence
once again. He becomes alert, and says something. Two soldiers rush to his side. Several residents run up the rubble but the soldiers quickly control the situation and send all civilians back to the sidelines.
As she is in the soldiers’ shed she gets first-hand information. There is a live person in the debris. The survivor is too faint to be understood but he or she exists, somewhere deep inside the debris.
The vibrations from the depths of stone must have brought meaning to their relentless walks over the debris, but if the soldiers have become more alert and agile there is no way they can exhibit that, because they must walk slowly, with great patience, running the probes of their life-detectors over the stones.
The news of the survivor spreads through the small crowd in the compound. Some people say that a massive crane is on its way to lift the debris, but the soldiers are not sure if the crane can enter the narrow lane that leads to the site. Even if all the parked cars and trees on the street are cleared, it is unlikely that the crane would be able to make past the compound’s narrow entrance. The number of residents on the debris mountain begins to swell and the soldiers are unable to control them. Some of them begin to scream at the soldiers. Akhila takes a while to understand the substance of what they are trying to say. They are asking the soldiers to run their machines over specific portions of the debris that they believe still hold their homes and families. One man yells, ‘Sir, I heard my wife and children in the morning. My door number is 209, second floor, it must be there, right there, I can see our cupboard, that’s our cupboard.’ He looks blank for a few moments, and he says, ‘My door number is 209.’
