Achilles slays Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons and regrets it immediately (Plaster by Bertel Thorvaldsen, 1837)

—————— 

At the fag end of the Trojan War the desperate Trojans, facing defeat, recruited a mercenary army of Amazons – ravishingly beautiful and at the same time brawny muscular big-breasted women, trained in hand-to-hand combat. The Amazons were the Wagner Group of the 13th Century BC. Only, they were female and beautiful.

Big-breasted, geeze, why wasn’t I born in 13th century BC Greece?

Palaephatus, a 4th Century BC compiler of Greek mythology, thought that the Amazons were actually men mistaken for women by their enemies because they wore clothing which reached their feet, shaved their beards and tied up their hair in headbands.

Of course, you and I know that the Amazons were broads. Legend has it that they made love to a man only once, because he died right after, his richard squashed under crushing vaginal muscle control, which must have been like the pressures that the “Trieste” felt at the Challenger Deep. If you were an Amazonian man in those days, you had a hard choice to make – you either had the mother of all orgasms that was immediately followed by your penis being squeezed into a neutron star-like twiddledeedum and death or you could choose to skip sex, played a game of tennis and remained alive.

———————————-

When the Trojans decided to call in the Amazons in their war against the Achaeans(a.k.a the ancient Greeks), it was a matter of time before Penthesilea – the Queen of the Amazons was facing off against the Greeks’ silver bullet hero, Achilles. If Penthesilea had had the right intelligence briefing, she’d have known that Achilles had been given the boon of invincibility by Zeus and he could never get whacked by anyone.

Unless. Unless the guy knew about Achilles’s heel, which unfortunately Penthesilea didn’t. No one had told her about it. Long story short, Achilles slew her. Oh yeah, in ancient Greece you didn’t kill anyone, you slew them.

When Achilles removed the helmet and chest plate from the corpse and saw what was underneath (especially under the chest plate) he immediately regretted killing her. Some historians say Plutarch wrote that Achilles muttered under his breath, “My oh my! Hey, Patroclus, get a load of those knockers!” 

According to Homer, Achilles was bowled over by Penthesilea’s beauty and fell head over heels in love with her – her corpse, that is. He begged his mother, Zeus’s favorite sea nymph Thetis, to bring Penthesilea back to life.

Thetis could bring Penthesilea back to life if she wanted to. Zeus had given her magical powers in exchange for oral sex morning noon and night. But to Achilles’ dismay, Thetis made excuses and begged off. Knowing Zeus’s roving eyes, she didn’t want competition.

In case you come across a differing version of the story of Penthesilea and Achilles, ignore it. This is the official one. Oh yeah.

Whatever the truth about the Amazons, there have been exceedingly strong women through the ages who have kicked ass. There have been many, some good and some scheming, but they all had some things in common – they knew exactly what men wanted.

Like the Roman Empress, Aggripina the Younger, for instance. Aggripina would stop at nothing in order to see her son, Nero, crowned emperor and that included poisoning her own hubby, the incumbent Emperor Claudius. In overwhelmingly patriarchal India, the Rani (Queen) Lakshmibai of princely Indian state of Jhansi, led her fighters against the British during the 1857 rebellion. They say, she knew each of the thousands of soldiers she commanded personally by name and made them feel special. 400 years prior, Jeanne d’Arc did exactly that. She infused tremendous morale into a rag tag French army and kicked English badunkadonk to hell and back. (It didn’t end well for her though. She got burnt at the stake but we’ll leave that story for another time).

Now burnt this into your soul…….

History has shown that women are far more capable of strong resilience under adversity than men. Research by the Harvard Business Review has concluded that women are perceived by their managers — particularly their male managers — to be more effective than men in virtually every functional area of work. They are more adept at multi-tasking and constantly exhibit initiative and nerve. They are eager to professionally develop themselves and are more firmly focused on results, while displaying high integrity and honesty. The HBR study found women to be more effective in 84% of the competencies that employers treasure the most in their managers.

If one goes by the number of years – perhaps ever since walls came up in 11000BC around the first human settlement on the northern coast of the Dead Sea at a tiny hamlet that would later be known as Jericho – yes, ever since then, gender inequality has been the longest running human rights issue ever.

————————

In 1960s, the American cigarette maker, Phillip Morris, launched a cigarette with a single target market – women. Unlike regular cigarettes, the new product, “Virginia Slims“, were slender and longer, making them look and feel feminine and elegant.

In those days cigarette ads were legal and so the launch was accompanied by a prize-winning ad campaign that had the tagline – “You’ve a come a long way, baby”. The copy was cheeky, aimed to portray the modern woman as being emancipated and no less than men.

Here is a collection of those ads. Take a minute to read the funny captions on the photos, they are hilarious………

——————————

This one speaks the loudest – it portrays a stylish black woman in a freaky Afro top and bell bottoms, looking like she doesn’t give a damn. It is the only one that does not have any funny accompanying caption. The presence of a carefree black woman in the 1960s is the point.

———————————–

In the real world, gender equality remains a distant mirage even today. The percentage of women in senior leadership roles in business is still very low. In spite of the fact that women make better leaders, only around 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.

Maybe I should have named this post “You still have a long way, Baby”.

——————————-

“In all things that you see breathing the breath of life, either courage or craft or speed has from the beginning of it’s existence protected and preserved each particular race. But those to whom nature has granted none of these qualities, so that they could neither live by their own means nor perform for us any usefull service in return for which they could be safe under our protection, they lie exposed untill nature brings them to extinction”

– Lucretius(99-55BC), in De Rerum Natura (“On the nature of things”), 1900 years prior to Charles Darwin’s natural selection

———————————-

It is 1598 and a boat from a large sailing ship beaches itself on a deserted island in the Indian Ocean, that we know today as Mauritius. Sailors jump out, wade ashore and begin exploring the surroundings. As they cut through the undergrowth, they see something they haven’t seen before – a huge ugly blunt-beaked bird, standing a metre tall, with brown feathers. The bird seems docile, as if it is domesticated. Having never come face to face with a predator, it makes no attempt to flee, seeming completely unafraid of the visitors.

They name the bird the “Dodo”.

Mauritius is soon transformed by the men from the ship. Over the next two years, more ships arrive and soon there’s no place for the dodo to go. The men slaughter the dodos indiscriminately for their meat and the animals they had brought with them (the dogs and the rats that had stowed away in their crates), they eat the dodos’ eggs. In less than a century, the entire species disappears. The last dodo was sighted in 1688.

At the time no one believed that the dodo could be absolutely wiped out as a species. The word “extinction” hadn’t yet appeared in the world’s lexicons. Why would God create an animal, some thought, only to let it die out?

It took another 150 years for the dodo to be officially declared “extinct”.

Today we know a lot more about what drives animals to extinction. We have also become aware of the pressures that have started to bear down on our own species and it’s fragile longevity.

Yet, we think of ourselves as invincible, too smart to go the way of the dodo.

—————————

It is the summer of 1918. Phillis Brown, the daughter of a British army officer, lives in an upscale neighbourhood in the heart of London. When the First World War broke out four years ago, she joined the Volunteer Aid Detachment, where she still works as a nurse, taking care of wounded soldiers returning from the Western Front in France.

In the autumn of 1918, the howitzers finally fall silent across Europe and Londoners begin to pick up the pieces and get on with their lives. Phillis hears pre-school children in her neighbourhood singing a strange new nursery rhyme. When I was a kid growing up in India, I was made to sing the same song, quite unaware of what the words really meant…

Ring-a ring o-Rosies, pocket full of posies

A-tishoo!! A-tishoo!!

And we all fall down

I had a bird and it’s name was Enza

I opened the window

And in flew Enza!

As the war is drawing to an end, Phillis notices more and more of the returning soldiers having severe breathing problems. No one has a clue as to what the disease is but whatever it is, its deadly. Some of the soldiers have a dark purple flush spreading all over their bodies. Their lungs are filled with a kind of sticky pus and they gasp and wheeze as they try to breathe, their eyes filled with the kind of terror one feels when one is unable to understand what is happening to him.

The soldiers die in the hundreds, their screams caught inside their choked throats. After that those who come to visit them – their relatives and friends – they begin dying and their friends and relatives and theirs and theirs. Phillis realizes that this a mysterious infection of some kind, which starts with a head cold.

The winter of 1918 is now around the corner when one day Phillis catches a chill, followed by high fever and a dry cough. In order not to infect her family, she moves out and begins living in a nearby boarding house. Two days later aged just 20, one chill evening a week from Christmas, Phillis Brown breathes her last.

It is estimated that 50-100 million people died in the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic that is now known as the “Spanish flu”. More people died of this disease than all the fatalities from the two World Wars combined.

——————————-

The COVID-19 pandemic – a common flu with a tweaked DNA that triggers acute respiratory distress syndrome or asphyxiation – makes one wonder about coming close to extinction. You are infected by just being in the same room as an infected person who is simply breathing normally. COVID-19 does not need someone to cough or sneeze next to you.

The virus, a microscopic parasite that has the ability to survive outside a host body for 3-4 days, deposits itself in the cells that line your throat and lungs and turns them into mini corona virus factories that churn out even more viruses that infect more cells, all the while disguising itself as a normal microbe, one of the many harmless microbes that already live inside you.

Soon your body is hijacked and you don’t even know it. That’s just the incubation period, when there are no symptoms, not even a sore throat or a cough. All around you people are beginning to wear masks so they don’t carry or receive the infection.

If you are an American, of course you are imbued with a typically American sense of faux bravado, a carry-forward of the American exceptionalism that we see today. “Lets go about our lives normally, let’s not let the virus dictate how we live,” you’ll say. Visiting a nightclub is your birthright and no one can take that away from you, not even a virus. “Didn’t we go about leading normal lives the very day after 9/11? That way, the terrorists didn’t win and so will it be with this pesky virus. Isn’t our’s the greatest country in the world?” you’ll say and you will go out on a date.

But the virus is not a terrorist. It has no ideology, no emotion, no passion and no devotion to any belief. The virus does not have the ability to think. It has a single-minded goal – to find a host and replicate, to keep it’s host alive so it can live in it and multiply.

By the time you leave the establishment that evening, you will have infected 35 other people, including the girl you brought along.

5 days into the onset of the infection, your immune system has finally begun to fight the virus. You start getting the chills of fever, perhaps aching muscles, a sore throat and dry coughs too. You begin to lose your sense of taste and smell. Your immune system is now beginning to overreact. It is causing inflammation inside vital organs within your body, filling tiny sacs that hold oxygen in your lungs with water, in much the same manner as HAPE (High Altitude Pulmonary Edema) afflicts alpine climbers. On X-rays, your lungs begin to exhibit dark patches – a sign that pneumonia is setting in. You try to take deep breaths in order to breathe in some air but you only wheeze. Your chest feels like it is in a vice grip.

At this point, if there is no emergency room doctor to insert a tube down your throat and connect you to a ventilator you will see a gaunt man in a cape holding a long scythe hovering near your hospital bed, waiting to snip the thread that connects your soul to your body. If he has his middle finger raised as in the image above, you are history.

When there are millions like you across the world, it is a pandemic and that’s what happened in 2020

———————————————

The good news – so far, natural cataclysms have never wiped us out as a species, although a super-volcano in Indonesia 76000 years ago almost did. The eruption, known as the ”Toba Event”, ejected volcanic ash into the Earth’s upper atmosphere, creating a 1000-year long cooling cycle that left only a few thousand human survivors in the whole world.

Pandemics too are natural disasters that have the ability to wipe us out as a species but somehow we have managed to survive those as well.

During the beginning of the Dark Ages, 540-542AD, the “Plague of Justinian” decimated the population of the region in and around the Byzantine Empire, around the same time that an Icelandic volcano erupted, blanketing the earth’s atmosphere with ash and bringing on a decades long winter. While the plague remained active for two centuries and took 100 million lives in Europe, the sudden cold caused by the volcanic eruption decimated crops the world over, triggering famines and taking another 100 million lives.

800 years on, around 1350AD, we had the bubonic plague known as the Black Death or Pestilence, in Eurasia,. Within just three years, a third of the world’s population (200 million) had perished.

————————

But just because we’ve never been completely wiped out in the past, doesn’t mean we won’t be in the future. The threat of new potentially deadlier existential threats have appeared over the horizon. Climate change, drug-resistant viruses, nuclear war, large asteroid impact, out-of-control artificial intelligence, super volcanos, coronal mass ejections (solar flares) – these are very real threats of the modern age that could wipe us all out completely.

Historical record shows that once every thousand years, an event has occurred that has wiped out a sizeable percentage of the human population. Occasionally a mammoth cataclysm like the super-volcano in Toba has brought us a hair-breadth from extinction.

Dr Simon Beard, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in Cambridge, thinks of himself as an optimist, but in his work he spends most of his time trying to figure out how the world might end. He says that an existential threat does not necessarily mean every last human being will die out. It could instead be something that destroys civilization as we know it. Humanity may just make it but we could be reduced to a handful, surviving at the subsistence level of hunter-gatherers who roamed Africa 100,000 years ago.

———————————-

The two above mentioned plague pandemics started at European ports, carried in by merchant ships that had stowaway rats which had plague-infected fleas. In the case of the COVID-19, Chinese scientists suspect the source to be pangolins, a species of ant-eater that is highly sought-after in China for it’s meat and scales.

If only the Chinese would stop eating crazy shit like cockroaches and snakes and dogs and pangolins, maybe the world would be a safer place. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was caused by the Chinese eating civets that in turn had transported the virus from horseshoe bats to humans. Goddammit, who eats civets? We gift our women with jackets lined with civet fur but we have to wait till the Chinese have eaten them first.

If one were to follow the thousand-year thumb rule then it is now time for the next big one. Will it be another infinitely more infectious COVID-19 style virus? Could the thousand km diameter super magma chamber boiling and frothing beneath the Yellowstone National Park explode, its éjecta ushering in a millenium long winter? Or will it be 99942 Apophis, the half-kilometre thick near earth asteroid that is very likely to impact the Earth in 2029?

Will there be an end game and if so, what’s it going to be?

 

When he died, in December 2016, Marine combat pilot, war hero, astronaut and US Senator, Col John Glenn had been married 68 years, to his childhood sweetheart. He credited Annie for being the very reason for his success in life.

The story of John and Annie Glenn is the very well spring of inspiration.

John first met Annie when they were neighbors and their moms would put the two five-year olds together in a large basket swing in the backyard and they would spend the afternoons giggling and screaming.

As Annie grew, she was found to have a severe stutter in her speech, so bad that she couldn’t even utter certain words without going into a long stutter. That led her to be shunned and bullied in school – until John took charge of her ‘security’. After that, she was never bothered again.

Glenn remained true to Annie through seven decades and sometime during this very long honeymoon, Annie was able to conquer her stutter through therapy and perseverance.

In 1982, a reporter for The Boston Globe asked Glen, who was then considering running for the 1984 US Presidential elections, whether marrying someone with such a severe stutter ever made him reconsider his presidential bid.

“That never really made any difference,” he replied,” we grew up together with her stutter and I knew the person she was and I loved the person she was and that was that.”

John Glenn passed on in December 2016. For me, it is okay to have never ever met a man like John Glenn but still feel a sense of loss at another little bit of good, chipped away and lost inside the maelstrom of survival. Annie Glenn passed away in May 2020, her death caused by complications from a severe Covid-19 infection. She was 100.

There must be so many ways to show your love for each other. Little simple ways, like this one I read about the Glenns somewhere…..

John and Annie liked to play a secret game between themselves. Whenever, as a combat pilot in the fifties, Glenn went on a mission, he would turn at the front door of their little cottage at the air base and give Annie a quick peck on the cheek and say with faux curtness,” I’m going down to the corner store for some gum. You want any? Yours is pineapple, isn’t it?”

“No, silly,” Annie would smile,”Jill Travers at middle school liked pineapple. Mine is orange. And don’t be too long. There’s shepherd’s pie for dinner….”

The same conversation played out on a clear blue February morning in 1962, when Glenn stood at the door of the astronauts’ bus and she touched the visor of his helmet.

This time she strained to hold back her tears as she said, “Don’t be too long….”

“I know. There’s shepherd’s pie for supper,” he finished with a grin.

She watched him board the Mercury-Atlas rocket that stood with vapor steaming from it a mile away, ready to fly him into the unknown.

————————————

A Pakistani-Canadian colleague had just returned after a month in Karachi, settling his father’s affairs after his funeral. He was the only offspring and his mother had predeceased her husband of 60 years the previous spring. We were at the lunch table at work, when I said to him, “Your father, what kind of a father was he?”

He thought for a moment and said,” I never got to know him actually. He was always so busy running his restaurant chain, while my mother brought me up. One thing I do remember though and it was when I was in college. Late evenings, I would be upstairs in my room, books and notes spread around me, trying to cram as much as I could, for a test. When Abbu arrived home, it would be late and my mother would be asleep in bed in their ground-floor bedroom, the first door to the right from the front door.”

Here my colleague’s eyes got misty and he cleared his throat as he carried on, “At the sound of the front door opening, I would go over to the landing, in time to see him stoop to remove his shoes. He would give me a little wave and tip-toe over to the bedroom door which was always left ajar so there would be some circulation in the steamy heat. He would stand still for a long while, looking in, staring at my mother’s still form and then he would turn to me and ask in a whisper, “Has she eaten?”

———————————

It is hard to put in words the transcendental emotion, the sublime feel of couples who have been married 40,50,60 years. My wife and I have been together 28 years. Almost all long-married folks agree that it is tough making marriages work, but that in the end they choose to stay together because of an almost indescribable connection that has been formed over the years by myriads of little things that they feel about each other.

Its the little words they say to each other that matter.

————————————-

———————-

She was cute, I’ll hand you that.

Slightly built, she sat at the edge of the bed, her hands clasped on her lap, like they had nowhere to go. She slipped her ghunghat (veil) off, reached up and carefully undid the pins holding up her slightly messed up hair. It cascaded down in curls, over her shoulders.

Her gaze went back toward the floor, unsure of what she must do next. The bed covers were strewn with rose petals but she seemed oblivious to them.

For the moment, she was trying not to pass out, under all that bridal finery and the oppressive heat. Slim jhumkas (traditional Hindu ear rings) peeked out from under the curls. She had on, the bridal ‘mangal sutra’ that I’d tied round her neck an hour or so back, at the ceremony – a yellow braided string, coated with turmeric, with a tiny gold pendant, flanked on either side by black beads.

—————————

I recalled the wedding. The mangal sutra had been handed to me open ended, with knots on both ends, so the beads wouldn’t escape. As I had slipped my fingers behind her neck to tie the two ends together, she repeated after the priest, in a soft but distinct whisper, “You are the reason of my existence. With this thread around my neck, I shall pray that may you live long.”

As her lips formed the words, for a brief moment, she lifted her eyes to search into mine, “Who are you, Robindranath Dey?” they seemed to enquire.

The 3-day ceremony was now over and here I was, my butt on the opposite edge of the bed, still in my sherwani, kurta and churidar, the air conditioning hardly able to drive away my discomfort at the May humidity. Goddamn, why the heck does May have to be the auspicious month for Hindu marriages? Wish I had my bermuda shorts on.

——————-

Bermuda shorts reminded me of the last time I wore them, the Saturday before I left for India. It was at the ball game, NY State vs Ohio. Vicky Tannenbaum had come along and as she sat next, her left arm loosely draped over my bare thigh, her hand had snuck further in, unnoticed. While 10000 guys cheered the NYS team on, she’d suddenly dug her nails in playfully.

“Ouch, watch it, will you? I only have two of those” I’d shouted out, with pain mixed with sudden pleasure. She’d giggled, nuzzling her red head against my chest.

“Take me to your dorm, Robby” she’d whispered into my ear. Back in my room, we’d torn at each other for the rest of the day. That night had been our last together and Vicky knew it. It didn’t bother her even a bit. She was attractive, on her way through med school with a straight-A average. Her parents had an already well established medical practice which she would simply walk into, after she got her MD. And she was cute as a button. There were lots of other fish in her pond.

When we were finally done, she lay across my chest, her red curls tickling my nose and me on my back. And as she slowly wrapped her legs round my thigh and lazily rocked herself back and forth, her wetness rubbing up against me, she mused, “You’re off to be married, to a Bengali country girl in a saree and my Dad will probably like to see me wed one of those orthodox toads in a Yarmulke, with those payots hanging from either side of his head. Well, I’ll teach Mr. Yarmulke a thing or two about putting those two side locks where they tickle,” she’d giggled.

——————-

And now once again back in the present, the thought of Vicky started up a stirring within, as I found myself facing that almirah with mirrored doors, by the wall. From where I sat, perched on the opposite edge of the bed, I could see my bride in the mirror clearly, facing away, at an angle.

Her anchal (the end of the saree that’s slung over the left shoulder) had fallen and lay like a wreath round her, on the bed. She had a ‘nath’ (nose ring) on one nostril and a bala (wrist band) on each soft hand. They looked like they’d been handed down, from her mother . Her hair was still flecked with all that sprinkly, shiny stuff they chuck at you in a wedding. Her feet were beautiful. Pink, bordered by ‘alta’, a vermillion dye that Hindu women have on, after marriage. Pretty toes, some with rings on them, peeped through her slippers. Payals, probably of imitation silver, transformed her ankles into the loveliest I’d seen. Yellowish-brown mehndi lines adorned both feet as well as her hands.

Don’t know how long we just sat there, facing away from each other, on either side of the bed but it was she who broke the ice first. She brought her gaze up to me, “Shunoon, ei biye ki aapnar moter birudhdhey hoyeche?” (Did this marriage happen without your acquiescence?)

I straightened and walked to the barred window that looked out on Hazra Rd. An ice-cream vendor was pushing his cart down the sun baked lane, his head covered by a wet gamcha (wash cloth made from a thin cotton fabric), knarled feet in torn flip-flops. “Kwaliteee!” he cried plaintively.

I turned back toward her and lifted my eyes to hers’, in a slow and excruciatingly painful effort. “No,” I replied and I quickly turned back to stare out the window. The ice-cream vendor was gone, but I could still hear his cries faintly in the distance, “Kwaliteee!” By now a bunch of stray mongrel dogs had decided to give him harmony. Every time he cried out, they barked and bayed at him, shuffling a few paces behind.

Just a minute had passed, when I felt her soft hands on my shoulders. She’d risen and come round the bed, to stand by my side, a little behind, away from the window. I shivered at her touch. I didn’t turn but continued to stare blindly at the scorching pavement below.

“Then why don’t you speak with me?” she reached up and held my cheeks in her palms and turned them so I was looking down at her beautiful face, “I left my home, my parents, my sisters and my little brother. And I have made this my home…..” her voice caught and I noticed that those long eyelashes were brimming with tears.

I gently grasped her two wrists and lowered her palms from my cheeks, till her hands were by her side. And I moved away just a bit. Don’t know why, but her touch was electric. I felt safer a couple of inches away. I was more comfortable with English. But she didn’t know a word of it. So Bengali it had to be, “And you? Was this with your approval?”

She nodded, dabbing her eyes with her anchal. “My father’s decision is my decision,” she said simply, “And now, your wish is mine. Forever”. QED- Theorem and corollary, I thought. With that simple statement, she leaned against me, and broke down into silent sobs.

I reached out and pulled her to me, gently holding her fragile body in my arms. After a while her sobbing subsided and I could feel her even breath on my chest, when all of a sudden, she wriggled out of my grasp, saying, “Wait, I’ll show you something.” She went up to the whatnot in the far corner and took out an ornate box made of brass. It was a ‘paaner dibey’, a small container normally used for betel leaves, nuts and zarda (chewing tobacco).

She ran her fingers lightly over the box. “My grandma used it when she was alive. Now, it’s mine.” She opened it carefully. Inside was just one article – a photo. It was me, striking a pose in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The one I’d sent through Baren when he came to India on his match-making expedition. “I spoke with you every day, ever since Barenda left it with us. I said to God, “Dear God, keep him safe”.

She left the box standing on the whatnot and turned, her young breasts squeezed up against my chest. An incredible warmth spread through us like wild fire, as I gently tilted her face up by her chin and said in mock severity, “My wish is yours. hmmmm. Do you have any idea what my first wish is?”

She smiled at that, feeling me harden against the pit of her stomach. With mock helplessness, her breath on my nostrils, she whispered, “No, why don’t you show me?”

—————————————–

It is 48 years now, since that first magical night. Madhu still has that box. She likes to call it her ‘treasure chest’. It has a few additions in it. Pictures of a young man, his American wife, Betty and daughter, Sona. And a young woman, with her banker husband, Tod and journalist son Michael.

And one more picture, at the very bottom, a photo, frayed with age, of a young man, much slimmer then but still recognizable now, posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Imagine you are a commoner in 800AD England. Hang on, that’s not possible. As per Wikipedia, the Angles, Saxons and Danes unified to form England only around 927AD, so that is still a century away.

So, let’s say you live in a village in the Kingdom of Wessex.

If you are taking a morning walk, you learn to stay away from the sidewalk and you stick to the middle of the road even though a passing horse might kick you in the nuts.

You avoid the sidewalks because folks clear out their ablutions by simply opening a window and chucking the contents of their bedpans out. You wouldn’t want that in your face, would you? It’ll be another 1000 years before they have gotten on to the concept of bathrooms and toilets and sewer systems.

In the absence of soap, you wash with ashes and you do that very rarely. Many of your friends and relatives don’t bathe or wash at all. They simply wait for it ta rain. It’s normal ta own only one set of clothes and wear it all year round. You wash it by leaping into a pond or just by being out in the rain. Children up to 10 run around barefoot and stark naked when the weather is not too cold.

The only motive power is the horse or other pack animal, such as the mule or the donkey and they are expensive. Everything, from the tallest fortress to the finest fabric, is made by hand. Books are copied by hand, at great expense, each edition the toil of one rare literate worker. Raw materials and hand tools are precious assets.

The fields are plowed by hand, sown only once in two or three years, left fallow and unfertilized when not sown. The only fertilizer is manure and not enough for all the land. The crop yield per acre is a third of what it will be in another thousand years, by which time agriculture will be an organized industry. Right now, there is not enough grain to feed the population, so land is precious, even to kill for.

Are you healthier than my kind (ie: folks from the 21st Century)? In general, no, because even underdeveloped places will have better healthcare and disease prevention. But if you wonder if the strongest among you in the Dark Ages is stronger than the strongest man in the 21st Century, your man will win hands down and that’s because of the hard physical labor he is used to. His diet is likely to be unrefined and even raw. Obesity isn’t even a word right now.

The only organized industry sectors that employ workers in numbers are construction, lumber, handicrafts and weaponry. Basic necessities are made at home. Peasants like you spin wool and weave linen. The fabric for clothing is very strong, so strong that one dress can last a lifetime literally and even be handed down after death. Of course, your late grandma’s surcoat might stink but it is not an issue, you are immune to smells.

Small mom-and pop businesses are everywhere – blacksmiths, tinsmiths, potters, carpenters, saddlers, wood and stone sculptors, lacemakers, weavers and cobblers, these are folks with skills that have been handed down through the ages by ancestors. Serfs in these businesses usually do better than the rest.

Living conditions leave a lot to be desired and comfort has declined. You make do without things that in ancient Rome were considered necessary for basic comfort. Beds are a luxury and you sleep on straw, on the ground. The principal item of home furniture is the multipurpose ‘coffer’, which acts as a seat, a bed and a chest for storing household stuff.

When it is time to eat, wooden planks are set on trestles, as makeshift tables. Tableware is practically non-existent and the members of a family eat with their bare hands out of the same wooden bowl, dipping slices of hard, stale bread into the bowl.

Peasants build themselves huts to live in and these burn down from time to time. In the densely packed alleys within town walls, fires are an ever-present menace. However, the huts can be rebuilt in a jiffy, the owner hardly suffering any loss beyond a few clay pots and blankets of skins. Grain stocks are buried underground, in sacks, so they are not destroyed by fires.

There are no drainage systems and a spell of wet weather can turn courtyards and streets into quagmires. With huge quantities of dung from the large number of horses, cattle, lambs and sheep, a town can have an all-pervasive stink of ordure, smoke and damp.

There is yet no such thing as medical science. There is no medication or medical procedures. That’s the great leveller these days. Disease doesn’t give a fuck if you are rich or poor, king, vassal, overseer or serf.

Disease and death are everywhere. There are hundreds of ways you can end up dead, starting from birth. You might simply catch the flu, inhale smoke from the ever burning hearth with no ventilation, contract tuberculosis, venereal disease from dirty richards and pussies, food poisoning from putrid meat. There are no sewers, no method for the removal of human waste. Pasteurization is centuries away and you could ingest well water contaminated with faeces.

The Dark Ages are known for its pandemics. Disease can be brought in by rats from a docked merchant vessel, wipe out millions and last over a century. One, the Justinianic Plague, began 250 years prior and killed a fifth of Europe’s population. There are still affected pockets everywhere in your time, though the acquired herd immunity has almost completely stamped it out by now.

——————————-

After dark is when life gets dicey. Remember, there is no established law and order. You try not ta venture out anywhere after the sun sets. The only light is from wax candles, resin torches or tallow that release as much smoke as light. Anything that is used to produce light is very very expensive. You avoid expending your meagre store of illumination by rising and going to bed with the sun.

In the end, what is important these days is manual dexterity and muscular strength. You have ta have strong feet and legs. The only mode of travel for a commoner like you is by foot. For you, a 50, or even 250-mile walk to the next town is du jour, run-of-the mill, like. Distance is of course not measured in miles. It’s in days of travel, like a “3-day walk”.

You’ll take several days to reach your destination but there are inns on the way who will give you room and board if you cut their load of wood for the fire.

There are other units of distance measurement, like the “furlong”, roughly 220yds, the distance an ox can furrow in one go. 40 “poles” make one furlong. The smallest unit of length is a “barleycorn” which is roughly a third of an inch. I bet you guys get together in a tavern, load up fulla ale and joke about some guy’s ’barleycorn-sized” richard.

On your travels, some innkeepers will let you stay just to hear the “tidings”. You’re their only source of news. Writing is the luxury of the few literati and you’re not one of ‘em, so people like you have developed solid memories. You have no intellectual baggage beyond what you carry in your head in the moment. Those innkeepers love it when you offload those memories on them. You can even be a professional story teller, like a walking Wikipedia and boy, then the innkeeper’s plump daughter is yours for the night, like.

The shortage of the tools of daily life has given rise to adaptability. If you are a traveler, you are able ta tell the direction by the stars and the time by the movement of the sun. In your head you carry a calendar that is able to broadly forecast the seasons and the change in weather patterns. You know which plants are medicinal though not yet why.

For what you do not know, the theoretical, you rely on the tales of the elders of your family and their painstakingly acquired experiences of life in general.

——————————

Today, here are the things I value, stuff that I don’t necessarily need ta survive but I still covet ta lead a comfortable life…. A sturdy Toyota Tundra, a lake side property, maybe a chalet in the country, cash to fly me to vacation spots, maybe a small single-engine Cessna 172 to appease my adventurous side.

Now let’s check out what you think of being of value to you….. horses, mules, donkeys, oxen, bulls, sheep and poultry. And a little plot of land ta grow wheat and barley, maybe some hemp and flax. Have these and you will consider yourself contented. Livestock provide you with nearly all your day to day needs. Flayed skins protect you from the cold. Blood is mixed in with clay to make cement. Horns are used for cups, wool for clothes and feathers for quilts and mattresses.

One thing that you don’t have ta pray for is wild game, lotsa wild game. You have that in plenty. Wild life is abundant. The woods are filled with the clamour of birds singing.

This paucity of grain does not cause starvation however, due to the abundance of meat from wild game. Most of England is covered in dense forest, teeming with bear, boar and wild fowl. Herds of deer nonchalantly browse the clearings. Hare, rabbits, partridges, foxes and wolves, they pack the woods with relentless cacophony. Sometimes, the skies darken with dense flocks of migrating geese. You just have ta aim at the general direction. Everyone is a hunter. You go out and hunt what you want for dinner, it’s that simple.

Hunting is not a pastime. It is a serious job of work. The object is your daily nourishment, though you have managed to make it kinda fun, like a sport, with competing teams and their own spotter dogs. Slaughtered boar and stags are brought home in triumph. On the eve of village feasts, your job is to contribute hundreds of quail, partridge, thrushes and ducks. You bring them in a game bag and tip them in a bloody heap on the kitchen floor, completely unaware of the concept of hygiene.

Your home has a perpetual stink of tanning hides, animal blood, mingling with the aroma of roasting meat, further mixed with the odor of earth, smoke, sweat, dogs and faeces.

And bad breath, body odor and the disgusting smell of toe jam. Man, I have no idea how you manage ta live in close proximity to unwashed bodies. How can you even think of having sex with your spouse who hasn’t bathed in a year, Dude?

I have a theory. Maybe you get turned on by body odor, how about that? I know of an African tribe in present day Senegal whose women won’t sleep with their men unless they go at least a fortnight without washing. Ugh!

———————————

Post-Script

——————————

The above was a chat I had with a random Medieval man when I time travelled to 800AD and now it’s time ta get back to the present day.

The dark ages were truly dark but there is a belief among some historians that had there never been a period of stagnation, there would most certainly not have been a Renaissance and an industrial age thereafter. Great creativity and enlightenment always follows pervasive ignorance. And vice versa.

Will MAGA America similarly lead to progressive enlightenment? Chances are slim, but who knows? The Dark Ages were somehow necessary, it is thought, so maybe MAGA America is necessary.

Necessary or not, the Dark Ages were an Eurocentric phenomenon. It was only Europe that stagnated, where folks dumbed down. Outside, the world flourished…..

The Muslim Arabs had an explosion of scientific output. Al-Khwarizmi gave us algebra around 820AD. Avicenna and Jamshīd al-Kāshī made advances in trigonometry, geometry and Arabic numerals. Islamic doctors came close to finding remedies for diseases like smallpox and measles and challenged classical Greek medical theory.

In India, as early as 500AD, mathematicians like Aryabhata and Bhaskara were giving us geometry and trigonometry. Interestingly, Aryabhata was born the same year that the Roman Empire fell to the Goths and triggered the Dark Ages. The move from zero as merely a placeholder by the Mayans and Babylonians – a tool to distinguish larger numbers from smaller ones – to a digit of its own was established in India by Aryabhata and then began being used in calculations by Bramhagupta around 800AD.

But Middle eastern and Indian advancements during Europe’s Dark Ages pale against the brilliance of the Chinese during this period. China’s Tang Dynasty (618-906AD) brought spectacular scientific innovations into the world, beginning with binary code, paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder, to name just a few. Although legend has it that the Mesopotamians first invented the abacus, the first archaeological evidence of a working model similar to one used today, came from 1200AD China.

Alas, the East had not realized that scientific advancement had to be in lock step with advancements in military power. The Dark Ages had cemented Europe as a martial entity that had learned how to fight and conquer, while on the other side of the world enlightenment and peace prevailed. So, while the Europeans learned to colonize, the east remained blissfully trusting.

The pendulum has swung back again. The east is once more on the rise, this time with sufficient military power to make a wannabe conquerer think twice. No East India Company will succeed this time around.

That’s life, isn’t it?

Some things from that evening seem faded, so faded that it takes a lot of effort now, remembering each detail.

After all it was more than half a century back – Diwali, 1965. But it’s a Diwali that still shimmers, in the haze, except that the haze – it grows denser as the years roll by and the lines, once sharply etched, now seem blurred.

Sukhoranjan, our Jeeves, lit the oil lamps and arranged them along the terrace parapet, the balcony balustrade and even on the window ledges – of employees’ quarters, Type-E, No.34, MAMC Colony, Durgapur, West Bengal, Eastern India.

The October breeze was mild, but the lamps flickered and inevitably some went off after a sudden gust, making Sukhoranjan scurry around, relighting them. “Oof! Aaj eto hawa hobar ki dorkar chilo ? **”of all the days, did it have to be so windy today?”***he fussed.

Meanwhile right after the first fire crackers went off in the neighborhood, our dog, Shepherd, took refuge under the bed – my bed, our bed, mine and my two elder bros’. Shepherd made frightened, whiny noises as he slinked in, tail well between his legs. (He didn’t emerge till it was dinnertime, the festivities were over and the neighborhood had fallen silent.)

My father had his arm round my mother’s shoulders, while they stood back and watched their three kids waving crackling fuljhari sticks wildly around. My favorite was the thubri, a firecracker crammed inside an onion-shaped clay pot with a hole on top like the caldera of a volcano, through which it kept spewing stuff out high in the air like a fountain.

The thubri was a dazzling display of colors that lasted around 30 seconds and then the pot lay spent but smoldering, with a tiny flame still licking up from within. I loved giving it a hard kick then. Who lit the first thubri – Chorda? No, perhaps Dada?

Heck, I just can’t seem to remember that clearly anymore.

What I do remember is that the war with Pakistan had just ended in a ceasefire. The single-seater Folland Gnat jet fighters from the nearby Panagarh airbase had finally stopped screeching past at treetop level, by the time Diwali came around. While the mood was upbeat on the one hand, there was also some grieving at the sudden death of the revered Indian Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri.

The squeals of excitement of that Diwali, the laughter – it all comes back in snatches, like when you are turning the knob of an old radio and the music from a short wave station keeps swooshing in and out.

————————————–

Some other moments are still etched. Like the fact that the stash of firecrackers that our father could reasonably afford happened to be far smaller than those of all the other Joneses in the neighborhood. And we didn’t want to finish before the others. A dark and silent house in the midst of bursting crackers would be an embarrassment.

My father had an ingenious way to address that. He took us for a long walk round the neighborhood, ostensibly to admire the Diwali lighting on the houses and the crackers others were bursting. It killed time till it became unbearable and the three of us raced back to our individual fire cracker stashes, to begin.

Afterwards, there were heaped plates of mutton pulao for dinner. This was a big deal because we had meat on the table only once every fifteen days or so. Mutton was all we could afford, chicken being prohibitively expensive in those days. Though there had never been any discussion on it, beef was never an option, even though it was the least expensive.

As always, my mother busied herself laying the table and waiting on her four men while they ate. By the time she took her seat, all the mutton was gone and only a bit of the pulao (the rice) was left, stuck to the walls of the pan like a thick plaster. When Dada protested that she didn’t have enough, she smiled and gave him a hug,” If you kids are full, I’m full.” I can still see her scraping the bottom of the pan with her thumb and licking it appreciatively,” You missed the tastiest part, you know.”

—————————–

I remember Sukhoranjan well. How can you not remember someone you grew up with? Sukhoranjan was a 16 yr old from Orissa who had found work as a chaprasi (gopher) in my father’s office. In return for free lodging and board in the servants’ quarters attached to our house, he became our odd-job man, getting the groceries, fixing things around the house, mopping and sweeping, a job that he took as gospel.

Sukhoranjan had left his native Baleshwar with his uncle when he was 6, at the peak of the 1955 famine and the cholera out-break that had claimed both his parents and his younger sister.

After a brief stay with abusive relatives in Chakradharpur, Sukhoranjan ran away and boarded a train to Durgapur, alone, as a frightened 8 yr old. Years of toil in tea shops and grocery stores followed and it was when he was 14, working as a door-to-door fruit seller, that one day his shadow fell across our doorstep.

It had been a blisteringly hot day and Sukhoranjan struggled to lift the fruit basket back on his head, when my mother persuaded him to lay it back down on the ground and asked him to rest a while in the shade of our front porch. Soon a sumptuous lunch followed, which he wolfed down in seconds.

My mother took him in that day and he had been with us ever since. A bright and cheerfully illiterate country boy, a year older than Dada, Sukhoranjan still called him ‘Borda’ (big brother). And he was especially invaluable in my leisure-time pursuits, having taught me the intricacies of gulli-danda, marbles and how to make a gulti (sling) out of a forked wooden twig and rubber strips cut from bicycle tubes.

It was only when you tried to ask Sukhoranjan about his parents or sister that he clammed up. My mother had once seen a photo inside that tiny steel trunk of his that held all his worldly possessions. It was a picture of a couple in front of a hut. He had simply nodded and looked away when my mother had asked him if they were his parents.

—————————————-

And Shepherd. He was a good looking, unusually large, dirty white mongrel pup when he found us. India is teeming with dogs without a home, that loiter around every street, scrawny and emaciated, with open sores and wounds from fights over scraps with other dogs.

But Shepherd was different. With a dark grey stripe through the middle of his forehead, from between his eyes to the tip of his nose, he was unnaturally fluffy and plump. As he grew, Shepherd got this bushy white tail and when he confronted another dog, it rolled up tight and went into a high frequency, low amplitude quiver, while his bright aggressive unwavering eyes stayed on the other guy and a low growl escaped from his slightly parted lips. Most dogs quickly figured out that the odds against having a ear torn or a shoulder gashed were very little and made a whining exit which sounded to me more like, “Fuck it, tennis anyone?”

I have a hunch that Shepherd’s father was one of those Siberian huskies that the Soviet experts brought over with them. This was 1965 – at the apex of Indo-Soviet cooperation. We were living inside a township that had technical experts from the Soviet Union helping us build coal mining machinery. The husky must have taken a shine to a local babe and one thing had lead to another. We never got acquainted with his mother. Guess she’d passed on by the time Shepherd, the pup, found us.

Shepherd truly was a Soviet dog. The KGB couldn’t have done any better, penetrating a third world country. Shepherd eased himself into our house gradually in strategically planned moves. He was first spotted sunning himself occasionally on our garden wall parapet and then we noticed he had promoted himself to the top of one of the two concrete garden gate posts. It was not long before he drew my mother’s attention,”Dakh re, kukur ta ki mishti dekhte” (look guys, isn’t that a cute pup?).

Soon Ma was flinging leftovers to him after our meals. One day, when Sukhoranjan was about to garbage an old frying pan, Ma decided to keep it and use it as Shepherd’s dinner plate. She had Sukhoranjan remove the handle and clean it out and began having one of us kids go out and leave it filled with scraps, on his favorite gate post.

As Shepherd grew however, that gate post proved to be too small and he kept inadvertently knocking the pan off it in his eager enthusiasm. Soon we started leaving the pan on our doorstep instead.

———————————————-

The monsoon of 1965 was particularly severe and I remember this one late night. Ma and Baba were asleep, their bedroom door shut. I suddenly woke to see Dada and Chorda standing by our bedroom window, holding the grills and looking out, talking in a low tone. I jumped out of bed and went up behind them. My eyes were at the level of their waists and I had to push my little head through to see what was grabbing their attention. In the blinding sheets of rain, I saw Shepherd, bedraggled, on top of his gate post, trying to find a comfortable position to settle himself in.

Dada looked at Chorda, got a nod and turned to me,”Sshh. Mukh theke ekta shobdo jeno na shuni. Noito gatta khabi, bujhli?” (Ssh. One sound from you and you’ll get one of my bare knuckle raps on your head). He was obviously worried about my parents waking up.

Dada was tough and I never took his words lightly. If he said he was going to beat me up, he was going to beat me up. You couldn’t reason with him. You couldn’t placate him. You couldn’t seek refuge under the law. He was the law. He might easily have been born in the turn of the century in the Sicilian town of Corleone.

So, here we were, by the bedroom window,  me held by the ears, slowly being shaken but not stirred, by Dada. He continued, “Teen shotti bol, shatti, shatti, shatti” and I repeated after him in a hushed, awed voice, “Shatti, shatti, shatti”. Repeating ‘shatti’ thrice meant giving your word to the other guy that you wouldn’t rat out on him. This was the first time they were going to trust me not go blab to our parents the first chance I got. It was awesome. I was in! I’d suddenly grown up. I was now being taken as a man by my peers. 

My euphoria was short-lived, for Dada hit me with a gatta anyway. I started, “What the…!!%^*” and he swiftly clamped his palm on my mouth, “That was just for taste. There’s more from where that came, remember that.” Jesus Christ, they should have named this guy Joey Gallo.

The gatta was painful and unprovoked and when it became evident that I was going to burst out crying, Kissinger (Chorda) stepped in,” Now relax, take it easy, ok? You are now one of us. We gotta stick together, right?” I nodded hurriedly, gulping back my tears.

Dada took charge immediately, “All right, all right, here’s what we’ll do” he jabbed a finger painfully into my chest sending me reeling back,” you get that spare mat from the prayer nook and meet us at the front door.” With that curt command, he and Chorda swung on their heels and slinked down the stairs, while I made my way in the dark, to the prayer nook, to retrieve the spare mat, making sure I kept a safe distance from that pashbalish (round cushion) on the whatnot that scared the bejesus out of me every time I was made to enter the prayer nook alone in the dark. I grabbed hold of the mat and raced downstairs to where my elder brothers were waiting.

They already had the front door open and Shepherd was standing there, dripping and forlorn, his wet fluff now sticking to his body making him look half his size. There was this cove under the stairs next to the front door which housed the family bicycle (my father went to work on it when he didn’t manage to get a ride).

Shepherd came in and proceeded to the cove where he shook himself dry vigorously, soaking us all in the process. I hugged him. He was cold. Chorda had brought a bowl of milk which he placed next to the mat. Shepherd curled himself up on the mat and lapped at the milk gratefully. He was done in a microsecond and lay stretched out, eyes half closed, bushy tail wagging lazily in appreciation. In another minute he breathed a deep sigh and was out like a light. The next morning we were taken aback to note that our parents didn’t mind Shepherd’s new lodgings at all.

The penetration of the household was now complete, the culmination of a totally successful ‘hearts and minds’ exercise – the only casualty being my forehead – from Dada’s gattas.

Sukhoranjan got a permanent unionised job at MAMC, married soon after and moved away in ’68.

Shepherd passed on in the summer of ’69 around the time of the first moon landing. He failed to recover from a tonsil operation. I had just turned 14.

 

It is the early 9th Century Kingdom of Wessex. A unified kingdom of England is still a century in the future.

You are a commoner, a serf, a helot, a menial. Take it easy, I’m just showing off my vocab, relax. All I’m trying ta say is that you are a nobody.

Europe is a dark and treacherous place in a dark and treacherous time. The roads are covered in horse shit and the most common sound is the squelching as folk step on it. There is no Home Depot to sell you ‘horse shit shoes’.

The history that we usually study doesn’t tell us about the world that folks like you, shit shoveling ornery dumb folk, live in. Instead, the history we read is actually the biographies of famous men, of monarchs and the battles they fought. So if your dad happens to be king, chances are good you’ll be in the history books and I’ll be reading about who you fucked and who you married and stuff.

But you’re a serf, say a cobbler or a stone mason. It is 800AD or thereabouts. You don’t know it but you live in what later historians will call the ‘Dark’ a.k.a ‘Medieval a.k.a ‘Middle’ ages. No offence, but it is a period in history that is marked by a decline in economic, intellectual and cultural order and an increase in conflict, subjugation and anarchy.

Let’s just call it the Dark Ages. I like it. Sounds dystopian (which it in fact was), but feels sexy.

Although historical ages change gradually, historians pinpoint the trigger for the beginning of the Dark ages at 476AD, when the last Roman Emperor of Roman blood, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the barbarian Goth, Odoacer. That is the date when “Ancient Classical Greco-Roman” changed to “Dark” ages. It will remain dark for a thousand years.

You were born somewhere just beyond the first quarter, three centuries into the onset of the Dark Ages, around 770AD.

—————————

Medieval society is organized in three social orders, known as the ‘Three Estates’. Foremost are those who rule and fight – the First Estate. The Second Estate are those who claim to be God’s reps on earth, ie: the clergy. The Third Estate comprises of those who work their asses off – folks like you.

The ones who fight are supposed to protect the others from invasions, while the clergy are expected to protect everybody from committing sins. Finally you, the peasants, are there ta serve, to make the lives of the First and Second Estates comfortable through hard unrelenting labor. You and your kind constitute 95% of the population

One great leveller is literacy. You are not the only miserable idiot who can’t read and write. Almost all, including most nobles, are illiterate. Literacy is not yet a priority. Rise in literacy and enlightened debate will happen but that is still 700 years ahead, in the future. That age shall get the monicker, “The Renaissance”, the age of enlightenment.

—————————

You, my friend, are at the very bottom of the food chain. Your ruler is King Beorhtric of Wessex. It’s a Germanic name, his ancestors having crossed the Channel from Ghent in present day Belgium.

King Beorhtric’s wife, Eadburh, is a piece of work, a promiscuous, debauched woman. In a year or two after marriage she’ll poison hubby dear accidentally in an inebriated state, while attempting to poison a dinner guest. Both, the guest and Beorhtric, will die. In panic, she will cross the Channel in flight and arrive at the court of the great Charlemagne, who will take a shine to her but she will ruin it all by choosing his son instead.

Slighted by the rejection but sagely, Charlemagne will nevertheless gift Eadburh a convent in Francia and she’ll become an abess but that won’t last too long either. She’ll be caught blowing an English refugee in exile and be permanently banished by Charlemagne. Eadburh will eventually die a pauper begging in the streets of Pavia, in Italy.

But that is all in the future. Right now, Beorhtric is king and he owns everything, the land and every damn thing on it. As the only son born into the ruling family, he has inherited all the titles, lands and income of the family. This practice, known as ‘primogeniture’ – the right of succession to the first born male child, is believed to be the only way to retain the ruling family’s legacy and power.

King Beorhtric doesn’t have any siblings but if there were any, they would be sent into the Catholic Church as monks and nuns. This step is taken to ensure that none of the siblings try ta stage a coup. But don’t fret. Those siblings, though now a part of the Second Estate, would still wield enormous power. They would be given enough assets to be able to lead luxurious lives. As members of the Second Estate, they would fuck with you psychologically while the members of the First Estate screw you physically.

The king doesn’t know you or give a fuck about you. You’re an asset to be exploited every which way. In times of peace you’ll harvest the crops and when war looms, you’ll be swept up, put inside a ‘cog’ and transported across the channel ta fight.

The king has divided up the land into “fiefs”, parcels of land that range in size from vast duchies down to tiny plots of land given to a single knight, called a knight’s ‘fee’. To manage each fief, the king has installed a “vassal” or “Duke”, who is a trusted crony, a cousin or a relative through marriage. In return, the vassal has pledged his loyalty to the king and the soldiers to fight an invasion or to participate in one.

The vassal in turn hires reeves(overseers) who supervise serfs like you while you till and harvest the land. Every thing is accomplished by hand and yours is hard, back breaking work. You keep 10% of the harvest and pass on the rest to the vassal who keeps 30% from which he pays the overseers and sends the remaining 50% to the King.

Everyone has a lord. Yours is the reeve, a large violent brute of a man that you cannot trifle with. He is a shit shovellor too like you but slightly better off since he doesn’t have to do all the actual toil. The reeve is beholden to the vassal, who has the power of life and death over not only you but your whole family. He says whom you should marry and whom you shouldn’t. If he takes a shine to your sweet, pink-cheeked wife and forcibly takes her to bed, there’s nary a thing you can do about it.

The vassal is in turn beholden to the king in exactly the same manner as you are, to him. And the king can fancy anybody’s wife, the vassal’s, the reeve’s or even your’s. This is before Magna Carta, a charter of human rights that will become law two centuries from now. Not that it will benefit you in even the remotest manner.

The Magna Carta is going to be a set of laws created by the English King John, a universally disliked asshole. It will give greater freedoms to “freemen”, a misleading term that means only the barons and dukes. Magna Carta will have provisions for serfs too, but don’t hold your breath, they will be vague and impossible to enforce.

Right now, whatever your lord says is the law.

What can I say? Had you been born in my country of birth, India, at this very time in history, you would be living in prosperity in a land of plenty, governed wisely by “philosopher kings” of the Chola Dynasty. Instead here you are, shovelling shit in England.

You were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, is all.

—————————-

Hovering over everyone and everything is religion and that is Christianity, administered by a murderous continent-wide criminal enterprise known as the Catholic Church. The head of the Church, the Pope, is all powerful and even your king has to bow to his demands. Even though your king is the ruler, the Pope runs a parallel, equally powerful government inside the kingdom and that parallel government is headed by an archbishop, a very powerful guy indeed.

It will be another 700 years before a roly-poly overweight guy, crowned King Henry VIII, will get pissed off with the Catholic Church because it won’t allow him to divorce his current wife and marry a voluptuous lady-in-waiting he has been fucking. He will start his own brand of Christianity called the Church of England.

Jeeze, imagine founding a church just for access to fresh pussy.

Getting back to the here and now, there is a new religion going around, Islam, which is nothing but a beta version of Christianity. It uses the same basic storyline, the same prophets, the same archangels and the same lies as Christianity, but it has gone a little further. It has added to it a knockout punch, a threat, which says, “either you are with us or you are dead”.

Islam’s laws are so strict that you are scared ta even take a pee, lest you get your head chopped off for not peeing as per strict Islamic rules. I am not kidding. They even have a prayer that you have to recite before a fuck and another after a fuck, which you have ta recite in a ritualistic bath while cleansing your richard of the “filthy residue” of sex.

With all the insanity around you, the prospects of a happy, peaceful comfortable life for you are dim, see what I mean?

There are and will be great rulers in your time, who come in and steady the ship for a while and fade out – Justinian, Alfred the Great, Canute, Charlemagne, Richard the Lionheart, William the Conquerer, to name a few. But what they accomplish will not make any difference at all to your wellbeing.

Alas, you live inside a universe parallel to that of the elite who decide your fate. In your universe, invasions, sexual assault and bonded labor are the norm.

You are the medieval man.

————————

Stay tuned for a glimpse at your tawdry life, in Part-2.

—————————————-

“Simba, being brave doesn’t mean you go looking for trouble…” – Mufassa (The Lion King)

—————————————————

————————-

You must have seen it in the news. For a week in March 2013, it merited Page-1 on most digital news sites….“Swiss female tourist, 39, gang-raped by six men in dense Indian forest while her husband was beaten and made to watch…”

Here’s how it went down. The woman and her husband were on a “cycling tour” of India somewhere in the vast wilderness of the province of Madhya Pradesh.

Let’s take a deep breath here and pinch ourselves to ensure we are actually reading about someone, a foreigner and a woman, biking through India for fun. There, I just pinched myself and felt it. So, unless I am in a Matrix-like state, this must be happening.

So there they were, the Swiss woman and her husband, all charged up, adrenalin pumping, when they must have decided, “why not just turn north and keep cycling for another 250kms and go see the Taj Mahal? Hey, these locals are just pitiful little illiterate coloured people, what harm can they possibly do to us?”

---

And why the fuck not? Miss Swiss and her hubby were members of a new breed known as “adventure tourists”, brave folk who like living on the edge, whose idea of a fun vacation is attempting something potentially life-threatening, in only those places on earth from which they might not make it out alive, places they may never have been to before.

As it turned out, it was a decision that the two would live to regret.

At the end of the first day, they decided to stop and spend the night near a village that was surrounded by dense forest. Around 9:30 pm a group of men popped out of nowhere and broke into their tent. First, they beat up the husband real good and tied him to a tree. Then the men made him watch while they gang raped the woman repeatedly through the night. When they had had enough, they robbed them of everything they had and melted away into the night. The two were lucky to be alive and except for one badly bruised vulva, the woman was otherwise physically undamaged.

—————————-

The route that the Swiss couple had chosen took them through a region that is acknowledged as one of the ten most lawless places on earth – Chambal, in Central India, an arid and underdeveloped stretch of land as large as Quebec, that is riddled with poverty, corruption and patronage. It has a regional legislature where the line between the law-makers and the law-breakers is so blurred that you’ll think you have cataract when you try to find it. Rich landowners rig elections and rule like feudal lords, as members of the ruling BJP Party.

The lawlessness has bred a certain demographic that is found in abundance at Chambal – dacoits. Bollywood has made blockbusters on them. “Dacait”(1987), “Bandit Queen”(1994) and “Paan Singh Tomar”(2012) are a few hit bandit flicks from Bollywood that you might want to sample if you are a masochist.

Should I be biking along, like tra la la la, through joints that bandit movies are made on? Chambal is as remote as Timbuktoo, in 1700AD. When Donald Trump railed about “shit-hole” joints, he had obviously not heard of Chambal. If you were a tourist, you would have to be an imbecile with an IQ less than 2 to attempt a bike trip without checking out Chambal as a route to cycle through, even if you happened to be male. There are folk over there who would bugger you just as soon.

Before I began writing this post, I googled “Chambal lawlessness”. The first article that popped up was “The curse of Chambal” – The Telegraph, April 07, 2013. There was enough material there to make the hair at the nape of my neck stand up.

If I listed all 195 countries of the world according to “bike-for-fun-security-for women” in descending order, India would be very near the bottom of it, rubbing shoulders perhaps with Mali or Chad.

The hazards that I am likely to face biking in India are very real. No one has ever heard of separate bike paths. If I am female, especially female and white, there will be creepy local males stripping me naked with their stares. The exhaust pollution from decades old ramshackle lorries overtaking me will be choking. The potholes are so deep that if my bike and I hit the bottom, a farmer on the other side in Mexico might hear the thud. 

No one in his right mind bikes long distance through India for fun.

---

Mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650) wrote in his “Discourse on Method of Rightly Conducting Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences” began by saying…..

“The power of judgement, which is called ‘reason’ or ‘good sense’, is of all things among men, the most equally distributed, for everyone thinks he is so abundantly provided with it, that those who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already have. The diversity is in the way we utilize the reason we possess.”

—————————-

I always thought that the Swiss were really smart folks, not only possessing in abundance René Descartes’s ‘good sense’ and ‘reason’ but utilizing them to their maximum. Quietly usurping millions in cash, gold and art that had been originally confiscated from Jews by the Nazis and left abandoned in Swiss bank vaults at the end of the Second World War, that took real smarts. Pioneering the concept of a no-questions-asked repository of ill-gotten gains from around the world, stashed away in numbered accounts, man, that was brilliant. 

The Swiss are true pioneers. Switzerland is not a rogue criminal state that launders other peoples’ loots. It is just a bunch of poor white guys being resourceful.

What takes the Swiss into the realm of pure genius beyond anything that even Descartes could have imagined is the way they project themselves as a pink-cheeked, cute and cuddly nation with it’s picture-perfect hills, it’s Bollywood song and dance locales, it’s chalets, it’s cheeses, it’s pastries, it’s chocolates and all those other innocent things that we associate with only the Swiss. Man, that requires brains, oh yeah, real brains.

Everyone loves the Swiss. The Swiss believe that everyone loves the Swiss. I bet even sex-starved, illiterate, goondas from Chambal love the Swiss.

---

I am wondering what Miss Swiss’s next adventure ‘project’ is going to be. Maybe she’ll want to cycle from Pakistan, across the Hindu Kush into Taliban-controlled Kunar in Afghanistan where she’ll strip down, discard her bike and streak across downtown Kunar in the nude. My eyelids promise to remain unbattable in her honour.

Am I being insensitive? Some might take my words as victim bashing. Yes, I am victim bashing and being insensitive, but only toward thrill seeking imbeciles and not to the general plight of women who are victimized in spite of trying their best to be safe. 

The gang rape of the Swiss woman was unfortunate and nothing can justify it, not even stupidity. But it was entirely avoidable and in that, this lady does not deserve my heart-bleed. After all, wasn’t it the thrill of a lifetime that she had been after? Yes it was. The sensation of getting out there into the great wide unknown and then most unfortunately having her pussy stretched was an acid trip that she had chosen to have and she got what was coming to her, period.

In the west, there are many like the Swiss woman and her husband – inexperienced, untrained thrill seekers, desperate to prove to the world they are not shit shovelling losers.

They can be any ordinary Joe…..accountants, gym instructors, librarians and ex-policemen and they throng the slopes of Mt Everest every May. They spend a few weeks trying to get in shape, then pay upwards of $60000 a head to the many summit tour conductors and set off to climb the world’s highest peak. The tour operators make them believe they are real alpinists. 

Those vacuous wannabes have one thing in common – a lack of self worth that they try to over compensate for by attempting a climb that they have no business being on. If by chance they are able to make it to the top, they die of either pulmonary edema or from being squashed under crashing seracs or simply disappearing into a crevasse, never to be found again, left behind as permanent frozen monuments to stupidity. 

Like in the case of David Sharp…….

In 2006, the 34-yr old British rock climber took it upon himself to attempt an Everest summit on his own, alone. That’s right, he wanted to get there and back without the help of Sherpa guides that even experienced alpinists like to have around when they scale Himalayan peaks. 

Nor did Sharp think it necessary to have supplemental oxygen cylinders with him. 

Sharp made it to the summit but on his way back down, his luck ran out. Exhausted, gasping for oxygen in that rarefied height, he decided to sit down for a while to catch his breath, on a small rock under an overhang, barely a few hundred feet from the summit. It was a decision that would prove fatal. No one pauses to sit down in the “death zone”, an altitude – usually above 8000 metres – where the atmospheric oxygen is insufficient for supporting human life, causing death by hypoxia. 

Multiple teams of climbers passed by Sharp and the experienced among them noted that he was doomed. They also noted that there was nothing that they could do for him. Lifting him up and carrying him down thin treacherously slippery ice gulleys and sheer drops that needed jumping across, was out of question.

His life ebbing away, David Sharp watched multitudes of climbers passing him by, pausing to nod and wave in a show of respect and moving on.

————————

——————————

Okay, that’s enough about dumb Swiss tourists and wannabe alpinists. Let’s go to dumb Hollywood stars.

In 2014, hackers, aware of an iCloud security issue found in the Find My iPhone app used it to access the phones of hundreds of celebrities. A Python script, posted on the net, allowed bad guys to target any iCloud account with a brute force attack – a hacker jargon for a rapid barrage of attempts at endless combinations to guess the password of an iTunes account until the right one is found.

Apple patched this security issue and now the brute force attack will stop after the fifth unsuccessful login attempt, leaving the owner of the iTunes account unharmed as long as the password isn’t discovered in the first five tries.

As to those celebs, here’s how they reacted when images of their private parts that they had willingly posted and texted were plastered all over the internet –

—————————-

“It is a sexual violation, pure and simple. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, these Web sites are responsible and should be prosecuted.” 

——————————-

“It’s so beyond me. I just can’t imagine being that detached from humanity. I can’t imagine being that thoughtless.”

————————————-

“To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves.”

———————————

“This is obviously an outrageous violation of our client’s privacy. We intend to pursue anyone disseminating or duplicating these illegally obtained images to the fullest extent possible.”

———————————

“It has come to our attention that our private moments, that were shared and deleted solely between my husband and myself, have been leaked by some vultures. I can’t help but be reminded that since the dawn of time women and children, specifically women of color, have been victimized…..”

———————————

Sure, my heart bleeds for them. What kind of imbecile would text her nude photos through an internet that is known to leak like a sieve? We now know the kind.

Or are they really being dumb? Maybe they want those titillating pics to be discovered. Celebs thrive on discovery and sensation, no matter how shrill their complaints may be about their privacy being intruded upon. Narcissistic and insecure, they enjoy taking sexy pictures and showing themselves off.

In the entertainment industry, any publicity is good publicity. Celebs repeatedly barter their nudity on hundreds of movie screens in front of total strangers and that does not bother them even a bit since it is art and their looks and their other physical assets are commodities in a lascivious marketplace.

Before all this broke I knew not a single one of these stars, except maybe Jennifer Lawrence who was then a middling star at best. Now I’ll remember most of them. They are now guaranteed at least face recognition, if not by name. If I see a movie poster that has one of them, I am not likely to turn away. I am likely to buy the ticket and walk in. They have achieved what they all aspire for. We are the dumb-asses feeling sorry for them.

Non-celebs do the same thing but here lies the difference – they are mostly teenagers who haven’t gotten to know any better. Peer pressure, combined with some kind of brazen and rebellious innocence drives them to show themselves nude online.

And if they are not teenagers but older, invariably they bare themselves with a clear intention to titillate. Here are some of their reactions……

———————————————–

“I like the feeling of knowing I’m desired, by strangers even. It’s empowering. When I post naked pictures of myself, I rather enjoy the thought of my boyfriend or fuck-friend jerking off looking at my photos. Ha! The best is when they admit to it”.

———————————————

“Wanna know why I do it? Because it gives me confidence in myself and it makes me feel good and it does not always lead to a difficult situation.”

————————————————

“I don’t know what religion you are, but if you’re Christian you should be willing to share. Asked over and over again, Jesus said that our primary objective was to “love one another”.”

—————————————-

Yeah right. A celeb veers off toward racism and victimization and a non-celeb sees Jesus in all this. If I try hard enough maybe I can connect all this to Higgs Bosons.

Sometimes I am tempted to let it all hang out myself. You know, post nude pics of me on the internet. If I wasn’t 70, with a weather-beaten richard, I probably would have. No, I’m kidding actually. I’m a bit too straight-laced for that sort of thing.

“Meanwhile, Jennifer, I loved your photos though I don’t go for your kind of baobabs. They resemble pyrus communi (European pears). Melopepo are my favorite fruit. Oops that was Latin again, for melons. I break into Latin when I am turned on. Your nudity hasn’t changed the way I see you and your other celeb pals – as nothing but a bunch of “puellae stultae”.

————————————–

“Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.”

– Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, in the first flush of his Presidency, early 2000

————————————————

---

If you want to be a book collector and line the walls of your den with dark mahogany shelves filled with a thousand books like I do, you gotta plan the whole thing out so every book is neatly arranged and you can find any particular book in a hurry. I can’t stand messed up libraries with crammed shelves, piles of books on the floor, on coffee tables and couches that intellectuals have. Thank the sweet lord I am not an intellectual.

I can’t afford mahogany, so my shelves are Ikea, dirt cheap, easy ta assemble, durable and light weight. I don’t give a fuck about mahogany.

I have arranged my library in genres.

Rack-A is Crime, everything on crime – crime fiction whodunnits, true crime, serial murder, murder suicides, schizos and their tools of murder – guns, knives, poisons, etc. Trust me, if I wanted ta kill you, I easily could. But I need you alive, you’re the reader.

Did I mention I have an extensive porn collection? Besides crime, Rack-A also devotes significant shelf space to it. Squishy fantasy porn, like Nancy Friday and Anonymous, How-to books like ‘The Illustrated Kama Sutra’, ‘The ultimate guide to cunnilingus’ , ‘Sex after 60’, that kinda stuff. Then there are other visual aids such as old issues of Hustler and Oui. (Playboy and Penthouse are too staid for guys like me).

Rack-B has classics. Y’know, like Jane Austen, Dickens, Thomas Hardy and stuff. I haven’t read any and don’t intend ta. They are there for show, to make me look profound, but they’ll be leaving soon. I’ve been thinking it’s time to end the pretence and donate them all to Nova, the 2nd hand bookstore by the riverside. That way, I’ll have more shelf space for porn. I can’t wait ta have the 20-volume ‘Encyclopedia of Sex’ by Marquis de Sade which will go on half-price sale next Sunday and I can have the whole lot for twennie smackeroos. Gave them an advance too, I did. You won’t believe what this de Sade guy had been up to. I am just wondering how he got the time ta try out all that weird stuff if he was busy writing 5000 pages of weird stuff.

Rack-C has modern conflict – mainly World War-2, the Korean and Vietnam wars. And religion – translated texts of all the major religions. I like ta have a good guffaw once in a while and religion always does that to me. To have both, conflict and religion, on the same rack is appropriate.

Rack-D is a melange of bestsellers and my pet area of interest – Space.

Rack-E is going ta make me a millionaire. It has some painstakingly collected First Editions and antique books. I just found an O’Henry printed in 1905 in an ornate hard cover, it’s paper so fine that it crinkles when you touch it. I got that for 50¢. I’ll read it and when the time comes, I’ll sell it for five grand.

Of course, I have arranged security against any pilferage from Rack-E : my Peacemaker Colt, which can drill a hole into any thief and his twin brother. That is, if he indeed had a twin brother and they were standing in line, one after the other. I got the twin brother thing from the starting page of Alistair Maclean’s “When eight bells toll”. (I am anything but original).

Then there is a smaller rack that has encyclopedias, Nat Geo issues and compilations. One shelf on that rack is reserved for my reading knick knacks – pencil, sharpees, stickies and page markers, highlighters, Iphone/Ipad charging outlets and of course, the case for the Peacemaker Colt.

And a bowl of peanuts, just in case I am having a beer or a glass of wine and it needs cumpunee. And a tiny pocket flashlight, in case a peanut falls on the carpet and rolls in underneath a rack.

I am an organized son of a bitch.

Oh, I forgot the one pictured above – my Soyúz Sovétskikh shelf, Rack-C. It has books on the Soviet Union. You have of course known the authors well – Le Carre : the genius of ‘understated, laid back’ spy fiction. Tom Clancy : the Republican wet dream gung-ho guy. Len Deighton, Brain Garfield and Fredrick Forsyth : ruthless evil. Solzenitsyn : fatigued suffering pooches. And Ian Fleming : the tongue-in-cheek – varying depictions of Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик – Russian for USSR, a land that could have have attained genuine utopia, if basic human nature had not got in the way.

There are a couple of non-fiction reads too. “KGB Today”, an in-your-face piece of American Cold War propaganda by John Barron, who used to be a regular contributor to The Readers’ Digest, which was widely believed to be a propaganda publication of the US Government. If RT.com had been a print publication, it would be the Russian Federation’s Readers’ Digest. And there is “Autopsy of an Empire”, a blow-by-blow account of the fall of the Soviet Empire, by a former US ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Lumbering up menacingly over the ensemble, you discern an Illushyn IL-76 military transport aircraft. It looks as if it will be able to clear Deighton and Clancy by a hair’s breadth.

Actually I’m not sure if that is an IL-76. But then, DILLIGAS? (Do I Look Like I Give A Shit). I prefer DILLIGAF, though.

I have Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” but since it was pre-revolution, it is in the Classics shelf on Rack-A. Didn’t I mention I was organized? And I have watched Dr Zhivago too many times to want to read the book, so Boris, I can’t waste shelf space here for ya. Go ебать yourself, dasvidaniya.

———————————-

I am one of the lucky ones. I grew up in the early 1960s at a time when the Soviet Union was at it’s zenith. We lived in a tiny industrial town in India where the government was building an engineering behemoth that would manufacture heavy machinery for mining coal. It was a joint Indo-Soviet venture – the Soviets had thrown in financing and technical know-how and Indians had contributed the labor and the corrupt bureaucrats.

The place was crawling with Soviet experts in those days and they lived together in this massive compound of apartment blocks, known as the “Soviet Experts’ Hostels”. The compound had volleyball courts and a swimming pool that my brothers and I frequented. Often some matronly Russian woman sitting on a deck chair by the pool would beckon to us, give us a hug and hand us Russian-made cookies, with a grin through teeth that could never pass even the most primitive metal detector.

Through the prism of my 11-year old eyes, the Soviets seemed very friendly, often urging us to sit and watch their newsreels and TV with them. I watched Alexei Leonov live, painstakingly clamber out of the Voskhod-2 and float around and wave at the camera, his visor reflecting the white wisps of the earth’s upper atmosphere.

The Russians would welcome us into the movie theatre they had in the campus that was constantly running shoddily made Russian films made by SovExport, a propaganda arm of the Soviet Union. If you were a kid on his summer break and had run out of games to play, you went to a Soviet movie at the Experts’ Hostel.

All SovExport films was excruciatingly boring, besides being very amateurish. One that I remember watching had an old man pushing a wooden sled with a sick old woman in it, from the left side of the screen to the right, with the accompaniment of a 200-piece orchestra and a baritone chorus. He started on the left when the movie credits came on and we were hoping something would happen – like maybe a German Stuka would suddenly dive in and bomb the shit outa them or something. (That was the only time I remember hoping for the arrival of the Nazis).

But the man on the screen just kept plodding on, until he disappeared with the sled, beyond the right-hand edge of the screen, just prior to the intermission. There were actual Soviet off-duty personnel and family watching, their eyes glued to the screen. When I quizzed my Dad about it, he said watching those films was mandatory for the Soviet personnel (unless they wished to have cabbage soup, morning noon and night, in a Siberian gulag).

I watched a movie that had been based upon Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’. In the middle of a battle scene, all of a sudden a Lada drove by near the bottom right corner of the screen, right next to a van that was unloading klieg lights for the shooting. Not a single Russian eyelid batted at that. There were no groans, catcalls, derisive whistles, nothing. This was at a moment in our lives when we regularly went to watch finely crafted American blockbusters such as Sound of music, Battle of the Bulge and Von Ryan’s Express. Even my child’s brain could not help but laugh afterward at the Soviet movie making skills.

But heck, it was fun. It was a time when hegemony and building spheres of influence were paramount. The Soviet team of engineers and their families might have been ordered to ‘mingle with the natives’, but I did not see anything but spontaneity in their warmth. It was the Soviet Union’s “hearts and minds” exercise and as far as I was concerned, they were roaringly successful at it. While the Americans were busy mocking our politicians and laughing at our accent derisively, the Soviets were building bridges that are still standing today.

I don’t have any Soviet porn. I could spare some space for it in my porn shelf on Rack-B, in case you can lend me some. Maybe they did have a Thongus Kutyokokoff. I have to look into that.

—————————————-

————————————

Personally, I think being buried sucks. You occupy unnecessary space that could have been used more fruitfully, like maybe for a bistro or a bar. That’s where mourners gravitate to after a funeral anyway.

The Population Reference Bureau estimates that ever since our species began, 108 billion people have roamed the earth. If you exclude the 8 billion sods like you and me that are still alive, we have 100 billion dead. Of these, around 80 billion are estimated to have been buried through ritualistic funerals.

Now, I’m sure you won’t sue me if I said that an average corpse occupies an area of 6 sq.ft. That would make the area covered by corpses all over the world as on date to be a total of around 29000 sq.kms. Considering extra amenities, spacing, pathways, etc, the final figure could well be 112000 sq.kms.

Imagine 112000 sq.kms of prime real estate, usually at the heart of town, blocked by a bunch of skeletal remains. If you’re already dead, would you give a flying fuck what happened to your body, your tits, your dicky, the end of your alimentary canal? Nope, you wouldn’t. How would you? You’re dead, remember? And if you had MAGA cousins and uncles sharing the crypt, forget it, you’d want outa there.

If we carry on burying our dead, pretty soon there won’t be any place left to live in. You might have an address like, “Next to Plot:21, Row:16, St TiddlyTwat Cemetery”.

I believe the best thing is cremation. Your next of kin are left with just a tiny tiny urn of ashes. If they didn’t care much about you, they can leave you in the attic or if they did, they can tip it over, sprinkle it in their vegetable garden and grow mommy peppers. They could then put the urn ta use, like a flower pot or sumpn. Personally, I would contract with a Hollywood masseur ta massage me into Scarlett Johanssen’s jiggledipoos.

Then there is the pathos. I was in a cemetery in Pointe Claire that had neatly laid headstones, all of the exact same style and size. All around were exquisitely manicured lawns. I realized it was a Military cemetery.

I was ambling down the rows, looking for an angle to take photos from, when I came upon a middle-aged woman lying prostrate on her stomach, her head resting on a step in front of the headstone. Baskets of flowers, a bit wilted, were all around. She was alone and at that time of the day, the cemetery was deserted.

I figured it must be a week after the funeral, the visitations, the suppers and lunches spent with consoling friends and relatives and now at last she was by herself, to be with that one human being that had always mattered the most.

The woman’s head was tilted to one side, eyes unblinking, staring at me approaching. Staring but not noticing my presence. Her arms were wrapped around the headstone in an attempt at an embrace. A large butterfly fluttered in and landed on her hair but she didn’t seem to notice.

The epitaph was succinct, just like all the others there. It read….

B60 926 153

Cpl René G Fournier

Royal Canadian Armoured Corps

11 March 1997 – 20 September 2021

When the woman sensed that I was about to kneel, sit next to her, offer my condolences, her eyes blinked for the first time. With considerable effort, her lips formed a smile and she said in a whisper, “Mèrci, tout va bien” (Thank you, I’m fine)

It was an overwhelming sight, the grief all-pervading, unimaginable. I had taken a photo her prostrate body clutching the headstone while I was approaching, still at a distance from her, but I cannot bring myself to upload it here. It is just too personal. I would be betraying her. In fact I didn’t take any more photos that day, so touched was I. I have uploaded pics from other cemeteries instead.

——————————

The question is whether a graveyard is a place of solace, whether it is a place where one can feel connected and find closure, the way the woman thought it would bring her inner tranquility.

Is that the only way? Wouldn’t the dark and desolate environs of a cemetery be a grim reminder of tragedy and deter her from moving forward?

And what about the other elephant in the room, the environmental concerns with the chemicals used in preparation of the corpses. More than a million gallons of formaldehyde get into the soil every year, besides the menthol, the phenol and the glycerin. What would that do to the ground water?

And then there are traditions around the world, cultures that actually celebrate a death with wine, feasting and dance, like in New Orleans which has “Jazz funerals”. Before the funeral, the jazz band plays sombre music and after, it ramps up into rollicking dance music and has mourners having the time of their lives. You might have watched one in the start of the James Bond film, “Live and Let Die”.

I understand that for some, the idea of breaking into dance at a funeral might look repugnant but either way, we have to move on with our lives and let just the memories continue to console us and the best way is to not leave a physical trace and that can only be by cremation. A small urn of ashes does not reopen wounds.

People who cremate are happier than people who bury. How’s that for a slogan?

The only thing going for burials is the pristine beauty of cemeteries in Quebec – the lush green, the headstones and the epitaphs. And that’s why I have the urge to take graveyard photos.