PUTRAKAAMESHTI - short story by Subhash Chandran

Unpublished translation

The middle aged man at the counter took a break from writing bills and went inside, into
the laboratory. People waiting to get their blood, urine or feces tested, watched his
departure with a little anxiety; a little curiosity. He returned in a while even more agitated.
More among those waiting in the chairs before the counter of that laboratory were young
couples, the smell of wedding still lingering upon them. Fatigue and nausea nestled on the
faces impatient for the urine test that confirms pregnancy. He might have come for testing
sputum, an old man on the chair at the corner coughed up his lungs to bring the mucus
mass out into his mouth. The old lady with feces in an emptied match-box covered it in a
dirty handkerchief and crouched on the floor waiting to hear her name called.
The day was like white hot iron. Against the laboratory on the other side of the road the
enormous and complex structures of the Medical College exhaled and inhaled hundreds of
patients every moment. Like a dull rhetoric, an absurd fancy, in which patients
outnumbered the total population encompassed those edifices.
A good number of labs stood on either side of the main road, ready to examine any
secretion from the human body, at any time of the day or night. With a magical skill that
converts time into currency, they crouched here and there with invisible silent beckoning.
A silk-cotton (kapok) tree filled the square screen of the exterior world visible from inside
the lab. Green kapok pods hanging all over, it stood like Sahasrabhagan, the god with
thousand phalluses.
“Celine!” called out the man at the counter.
From amidst the jingles of glassware and the smell of chemicals a wry face poked out.
“Why this delay?” he queried.
Three other young girls at work inside the lab came up to her. With an untargeted fury,
they whispered to each other in a subdued voice.
“The patient in the lab has not come out yet, sir.” One among them shouted to the counter.
“Then call them who doesn’t need a latrine.” the middle aged man ordered. His eyebrows
bent with annoyance proclaimed that he himself was the proprietor of the institution.
“Aukaaderkutty, seventy…” a voice shrilled like a piece of broken glass. The old man on
the chair at the corner stood up, began to cough, anchoring his hands upon his flanks.
Spitting out a mouthful of mellow green sputum to the scorching sun outside, he walked
into the lab.
A young woman laid her head upon her hubby’s shoulders, with an air of authority. He
made a proud smile and with the left arm hugged his wife who had a full and plump
bosom, but rather to a wasteful excess. Her lower belly shivered with a tickle.
Next to them was another woman ornate like the god of Tirupati. Amidst her suffocations
she might have told her husband something that smelt of honeymoon; he touched her
knees upon the silk sari and whispered: “Let’s once get to home!”
Through such mysterious chitchats the couples overcame the boredom induced by long
waiting and blazing sun.
Old lady with feces in match –box changed it over from one hand to the other and back.
“Knock the door and call him out from the latrine,” the man at the counter shouted
angrily. A lean tall girl came out from the lab and whispered: “How would we, sir? He’s
gone to collect semen!” Her muffled voice, consciously hushed up though, sprouted up in
the eager, sharp ears around. They were choked by an amusing curiosity to see the man
come to test his sperm and meditating inside the latrine.
“Knock the door,” the middle aged man repeated: If it takes too long, ask him to come
next day with his wife.”
The lean girl went inside. Exhausted as if she were about to commit a mighty sin, the little
spinster broke her knuckles.
Beyond the lab, in a small room with a tin sheet door bearing the board ‘latrine’, a man of
forty was sweating all this time. Knowing little of the outer world, thinking little else, he
delved into himself. His left hand bore a tidy little ink pot which was given him by a
technician girl there. In his right hand miserably lay his manliness like a fledgling never
succeeding in its flights. Many a time did he piss little by little. He stared into the white
closet where fallen hairs wrought strange pictures.
Floor tiles grown slimy with the urine of patients and pregnant girls were broken here and
there. In the beam of light falling through the concrete window strewn with dust and
cobwebs he bore the posture of a soliloquizing tragic hero. He felt that all the ten years of
his ungratified wedlock were spent in this nauseating small room. In the same dim light, in
the same helplessness.
His birth, his growing up, his studies, his getting employed… all were designed to reach
this final mean stature. Legs apart, head fallen, holding his penis the face of a middle aged
moron – did the entire job to stand like this. Ate all life for this. For this alone did he
ceaselessly scorn his spiteful boss.
He tried to shake off the memories about his boss, like every moment of the past years,
and like every time before he failed miserably.
He looked at his organ: a pitiable meek fellow who cannot be blamed even of indecency.
Looking at the thing which lay in his palms like the thumb of Ekalavya, he plunged into
the extravagancies of adolescence when he paid unfailingly to the lustful desires.
A night of his knickers –clad boyhood came to his mind. With the fragments of wisdom
that came down from friends, all night he exhausted himself for it. Simply tired at last,
some time around midnight he fell asleep thinking that friends had played a trick on him.
When he was awake some time later his body bristled with a pleasure some feeling! The
adolescent body that learned to enjoy a sin by itself grew into new pastures. Awakened by
the excitements of sex, frustrated by the want of a partner, there followed a era of flea-
smelling masturbations executed like a ritual. A bright red bindi that illumined a cute little
forehead, a look that hooked him for a second while, a charming mole anchored on a
plump cheek or a long neck – was enough to arouse him. It was filled with energy enough
to impregnate a woman with a single look….

The door echoed knocks of maximum strength that female fingers can create on tin sheets.
He painfully pissed a few drops. As if in the hell where a sinner without progeny taken to,
in that narrow space he craved for something that can arouse him. The child in him
explored the damp wall with mould-strewn pictures. Karl Marx, Lenin, Mother with the
baby, Skull, Staring owls, A father strolling along holding his son by hands, Gandhi - he
was capable of finding any number of paintings on that wall. He drew out everything from
his pockets – purse, the bus ticket swarming with incomprehensible figures, employee
identity card, pen… he eagerly gazed at them too.
“Hey!” the female sound came along with thuds at the door: “Enough, enough! so many
people are waiting outside. Come out. Don’t waste our time.”
He got out of the latrine, and amidst ten or fifteen pairs of eyes staring at him with
mysterious sentiments, strode along to the counter like a culprit.
Handing over the little inkpot to the middle aged man who writes receipts at the counter,
he told: “I shall come tomorrow; or else the day after…”