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

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

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...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...