Tuesday, 6 October 2015

Ban the Little Finger



          “I’m antibans,” I said to Shri Husband.
          He stared at me for a couple of seconds and asked in a staccato tone: “What. Is. Antibans?”
          “Anti-bans,” I said, correcting him slowly, clearly, adding: “Means I don’t like people banning books, films, like that.”
          “Why?” he asked. That’s his most often used word, by the way, along with ‘How’. Whenever someone asks him a question, he asks a counter question with either Why or How or both. If someone tells him, for example ‘the milk is boiling over’ or ‘switch off the fan’ or ‘the car battery is dead’, immediately his lips spout the word “Why?” or “How?” It’s an affliction. There must be a medical term for it.
          Anyway, I told him why I was anti-bans: “We can’t ban the Press, freedom of speech, beef, sleeveless blouses. It’s wrong. We’re a free country. This is the 21rst century.”
          First interruption from Shri Husband: “You mean we ‘shouldn’t’ ban those things. There’s a vast difference between ‘can’t and ‘shouldn’t.”
          Lecture-baazi shuru, I told myself.
          Aloud I said, “Yes-yes-yes”, glad that he’d understood.
          “But what’s wrong with bans?” His second affliction is that he must start counter everything I say with a ‘but’, argue for the sake of arguing.
I stayed quiet.
          He took my silence as encouragement and continued with the lecture: “Banning is good. We should ban bottled drinking water, for example. No-one seems to mind lack of potable water. Hotels that advertise holidays in the lap of nature don’t mind increasing plastic litter by the truckloads. I read several letters to the editor protesting lack of traffic signals at busy junctions, about taxi fares, about how our culture is dying out, but not one insists that every restaurant should provide filtered, safe-to-drink water.”
          He inhaled and I squeezed in a couple of words: “Tell me, why should the government ban cigarettes? or liquor? or gambling? We are adults, we know what’s bad for us, let us decide.”
          Shri Husband’s hates someone disrupting his interruption. He raised his voice a couple of decibels higher: “What I say is, if you want to ban something, ban the root, the cause, the root-cause. If you want to ban cigarettes or gutka, ban or at least strictly monitor the cultivation of tobacco. Now, liquor…” a momentary silence, then- “why would anyone want to ban liquor? (True Goan, my man, muah!) As for gambling, there are other, more reliable options to earn money.”
          I nodded in happy agreement. We were taking a late-night walk on the new pavement along Chogm road whilst during this dialogue, watching a busload of tourists buying cashews, flapping towels to dry them out, letting children gambol dangerously close to the traffic, munching snacks they’d carried along from home, chucking fruit-juice tetra-packs wherever they could, chatting loudly, clicking photographs on their cameras, wiping chins, picking noses, unpacking zip-bursting overnight bags, wiping footwear at the edge of the road, familiar, lovable sight. As we neared, a woman raised one hand, curled up the fingers towards the palm, leaving the little ‘pinky’ finger up. ‘Susu’, she silently worded what she wanted/intended to do. Worried that passers-by might halt and watch, she gathered her kinswomen to trudge along with her to the shrubs that would camouflage her whilst she voided her bladder in peace and privacy. Between the fence of a building in progress and the shadow of a lamp-post, safe from the blinding headlights of the speeding traffic and unafraid of scorpions and snakes, she had chosen a perfect site. She emerged smiling.
          That was the signal for everyone to follow suit. Multiple hands were raised, flagged by the upright ‘pinky’ indicating the need to answer Nature’s Call.
          I clucked disgustedly.
           Shri Husband shushed me. “Tourists are our bread and butter,” he said in a low tone. “We have to provide clean and convenient eateries and toilets all over the state. At least in the tourist-infested areas.”
          “Infested!” I whispered back, giggling. “Sounds like an invasion of worms.”
          “Wrong word,” he agreed, “Let’s call them areas rich in tourist-dependent incomes, shall we?”
          We walked on. We agreed (either it’s the age or the weather, we seem to be agreeing on many topics these days) that unless there are enough loos, garbage bins, drinking water taps and parking spaces for buses, tourists are going to have a difficult time and we villagers will continue to crib.
          “Trouble is,” Shri Husband said, “Country-wide, we tend to concentrate on trivia like naming roads and banning foods and women from wearing trousers.”
          The stench of excreta reached my nostrils. I said, “We must ban people from using open areas as toilets.”
          “The government could,” he said reasonably enough, “but it would be hard to enforce unless loos are provided.”
          I turned around to see what was happening.  Fed and relieved, the passengers were climbing into the bus, some laggards still advertising their ‘need’ with the raised ‘pinky’.
          Ok, I agreed, we can’t ban anyone from fertilizing the soil, but we have to discipline them somehow. Maybe we could ban them from raising the little finger skywards?
          Shri Husband shrugged. Couldn’t make out whether that was in agreement or annoyance.

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