Ancestry

For those who have no ken, most Homo sapiens have

“dho haath hai”

-Have two dangling non-prosthetic limbobrumbo’s. I mean hands.

Don’t ask me how many hands the other species have. There may be as many hands as there are organs for all I know.

Just leave me out of it.

The bother. I would rather not touch upon it (on it?)

I recall something from my student days.

“Don’t you dare!”

A girl says to my friend.

“No problems” My friend says.

I see his hand magically reappear from some where.

Not even a slight flush on his confident face.

We were both sitting and the girl was standing in the narrow gap between our seat and the next seat in the bus with another girl. The bus was always over crowded in the evenings.

I was holding her books and bag (and the books and bags of every girl in the neighborhood, being the nice guy. They came up to my chin; I could barely breathe and move my limbs.).

I was not out to please them by any means.

Once they see my face and they dump every bloody thing in my lap. Being mates in college and being from the same locality I could not chuck them out of the window too.

So I bore it like many other boys do.

Silently.

It’s a bloody curse, being decent where one should not be. It comes of a strict upbringing. My friend was better off. He came from a family of libertines.

He thoroughly enjoyed his evening’s escapades in the bus.

Even today I can’t understand what pleasure he got out of those little intimate incidents in the bus.

Perhaps violating something is sweet to some minds. I had other views on them then.

Girls would smell good in the mornings, but after a day of collage in the tropical climate their hygiene invariably goes down a notch.

(Most of the girls wear their hair long. In the heat their heads would sweat and the hair would get plastered on to their backs dampening the back of their dresses. They would start to sweat profusely. The sweat-damp hair is no funny thing to withstand.

You can bear one of them if you try your best. But being surrounded by dozens of them is tough.

At such moments the only thought I ever would have is to “escape” as a funny character in one of our movies keeps shouting through out the movie.)

But that friend of mine reveled in those situations.

Did I lose out by sitting idle when anything could have gone in those days of my bus rides to college and back? I can’t say. Even conductors collected the fare from the foot board as the students would be so tightly packed inside the bus.

What if I was a libertine?

Some girls might have said “don’t you dare” like the one who put my friend to his place in the incident. Well he said that was because he broke an unwritten rule. Nobody touches the girls in one’s own class. He did it on that day.

He could not pass a chance up. Strange guy (Or perhaps I was the strange one as some discerning souls would no doubt discover! In these wonderful times unless one is thoroughly sexist one can’t live).

He is married and is running a family now and admits his mother in law is the “goods”

You see god has long been dead.