Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Yellow Jungle [fiction]

The sun is trying hard to break through the thick grey clouds. It’s wet outside, remnants of last night’s heavy rains. A new day ahead: I walk to the bus stop.

The road is covered with a viscous sheath of mud, instilled with prints of tyres and chappals. It’s now my turn to pay tribute to the road: I stamp my Nike hoof mark on the mire with each step I take. I look at the clouds, feel the tickle of the wind’s silk hands on my face, smell the litres of Hugo Boss that I showered on my body this morning, grin at myself for being handsome and wearing a new Fab India Kurta, when I step on something softer than the sludge.

“Shit!” I shout! I look down. It’s just a rotten papaya...

No, it’s not! It’s actually on a yellow pile of mustard coloured shit of some unknown cursed animal that my Nike shoe royally trod on! I decide not to spoil my mood because of some creature’s excrement and I pretend that it was really a rotten papaya that I had stepped on. So, I make my way to the bus stop with a smile on my face.

I reach there. There is a yellow rectangular cubicle just across the road. It’s a men’s public toilet. Public in all the senses of the word! So public that it gives an open-view of it’s two lavatories, once white may be, but now soiled to the point where they look more murky than the road itself. So public that you can actually notice the red splotches inside that are now an integrate part of the cubicle’s identity. So public also, that it is open to all to admire our local men pull up their lungis and dhotis to “privately” urinate.

The whole place smells of urine: fresh urine, two days old urine, one week old urine, antic urine…

Next to the over-public loo, on the right lies a yellow trapez… (well yeah, YELLOW again) It seems I didn’t dream. The good soul that feeds on the all the garbage of the surrounding area happens to be a yellow trapezium-shaped metal container as big in size as a car. There it reclines, slowly digesting it’s food at it’s ease, and burping and farting putrid-eggs flavoured gases.

Here’s a donkey also. The mud wrapped animal, it’s tail swinging like a pendulum, and it’s triangular ears pointed upwards, has it’s head bent down in a pile of rubbish that adorns the garbage bin on all the sides. The animal searches cautiously. The grey tip of its nose goes through the plastic bags, the wet garbage, the dry garbage… It goes round the yellow bin, searches some more, and seemingly unsatisfied, strolls to the other side of the road in the hope of better luck.

And now comes my way three brunette goats. They look like beauty queens ramp-modelling on the muddy road. Each of their step is taken at regular intervals, in a synchronized way. Their dark fur looks like it has been oiled, shampooed, conditionned, and blown dry. They even have golden strips of hair on their body that lends them a “i-just-went-to-the-parlour-for-a-bleach” attitude.

One of them stops walking. It stands still and suddenly an assortment of black pearls come out of its behind and spread on the road, rolling in all directions. I turn my head away from such wealth and look around.

“Shit, donkeys, goats, men… Am I in a jungle?!”

2 comments:

Aditi said...

hey u changed it?.... wat happen to the bit about sharukh khan or sumthng? did that get edited out?

Murali Raman said...

u remind me of that in-famous malayalee writer who won all kinds of international honor for writing novels with a lot of excrement and turd in them...forget his name...the irony!!!
who was it?