Skip to main content

Condom Mechanics



Short Story

The condom failed them.  Aisha became pregnant.

“Oh, fuck!” was Anand’s spontaneous reaction.  He didn’t mean it to be vulgar, Aisha knew.  Boys and girls in the college used the word with a vast array of meanings and meaninglessness.  It was the most popular word on the campus as it encapsulated a kaleidoscopic range of meanings and feelings.  The word also referred to the most popular pastime on the campus.  Aisha wondered whether it was after a visit to their campus that Bill and Melinda Gates decided to offer a $1 million-funding to anyone who can produce the “next generation condom” which would make the popular pastime as pleasurable as if there were no condom.  And foolproof too, hoped Aisha.  Not like the one that had ditched her.  

“No tension,” said Anand with such a bindaas attitude that for a moment Aisha thought he was an ambassador of Manappuram gold loan.  “There are gynaecologists who will fuck any pregnancy just like that for a few gandhis.”  He snapped his fingers.

‘Gandhi’ was the campus slang for a five hundred-rupee note.

“I’m afraid,” Aisha heard herself muttering.  Will it be painful?  That’s what she was primarily afraid of.  Pain is not something she was familiar with.  There was no luxury in the world that her father, Hameed, could not buy her without touching the black money he had stashed away in some Swiss banks.  Hameed would not allow pain to come anywhere in her neighbourhood.

Hameed had come to the city as a young man possessing nothing more than an extra pair of clothes and high school education.  He started as a daily wage labourer in a construction company.  Today his own construction company is worth a few hundred crores of rupees.  A few cases of cheating were filed against him by some people who were his clients.  But such cases mean nothing in this country when you’ve acquired a certain stature – economically or politically.

“There’s nothing to fear,” said Anand rather contemptuously.  As a Rajput he was very proud of the bravery that his ancestors had bequeathed him.  He boasted quite often that the history of his family could be traced back to Paramara who restored the stolen kamadhenu to its owner, Vashisht maharshi.  It’s funny, mused Aisha, that the cow was stolen by another maharshi, Vishvamitra.  We do have a very motivating heritage.  No wonder Anand’s father is a successful politician of a national party that takes much pride in the nation’s cultural heritage which is presumed by his party to be under constant threat from Islamic Pakistan.  Mr Karan Parmar, Anand’s father, would never accept a Muslim girl for a daughter-in-law.  His Rajput ancestry would condemn it as  treason to have his son marry a Muslim girl.  A Khap Panchayat would be summoned and the greyest-haired or baldest-headed khap leader would pronounce the verdict, his breath reeking of hate: “Death to the offenders.”  Mr Parmar’s black money that has not made its way to a Swiss bank yet will buy the life of his son from the khap warriors.  Justice is a blindfolded lady. 

But who wants to marry Anand, now?  Aisha chuckled.  She had never imagined herself as Anand’s wife.  Whatever happened between them was a natural part of the mechanics of enjoyment that prevailed on the campus.  Bill Gates, the Imam of Generation Next, had understood it and hence sought to replace quantum mechanics with condom mechanics on the campus.  May Allah bless him!

But Allah’s ways are not easy to understand.   Otherwise how would Hameed, the lord of construction mafias, come to know about her pregnancy so soon?  He fretted and fumed while his wife stood with a marmoreal demeanour.  Having concealed her face behind the religious veil for years, Aisha’s mother had lost her emotions or had come to think it was no use revealing them since nobody would see through the veil anyway.

“Go and play this on your laptop,” said father flinging a CD at her.  “This is selling like hot biryani in Palika Bazar.”

Her heart stopped beating when her laptop brought the CD alive.  What she saw was one of her pastime scenes with Anand, though Anand’s face was never seen in the video.

She pressed Anand’s mobile phone number.  “Dhoom machale,” said the dial tone before it was cut off.  “The person you are trying to contact is out of range or not available now,” said a mechanical voice. 

She dialled the number again.  The phone was now switched off.

When she reached college the next day she learnt that Anand had gone to join an MBA course in the land of Bill Gates, the Lord of Generation Next.

Comments

  1. At the end of the day we have educated illiterates. People bought degrees for people who are worse than illiterates.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's the best of times and the worst of times, said Dickens in Hard Times....!

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. Vishal, I have taken the scene beyond the present.

      Delete
  3. Honestly, I do not understand. My bad,of course.

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's just like me avoiding scientific writing saying "I do not understand". A former student of mine who is now in university remarked on Facebook that I was generalising about the present generation. He understood the story from that angle. A journalist friend rang yesterday to say that my story has no emotion and is too intellectual. He also understood the story, however. What can I suggest to you, Raghuram?

      Delete
  4. Sad but more common than ever in the present times.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The way the the communal and personal feelings get intertwined while narrating brings the story to life. I had a great time reading this post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for saying that you enjoyed going through the story. I didn't think of it as a communal problem. Communal problems are created by idiots like the Khap Panchayat oldies. I'm worried about the young generation.

      Delete
  6. Wow, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this story, you use such a powerful and effective language.. I loved how you described Hameed's wife hiding her emotions under the veil!

    Good Luck, looks like a successful blog!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for telling me something precisely (which very few commentators do).

      Delete
  7. another interesting piece...
    A story one keeps hearing of nowadays, atleast in B schools...

    Your choice of expressions is brilliant Sir !

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

The Ironies of Power: Modi at Gangaikonda-Cholapuram

When Narendra Modi posed for one of his infinite photo-ops framed against the gopuram of the ancient Gangaikonda-Cholapuram Temple on 27 July 2025, one of the biggest ironies of history was created. Gangaikonda-Cholapuram was the capital of Rajendra Chola (r 1014-1044) who was much different from Modi upon whom the BJP leader H Raja conferred the title of the “Living Gangai Kondan”. Rajendra Chola’s empire was marked by pluralism. He built temples but was not a religious bigot. The differences don’t end there. They just begin. Rajendra Chola was a Tamil ruler and a symbol of Dravidian pride. A man like Modi, who is using every means at his disposal to impose Aryan-centric ideology and suppress India’s diverse cultures, religions, and languages, can never truly wear the mantle once borne by Rajendra Chola. Modi’s very presence in the ancient Chola capital looks like a grotesque appropriation of a legacy that resists his political agenda.   The Chola Empire patronised multipl...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...