Wives

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I have been asked to talk about "wives".

Tough subject. Let me try.

In 1978, I was a 35-year-old bachelor waiting to get married lustily. I was then living alone in Qrs C1-97 of IIT KGP.

On weekends whenever I got bored, I would take my rusted pushbike and pedal to the Kharagpur Railway Station 5 km away, have bread-butter-omelet-tea-cigarette in the gorgeous Railway Restaurant there, and visit the Wheeler's Bookshop by it.

One morning I bought "Thurber Country", a Penguin Pocket Book, for Rs 2 and brought it home. And found on its inside back cover an ad for the book: "Is Sex Necessary?" by Thurber and White. I ran back to the Wheeler's but didn't find the book there. I returned home and wrote to the Higginbothams at Madras for a copy.

It arrived duly by VPP (Value Payable Post). 

And I browsed it greedily. But found that the word "sex'" first came on Page 69 of the 130-page booklet, with the sentence: 

And now we come to sex.*

along with the footnote: 

*Are you glad?

About wives: The chief question is "How many wives should a man have?"

Apparently there are equal number of men and women in our society...more or less.

It is not always so in Nature.

I read Maeterlinck's "The Life of the Bee" (Maeterlinck is a Nobel Laureate, by the way). He says:

In the typical beehive there is only one Queen. And thousands of slaves. And a handful of lethargic drones eating and sleeping like me. One fine morning the Queen decides to leave her hive, and takes off into the sky. And the drones wake up and chase her. The lucky drone who gets to mate with the Queen drops dead as soon as his job gets done. 

I don't know where the Queen goes. Maybe to set up a new hive and give birth to thousands of slaves and a handful of drones.

Talking of drones, most of PG Wodehouse's young men are members of the "Drones Club" in London.

I have also seen at IIT KGP a 'Jersey Bull Mother Farm', where 50 or so cows got serviced by a single Bull.

Talking of bulls: 

A cowherd tethered his cow (in heat) to a tree near a grazing bull and waited and waited. The bull never bothered to do his duty, it seemed. A passerby asks the cowherd why. And the cowherd replies:

"He is the Government Bull" (Sarkaar ka saand)

More than a decade ago I wrote this verse in my booklet: "Raadhaa Rhymes":

Very Old Bull

A  very old Government Bull

No longer felt useful;

With cows and calves so youthful

He felt very miserable

He went to the Government Hospital

And found a placard: 'House Full';

The Matron there was kind to him

And referred him to an Old Age Home;

There he felt merry and gay

With older cows and heaps of hay!

Talking of bulls there is also this good old Reader's Digest Story:

On a busy street of a Wild West Settlement, all of a sudden people hear the clippity-clop hoofs of a horse, and run into their homes shouting: 

"Big Brother Bull is coming!" "Big Brother Bull is coming!"

And a barman tries to shutter his shop down hastily. 

And a BIG horseman arrives and halts in front of the bar, and descends, and rushes into the bar firing random shots from his pistol.

The barman hides under the table watching fearfully. And the horseman shoots open the mouth of a bottle of whisky and downs its contents into his hatch...glug glug glug..

The barman gets up shakily and placates: 

"Have another drink!"

"No! No time! Big Brother Bull is coming!"

I am told Sri Krishna had as many as 16,008 wives. But others affirm that only 8 of them are his legal wives. The rest are 'spiritual' wives.

During our university years at Waltair we used to refer to our girl friends as 'spiritual sisters'.

At IIT KGP, I heard them called: 'Rakhi Sisters'.

Talking of Rakhi, at KGP there were these sisters: "Rakhi" and "Pakhi".

There were also twin-kids of our typist Shyama Prosad Banerji named: "Laltu" and "Paltu"

Bengalis are also great at giving nicknames. 

In the MSc Class of '84 there were three girls strolling along the streets, always together, by the evenings. One of them was tall, another had a piscine face, and the third short one was always falling behind the two. 

The campus wives, watching, called them: 

"Gecho, Mecho, and Pecho"

Raksha Bandhan was not known to us in AP during my youth there. On the other hand, Shravana Poornima was a solemn occasion meant for changing our sacred threads (jannaus of Rahulji) uttering this mantra thrice:

ॐ यज्ञोपवीतं परमं पवित्रं प्रजापतेर्यत्सहजंपुरस्तात् ।
आयुष्यमग्र्यं प्रतिमुञ्चशुभ्रं यज्ञोपवीतं बलमस्तुतेजः ।

The old and worn out jannau is not to be discarded into the dustbin. It has to be lofted atop a branch of a peepal tree nearby. 

Peepal tree (Ashwath) is a sacred tree. It occurs in the first Shloka of the charming 15th Chapter of Gita: "Purushottama Prapti Yoga):

ऊर्ध्वमूलमधःशाखमश्वत्थं प्राहुरव्ययम्।

छन्दांसि यस्य पर्णानि यस्तं वेद स वेदवित्।।

I see that this post has rambled like the Mark Twain Gimmick: "Grandfather's Old Ram"

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/mark-twain/grandfathers-old-ram/

If I can find a willing co-author, I can write a booklet titled:

"Is Wife Necessary?"

...as a companion volume to  the "Thurber & White" Monograph.

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