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    Wild Animals Prohibited
    Wild Animals Prohibited
    Wild Animals Prohibited
    Ebook268 pages4 hours

    Wild Animals Prohibited

    By Subimal Misra

    ()

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    About this ebook

    •FOR FANS OF: William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Tarkovsky, Godard, Beckett, and any other authors who play with form as a way of subverting the norms of literature.

    •BENGALI'S BEST AUTHOR: who's work has recently been reprinted in HarperCollins India's special collection of the ten best works in translation they've published over their entire history.

    •SECOND MISRA BOOK FROM OPEN LETTER: This is the follow-up to This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale (July 2020).

    •A LARGER-THAN-LIFE PERSONALITY: Misra famously tore up his degrees and took to teaching at a school by the red light district to help educate the sex workers' children. He refuses to attend literary festivals and doesn't put an official price on his books, instead issuing them with a "suggested exchange value."

    •ONE OF THE MOST UNIQUE VOICES FROM INDIA: Very little Indian literature has been published in translation, and nothing that's as bold, controversial, and anarchic as Misra.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Letter
    Release dateSep 7, 2021
    ISBN9781948830577
    Wild Animals Prohibited
    Author

    Subimal Misra

    Subimal Misra was born in 1943 and his writing career spanned over four decades. The cliched label, ‘anti-establishment', is often applied the moment his name is mentioned. But since ‘anti-establishment' now seeks to become the establishment, he opposed that too. He was entirely a little-magazine writer, not having written a single letter outside little magazines in his career. Some say Misra brought a different genre into Bengali literature, which made his writing distinctive. From a stance of all-round opposition he said, ‘I try to think differently and yet people make an uproar about me – the two can't coexist, that can't be. If I attain instant recognition and popularity, then I would think that what I'm doing is not new.' When the way of saying becomes the subject was one of his favourite expressions, with a debt to Jean-Luc Godard, of course. He also said that he didn't believe in any prevalent one-dimensional label: Whatever is accepted as correct is what has to be examined much more. Misra passed away in February 2023.   

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      Book preview

      Wild Animals Prohibited - Subimal Misra

      Wild Animals Prohibited

      Any person bringing, keeping, or raising in urban areas categories of animal or animals notified as dangerous vide government gazette notification, in contravention of regulations promulgated by the government, or in violation of the rules and conditions of the license, shall be fined an amount not exceeding rupees two thousand.

      —Clause 71 (a) of the Bengal Law no. 4 of 1966

      When Jodu arrived with his wife in the evening, we got started. Ram and Shyam had come by late afternoon and were sitting around, making conversation every now and then. Every once in a while they said: We’re gonna have a helluva time today! At three thirty, when it was time for the daily water supply, my wife entered the bathroom with a loosely draped sari around her and a towel and soap case in hand. When she emerged an hour later, her body exuded the fragrance of sandalwood soap. I often feel like biting her exposed shoulder but don’t, thinking it would be improper. But as soon as Amala emerged and my old maidservant went into the bathroom with a pile of unwashed plates and utensils, I took advantage of the privacy to fondle my wife a little. But Amala was largely preoccupied with getting dressed or doing up her face, she didn’t give me much time. Yet I took the opportunity to lick and lap up as much as I could. Ram and Shyam called out from the next room a couple of times, There are some squeaky sounds coming from your room, what are you up to, Madhu? Making no bones about it, I replied, I’m kissing. They got excited and said, We wanna kiss too. In response, I tried to explain the situation to them. I counseled them to wait: Gently into the night.

      And thus the evening advanced. Ram and Shyam looked at their watches, they were getting impatient and restless. They knew things couldn’t begin before Jodu and his wife arrived. In the other room, Amala daubed color thickly on her cheeks and face. The old maidservant shuffled back after washing the dishes. I shouted at her: What’s with you, you whore, you take so long to wash the dishes—come on now, hurry up and pour the liquor into the glasses. The old woman was afraid of me. She quickly busied herself with fetching the liquor from the cupboard. In whispers, I indicated to the others the authority I wielded in my house.

      The evening grew darker and the lights were turned on. Sipping our drinks, we waited in silence for Jodu and his wife. They arrived after a while, sat down, had a drink. I closely observed Jodu’s wife, Kamli—how she sat, how she spoke, the way she laughed animatedly at every turn, almost to the point of keeling over. My wife Amala joined us after a while. She brimmed over with laughter at every word, her entire torso from waist to shoulder swaying lustily, the anchal of her sari slipping off time and again to expose her breasts. We carried on talking while we drank.

      Ram asked: Is the revolution advancing?

      Shyam replied: I don’t know.

      Jodu asked: How many salary increments did you get? I replied: Three.

      What are those people doing?

      They keep playing cards, sitting beneath the mezzanine verandah upon newspapers spread out under the tube light.

      What do they do?

      Sometimes when we are rapt in pleasure, they climb the stairs and knock on the door, they look here and there suspiciously and with angry expressions they ask, ‘What’s happening here?’

      In the midst of such talk the flower seller’s cry could be heard: Bel, buy belflowers! Hearing the word bel, the women got excited. I called the flower seller upstairs and bargained with him. Then I bought two strings and we fixed it on the women’s hair, me on Jodu’s wife’s, Jodu on my wife’s. They were beside themselves with joy and let us kiss them right there in front of the flower seller.

      After sending off the flower seller, while some of us were kissing—were getting ready to, rather—standing at the door was the young beggar girl from the bottom of the stairs, dressed in dirty rags, holding in her arms a rickety baby just a few months old. She wailed: Ma, a roti for me, ma! And I don’t know why but I thought of the people sitting beneath the mezzanine verandah on spread-out newspapers, silently playing cards under the tube light. Sometimes my wife gave her a roti or half a roti and sent her off before her incessant wailing began to get on our nerves. But most days she got nothing and she stood at the door for a long time, pestering us. Sometimes we teased her: Hey girl, wanna come and drink some booze? She stared at us with wide eyes as we fondled each other. Sometimes one of us got up in exasperation and twisted her arm. She would turn blue in pain and her eyes saw only darkness as she tried to protect her now withered young breasts as well as her baby. Sometimes we chucked whatever we could find at her—pieces of stone, for instance. We even spat at her. Some days my wife took the situation into her own hands. When the water in the kettle boiled she splashed it on the girl’s body, and when the girl and the baby screamed at the sudden attack, we enjoyed it.

      The disturbance of the flower seller and beggar having passed, the night advanced. We kept waiting, kept getting ready. There were bits of stray conversation. We talked about how the number of our female members could be increased with the addition of at least two more persons, and our wives protested loudly at the suggestion. They said, Getting more girls is not permitted. How are we inadequate in any way? We laughed, and through our laughter we enjoyed their talk. Compared to other countries, we simply haven’t become civilized—we talked about all that too, about social norms and taboos on sexuality being a sign of backwardness, and we talked about the many countries in the world that had left these behind long ago. Our women expressed their views on how outrageous the ban on the import of foreign lipsticks into the country was. Sometimes it was contraceptives need to be more reliable. They talked about things like that. Ram and Shyam wanted to talk about those four people, the ones beneath the mezzanine verandah, who kept playing cards silently under the neon light, sitting on spread-out newspapers. We knew very little about them, and consequently our discussion lacked substance. Jodu said, Those people are extremely unsocial, they don’t say anything even when we walk past them. My wife said, They’re men, after all, the day you bring them under control they’ll talk your head off.

      The night progressed. We couldn’t stand any more useless chatter. I said, Let the real thing begin now. What’s the use of sitting around any more? Hearing me, everyone sat up. Everyone wondered what today’s item would be. After some discussion, the day’s program was decided upon. Given that there were four men and only two women, there was some argument and bargaining and laying down of conditions. But eventually everyone was reassured that they would get their share in the next session, and the matter was more or less resolved for the day. But on some days, there was a toss, and those who won the toss got the chance to get the women. Then the bright lights were turned off and a dim blue low-watt bulb was lit, because if anyone outside found out or suspected anything, it could be dangerous. I had locked the old maidservant up in the tiny store room. I had told her, Sit quietly, you old woman, don’t you dare shout and scream! Each time I locked her up like this, I inevitably felt a surge of emotion, and in that agitated state, I felt like landing two blows on her face. Damn her, how long would she oppress us like

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