Skip to main content

Jack and Jill


Fiction

The 6 year-old Jack and 4 year-old Jill had a small, little fight.  Jack felt guilty.  “I’m sorry,” he said hugging his sister very affectionately.

During the unexpected hug Jill’s hand touched Jack’s little penis.  “What’s this thing you’ve got here?”  she asked groping Jack’s groin. 

“That’s the pipe for carrying urine,” said Jack.

“But I don’t have such a pipe,” protested Jill.

“You’re a girly, silly.”

“So what?”

“Stop being stupid.”

Jill went to the kitchen where mum was cooking dinner.  “Why don’t I have a pipe for carrying urine?” she asked.

“You’re not a boy,” said mum.

“So what?” asked Jill.

“Only boys have the pipe...”

“Why should boys have all the fun?” asked Jill.

Mum  looked into the living room.  Pop was sitting there, his legs stretched out on the tea poi and reading Vikram Seth’s Two Lives.  Mum and Pop, both, worked in offices.  Both had to get up early in the morning.  Both had to work their asses out in their respective offices.   But pop had the free time to read novels.  Mum was supposed to continue her work in the kitchen.  Mum had to get up a little earlier... 

The urine pipe does make a lot of difference, thought Mum.  And boys have a lot of fun with it.  Girls should be mum.  

Mum kissed Jill and said, “You’ll understand it in time, darling.”

Later in the night Mum asked Pop, “You don’t love me?”

“I’m tired, darling.”  Pop turned the other way.  Mum pulled the blanket from Pop’s side so that she could at least have a good night’s sleep.


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. Brilliant post sir, loved every word.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sir nyc 1 sir..i think with the boy's pipe ,girls have most of the fun.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The thrust of the story goes far beyond that fun, Geetesh.

      Delete
  3. Replies
    1. Is life any less crude now, Chinmoy? And that's precisely why you couldn't but love the story!

      Delete
  4. Fascinating! Though I am not too sure how to react to it. I feel maybe that's the whole point.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Indeed, Sid. You have become literary-wise, I think.

      Delete
  5. Even I dont know how to react ! the first part is bit more elaborative. But ultimately I think its the message that matters :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The first part only LOOKS elaborate, Paresh. The whole thing is just a mini story, written in the tradition of mini stories.

      Delete
  6. Every time I read your posts even if the door bell is ringing I don't get up. I think and feel that this post is straight forward and for once atleast the lady got the blanket and the good nights sleep.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the compliment, Athena. My stories come from real life even if they look like fables sometimes.

      Delete
  7. Crisp & thought provoking! :)
    Well put.:)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Situation is changing fast and very soon human beings without any sort of pine will have all the fun :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One thing seems quite certain, Jahid: the number of people who are going to have fun will go on decreasing.

      Delete
  9. Reaction to this post would be diverse....The message the post eventually conveys would vary across readers and their individual perceptions....Good work.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Soham, the story is amenable to a number of interpretations. Yet it's not very complex, either.

      Delete
  10. so the crux is pipe has nothing to do with 'fun'

    ReplyDelete
  11. Very nicely written !

    ReplyDelete
  12. I interpret this post as a story with a message....it makes for an absorbing read and also delivers what you wanted to deliver....plus, it's short, which doesn't put much strain on any reader with shorter attention span.....so a job well done i guess

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Ritesh. This story generated a lot of discussion even outside the blogosphere. I had to answer quite a lot of questions, mostly from youngsters. I'm glad that the story was taken positively. Yes, it does have a message.

      Delete
  13. [ Laughs ] I LOVE your personal take on Jack and Jill!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not really personal, Renard. Pop and Mom are as much heroes of nursery rhymes as Jack and Jill :)

      Delete
  14. As I too want to have fun, I refuse to cook during weekdays :D :D :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are lucky, Pankit, that you can get away with it.

      Delete
    2. Believe me, it was not easy. I come from an old-fashioned family, wherein my mom and bro believes that females' first and foremost duty is kitchen. I have fought for it so long and now they have given up on me for that :D

      Delete

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

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...

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...

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...