Of course, there were, but only those (too shameful to lose) I was prepared and inclined to share with her alone. Then there were those (too alarming to keep) that would offend her—from the jealousies of Skylark to the misapprehensions of my cousin and Mojo’s vilifications. I took a few ‘hours’ to whitewash my inbox clean before I granted her exclusive access to sit in the arm-chair of my ‘secret’ soul.
Cracks in Cherry’s ordered existence surfaced straight away and restored my traumatized confidence in Manu’s philosophy that women were, and still are, a reincarnation of evil. She was, after all, like all the other frogs—lay flat on her belly—no gynaecologist could tell between the constipated and the one heavy with ‘tadpoles’. I discovered a continent of lies faster than Columbus did the West Indies. She was full to the brim with them more than the devil had sinners.
Her inner sanctum Sanctus unveiled in her inbox, and to my consternation, I started judging others by herself, I began believing in ‘looks is deceiving’ maxim, and concluded that the genuine, the only charming life of every creature, is nurtured beneath the sheathes of dark hours, secretly. The life of each creature orbited around mystery, and plausibly that is the mother of all ‘WHYs’ all ‘civilised’ citizens insisted stubbornly on the reverence due to their personal secrets.
To attest just how stunted sincere truth thrives in the human race and how often even where it is likely to be found, behind all the peripheral balderdash of integrity, behind closed doors of secrecy and in the deepest recesses, evil is seated at the steering wheel. For this reason, virtuous men and humanity of the better kind would rather be deprived of human company for the companionship of the four-legged creatures, to be in no doubt, for how are they to find respite from the incessant mock-ups, manipulations and mischief of humankind, if there were no pets into whose ingenuous expressions they can look and admire with no mistrust?
For what are our sophisticated characters but life-size masquerades? Disgusting disguise, and as a rule, behind the smokescreen you will uncover the self-seeking ogres. Men leaning on the facade of philosophy, and smiling with visors of benevolence, and what I shouldn’t disclose—in my own hypocrisy. Women have a lesser option. By default, they smear themselves with tinges of decency here, reserve there, gentleness on the lips, and timidity on their faces.
It was no shocker therefore to find out from her quarrels with her elder sister that my charming Cherrie had been married twice and had added four children into the population. Neither was she a doctor nor ever been one. Was north of fifty, battling weight, hypertension and diabetes into the bargain. Had intermittent renal failure and sometimes depended on life support machines during these attacks. Descended from a family of albinos, herself recessive, but still the heritage had blessed her with night blindness. Funny thing she would deny these ‘blinking malice planted by her enemies’.
From her mother’s admonitions, it was apparent that her personal life was as interesting as a belching competition: was awake at weird hours, had reverse anorexia and ate ravenously even when she wasn’t hungry; and the mirror at her bathroom was occasionally shaken by her looks; of course, since she almost never noticed it, she was oblivious that the yarns of her interlocking hair needed restraining, that her eyes, fogged up with absent-mindedness, and teeth pongy with mouldy layers of bleeding gums required urgent medical attention, and that the petticoat with missing buttons was a long-awaited candidate for the comfort of the garbage mass. She talked herself passionately—often contradicting her views, like the hesitant Mr. Grinch when deciding whether to go and steal Christmas presents, and the blind man living across the hallway, thought there were two Grinches living as one.
I now believed that evil had pervaded her like a tangible thing—with frequencies, just like echo and sonar energy. Her humble abode acted as an evil transmitter and vibrations of evil reached her because from her deleted messages—mostly squabbles about scandal this and scandal that—I found out what was principally the most devastating evidence of her duplicity. That together with her evil associates, they insinuated in all sorts of insidious falsehood to trap me, rousing each other with ornate communications by way of trickery, and secretly directing her on how to allure me and then retreating, to build her web the more subtle and enthralling.
I found out, to my cost, that she was the envoy bent on accosting and wrecking me of my macho inclinations. One note from Tipsy Daisy declared it all, ‘tame this son of a woman! What does he think he is? A big strapping boy, milk hardly dry on his lips, without a smear of mortification?’ she mused. ‘Break him to bits and pieces!’ another one from Bang Belly declared. I found out what I had been hunting for in my Damascus voyage. She was in a scandal-mongering company—led by Tipsy Daisy, Bang Belly, Chatty Mouth, Big Foot and herself—and I had been trapped into their snares and was about to be dethroned of my masculine prowess. I was just like other men, after all, with carnal feelings and unsaddled passions for women, in spite of my hardliner stance.
I read their messages on ‘strategies’, ‘the art of alluring a man’, ‘best laid traps’ ‘solicitations’ ‘playing hard to get’, and all other feminine hotchpotches and wiles that Cherrie had experimented to drag me into succumbing to her traps. The Columbus’ Realisation hit me; that the earth wasn’t actually flat. How foolish I was! I swore, now like a woman, remembering too late that she had left boiling milk in the cooker. Sour memory, like vomit, clogged my throat. It was hard to swallow the true-to-earth fact for it became as a huge lump of ice lodged in my belly and kept melting leisurely all day long. I bet this is how the ambushed cat felt once he was inside the trap of curiosity.
Each word became a piercing blade, battering my heart. Every word was pungent more than a concoction of salt and vinegar. But I had to erect a war strategy by studying and cramming the notes over and over to drain the very sediments of its acidic connotation. I had to know too, the capabilities of my antagonists from the other side, those who were baying for my blood and I was obliged (for the sake of poetic justice) to hack into their facebook and regular mail accounts. I also needed to justify my course of action to my conscience, which could not condone any form of undercover spying especially to my friends, but you see it was the lesser of the two necessary evils.
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The nerveless barbarian hags that they were! I was ready to employ any means necessary to prescribe boundaries to their outrageous misdemeanours and wait upon the wrath of heaven to breathe its revenge and obliterate out the tragedy of having trapped me in their soiled embrace. I was going to turn tables by tricking the tricksters. I wasn’t an eclectic and intelligent man for nothing. Didn’t one wait until a crocodile’s tail surfaced out of the water before launching an attack?
With such a spirit, I let a handful of days fall like leaves from the tree of time as I amassed my art-of-war strategy. But as with tragic opera, things got worse after the interval and amazing episodes overtook me—seemed like every step to my dishonourable downfall had been calculated! She accused me of duplicity (what cheek!), changed her ‘Engaged’ status to ‘Single’ and blocked me. She changed her phone number and never answered to emails I sent thus making herself inaccessible. I had no clue how she may have known that I had ‘checked’ her out. Or perhaps she was taking no chances for she must have discovered the testimony of her incriminating ‘sent’ messages and ‘threads’ still lied undeleted in her inbox.
Bang Belly was next. She came online and turned on her webcam. There was a sort of a snooping look in her face and chat messages that I did not like. I don’t know whether Cherrie had told her that I was ‘unpredictable’ only, or unashamedly insolent but I know the hag meant to cross-examine me. I was conscious of myself as we chatted and constantly watched her face on the webcam beaming with a smile, which, as she realised that I wore a stone-face, took effect and melted in her very hollow dimples. I did not give her more time to open her lips. ‘I am so very busy right now, Bang Belly!’ I screeched at the keyboard and gawked at her reproachfully with such an icy decorum that she was very relieved to turn her webcam off as soon as decency permitted and vanished into obscurity for all I cared.
It was apparent that Bang Belly must have banged into Big Foot’s inbox to transmit her of the new development, because the hag came online, as if it were a coincidence, and strove to initiate ridiculous chitchats with me, perhaps to corroborate what Tipsy Daisy had nourished her—for symptoms of impudence or impertinence, I figured out. She must have believed that I was already down and out. I didn’t intend to humour her silliness anyway.
‘What you hags have done to me! No punishment is severe enough!’ I cursed her. ‘You used her to get at me! What cheek! Shame on you!’ I’m not done with you lot!’
Before you could say Muddah meets Fadduh, Chatty Mouth and Typsy joined Big Foot in the chat. I wanted to block them, but that would have been unmanly. So, I assailed them head on. Four hag-faces staring down at me; come to celebrate their imaginary victories from imaginary battles. I had a bad feeling about the whole business. I had never been in a scandal before. But I put on a strong countenance. I was not blowing my top for the sake of some five foolish hags. I wasn’t going to afford them a satisfaction to provoke my displeasure. They were not worth the satisfaction. I had to put them into the place they belonged
And all the time the duo-core running of my mind unsettled me nearly to the point of insanity. I was continually monitoring myself, my inner self, to stabilise my propriety with my own temperament, staring blankly on my computer, behind that chat window filled with four ogling faces, as I sat impatiently volleying questions against explanations. This was insanity, and even worse, for I was conscious of my lunacy.
It was pointless arguing with them.
ROUND SQUARE: There’s nothing extraordinary about it. If you and your hags are guilty for sowing this unfortunate seed, then I curse you with all my heart. You are evil and I wish to have nothing to do with you.
TIPSY DAISY: You are misplacing your priorities once again! If evil is flesh and blood, then above all, he lives inside us!
ROUND SQUARE: Then you must be his most preferred house!
TIPSY DAISY: You undervalue my worth at least as much as you puffed up yours a while ago.
ROUND SQUARE: Who are you people? To invade into my soul, and break trusts, sending your loyal disciple to corrupt and steal my morals…so ambitious to depose me, you set that witch on me, this devious impostor, this charlatan peddling lies, unfortunate creature sunk low to her advantage— unsound spirit in an unsound body—sick in her dexterity! Why don’t you guard the avenue to her waning soul before brooking for a showdown with me?
TIPSY DAISY: Look at it this way: I am merely a medium who helps fellow mortals stir up or stimulate things that already lived within them even without their help. My support, you see, simply made it easy for you to discern something invigorating in life and thus was more satisfied in yourself.
BIG FOOT: We only live only once. Why then, should we squander those precious few decades assigned to us roasting beneath the swathe of some barbaric scruples? Do you know why you labelled us evil? So that you may swing your own liability out of dread of your own conscience and that things inside you that crush them down—away from your own bigoted ego, into mine, through ‘diffusion’ as psychos call it, or ‘transference’ only to console your scruples!
ROUND SQUARE: That is preposterous, and you know it…
BANG BELLY: Laughable!? And you hoped to bamboozle your own scruples by fiddling with your brand of sophistry!! And by tagging me with that offensive label, you anticipated you’d truly even flatter yourself. And our little trial had no other function than to simplify these little frivolities for your banal chauvinism.
TIPSY DAISY: But you were naïve to think of deceiving the devil without signing away your own soul. Why else do you think she cancelled her ‘engagement’ to you, huh? The party is over bway:(.
ROUND SQUARE: You tell me, dumb ass!! I’m not answering questions like that from you hags.
TIPSY DAISY: Yes, because you know too well that she has had the audacity to be real and live in line with her own standards.
BIG FOOT: And now at last she has done something grandiose!
CHATTY MOUTH: Something exquisite!
BANG BELLY: To seize the gallantry and the vigour to bow out from your fiesta of fantasy so early!
BIG FOOT: and exposing your villainy for all the world to witness.
ROUND SQUARE: You control her. She is just a pawn in your game. A marionette to be pulled and pulled until she cracks from the long stretches.
TIPSY DAISY: That sting my raw nerves, son, but I’m afraid I am obliged to deprive you of that charismatic fantasy.
ROUND SQUARE: Fantasy?
TIPSY DAISY: You lack the providence to multiply your idiocy, we are here to make sure of that, besides, and you won’t be permitted to keep it for long, anyway.
ROUND SQUARE: What do you mean?
CHATTY MOUTH: She was engaged to you on her own whims and accords. We had no hand it. We are only more concerned that you outsmarted us in our little inboxes and now you can’t spread propaganda about us.
ROUND SQUARE: Bite me!
BANG BELLY: We finally found out how we can stop you from being on Facebook. If your friends and enemies come to learn of what we found out about you today,...
ROUND SQUARE: You can’t blackmail me!!
CHATTY MOUTH: Unless you make a decision by tomorrow that, you are terminally bedridden, that you have to go away for a year or two and sadly have to deactivate your account—Monday morning (and until you bow out honourably) every Status Update will carry your story.
That was what I called reversal of events for lack of better adjective. The hunted hunting the hunter. Killing one bird with two stones—to make sure it was dead. Double-crossing the bridge—just to be certain! Cherrie appeared online shortly to curse me with a mocking denouncement: ‘You’ve crowned my name with the very tiara of falsehood. If I must depart from you, eternity, gravity, and mortality do to this body what extremity it can, but the sturdy pedestal and edifice of my love is as the epicentre of the earth, dragging all things, as it is, to it. I am going in to weep for my dishonourable ignominy. Where shall I hide my face?’
She went offline before I had chance to solicit further explanations more than just ‘weep for my dishonourable ignominy’. But she was dead right—for she wept herself blind at our separation—as you will come to know, in the next episode.
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