One
of the most illustrious farts of all time, smelly and capable of intervening
into the processes of history, was recorded by none other than the male
Malayalam writer, Vaikom Muhammed
Basheer, who was, as the lore goes, a
low level gossipper, and capable of having vivid insights into such aromatic
performances of the opposite gender. As Madame Boa Boa(Also called Boa
constrictor), the literary researcher who had gone into the “Specific aspects
of gender transmigrations in Basheer’s ‘Bhrr’” as her treatise for her
Doctorate in philosophy and was to later become something of an expert on the
subject with her Post- doctoral work on “A generalized theory of fart in world
literature: From Sade to Basheer” and the initiator of the science of
Fartology, a newly found branch to Osphresiology, was to put it, it was perhaps
the first occasion on which a fart could subvert the long held position of
thematics like, Love, death and fear as central to literature and enter into
discourse as a meaningful event, equally significant as any other.
When we look at the more recent technological
innovations on the internet, we could easily see this as a significant
beginning, with the fart machine which could explore the thematic of regional
variations in real and performative farts, though still only partly capable of
transmitting the aroma differences over the internet. With that one could
easily have formed a better base for the total viewing experience, an almost
seven –d one, though this was still a significant advance over the previous
epochs. As of the “Workings of Political power and dissidence in fartology from
George Bush to Bob Avaikan” an obscure underground treatise on the subject
which was much adored by the researchers of that time, the real author is as
yet not known, though it was supposed to have been written by either a black
woman from the Yoruba tribe, or an Alkanazi Jew. The German fart on the net,
which some musicologists could relate to the National Socialist musical
structures that could be traced to Hexagoner or even before, were also
fundamentally related to certain Indian practices in Classical music, which
could be seen as further evidence to the long term give and take between
anti-egalitarianisms everywhere, though no Fartologist seems to have stumbled
upon the subject as yet. A Dalit
researcher in musicology, however seems to have worked on the linkages between
the musical score “Aparaadhi Naanalla” and its counterparts in Aryan musical
history, though his thesis has not been completed or published, because of peer
pressure and lack of proper research support of a monetary kind, due to which
he had to shift to the job of a lottery ticket seller.
Proust,
Sasser Masoch and the likes seem to have made significant contributions to this
gold mine of literary history from which generations of future researchers will
surely find enough materials to sustain their arguments through their torturous
journey through Fartology or literary history or some other specialist area
which is as yet to come into existence. The various strands of medicine have
evolved much simpler/ much more complex strategies to gauge the smell of farts
and discover new/ already existing variations in health conditions, which they
have termed ‘diseases’ and ornithologists and bird watchers have already pushed
their noses into the non-human possibilities in fart discourse.
So,
as of now, we are in the midst of an already flourishing discourse spread over
various disciplines related to the science of Farting, through much of the work
done by Madame Boa Boa and her students which have found publication in
research journals, these have not as yet found popular audiences according to
the pundits with high rise brows who dwell in such sciences as studies of
‘Popular culture’ and so on.
My
friend Poulose, a pick pocket from Kerala, laughs at these pronouncements and
cite the instance of “Bouvard and Pecuchet” and talks about how the purses
picked from back pockets exhibit authorial aromatic traces, and also suggests
that an art form based on aromatic notation, one that is purely meant for the
nose was already alive among the Baigas around Chanda and also the Pradhan’s
around Tila tola on the banks of Narmada somewhere around the seventeenth
century. Jong Kung Sung, a Buddhist researcher from communist North Korea also
suggest that the Buddhist reckoning of smells were not so structured, delimited
and segregated around the thematics of shudhi/ ashudhi, permissible/ taboo
etc., and had accounted for the full range of possible and as yet impossible
scents, while the brahminical perception of these were somewhat structured and
rigid and used to be organized around such inclusion/ exclusions. She suggests
from the evidences garnered from the early twentieth century dalit folk songs (‘chandanam
vaariyeriyedaa thampraa’, and
‘kunthirikkam pukakkadaa’) that the practices of incense burning, sandalwood
smearing, and so on were actually part of the brahminical bifurcation of the
world of scents as high and low, and that it were in such contexts that the
politics of fart, especially such as the one seen in Basheer’s literature,
provide a clue to the ‘egalitarian and leveling influences of a disruptive
fart’.
French
experts have still lagged behind in the science of fartology, though
Baudelaire, Genet, Proust and many other modernist explorers in the terrain,
and movies like ‘La Carribeniers’ have sufficiently highlighted the
significance of a perceptive nose. In Spain, the paintings of Heironimus Bosch,
splendidly depict the flights of this early bird, and in many major museums
around Europe, around the paintings of Bruegel, Jan Steen , K.P. Reji and the
like, one may come across as lingering a
whiff of smell that suddenly takes you to another place or time.
Early
walkers in my township talk about the early morning as a time when the sense of
smell is especially highlighted, pronounced and easily perceptible, while
voyeuristic explorers have stories with much more vivid and lurid details
around the subject. The smell of farts coming after eating roasted jackfruit
nuts, potatos, tuvar dal, peanuts, certain chutneys, ududu vadas, various
chicken dishes, pork and tapioca have also found many referances in popular
parlance. Fartology is already into a detailed exploration of the tonal
variations on the subject, and even individual variations have also been slowly
incorporated. Rock troups like ‘The Abba’ had used the sound in its albums, and
explorations are on in electronic music to incorporate its potentials into
noise music, varying its length and
intensity, controlled and well modulated farts as well as errant ones are well
on the way to making their specialized explorations in music and the ‘history
of sounds proper(and improper)’ through the works of the fart avante-garde group
‘Saffron Fart. Inc.’.
‘Everybody’s (note that here the notion of body also
gains a certain centrality, while earlier the former part of the word was
unduly accentuated) guide to farting’ by Rupert A. Paris was a typical exploration from the side of
management/ personality experts on the subject. The lore about ‘My experiments
with smell’ by an unknown writer who calls himself ‘unpoet’ which has been now
twenty five years into writing, has been in circulation for quite sometime, but by now people have almost forgotten about
it since it has not still made its appearance. ‘Aromatic international’ a huge
corporate firm dealing with all kinds of products, research, development,
publications and trading related to the aromatic world has a great degree of say in the field,
though the researchers complaint about the inadequacy of research funds in core
areas of interest to humanity and undue prioritizing of economically viable and
commercially plausible research such as weapons research in the field. The
military researchers from Minnesota and Arizona have deviced new weapons which
work with both enticing and revolting smells in elaborate ways to induce
responses in the subconscious mind ,
using them to further the strategies of authoritarianism and subjugation of the
many. The Military Research wings of major countries who have done extensive
and secretive research works on a huge
number of topics and people in their pursuit of regimes of total control( ‘The
Happiness Project’; ‘The Smell Pop Project’), which could only be accessed by
the top level researchers and military/ political personnel. Most of the time
the results of such research done in the interests of the State and military to
further their designs over the populace, were unknown to the general public,
and while active research was going on in programming the human brain and using
people like robots was already underway in military research, the civil
researchers would still be talking about the responses of mice to external
stimuli and running around with mundane
and stupid projects in areas which were well explored long back, with the
express purpose of extending the states control over citizens. If and when some
military secret of this kind is divulged to the general public, it was either
done by some maverick hacker who had occasion to sneak in and discover the
trouble there, in some political tit tat between politicians who were into the
secrets, or by the espionage systems of another country who wanted to see the
demerits in the way their opponents handled their people, though they would
themselves be using such strategies on their citizens. The devices to lead
thought towards particular directions, to converse in the mind without sound
with another person, to tele- prompt responses and so on developed for
espionage purposes or space missions since it was impossible for top level political, military and
scientific leadership or intelligence personnel to hold open conversations with
each other with the ‘threats’ of leakages of information looming large, since
research had advanced as regards technologies useful for the speech /hearing
impaired also and since the military industrial complex preferred to keep
information about their forays into everyday life of the people, or their grand
theatre, set up all around civilian spaces top secret. And the people who like
to call themselves intellectuals still talking about advanced research in
archaic terms and are totally incapable of understanding the implications and
threats that such research produces since they were not visible at all.
Some of the other contenders include smaller
manufacturers, Private projects for specialized research, World Fart Scheme; The
Fart and Hindu Mythology Project; The Ukranian Fartist Project,The Pentagon Project
for the Eradication of Smells(N.Y), The Chinese Project for The mobilization of
Fart; The Police Academy Proposal for the Enquiry into the Role of Farts in
Crime detection; The Cambridge Companion to Farting; The Russian Presidents
Project for Cleaner Farting, The Queen’s,Master’s & Common Wealth’s Aid for
Equitable Farting among British Servants; The Indian Naval Fart Academy; The
Hollywood Celebrity Fart Project, Fanny and Alexandra Fart Project For Research into Bergman films, the Dario Fo
and Passolini Institute for Farting(also called ‘The Shitter’s (not Shwitter’s)
Academy’); The Online Fart Club with
above three lakh members, The Psychiatric and Psychological institute for Fart
Research, the Malinowski Centre for
Farting etc,. Major research journals, Magazines and Publishers specializing in
the area include The Klan Fart Journal, The New left Review of Farts, Journal for Comparative Farting, Farto-
Analysis, John Poppins Medical Journal of Fart, Fart- Economy Etc..
The
scents From Denmark Academy of Shakespeare research has recently brought out an
extensive Bibliography of Fart Related writing
in the Human and Social sciences. The Nationalist and Anti Nationalist
project for Planetary farting has also devised certain new instruments for fart
measurement like the Gerard Richter Scale, and Researchers at the Berlin
Ensemble have devised a ‘Smell tuner and micro producer machine’ for their new
Smell Art clientele.
Madame
Boa Boa was also famous(even slightly notorious) for her somewhat bold
pronouncements regarding the socio-political affairs of her country and the
world: ‘Mishraji doesn’t mix” she would say, and the woman who was gazing at
her from her bed would burst out into laughter. “Yes, at least he should try to
live up to his name, no?”. They were referring to their Brahmin neighbour’s
elusiveness towards their somewhat provocative demeanour. Yamini, her
girlfriend would pout her lips a bit when she saw him or give him a wink
sometimes and smilingly observe the tremors of the shock travelling down his arms
as a slow shivering, on which she would go inside hoping that someday he would
break with his complacency and just walk in after her. Anuradha, his wife, who
was a secret visitor to their abode, and a creature of pleasure, would tell her
about his dilemmas and predicaments as a creature of purity and veganism: “This
man, you know, with all his punditry, cannot even walk down the street and meet
a woman! And you know, he knows much about all those theories of sexuality and
all that, and to me it is just a walk next door, or across the street, most of
the time and I am virtually uneducated in any of that.” This is how Yamini and
Madame Boa Boa came to that generous conclusion
about it. Anuradha herself had grown out of her shyness and chastity
problems through the timely instructions from Yamini, her neighbor and Madame’s
partner, in their escapades together during the day hours when they were alone
at home and were feeling frustrated enough to make out with each other.
“We Brahmins don’t mix, and Mishraji doesn’t
like it that I mix with people outside the household, so I am mostly at home,
virtually at the end of my nerves and madly wanting to cuddle around somebody,
and there was no other way, and naturally your bedstead was the nearest pasture
in which I could graze.”
“Ha,
ha… Some rules are better broken with sweet kisses, or else the world will
always fall on each other’s back with some war or other”,Yamini would reply to her, while she dipped her head
deeper between her thighs and explored the secret continent by slowly working
on the clit. “ I always thought that a clit was somehow related to Cleetus”, (
her first lover and who had an adorable way of making a clit flower.). But when
I come to you, I know that the bloom was already there, wet and ready to open,
maybe, and it had nothing to do with him!” Anuradha would open her thighs wider
to let her tongue search deeper, and slowly they would climb on to the rocky
pinnacles of ecstasy reaching which their bodies would become taut as stretched bows, the tremors of which a Louise
Bourgieos sculpture or Bernini’s St.Teresa would covet to excel.
Initially,
on some days Anuradha used to feel very down and out, having had to listen
terribly bored to her husband’s treatise on the ‘women’s question’ or the ‘class question’ or the ‘caste
question’ or his moralizing lectures about questions connected to whether it is
politically correct to look out of the window, to look at one’s image in the
mirror for long as she used to, to read pulp literature, to go for a movie with
a friend, to dress in a voluptuous and sexy manner as she used to do, exposing
things a little here and there with due regard for a somewhat frustrated and
coveting audience, to watch T.V, to sit with her thighs a bit open, to wear
mascara or lipstick or to use the creams and waters which were a regular part
of women’s daily repertory, to have pets around in the house and so on. Mishraji hated dogs and cats,
because in an apartment they were difficult to maintain, but liked the
aquarium, from which nothing stood out or caused much obstruction, neatly
fitting into the special constraints of a middle class apartment. They lived in
the same flat, the Mishra’s on the second and Boa Boa’s on the third floor,
just up a flight of stairs. Mishraji was only vaguely aware of the existence of
Madame Boa Boa or Yamini, because he used to leave early for work in the
accounts department of the company specializing in soft drinks, and was not usually moving around much during the
holidays also, keeping mostly to the apartment. Yamini or Boa Boa never went to
their apartment for some reason or other, while on week days Anuradha was a
regular visitor to their flat above. Since Anuradha was of a voloptous
disposition from her early ages, though without much actual experience in those
years, except on a few occasions, when the man who came with the gas cylinder
had grabbed at her breasts, or a distant cousin who had come for a short stay had
kissed her on her breasts, navel and so on, passing his hands over them, as
they had secretly coveted each other for a few days of their stay together.
Though she had wanted to continue that relationship, they were unable to meet
again due to the severe restrictions set to her movement by her well off
family. If it were today, I would have easily moved about in a purdah, outside
of their notice and could have easily met him that way, she would say to
Yamini. Boa Boa, being an academic and researcher was well informed in matters
of all sorts and well instructed in matters of sex would in her early years
draw her out of the austerity rituals by playing well with her libidinal
cravings and skillfully move her ahead from her complacency on that count. “He
doesn’t even have the urge to play with me”, she would say to Boa Boa, and when
you play with me it is like a splendorous explosion of fire and colours, that
is why I can’t keep away from you.”
“It
seems to be like the Common wealth where the commons are deprived of all their
wealth and you were so rich in pleasures, no doubt!”.
Madame
Boa Boa would say, as she twined around her in the bed while Yamini sat
watching. “My advice to any Brahmin girl who faces your problem will be to burn the ‘Bra’ and to become an Amin or Minh or whatever,
without bothering the least about your mixed ragas or mixed blood.”
“Ha
ha”, Anuradha would reply, “a splendid idea indeed. At least one would get a
better list of prospective lovers, that way!”
2.
Mishraji
parked his scooter and went up to the Metro. At the entrance he looked at the young guy and the lustful
woman who kept guard at the two gates. Both were cute people, and the young man
was an expert at frisking, taking a long time to frisk people when the rush was
not too high. When there was a rush also, he did it effectively, moving the rod
with an almost erotic precision around the zones of necessity. He smiled at
both, out of curtsey, and also with a certain love and caring, having been
regularly travelling that way and meeting them with some regularity. As the man
was frisking him, he felt a strange pleasure in his loins, since it had been a
long time since he had stood so close to somebody, and the instruments slow
move over his body thrilled him and produced in him strange expectations. As an
advocate of civil rights, he had often felt that the procedure of frisking
involved a strategy of power and an institution which was suspicious of the
whole lot of the people who were travelling that way while taking for granted its
own privilege to subject any person to a close physical scrutiny. If an
institution feels itself privileged to subject to such humiliating and time
consuming bull- shit treatment the whole lot of its customers, then as citizens
we were also liable to suspect that institutions motivations, he used to tell
his friends. But when Sadgopal, the security man’s hands were searching him,
there was no doubt that he felt a secret pleasure in it, and he also looked
across longingly at the other gate where the woman was standing and watching
him, and felt that it would have been really good if he were to be frisked by
the woman there. She caught his gaze and suddenly looked away, a slightly
different pallor appearing on her face as the blood rushed up there and flooded
the face with a certain effervescence.
“Hi, Sadgopal, why do you appear to be so
sad?” He asked.
“The
task of a Chitragupta is always hard to accomplish, because the dead pile up,
and you have to wake them and draw them out to life again with some pleasure or
other. That is why sometime we look like brother and sister grim, though we are
not that way in our real lives!” Sadgopal replied.
“Why
do you collect these cigarette lighters and match boxes and stuff like that
from the commuters? Why don’t you allow them in? I have heard some people
complaint against it.”
Mishra
asked Sadgopal while he was at it.
“Oh,
sir. That is plain and simple, we don’t get much during the searches. And you
know, we are supposed to take a few things to fulfill the targets set for us by
the institution. And many of us are chain smokers who do not want to pay for
the lighters and match- boxes. So that comes handy. Sometimes we find somebody
with some booze on them also. We stop them since these things are not allowed
on the metro. Sometimes, when they are in a hurry, the guy would leave the
bottle with us. Which is one of the sources for some booze sellers here, because
they can sell it at a lesser price to their regulars. And you know, we can
always have a drink or two while at work, without paying anything. These are
really heady facts, aren’t they?” Sadgopal brushed his hands slightly against
Mishraji’s butt as he let him through. “And a guy, if he wan’ts to have the
drink will take it back and have it somewhere around the station. So some of
the vendors who sell some namkeens, plastic cups or cigarettes also benefit
from it. Isn’t this all good business?”. The guard shouted after him.
Mishraji
could not help congratulating Sadgopal
in his mind while walking on to the platforms. Eventhough he was an accountant
himself, he had never thought about the business prospects of such a regulation.
“The metro is alive, Long live the metro!” he whispered to himself while moving
on.
3.
“Mishraji,
you should at least mix some drinks to further our friendship”, this time
around Sadgopal was quite categorical. They were sitting in a lodge room and
talking to each other. Mishraji had dropped that days work and they were
together seated on the bed on which the sheets were in a mess, looking into
each other’s eyes. “You have a certain green sheen in your eyes. “
“Which
could only mean that I am a bit wild”, Sadgopal replied. “And that is very
true, also.”
“When
I am with you, I also grow wild, Mr.Sadgopal!” he added.
“I
liked the smells here’, Sadgopal added. He turned around and sniffed the air
around the
room.
There was the smell of an after-shave mingled with that of some food that had got burned while they were busy at
it in the next room. Sadgopal played a popular tune from Shivamani on his
mobile phone.
“How
shall I mix it, this drink that you wan’t?” Mishraji asked Sadgopal. “In love
at least, everything is permissible.” So mix something as you like to make it.”
“Oh,
usually, I do not drink. And so know very little about drinks.”
“Oh,
it doesn’t matter. It only means that you are much more innovative, and am not
so much given to habits.” Sadgopal replied.
“So
says the sad Gopal, so then I will mix!” Mishraji ran his right hand over
Sadgopal’s shaven ace and then felt his own for bristles.
Boa
Boa ran out of her toilet and told Yamini. ”I think we need some toilet paper.
These ass holes block the water while I am at it, and that is difficult to
handle. I just managed with the water that was in the flush. What else to do?.
They think that we should be asexual beings, not lesbians , heteros or whatever.
And they do not think that they shouldn’t have sex, either. So it is like that,
everywhere there are these two sets of laws, one for the people to follow, and
another for themselves. We can only laugh at these, when an egalitarian sense
is lacking in it, these laws are just bull shit. The only thing that they do is
to re establish administrative power and the right to punish. As in the dalit
folk song, “we can see the obese lordship lying on the thousand headed snake of
infinity” trying to regulate and control him. That is all that is there to
it.!”
The
pigeons sitting on the terrace wall of the next apartment looked intently at
them and started to utter their wooing sounds.
