Skip to main content

Bottom and Titania in a Multiplex


Bottom had walked into the multiplex for window-shopping.  The centralised air-conditioning in the multiplex was a joyful relief from the scorching heat in the city’s overcrowded open spaces.  Moreover, he could gratify his voyeuristic inclination by looking at the legs or cleavages of the pretty fairies that wafted coquettishly around with mobile phones clinging to their ears like earrings and chocobars slipping through their velveteen lips.

Though he imagined the girls as fairies Bottom didn’t really believe that fairies existed.  So when he was approached by Titania, the fairy queen herself, his surprise was quite palpable.  But, like most twenty-first century boys (and girls, of course), he knew how to tackle any odd situation in life and so he overcame his surprise sooner than any person from another period of human history would.
Titania had just woken up from a sleep.  But her mind was still under the influence of the overdose of the sex pill she had had earlier.  The first man she saw as she woke up was Bottom. Yes, she was sleeping in the multiplex.  Fairies can sleep anywhere. In the olden times they used to sleep in the cool shade of trees in some jungle.  When jungles started disappearing fairies faced the threat of extinction like the Indian tigers.  However, unlike the Indian tigers, the fairies discovered appropriate places for survival – the air-conditioned multiplex, for instance. So there she was, Titania, with all her attendant bevy of fairy maids.  She saw Bottom sitting absolutely relaxed on one of the chairs on the third floor of the multiplex, watching the girls on the ever-flowing escalators, with his legs stretched out as far as they would go.
“You look fabulously handsome, young man.  I’m bowled over.”
Bottom looked at the beautiful but odd and tiny creature standing before him, then at the other creatures who accompanied her, and again at the speaker. By the time his gaze travelled so much he had overcome his surprise. 
“Yeah, no wonder you’re bowled over.  I had a lot of girlfriends at school, you know. You are also welcome.  One more won’t make much difference.”
“You are as wise as you are handsome.”
“Well, you know, I think I’ve seen you somewhere earlier.”
He must have seen her in his fairy tale books which he used to read long ago.
“Ask me whatever you wish and my maids will attend to your wishes instantly.”
Quite strange, thought Bottom.  But like most boys (and girls, of course) of his time he knew how to rise to the occasion.  “Okay, I want my parents to stop peering into my room to check what I’m doing with my laptop.”
“Do you really want that, dear?” asked Titania, though she was under the spell of the sex pill.
“You said you could get me anything. Get me this and prove yourself.”
“But...” hesitated Titania. She was not as quick as the new generation lover of hers.
“Alright, darling.  I’m paralysing your parents.  They won’t ever walk anymore.”  Fairies belonged to an ancient period.  For them curse and blessing were all a once and for all thing.  They were not aware of multitasking or part-time jobs, for example. Eternity does not understand calendars.
“Where are you going so soon, darling? Sit with me, play with me, dance with me…” pleaded Titania under the influence of the sex pill and also the ignorance about human nature. 
“You think I’m nuts? Bye, see you, ta ta... I just want to make sure that they are indeed paralysed.”
The shock of base ingratitude was too much even for the hangover of the sex pills.  When the hangover took an unexpectedly earlier leave of her, Titania realised what a fool she had been making of herself.
“This is the problem of deforestation,” she mumbled to herself as she went in search of Oberon who might be flirting with some dunce with hair dyed in brilliant colours in another part of the multiplex.

[This is a spoof on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene i. Titania is the fairy queen in the play and Oberon is the king.  Bottom is a working class member of Shakespeare’s contemporary London society.]




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




Comments

  1. [ Smiles ] Well, it was certainly an enjoyable read.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gosh Sir! An intellectual spoof indeed. Very real and believable.
    Imagine Bottom not protesting & rather going to check if his parents are really paralyzed...
    Forests replaced with Concrete Jungles. And innocent fairies now under the effect of harmful pills...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Anita, for your patience to understand my stories.

      Delete
  3. An interesting spoof! Really funny!

    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

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...

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...

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...