Anything But Vacant

I looked outside the balcony…and sighed. All I could feel and all I could see were yellow.

A pervert was leaning against an electricity pylon, chewing. He stared at me and smiled. Though my innocence had been busted wide opened a long time ago, my vision had remained faithful. I could see the streak of mustard oil down his thick brown sideburns, glistening. The pervert had worn a light shirt to ward off the hell like heat; his skin had sprouted melanin to embrace the invisible light. Scorching temperatures had burnt the fat underneath the pervert’s skin. He stood there, two grey slippers strapped to his feet. His fat had molten like butter under a hot knife and sizzled through his pores. It had melted off his bones, his organs, his skins and the remnants of his muscles. This molten one lacked any curves, contours or calm smooth surfaces. Instead, tuberosities, processes, digits, tubercles, condyles and extremities cast deep impressions upon his polished black leather.

This was Kamathipura, the red light district of Mumbai; my home for the past seven years, one of the many places littered with colours, dirt, clothes, evil, perverts, animals, germ laden street foods, culture, mule carts and B-grade films.

Yet, amongst the roads and uneven muddy tracks, ‘our kind’ was nowhere to be found. The brave ones walked amidst public, crossed narrow alleyways, dodged their way through beeping vehicles, stuffed their bags full of fruits, vegetables and rice dosas; yet everyone was blind to our camouflage.

The weaker members of our class were recessed into their nooks and crannies, like rats hooked with pink fat tails and geckos with soft fleshy bellies. Scared animals waiting for the dominant species to sleep; “protomammals in the days of the tyrant lizards,” the intellectuals would have said. Creatures of the night stared up to the skies in pursuit of darkness when our kind would overthrow the hierarchy and take over the city. We did that everyday.

Naked blue skies, without their cloudy costumes had radiated scorching heat upon people spectacularly well. It was the same reason that when Mumbai turned a different cheek to the sun, a chill began to set in. Bipeds and quadrupeds of different kind began to emerge. Packs of beige fleshy geckos were glued near the luminescence of fluorescent lights. A shoddy man supporting a crown of boiled eggs vocalising ‘garam ande, uble ande’ began roaming around equally shoddy houses. A cycle bell tinkled and loose chain jangled its way through a group of dirt-smeared children who were way past their bedtime. A Couple of frogs were busy revelling in their watery home. Towards the end of my road were a group of men. Further away were a few women. All were squatting; their saris, lunghis and polyester trousers bunched around their knees. All had their buttocks exposed. All were shitting though not much of them could be seen in this time of the evening. Only the fetor provided the clue.

One by one, the beasts and bitches (pimps and the prostitutes) surfaced. My kind possessed strange skins; cotton and silk skins that shed light in the red and yellow spectrum, frequencies that were tuned to our symbionts’ vision, for the other half only saw red, yellow, orange and anything in between, just as a wasp only saw the ultraviolet markings on a flower. Red glossy paints were marked across their lips. Reds were deckled onto their cheeks and mandibles. Silvers and gold were lining their mains. Hundreds of yellow beige pixels switched on and off across the houses like aroused fireflies during their mating season.

The other side of the twisted coin to their dark double life was all too visible. They would now infest the clubs, the pubs, the restaurants, the gardens, the pathways, anywhere where a few Rupees could have been earned.

We were to rule Mumbai for the next 7 hours. The night was ours…

I returned and slumped on my bed. The white pillow had the grease marks from the previous customer’s head. I was far more fortunate that customers came to me in this hotel where I worked. There was something lewd and smutty about the whole atmosphere. The dim red lights, the smell of incense, the hot clammy environment, the sound of an invisible radio playing Lata, magazines intended to be appetisers and muffles and subdued tones of penetrations, orgasms and carnality that enveloped me. This is what all the perverts looked for.

Days had snaked their ways through events; events had slithered their way through time. As for the events, they had gotten bizarre by every swing of the imaginary pendulum. I took comfort in that eccentricity. My whole life had been one great bizarre story. I could somehow relate to that growing obscurantism.

It had almost been seven years since I had been doing this. The customers, they weren't getting any more compassionate either and there'd be times when I had to take days of work because I had strained a muscle, pulled a tendon or was far too sore to move. All those injuries…without getting up from the bed. As the skin inside my ribbed pouch became durable and my muscles grew stronger, more and more people began docking at the sperm depository that was my private room. I had run out of orifices long time ago. Sometimes there were so many people at one go that I had honestly thought they would end up fornicating my nostrils and ear canals.

But a job was a job. No job was perfect and my one…well what can I say. I must admit, I enjoyed it at times. It was fun. I can't deny that. I did get in trouble with a few jealous women though. Every now and then some arthritic hag veiled like toffee or rolled into a sari like a samosa role would come by and start screeching at me. At first I was startled; I was shocked. I was breaking people's homes. Then, as those screeches failed to change their content, I became immune to their barking. Why then should I care for them? We all had to fill our stomachs and I never asked for this. Whenever I felt vulnerable, I hammered that thought into my head. I had never asked for this.

Anyway, this was business. I was providing a service and if someone didn't want to buy the product, then they didn't have to come. “You're a home breaking witch,” one woman had shouted at me. “You think I'm stupid with that story about you selling kebabs. You don't sell kebabs. You get paid to put them inside your small dirty vaginas.” My reply was usual: “And if you weren't so fucking old and ugly, he wouldn't be coming to me everyday, complaining about your odour and rolls of fat.”

That line usually did the trick. They would simmer off like two agitated drops of water on a heated pan. Men of every type, every faith and every profession came. They came in droves; Hindus, Muslims, Christians Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis, doctors, lawyers, police inspectors, petty politicians and of course, husbands. Men, who's battery life was about to go, men who only a few years ago had discovered puberty, middle aged men with broom like moustaches who always insisted on kissing me with their salivated lips, dripping wet moustaches and a breath which smelt mildly of decayed flesh.

Customers came, quite, subdued, ready and willing to give up everything for the next few hours. Yet their professions always seeped into their fetish. The doctors and chemists were so neat and meticulous. The act of sex to them was some uncanny biological experiment. Stimulation of a few thousand neutrons…or was it neurones, increased blood flow, dilated blood vessels and a high respiratory rate in a specific period of time leading to a pleasurable stimulation. The lawyers were boring and always technical with money. They always sat down, whether it was on a chair, on the bed or the dirty mattress. They always crossed their arms, appeared focused and negotiated the best deals. The young boys, climbing afoot their zenith of libido always fell in love. They hardly had enough money to receive the full service but they were the ones who stroked, not pulled my hair. The politicians, what could I say, they lived up to their name. They would negotiate a deal, promise to pay after the service and then refuse to pay the full price.

Finally, of course the husbands did what they had to, exercise power over every woman, a power they had lost to their wives long ago. They would come and impress upon me that this fine pedigree was doing me a favour with its two and a half inch erect stub. I hated those hypocrites the most. They had matchstick legs supporting a large barrel like body with thin arms and a large balding head. They sweltered too quickly and never lasted too long. Most irritatingly, they complained that I never gave them good service, that I never showed them interest or love. Love? Since when did paying someone to have sex with him require love?

I had often wondered about my purpose. I knew I was smart and educated. Surely, there had to be an easier way then this. I was going to College. Was all this really necessary? Surely, my lifestyle could have been maintained by another manner. I palmed my growing belly and wondered about life and death.

Cushioned by a clear warm yolk, protected by a mineral cage and embraced by walls of burgundy flesh; to lay buoyant in a liquid black universe where the membranes, his boundary to all reason and rationality lay within a limb's reach; would a foetus, a pseudo life desire for birth? For him, nothing existed on the other side.

Would he wish for a dawn? Would he crave for an ending to this comfort and reason, to stop hearing the lullaby of two hearts, one of its nourisher, the other a bantam imitation? Would he wish the beat to be replaced by alien tones, sounds of cries and wails? Would he wish his tiny universe to be ripped open, only for him to undergo the claustrophobic tension and torsion where his soft skull would curve and twist and shoulders would converge to one point? Would he wish for an ending to his life by that all-consuming white light that lay at the end of the narrow ribbed tunnel?

And yet, wasn’t death just that?

Wasn’t death just an elaborate womb; a comma in a never-ending sentence, through which all life must have traversed?

But oh how wrong I was to ever think I or whoever I gave birth to had any significance. I was a number, a biomass, fertiliser that would bear the ripest fruits on my grave. My rotting body would nourish sour apples and pink sweet seedy guavas. My bones would provide the seeds and skin, my muscles the green leaves and fruity flesh. Then one day, a boy would come by, walk over my grave, pluck the fruit and chew it, in essence eating my dead remains. What were once my limbs, my face, my abused genitals and nails would strain through his teeth, mix with his saliva and plaque, pass through his slimy intestine and get stored within his rectum. 18 hours later, he’d hide behind a broken wall and shit me all out. The dry brown shit would then undergo mastication by flies that had visited other shits before. I would journey through their tight tiny rectums too, then get broken down further by fungal moulds. The flies would die seven days later and fall to the ground where every animal would step on them, in essence stepping on me. Would I ever be spared the humiliation?

People were so arrogant, so evil and yet this is what they amounted to; lumps of walked over shit…

But I drew comfort that that would never happen because I would be cremated. Still, my molten flesh and skin would stick to wooden splints and my meat would be barbequed for the next 15 hours. My stomach would burst upon, my eyes would boil away, my insides would rip open with steam and hot white coal would sear into my uterus. I laughed; I was sending myself to hell, giving myself an early taster and because I believed in reincarnation, I would face eternal damnation.

…But I couldn’t philosophise any longer because that parasite was within me now. The first thing tomorrow, after College, I would go to Dr. Satyavadi, the man who tore away youths from within their mothers' filthy wombs to supplement the hospital's income. He was a funny young man who had once, behind closed doors, described us as such:

The price of sex without a condom was much higher than the price of a 1st trimester abortion and therefore it was economically a 'wiser' decision to let the components of the ecosystem (economic/ecological system) do what they did best. The cravers provided the providers with cash and unwanted omissions, who in turn pleasured their meat for a few hours. The providers provided the removers with cash and unwanted dummies within their second hand cocoons. The removers in turn scraped, sucked or cut away those omissions and provided free hospital services for other poor needy women. The money that was going to be spent on drugs or hospital care for other women, by their husbands, brothers or fathers, the craver, was now going to be transferred to the providers. That was the completion of the circle and the set up of a stable ecosystem.

I was letting all of this get to me. Things for prostitutes were different now. Nina, another whore working in this hotel, was right about one thing. This wasn’t the age of courtesans, those intellectual whores of Nawabs and Rajas, who spoke Urdu beautifully; the ones with whom one could have conversations over literature and other arts. Nor were the Madams or Mausis torn sympathetic souls that felt pain for their prostitutes. They didn’t shed any tears over the welfare of the whores whom, as portrayed in the black and white movies, supposedly thought of them as their very own daughters. Neither did they shed any joyous ones when a man, blindly in love, decided to elope with one. These 20th Century prostitutes spoke Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi, those three ugly sisters of Urdu, which vocalised surprisingly like a bag of screws and bolts being rattled over a frying pan. This was the age of fast information, neurones were the information cables and sexual communication travelled via the same route. This was a fast fuck facility and sex was served on a plate. “What would you like for your order Sahib Ji. I would like some thighs, cut the fat, I want it lean; breasts, well done, and a generous portion of vagina, not too bloody, don’t mind the hair but not too loose. Everything must be fresh.”

I jolted as the bell rang. My vision focused and I fixed the crumpled sari onto my shoulder. The ringing meant that a customer was waiting own below at the bottom floor. The bell rang again. It had a sense of urgency. I knew what that meant; the customer was rich. I looked into the mirror, placed the usual pastry make up onto my face and walked out of my room.