Men are finished

A few weeks back I watched an online debate on the topic “Men are finished”. It’s interesting that we’re having this debate at all. After all, men still overwhelmingly dominate politics, science, sports, even restaurant kitchens. Naturally, I dismissed the motion as absurd.

I was wrong.

Lately, I spent eight consecutive days trekking in the Himalayas with twenty strangers, sans internet. 15 of those strangers were men. This was one of the few times when I was forced to flock with birds of another feather. And man, of an entirely different feather they were.

While I am all for female equality and for shattering the glass ceiling imposed largely by men, I will never understand the “pride in being led by women”, as a friend described the situation where two women were walking ahead of the men. I will also never understand why a guy would spontaneously break into garba (which autocorrects to garbage) surrounded only by men in the middle of a cold night, and not spare them of even the gayest of its moves. Again, why would a guy dismiss as “a bit harsh” my confronting possibly the worst trek leader on planet earth, and give him the “benefit of doubt”, or, for that matter, be content with sipping watery tea simply because it’s “something warm” (why not drink piss instead)?

I have written extensively about the perils of political correctness, but this trip was an eye-opener even for me. The sample size should suffice, for all but one man behaved in this manner, and they belonged to varied socio-economic, demographic and geographic backgrounds. The younger the lot, the stronger the grip of PC. The stronger the grip of PC, the more emasculated the men. I suspect it also has something to do with the income group. As Manu Joseph put it in his novel Serious Men, “These days, men live like men only in the homes of the poor”. There’s no shame in being sensitive and living in a world where women do better, but there’s no pride in not calling a spade a spade and inviting subordination.

Men are not yet finished, but the process is underway. We won’t lose our dicks, but we’ll lose our defining traits.

The photo below captures what I want to say.

A letter to Trinity

Dear Trinity,

I couldn’t utter a word for a full minute after papa informed me on the phone that you were gone. He couldn’t say much either, except that you were no more. I knew you were on the brink when I saw you last. But I could only break my silence with a quivering ‘how come?’

In those thirteen years, we transitioned together – me, from adolescence to adulthood; you, from infancy to dust. In one lifetime, I could outlive you seven times. Boon or bane?

I never told you this and you never asked, but your name, Trinity, was inspired by The Matrix. There was considerable opposition to it since people thought it would be tough for you to grasp, but they were wrong. You leapt all the way up to my face, sometimes even defeating my maneuvers to evade your prying tongue, whenever I called out to you. I wonder where you got all that energy from, for you were always wafer thin. While you were not stupendous at spotting the ball once it was lost (remember how you made me do the fetching every time that happened?), that nose of yours sure did a great job of picking out the well-camouflaged pieces of chicken in your big bowl of food, and leaving the rest behind. You’re probably unaware of the joke, but after all our attempts to make you eat failed, we blamed it on your figure-consciousness. Was there an element of truth to that? I hope not, because you’d grown terribly weak in later years.

You were thin, yes, but none could question your agility and speed. Hey, you often outran the much stronger Alex when the three of us played fetch-the-ball! Wait, did you ever stop to consider that he let you win? Ok, maybe not always. But he did love you too much to see you lose too often, and this despite the fact that you were always more curious about the contents in his bowl of food than your own. After all, you gave birth to the only offspring he ever had, nine of them, all in one go. It’s a good thing you weren’t human, for they often give up on their wives if they birth all daughters. I think you were far too dazed to notice that I pulled each one of your kids out of your body with my own hands. Rather messy day, that. I hope you never got to know that one of them didn’t survive. Don’t worry, we gave her an honourable burial in the park right in front of the house. Yes yes, that same park, of which you once chased out an unsuspecting stray while I was giving you a walk. Poor guy, why were you so disapproving of others of your kind? Coming back, I want to apologise to you for keeping you confined to that little room where you gave birth, for nearly two months. I could see you wanting to escape as the eight crawlers went all milky way on you, but I had little choice. But hey, as a one year old mother, you did a great job. The sad bit is that it made sure you stayed thin all your life.

Trinity (foreground) getting curious about Alex's bowl

You were about six weeks old when Papa and I brought you home, in 2004. You might be surprised to know that unlike your kind, humans carefully pick and choose the recipient(s) of their affection. It’s natural that you feel disappointed in me for not recalling precisely why I picked you from a large group, but I did like the way you circled around my feet and licked them.

Do you remember your first meeting with Alex, the four year old big guy already at home, when we let your nose and his do the talking from across the net door that you later tore apart? That was because we were terribly afraid of what he would do to you, only we were fearing for the wrong dog. Soon you were making us run after you, trying to stop you from jumping up to bite his nose, placed about two feet higher than your mouth.

Gosh, you never let that pattern reverse for the next eight years you and Alex were together, did you? And you didn’t even need to jump to bite him after the first few months. I can probably understand the fun in dominating one’s partner, but why did you get so jealous at his being called ‘good dog’ or being patted on the head? Intervening forcefully to divert attention towards yourself to steal the mantle of ‘good dog’ wasn’t the best strategy, you know. Poor guy, except visibly seeking solitude at times, he loved you too much to complain. Despite everything, I know you did too, for you never recovered from the shock of his death on March 9, 2012.

Trinity refusing to let go of the ball, as always

Trinity (left) and Alex (right); Trinity is the one being chided but it's Alex who seems sorry as she wags her tail

The two of you made for an odd couple. While he was ferocious and uncouth - his love for sampling human blood of varying delights and the habit of making a show of nature’s calls, put us through considerable heartburn and embarrassment - you never bit a soul and your cat-like discretion in potty matters was often admired by the three homo sapiens in the family during secretive, closed-door deliberations about the two of you (whenever we found out you were eavesdropping we changed the subject to stop you from gloating about it to Alex). We never did figure out, however, the switching of personalities between the two of you when it came to animals. While Alex floundered with the mice in the kitchen, you made sure the cheese always stayed protected. Mummy confirms that in the court of mice, you would be tried for over 100 brutal murders. But hey, I am not scared for you because I know you’d kill them all before they could sentence you. 

Know the reason why I preferred playing fetch-the-ball with Alex? Because while he let go of the ball as soon as he got back to me after fetching it, the only way of making you do so was to poke a finger in your ear. Also, even as he saluted every time he was asked to do so, why did you simply collapse on the ground and play dead?!

             Alex, on being asked to salute

Trinity, on being asked to do the same

And of course, of course you know damn well what your homo sapiens remember you most for - that incessant, inexplicable wailing which was the most endearing, irritating and confusing thing about you all at once. I know it was your love for us that made you whip up a storm of cries as soon as you were left alone, but sometimes, waking up your homo sapiens groggy-eyed in the middle of the night doesn’t exactly win you their love, you know. Are you even aware of the flak I got from mummy-papa for letting you lick my face, my bribe for shutting you up?

I hope you realise that the only time papa raised his hand on you, towards the end of your life, was a desperate attempt to stop you from waking up the neighbours. He deeply regrets it now, realising that the terminal decline and paralysis you struggled with in your later years had increased your craving for us. The only thing he regrets more is that none of your three homo sapiens was around you in your final moments, to hold you tight as your breathing slowed on the night of May 23. We could never think about putting you to sleep, but papa said, and I agreed, that what happened was for the best. He wondered whether you’d have fought to live longer had someone been around. That broke my heart, the last I saw you was on April 16. If it’s any consolation, we did sit beside you after you were gone. Although I don’t believe that the dead look down, if it’s true, I hope it made you wag your tail. And if there’s really a world for the dead, that ball we buried alongside you will make sure you, Alex and I have something to keep ourselves busy with, when I join the two of you there.

Trinity’s resting place

It took your death, Trinity, more than five years after Alex’s, for me to muster the courage to have another look at the captured moments of either of you. It’s true what they say about a man with nothing to lose - with your departure, the ‘Alex-Trinity’ era of my home, my family and my life is well and truly over. While I was unable to take another look at Alex’s motionless body lying in the veranda on the morning of his death, I spent considerable time next to yours, caressing you. To borrow a line from my favourite TV series, loving the two of you has been the most profound, intense and painful experience of my life, almost too much to bear. 

Each day I died a bit thinking you'd leave me behind, and now that you have, I feel liberated. The only thing that scares me is that, with my death, your memories will be gone forever too. Hopefully this tiny space will prove me wrong even far in the future, as someone, somewhere will keep stumbling upon it.

Yours,

Whatever you called me