Author: Arnab Bose
4am. 2011. Before we woke.
I am in my car somehow parked in front of a classic Lutyen’s bungalow in the heart of New Delhi, grudgingly waking up from a stupor. Yes, few hours before I did show some enormous proportions of affection for my new found love, margaritas.. however her betrayal will come so swift was beyond my imagination. Perhaps there is a more sinister plot behind me romancing margaritas to finding myself inexplicably locked in my own car – maybe there were gangsters or there might be some political underpinnings.. but one will never know, and in fact I do not want to know as well. Such luxuries of not wanting to know what happened can only come to you if you are single in the city.
The story is very similar, same city of origin, same kind of schooling, similar world views, similar number of years spent in Delhi. Everything is same, except for one slight detail, sex – male.
I will show in this column that being single in the city is as deliriously funny and dangerous, as unwittingly exciting and heart-breaking and as blissfully submerging for a man as it is for a woman.
The lens is different, the characters are the same.
The changed lens has one problem, men do not see gender that easily. That is one reason probably why gender specialists are women. Though gender includes both man and woman, gender studies in our mind set normally entails a discourse on feminine attributes, and somewhere masculinity has lost its relevance or reduced to a stereotype.
To me gender or studies pertaining to it is not a debate, not man versus woman, boy vs girl, male female story at all. Instead the debate to me can be broken down to a thousand mutinies, the multitude of conflicts and insecurities that beseeches the male mind.
One mutiny which I recently overheard within the confines of a bougainvillea caressing DDA flat on the sprawls of South Delhi went like this, mark the words of a Delhi based sage with prophet like undertones who spake thus – [start quote] there is a need for a shift in our thought process, the concept of phallic centricism is vacuous. The vacuity can be put to an end with phallic centricism being replaced by testicular centricism [end quote].
My humble summary of the sage’s rant can be found in the following words. Sigmund Freud had it all wrong. Women do not have penis envy, they have testicle envy. Therefore the focus of oral amorousness need not be the pointed edge but the two which are well rounded. As a subliminal side effect, it is needless to say that the pleasure is doubled.
I may be summarily and prophetically wrong in interpreting the sage’s words, to understand the underpinnings requires years of scholarly devotion, a mere fleeting glance does no justice and in fact is quite blasphemous. Without further intruding into divine domains, I shall leave it to far greater minds who are so rampantly plentiful in Delhi to make me more aware in such ‘phallic vs testicular’ matters.
4.10am.
I am mildly awake now. The car keys are in the ignition slot. My wallet in my pockets, everything seems all right. Except for a sense of bewilderment, and so tritely thinking to myself how life imitates art..
From my time in the hotel lounge serenading my drinks to now that I am in my own car, there must have been a series of events to me without me having any remembrance of it now. There must have been a noble human, an unknown face be it, but what a stellar act. That soul lifted me in my times of trouble, groped my semiconscious body to find my valet parking ticket, procured my car, put me into it, drove me to the Lutyen parking lot, put me on the driver’s seat. What made the soul do the last bit has left me a little perplexed, I am sure I would have been as comfortable in the side seat too. Then left the emergency car lights on, how thoughtful I think back. As I picked myself up and drove back to my pad I thanked the compassionate soul, and I wondered to myself that I could have died. A sigh and a gasp of relief went out of me, with my hair sweetly embracing the early morning breezes as zipped through in New Delhi, and I circled and semi-circled my way back to my place, with a pleasant smile set on my face.
Just one last word – the kind yet poor soul who helped me in my ordeal did charge me for his compassion, my blackberry is in the hands of a saint now.
No Comments