The Opium Eater and Other Stories [a potpourri set primarily in India]

10. Stomach-ache: A Prose Fabliau

This story is dedicated to Andrew-drong who has been extremely supportive of my own book. I've enjoyed our friendly (& inquisitive, on his part ;-) PM exchanges! As I haven't been able to dedicate a chapter (of my book) to him, and may run out of chapters before I'm able to, I'm dedicating this story! Thank u so much, Abhi—hope u enjoy it :-)!

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Lala Manohar Lal Agarwal's sexual problem in his brand new marriage was of a geometrical nature. He was himself like a huge balloon, whereas his bride Soni was like a pair of compasses with stiff legs that would only open this much and no more. How to fit the balloon between the legs of the instrument in such a way that the nozzle of the big sphere would touch the vertex of the compasses' angle was the task set for him on his wedding night. He tried again and again to establish the contact, but to no avail. When he had failed repeatedly, he attempted the hope strategy. That is, he closed his eyes, noisily breathed out, drew his tummy in, or at least he thought he had done so, and imagining that he was now sufficiently deflated, quietly tried to sneak in. But the trick didn't work. In his desperation he even resorted to force, and tried to distend his wife's legs to an angle of 180°. But Soni was not a rag doll. Quite the contrary, she was a superbly-formed athlete with long and well-toned muscles and joints that were springy with steel firmness, and were not held together by rubber bands.

It was indeed the girl's athleticism that had caught the eye and attention of Manohar's father, the big Seth, Lala Hira Lal Agarwal, and had made him decide on the spot that his son would marry this girl.

The Agarwals were banyas, the well-known trading caste of India, whose affluence and obesity is legendary. It may be pointed out, in the interest of fairness and objectivity, that not all banyas are rich and rotund. Like any other social sterotype, this one too has its exceptions, and there are some members of this class who are both slim and badly off. But the Agarwals were not among the exceptions. They had been, from generation to generation, fabulously rich and notoriously fat. Manohar's grandfather, for example, is still remembered in Ghaziabad as the fattest man that that town has ever produced.

All his life he had sat in his textile store from dawn till dusk, moving everybody around him, but not stirring himself. He had, in this way, amassed a huge fortune and also an equal amount of blubber. By the time he reached middle age, he had grown to such enormous proportions that some areas of his body extended beyond his reach; he could not scratch himself, and it became impossible for him to have a proper bath by himself. The arrangement that he had made in this connection was that every morning, four of his most stalwart domestics took him out to a creek on the outskirts of the town, sat him in the water, and gave him a thorough scrubbing. They laved his back, washed his limbs, and finally went to work on his monumental belly, which consisted of rolls upon massive rolls of fat. They parted the folds, inserted an oversize towel edgewise in the opening and then pulled it from side to side, like two loggers sawing down a tree.

When all the tummy folds had been treated in this fashion and the daily deposit of grime and grease removed, Lalaji felt and smelled clean for the rest of the day, except for one evening when he started exuding strong whiffs of a putrid smell.

The servants were hurriedly summoned to see what was the matter. They went over his whole body with their noses like hounds trying to pick up a scent, but could not locate the source of the foul odour until they came to one of the stomach folds. When they lifted it, they found compressed in it a dead fish, which apparently had become trapped in the course of the morning ablution, and had now begun to decompose.

Manohar's own father was a shrewd and far-sighted man. Not only did he plan to increase the family fortune, which any Agarwal would have done, but he also resolved to decrease the family girth, at least of the future generations. In pursuance of the first, that is, the monetary goal, he opened a new store in Delhi, which is a stone's throw from Ghaziabad. He moved to the big city himself to look after the new business, leaving the old one in the hands of his two sons. Concerning the second objective, he was determined to marry his sons outside his chubby community in order to improve the family heredity. And as luck would have it, an opportunity came along which he seized immediately.