CHARACTERS: Jay, 52.
The audience.
SET: The roof of a Bombay high-rise.

Remember me? I'm Jay. Jay. I've been in hibernation for eighteen long years, like a bird that recedes into its shell for the winter. No, no, not your Bombay birds or birds anywhere in India, popularized by the Bombay Natural History Society, who don't need to hibernate, simply because there's no winter here. So they can be around at all times, perennial birds, as we have perennial trees, ha, ha. But I'm talking about the birds in cold countries of the temperate zones, which mainly happen to be First World countries. You know, England, America, France, Germany. Canada. The birds here must have a tough time during the winter, because while human beings have fireplaces, and heaters in their homes, there are no such things on trees. It's a marvel then that the poor creatures don't freeze to death in their nests, together with their young, and become extinct altogether. You may say it's their plumage that keeps them warm, and First World birds and animals, like First World humans, are sure fatter and better fed than their Third World counterparts. But I 'm not so sure. In idle moments, when I have nothing better to do, I often think of these birds, and wonder how they are able to pull through. Some of them, I'm told, don't even hibernate, in the strict sense of the term, but go on singing through the winter. Yes, I've heard this with my own ears. Maybe that's their strategy to keep warm: singing. (Whistles) Which reminds me. There are two distinguished Indians who are named after birds, and both of them happen to be women. What birds? Oh, nightingales. One is Lata Mangeshkar, and the other the poetess Sarojini Naidu. Have you read her poems? Well, I know one of them by heart, and can recite it for you. It's
called, of all things, "Palanquin-Bearers". And this is how it goes:

Lightly, O lightly, we bear her along
She sways like a flower in the wind of our song
She skims like a bird on the foam of a stream
She floats like a laugh from the lips of a dream
Gaily, O gaily we glide and we sing,
We bear her along like a pearl on a string.
Softly, O softly we bear her along,
She hangs like a star in the dew of our song;
She springs like a beam on the brow of the tide,
She falls like a tear from the eyes of a bride.
Lightly, O lightly we glide and we sing,
We bear her along like a pearl on a string.

A wonderful sense of rhyme, isn't it? Even though the poem, by itself, is absurd. I mean, have you ever personally seen a bride being carted around in a palanquin? It hasn't happened since the days of Queen Victoria! Forget it. Let's talk about my favourite subject — me. If you remember (takes out a bottle of rum from his pocket and drinks), the last time we met, eighteen years ago, I was a male prostitute. I sold my hot sexy body to men. I would have sold it to women too, but I couldn't find any female customers willing to pay for my wares. You know how miserly Indian women are. Always haggling over the price of potatoes and tomatoes. So I contented myself with men, and selling my package, which, I assure you, is considerable, I made quite a packet. I carried on like this for a good ten years. But then I was tired. How long can one go on, buggering and being buggered? Trading the crack in one's back? Someone told me that there was a law against it in our country that could land me in jail for life. However, what clinched it for me was this awful disease called AIDS. It's fatal you know, worse than cancer. I once screwed a fellow. After we cleaned up, he shook my hand and said: welcome to the world of AIDS. I'm HIV positive. I shat in my pants and rushed to the doctor to get a blood test. The results came out negative, but the doctor asked me to return for a retest some six months later, mumbling something about a window period. It's only later that I discovered that the day on which I screwed the guy was the first of April. The fucker played a practical joke on me just because it was April fool! At least that's what I told myself and flushed the matter out of my system like a load of crap. And today, the Lord be praised, I 'm still alive. (Drinks.)

But my existential dilemmas remained. Who was I? What was I to do with myself? These are questions, as you know, that have been bugging me since the cradle. The answer, as usual, came to me on the potty one morning. I was awfully constipated, I remember, and didn't have a good crap that day, but the answer came to me all the same. I decided. I decided to become a writer. Yes, a writer. Spelt W-R-I-T-E-R. This job, it seemed to me, was no different from that of a male prostitute, in which I had so much faith. Writers are hacks who live by their pens, conning the world into reading their stuff, and that too after paying them royalties. If you ask me, it should be the other way round. Writers should pay readers who take time off from other, more pressing engagements, to pore over their writing. But then, the world has always thrived on illogic.

Whiz kid that I am, it was easy for me to fool editors and publishers with my compositions: poetry, fiction, non-fiction. Many a time, I plagiarized these from obscure books in dusty libraries, knowing fully well that no one would call my bluff. For there's no one in the world who's read every single book in print. Is there? Of course, I wasn't stupid to lift things word for word, without changing them here and there; you know, an article or a preposition, just in case I was caught. But the Lord be praised again, I was never caught. Instead, I was rewarded. I grew rich, with cheque after cheque arriving in my name. I grew famous, with my photographs often adorning the pages of evening newspapers. I was as proud as a peacock (makes a peacock pose). Then, then when it was time for me to publish a book - graduating from magazine writing to book publishing is like moving on from masturbation to actual fucking; everybody does it at some point. So, when it was time for me to publish a book, I browsed the net, which I had learned to use by this time, and got to know of vanity publishing. Publishing that feeds one's vanity. It's simple. All one has to do is google the name of a publisher, and send him one's manuscript along with a cheque for so many thousand bucks. And pronto, one's book is out. I zeroed in on a publisher called The Scented Quill in the back lanes of Daryaganj and sent him one manuscript, then another, then a third. Don't ask me what I wrote. I just wrote. And today? Today, I'm the celebrated author of over a dozen books, all fancifully bound in silk cloth. (Drinks) So there we are. Writing and fucking. Both have fetched me money, and what is more, both have made me feel good. Not just good, but terrific. Now, what do I do when I feel good? Or terrific? You've guessed it. I go drinking. (Shows bottle to audience) I opt for the seediest country bar in town, and order a full bottle of rum. This, I dilute with soda or water or coke (depending on my mood) and drink. Propose a toast to life. What's my state by the time I get to the end of the bottle? Of course, I'm drunk. Drunk to the point of urinating in my trousers, falling off somewhere, and staying that way till morning when the nashawears off and I am on my feet again. In the bargain, I have frequently lost my wallet, which some mother-fucker in the bar has stolen from my pocket. But so what? Isn't this the real way to celebrate one's success? I see it as poetic justice, for none of the riffraff in the bar are as lucky as me, with my kind of success in my fields of expertise. I believe, I believe, it is my duty to share my spoils with my less fortunate brethren. (Drinks) I 'm a Marxist, you see.

Do you think I'm delusional? Suffering from the Don Quixote syndrome? You know, Don Quixote fancied he was a knight errant. He rode an ass and imagined he was on a stallion. Likewise.

(Thinks) But if I am delusional, a modern day Don Quixote, it's not me that's responsible for it, but the whole world. I have already demonstrated how easy it is to fool the world. I sincerely believe that, not just the first of April, but every single day, January to December, should be called All Fools' Day. Reminds me of a Bryan Adams song. Heard of Bryan Adams? That Canadian singer who has been to Bombay so many times? I've attended all his shows with my lovers, buying tickets on the black market. Anyway, the opening lines of the song are (sings): Let's make it a night to remember/ January to December. It's one of my favourite numbers that I hum to myself on the potty when I'm down in the dumps. (Drinks) So, that's my range of moods: down in the dumps, and deep in the doldrums, at times; ecstatic and delusional at others. Well, this is what the shrinks call schizophrenia, isn't it? Manic depression. And a whole lot of other scary, high sounding things. But let me reiterate: if I suffer from delusions of grandeur, it's you guys who are at fault, not me. What's that old proverb - or it is a saying? Some people are born great, others achieve greatness, and still others have greatness thrust upon them. I guess it's pretty clear to all of you by now, that this chap before you, perched on the roof of his apartment building, as if he's going to jump off any moment, belongs to the last category.

What's that? Don't jump off? Oh, no no no, no no no. I'm anything but suicidal. Why the fuck should I quit when I have everything going for me? Well, let me continue the story of my life. Or shall I say, the story of my literary life. (Drinks) Tricked into believing that I was a writer, without, I bet, reading a single line that I'd written, some universities abroad invited me to be writer-in-residence in their departments, for which they paid me the airfare. Now, I 'm no fool to look a gift horse in the mouth. So, I go. To four different countries, at intervals of two to three years. The first time, it was to England. The second time, to America. Then I went to Germany. And finally to Canada, where I met up with Bryan Adams. All rich, developed countries with swanky cars and spotless streets, unlike our streets in Bombay, which are forever dug up, and full of shit, unlike our cars which look battered and rundown a day after they've left the showroom. Here, here, I was shown into a room, given an allowance for my upkeep, taken to the nearest grocery store for provisions and such like, and then supplied with paper, pens and computer, and told to fuckin' write. Write. Write. Write because you cannot bite. Write because you cannot fight.

I began to panic. I mean, writing is not something that happens at the touch of a button, is it? I need to be inspired. I need to be influenced. There were books in the library all right, from where I could copy whole passages and call it intersexuality … oops, intertexuality. But for that I did not have to be thousands of miles away from home, freezing in the cold. I could as well be in my cozy Bombay room. And what do you think the duration of these stints was? A week? A fortnight? A month? No, sir, three full months. Ninety arduous days. A day has twenty-four hours, dammit, of which eight, at the most, are spent sleeping. What's left? Sixteen? Well, sixteen multiplied by twenty-four—you do the math. For that many hours, I had to write, not having a clue as to what I was supposed to. The dorm rooms, needless to say, had no distractions that could take me away from my sole goal, which was to write. No radio, no television, no telephone. And I had no friends in these strange lands, where people spoke in funny accents, and then called my accent funny! Such audacity! Moreover, they were white-skinned firangs, as we call them in Bombay, and I am a man of colour. That is to say, a colourful personality. So naturally, there was racial prejudice. That left me with noone but myself for company, and believe me, I made the most of it. I ate by myself, drank by myself. I even made love to myself, once, twice, thrice daily. If I could achieve it, I would've had a baby with myself! In due course, I forgot that the world is inhabited by people other than me.

I began to see myself as a jailbird. I was in jail, oh yes. And not in the sort of crowded prison cell that one shares with other inmates, hordes of them, leading to rampant fucking by day and by night, orgies of the kind that would make a porn filmmaker envious. No, I was in a prison cell from where I could see no one and none could see me. You know what they call it? They call it solitary confinement. It's reserved exclusively for psychopaths. Criminals who get violent at the drop of a hat, and stick a knife into the tummies of anyone within reach. The punishment here is not just physical, it's psychological. I mean man is a social animal. No man is an island. Deprive him of company, deprive him of speech, and you deprive him of the very thing that distinguishes us from animals. For if there's no one around, well, whom do you speak to? Yourself? But if you speak to yourself, like Bombaywallahsseem to do nowadays, when they speak on mobiles hidden in their pockets, through earphones concealed in their ears, there's a word for it: lunacy. Lunatics, incidentally, can be as prone to violence as prisoners in solitary confinement. But in a madhouse, they don't put you in solitary confinement. They put you in an isolation ward. So that's the other way in which I started to view myself: as a nutcase who talked to himself, going on and on and on, till finally the docs and the nurses in the lunatic asylum could take it no longer, and cast him into an isolation ward. Each morning, as I woke up, the thought that hit me was: hey, I'm in jail; hey, I'm in a mental hospital.

(Drinks) None of this, of course, must be taken literally. For no, unlike a jail, or an isolation ward, my front door wasn't locked from outside. I was free to open my front door and get out whenever I pleased. There were no guards to question me, to put curbs on my freedom. But this freedom was only notional. It wasn't for real. The bottom line, for a bottom guy like me, is: what was I to do with this freedom? It was useless to me, for I had nowhere to go, none to meet. I was on a subsistence allowance that didn't afford me the luxury to get on trains and buses and see the countryside. Or places of historical importance. Or museums and art galleries. Or restaurants and gay bars. Do you have any idea how expensive things are in the West? You sure don't, if you've never left the shores of Bombay. Despite globalization, things are still cheap here, available at subsidized prices, as in the great days of socialism, god bless Chacha Nehru. Not so in the West, where a single euro or a single dollar is worth as much as fifty rupees. So. Although I was free in principle, free technically, in reality I was no different from a man who was in handcuffs. It was a sort of slavery. In the old days, the gora sahibs enslaved us on our own soil. Today, they got us on their soil and enslaved us there. Okay, my dorm rooms had a comfortable bed, bright lights and a bathroom exclusively for my use. In that sense, they were different from the dingy cells in the Arthur road Jail, where Sanjay Dutt was, with piss and shit everywhere. Maybe I was in a first class jail, the kind meant for cabinet ministers. Still a jail is a jail, isn't it? In my seclusion, I began to daydream. I began to fantasize. Those delusions of grandeur again. (Drinks) I was no common criminal, in the lock-up for the usual reasons: murder, rape, looting. No sir. I was incarcerated on account of my writing. I was Solzhenitsyn; I was Rushdie. I was Taslima Nasreen. I wrote fearlessly, in pursuit of nothing but the truth, and rubbed people the wrong way by calling a spade a spade. A fatwahad been issued against me, and now I was in exile in this dorm room in a faraway country, because I had voluntarily forfeited my freedom. I was thus a martyr. My dorm room was my crucifix. I was doing time, cut off from the outside world, as a sort of penis, sorry, penance. But my sacrifice wouldn't go unnoticed. Maybe, people of my own era would take it lightly, and regard it as little more than publicity stunt. But not posterity. Posterity would be able to put things in perspective, and acknowledge my contribution to human welfare. To be loved by one's fellowmen is to be a mere mortal. To be loved by posterity guarantees immortality. You will recall that in the Christian faith, no importance is accorded to the Here and Now. But much weightage is given to the Hereafter. (Drinks) Such are the ramblings that went on in my mind as I lived from day to day, in soundproof conditions, with books, foolscap sheets, and gel pens for company, but no one in flesh and blood.

I am convinced that only heroes can live in solitude. The common man would wither away. A man, who lives by himself and is at peace, is Superman. (Drinks) In time, I began to see my predicament in other ways. I was a hermit, a monk. The Hindus speak of four stages in a man's life. First, he's a student who is celibate. Then he's a householder. Then, a hermit. And finally, a sanyasiwho renounces the world because the world is illusion. Maya.

One becomes a householder at 25, a hermit at 50. I spent my householder days selling my body to fucking homosexual men. To the extent that the householder's life is characterized by sex, I was dutifully performing my role. But now that I 'm in my fifties, I should resign myself to the life of a hermit, which, fundamentally, is a life lived alone. My stints abroad, then, willy nilly ensured that I did not stray from the path of dharma, duty; that I lived, in fact, in ways that were pre-ordained by destiny. Vanaprastha ashram, or the hermit's life, is a good thing because it allows one to reflect, contemplate, meditate.

(Drinks) Of course, I did none of these things. Meditation is a state of thoughtlessness. But in the English language, to say a person is thoughtless is to say he is a fool. In any case, I'm no good at knocking the thoughts off my mind. If anything, I have a hyperactive brain. I can only achieve a state of perfect thoughtlessness when I'm asleep. Which itself is rare, because I suffer from insomnia. And somnambulism. I walk in my sleep, yes. But the Hindus deride a love for sleep, too, calling it tamas. Indolence. What is one to do? Well, I harboured prurient thoughts and freely masturbated on the bed sheets of my dorm rooms. Go and check them out, if you wish. They bear a number of telltale signs.

(Drinks) Between Appearance and Reality on whose side are you? I'm on the side of Appearance. Appearing to be a hermit is to me much more important than really being one. Accordingly, I spend a lot of time thinking of the outfits I'll wear as I sulk in my room, or walk on bustling high streets, or amble in jungles. I'm even thinking of approaching famous fashion designers like Wendell Rodericks and Manish Malhotra to advise me on my attire. During my gigolo days, I granted sexual favours to quite a few of them, doing disgusting stuff like rimming, and that too at a discounted rate. So the fuckers owed it to me now. But come to think of it, I don't really need their services. All I need to do is drive down to Pune, and consult members of the Osho commune on the colours and designs I should wear, to look like a true sanyasi. This guy Osho was interesting. He was a hermit after my heart. First, he was Rajneesh. Then, Bhagwan. Then, Osho. I mean, how many names and how many identities can one have in a lifetime? Not just that! He drove in Rolls Royces and he fucked white women. When people told him that this wasn't behaviour becoming of a sanyasi, you know what he said? He said: the best way to overcome temptation is to succumb to it. And proceeded to write a book called From Sex to Superconsciousness. Ha. Ha. How convenient! If I'm not mistaken, that gay English writer, Oscar bhai, Oscar Wilde yaar, said something very similar.

But hey, Osho was cool. Let me not badmouth him too much, because at the end of the day, his philosophy and mine are the same: Appearance is superior to Reality. You agree?

(Drinks) You know, vanaprastha ashramshould be fun for someone like me, with no strings attached. I'm not a married man, with a wife who came to my house in a palanquin, like that ridiculous poem I recited for your benefit. I don't have kids who'll perform my last rites when I'm dead. And I was never a hedonist, addicted to material wealth, unlike most Indian men, for whom the transition from the householder's life to the hermit's life is therefore difficult. I mean, imagine sleeping in an air-conditioned bedroom for twenty-five years, and then suddenly giving that up to sleep on a bare mat! Imagine driving around the city in a Ford Ikon at one stage in your life, and then trekking in jungles without footwear, M.F. Husain style, at another. It's easier said than done. But for me who was always frugal, who practiced austerities from the word go, the transition shouldn't be tough at all. Even during my various stints abroad, I usually survived on a slice of pizza and a banana. It's in the collective consciousness of us Indians, from the days of the great yogis with flowing beards, to be ascetic. Existence, consciousness, bliss. Being is becoming. (Drinks) Here are some vital stats to amuse you. The average German family spends $500 a week on food. The average American family: $350. By contrast, the average Indian family spends not even ten dollars per week on its meals. Shame. No wonder, there are so many fat people all over Europe and America and so many skeletons in India. Every other talk show on TV in the West is about fat people wanting to lose weight, and not knowing how to do it. Send them to Ethiopia, damn it. Send them to Bhutan. Send them to Bangladesh. They'll automatically look famished, without spending thousands of dollars on weight loss programs. Not famished, but anorexic. Ha! First blow up cash eating and growing obese. Then blow up cash getting rid of that obesity! What a criminal waste!

(Drinks) All right, tell me one thing. Does one have to retreat into the forests to become a hermit? Leave one's kingdom of Ayodhya like Lord Ram? That monk who hung around with monkeys. Can't one be a hermit in the midst of worldly life, in the midst of squalor, for vanaprastha ashram, after all, is a state of mind. But hey, I'm contradicting myself here. I'm suggesting that Reality matters more th an Appearance. (Drinks) I'm getting it all wrong. I'm getting mixed up. No. For me, Appearance is superior to Reality, and that's that.

Even so, I can't leave Bombay city. Bombay is my kingdom of Ayodhya. Take me away from Bombay, and I'm dead. What a terrific city Bombay is. So full of energy. Fifteen million people, most of whom live in slums and shanties. A city of pimps, prostitutes, hijras, homosexuals and drag queens, who can be had for the asking. A city of glittering neighbourhoods, like Marine Drive, Malabar Hill and Bandra, on the one hand, and of its own version of the Bronx, Dharavi on the other. (Speaking of Bandra, did you know it's the queen of the suburbs? And in it live all the queens of the suburbs? Ha. Ha). (Drinks) Bombay. A city in which ten people die on the railway tracks each day, cut up to bits by speeding trains, as if they were meat in a butcher's shop. What does that make Bombay, a cannibal's paradise? Bombay, dream city of terrorists, waiting to have its own 9/11. (But which buildings will they fly their planes into? Oberoi Sheraton and the Air India building at Nariman Point? Or do you prefer the Taj Mahal Hotel*?). Well, who can leave a city like that and go away to the Himalayas? Will some of you out there please tell me what to do?

(Drinks) But then, I like the Himalayas too. I would like to live, like the Dalai Lama, in a Buddhist monastery in Dharamsala or Tibet. The prospect is so exciting it sends a chill down my spine. I want to scream for joy, like children off on a picnic. What I find especially appealing about monasteries, Buddhist or otherwise, is that they are all male spaces where women are not allowed. No entry. Call me a misogynist if you want - which homosexual man isn't a misogynist? But to me, a monastery is no different from a country liquor bar or a gents' loo at any of our train stations on the Central or Western line. A woman cannot step in without violating a sacred code. The bhikshusare free to move about without clothes, bathe together, even sleep together, two to a bunk, in a spirit of camaraderie and brotherhood. Can you give me a better instance of male bonding? And even as they bond, they work towards their salvation, their nirvana, by meditating, praying, fasting. Eating only vegetarian food. And so on. A better way to kill two birds with one stone wasn't devised.

(Drinks) Some pessimists, however, like to see the glass as half empty rather than half full. To them, these bhikshuswho live in monasteries in the Himalayas, are liars. They don't bond together, they band together. There's no question of their attaining their salvation, or nirvana, or moksha. They are as far away from it, as the North Pole is from the equator, or the earth is from the moon. (Pauses) Okay, so be it. (Shrugs) What do I have to lose?Mera kya jata hai?I have other options.

What? (Drinks) Well, I can take off on foot with the followers of Lord Vithoba, and trek all the way to the holy town of Pandharpur. Heard of it? I believe the railways now run a direct train to the place. Yes. It leaves Bombay late at night and reaches Pandharpur early next morning. Just in time for the arti. By the way, did you know that Lord Vithoba is an incarnation of Lord Krishna? That Bhagvad Gita guy, best friend of Arjuna? Yeah, he is. So, as I was saying, I can join Vithoba's devotees, warkarisI think they're called, and walk for days on end through the Sahyadri hills, till I reach Pandharpur. At the end of it, my feet are bound to be all cracked and chapped, but I am sure to score brownie points in my karmaaccount. All I have to do while marching with the warkarisis chant. Vithal, Vithal, Vithal, Vithal. That doesn't call for much, does it? At times it rains, real heavy rain yaar, but one has to be prepared to get drenched. Sorry, no umbrellas and raincoats allowed. One also saves on food, I'm told, because the villagers en route consider it their job to feed the devotees. You see they have to earn their brownie points, too, in their karmaaccount. Everyone has a karmaaccount, including you. At the head of the procession is the palkhi. No, not the Sarojini Naidu kind of palkhiwith a coy bride in it, but a palkhicontaining the idols of Saint Jnaneshwar and Saint Tukaram. (Do you think the late Nani Palkhiwala's forefathers must have trekked to Pandharpur with these guys, and that's how they got their surname?) Anyway. Now, my problem is, what do I do on reaching Pandharpur on Ashad Ekadashiday? (Drinks) Hmmm. (Thinks) I know what. I can start another padyatrafrom here to some new shrine. Say Sabarimala, in the south. From there, I can go to Tirupati. Then to Puri. Then to Rishikesh. The nice thing about India is that there's no dearth of holy places. If one wants, one can spend one's entire lifetime just going from one temple to another. Not all of this has to be done on foot, silly. When one's feet begin to ache, one can jump on a train and continue. Who will ever find out? It's like, it's like taking a vow to go on a fast, and then secretly eating—jalebis and all—when no one's looking.

(Drinks) Option two. I can join a group of naga sadhus. This one's really erotic. Wandering with a bunch of stark naked men of all ages, from the very young to the very old, with dicks of different sizes, in search of truth. Even the thought of it gets me all worked up. I break out into a sweat. It's how the world must have looked when prehistoric cavemen first set foot on it, god knows how many billion years ago. So, in a way, it's like sitting in a time machine, and going back in time. We might actually encounter dinosaurs! Stephen Spielberg please note. But jokes aside, this is a great idea. I freak out whenever I think of it, and use it as a masturbation fantasy. These nagasaints, every time there's a Kumbh mela, in Allahabad or Nasik or wherever there's a filthy river, actually leave their forest hideouts and come down to exhibit themselves. I mean, how come indecent exposure laws do not apply to them? It's not fair. And to think that these melasare frequented by not just men, but women and children as well. Doesn't it amount to flashing? How obscene! How are these guys different from the nudists who roam the beaches of Europe and America? A reliable source tells me that the naked saints pop up at the Kumbh melafor a specific reason. What? Well, they go there so that barren women can touch their dicks and— abracadabra—be blessed with kids. Seriously! I'm not fibbing. Ask any holy man, if you don't believe me.

(Drinks) You know, booze is a thing I can't give up. I've tried very hard but failed. I even became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, but ran away on the third day. Vanaprastha ashramis fine, but please don't ask me to quit drinking. I don't care if I'm in a Buddhist monastery, or on my way with the warkaristo say hi to Lord Vithoba, or having my shivalingfondled by barren women (how disgusting!) with other naga sadhus. But I need to keep sipping my rum. The poet Hafiz used to sip red wine as he wrote. Almost every poem composed by him refers to red wine. If he could get away with it, why not me? Why grudge me my harmless bottle? All hermits have their addictions. Most of them smoke the chillum. So what's wrong with rum? (Sings) Drink my rum and fuck me in the bum. That's a song a client of mine used to sing long, long ago. He's the guy, I guess, who got me addicted to booze. Before that I was a teetotaler. I drank only tea. But this guy made me drink rum. In time I got hooked. Couldn't live without it. I don't want to shock you by disclosing that I drink not just in the evening. No. I drink in the afternoon, and in the morning as well. You know what time I start? Six a.m. As soon as I brush my teeth. That makes me a fit case for cirrhosis of the liver, isn't it? But I'm too sacred to go to a doctor for a check up. What if he says I am going to die in the next 48 hours? I mean, I'm not ready to die till I finish my vanaprastha, and enter the final stage of my life: sanyas. Until that happens, I won't be off the cycle of birth and rebirth. I won't get my moksha. Who wants to be reborn anyway? One life is bad enough; so imagine having to go through it all over again. Reminds me of the snakes-and-ladders game we played as kids. A snake bit you. And you slid down the ladder to start your innings from scratch. Such a pain!

(Drinks) Hey. Do you think I've been talking too much... Is vanaprastha ashramanother name for senility? Have I defeated the very purpose of hermithood, which is to keep mum and meditate on the virtues of silence? Okay. I'll shut up. Is anyone of you out there a ventriloquist? Then please join me… here on the roof. You see…my throat's parched. I've been going on and on like a brain-fever bird. What I'd like you to do… what I'd like you to do… if you don't mind it, is take over from me. You do all the talking in your own voice, or the voice of anyone you wish to impersonate and I'll merely move my lips. What do they call that in the movies? Lip-sync, yes. Thanks. That's what Lata Mangeshkar does, isn't it, as she sings for Aishwarya Rai. (Finishes bottle, chucks it at the audience) In short, I'll be your puppet. How do you like that?. I'll be both your puppet and your pet. You pull the strings, and I'll dance to your tune. You say whatever you like. I won't contradict you. I … I promise. I'll dance… to your tune. I'll be your pup…. your pet …. Your puppet…. for life (passes out).

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*Five months after the playwright wrote this play in Montreal, Canada, the
Oberoi and Taj hotels actually became victims of Mumbai's vicious terror
attacks in November 2008.

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