Manhood

No Nita, you'll never understand me, or us.

You are right. We men are like hungry dogs. Many are like those wild insistent types that you see on the streets in summertime, that stubbornly follow the bitches around, sniffing their pudenda and seemingly violently take them, sometimes many ganging up on one. (Why you'll even see one waiting in the wings for its buddy to finish.) If our Hindi movies and our California pornography are to be believed, this is how we work.  Yet Nita, you may also have noticed this other type in Calcutta's streets (you don't see real life in Amerika) :  the one with the hungry beggared look in its eyes, its tail between its legs, squealing pityfully, probably also suffering from mange, excessive dribbling, hernia, priaprism, abscessed rump, and other forms of debilitating infections and infestations.  These dogs hope that the bitches would pick them, like the women who came to the aid of Fiorentino Ariza, and roam the streets, scowling, pleading, wallowing, as the stronger alpha males snarl and shoo them away. But bitches are bitches, in magic real Latin Carib villages, as in Calcutta's streets ruled by its troika of Bohemian intellectuals - conforming to stereotypes, yet impregnable (intellectually) and incomprehensible.  Some Neodarwinists claim that rape could be an evolutionary safeguard, for  zeta-males to pass on their genes.  How do they clinically establish rape, Nita?

Has your precious middle-class body ever been violated? By dogs? and then been subjected to forceps, and microscopes, and then held up in a court of law?  I disgust you, but if I were a woman I wouldn't much care, if they didn't damage me much.  I am a man and I could be raped too - now that would be physically more painful.  But does rape always come with brutal violence? What if the woman is not in  a position to resist? how is consent established?  A murder is simple to understand : one person killing another, intent easy to see.  But then, as some radical feminists say, every act of sex is rape, every penetration an invasion. I haven't met any young, attractive woman who buys that.  So most certainly, you don't Nita. Then why the disgust? 

My bottom dogs don't rape. They merely roam the streets, trying to understand, hungrily feasting on morsels that come their way, an odd one among them daring to revel in delusional thoughts of cool superiority.This odd one stares into puddles, its sick undernourished brain sees a handsome specimen in the reflection, and then it marches up, chest puffed up and all to take the next bitch that comes his way - then feels torment in rejection, impotence, or the incompleteness of a hurriedly finished meaningless act of dog love - is unable to find succor or Sonya, and interrogates and hangs itself like John the Savage, (or if it is a literariy sophisticated  Russian immigrant, it could kill its doppelganger after preying on puppies) after being tormented like a barrel-chested andropaused male victim figure from a Fassbinder film.

We men are cast to be performers. Testosterone raging and all, we are supposed to jump in the ring, and take you, like a Kyrghyz bridal abductor, or its mellowed down version - an insistent nagging Hollywood hero, or worse an amoral Italian artifice. That is perhaps what you have to come to expect of us, Nita?  You who join them in cheerleading these mad dogs?  This is my story, Nita, and I am sorry I didn't give you a voice.  But I can wait - wait for you to come and tell me your side of the story - honestly, as only a man and woman well past the trifles of difficult loves, can talk.

ps : মাইরি বলছি!  সন্দীপনের "কুকুর সম্বন্ধে দুটো-একটি কথা যা আমি জানি"  টা এইটা লেখার ঠিক পাঁচ মিনিট পর পড়া শুরু করলাম। very কাকতালীয়!!