Desicritics Author: Dianne Sharma-Winter

Fiction: Baby Massage

Dianne Sharma-Winter — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:01:06 EDT

“No body speaks in there!”

“He doesn’t have any English.”

“It’s more than that,” Clare insists. One thin wall separates her from Baby. “You can hear a mouse fart between these walls.”

“Depends what you are listening for,” says Cedric, smoothing down his hair.

“What is it that you are listening for O Super Sleuth of the Coconuts?” Chris teases as he hands Clare a drink.

“A groan of gratitude, a sigh of bliss” she sips and pouts at the same time. “A yelp of pain.”

“Darling, he is good but he is not Mr Bhim,” Cedric closes his eyes and sighs. “No one ever did it as hard or as good or as long as Mr Bhim.”

Lisa laughs mockingly. Behind her hand to Clare, she whispers. “I never went myself. Are you crazy? This is India. Last season in Arambol! My god! I can tell you some stories! I blame the women myself."

" I have a nice little woman from Kerala. O so nice, she and her husband. You remember? I introduced you on the beach? I only give two hundred rupees though. I have my price. I tell her! I have my price.”

“He did slap my ass when I got onto the table though,” says Cedric.

“Totally asexual,” Chris confirms. “Darling, you know you want it! Just go and see Baby!”

“Even when I go to my lady, I always wear a thong. I would never completely strip. Are you crazy? Tomorrow when I go to my lady I will make you an appointment.

Just pay two hundred rupees no more,” insists Lisa.

But twenty minutes into the session with the lady from Kerala, she closes her eyes and thinks about Baby.

Once these thoughts take root in the mind, action will always follow.

No screens to hide her as she strips to her knickers.

The last time she walked naked across a room in front of a man was springtime. The newly green leaves of the poplar tree brushed her window. Her lover was packing to leave.

Then she walked naked across the room and broke his heart. Now she could be a rotisserie chicken, all goose bumps and hair follicles; white in the darkened room.

The oil is sharply sweet, like lemongrass but spikier; he mixes it himself. She has smelled it bubbling on his gas cooker at night.

He smooths the oil from her toes towards her heart pausing at her rump to hook her knickers over her hips.

Her radar is alert to his body which he keeps at a professional distance. He listens to his breathing, sends out senses. Gets back a negative report. Relaxes.

He works a line from her toes to her butt and back again, smoothing buckles of tension.

She closes her eyes.

Doesn’t think of the woman from Kerala.

Her eyes are shut like a nun against her nakedness. His hands are running in the thin line between the top of her leg and the beginning of trouble. She is alert to any ‘accidental touch’ but he never crosses the line.

He grades the corrugations of her twisted back into a smooth path. Bliss.

On the flip side, as he is working the oil up her right leg, he speaks for the first time.

“Excuse me?”

Shit! She has to open her eyes now.

“Yes?”

He is poised with his hands cupped on a neutral area of her body. They look like black birds preparing to fly.

“Breasts?”

God, she wishes she had kept her eyes shut now!!!! What is the etiquette? Does she say yes? If she says yes, will he think she is a slut?

Does she say Yes Please? If she says yes please, will he think she is a desperate old slut?

She shuts her eyes.

“Yes.” She squeaks.

Oil goes over her breasts; she could have been a lump of ivory being polished. Really Chris was right, the man is a total professional.

His hands move around her right breast.

No lover has ever touched her beast in such a way.

Totally. Professional. Baby, baby.

She smooths her lips into a straight line, hopes her left nipple isn’t giving her away.
Too soon he stops. She bites down on the whimper that will betray her.

Her left breast goosebumps in anticipation.

When it is over, she staggers to her feet, pays and thanks him without looking in his face.

“How is the arm pain? The back pain?”

Back? Arm? She is a walking Breast Chakra.

She mumbles something like Baby Baby and staggers into the sunlight.

“Tomorrow?” He asks.

For a minute she thinks of moving out of her hut, sleeping on the beach and eating coconuts for the next three weeks so she can go to Baby every day.

Maybe, Baby.

Sexing Up Disasters

Dianne Sharma-Winter — Mon, 9 Jun 2008 01:35:21 EDT

Last week the US Navy ships, frustrated by the stonewalling of the military junta to bring aid to the estimated 2.5 million Burmese, slipped quietly out of the waters off cyclone ravaged Burma. Tailgating their ships were the British and the French fleets.
The Burmese once again have been left to suffer in silence, in the same way as their democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi has so eloquently demonstrated in her 13 years of house arrest.

I wonder if the people of Burma are still waiting for the help that sat off shore for four weeks during the diplomatic dithering that went on while they starved, shivered in torrential rains and attempted suicide out of the kind of despair that those who held their fate in their hands will never know.

Smugglers from the Bay of Bengal smuggled what they could into the area. They didn’t wait for international approval, they didn’t dick around with diplomatic double speak. Their response may have been a drop in the vast ocean of despair that swamped Irrawaddy basin, but it was heroic and human all at once.

The media, those able to make their way into the area or those already there continued to report, mostly anonymously for fear of military reprisals. The rest of the media reported from Bangkok rooftops and other places off shore, but there was a sense that they too were ready to leap into the fray if and when they received permission to enter Burma.

While the world waited, I thought about other natural humanitarian disasters in recent years. The tsunami of 2004, the earthquake that affected Pakistan, Afghanistan and India in 2005 were two that sprang to mind. I happened to be in Tamil Nadu that Boxing Day and for a month or so afterwards, so I was able to see first hand the sexing up of that disaster by the media who had an absolute field day.

I remember seeing helicopters carrying obscure Hollywood has beens to the distraught and displaced fishing people of that coast. I remember seeing fights between the displaced and those unaffected by the tsunami who equally received aid from whoever was handing it out. Worse still, I remember the unshakeable feeling that the headcount of those lost was somehow more “sexy” to the media by the huge amount of foreign tourists who were also taken that day.

As information filtered through to those of us foreigners on the coast of Tamil Nadu, it became apparent that what was to us a local tragedy was rapidly becoming an international tragedy. One Irish man who had a cell phone and who was in contact with the outside world reported at one gathering that “The Swedes seem to be the most affected.” In fact they lost around 62 citizens while ten thousand people were never heard of again in Tamil Nadu.

Less than a year later when a devastating earthquake hit the disputed area of Kashmir, the media response filtered through to me safe at home in the shaky isles of New Zealand. Having visited that area previously I had an understanding of the difficulty of even bringing aid to an area where roads and basic infrastructure didn’t exist. The media reported from where they could get to and we got a lot of reports of the situation in Balakot.

I do remember seeing one report from New Zealander Mike McRoberts who had walked for three days into the mountains to report on something other than was what becoming common fare. Looking at his dusty clothes, hearing his breath straining in the high mountain air rapidly chilling with the approach of winter I thought, “Good on ya, mate.” I was proud of him for doing what I expected reporters to do, to search out the human truth of what we call the news.

In the case of the Pakistan earthquake, the story died as winter approached and people suffered and froze in the harsh climate of the Himalaya and the even harsher climate of disaster in a politically sensitive area. But was it the political or the geographical landscape that delayed relief efforts? India was the first country to offer aid to her warring partner and for that I had to say another (if slightly more cynical) “Good on ya, mate.”

India and Pakistan at least talked and finally agreed on opening up entry points for relief aid in the Pakistan controlled area known as POK and relief, although slow in coming, eventually made an appearance. They talked and that’s the point here. There was some communication which resulted in aid reaching some of the affected. It may not have been a perfect solution but it was a nod in the direction of humanity.

While I am pondering the history of disaster politics, Mother Earth revealed another weapon of mass destruction. The earthquake in China’s Sichuan province has devastated millions of people of a scale that is yet to be fully appreciated. But I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that the many international media hounds who were baying at the shores of the Irrawaddy delta simply turned tail and camera and headed for the hills and valleys of Sichuan in order to bring us the news.

The few brave media souls who stayed in Burma are now the odd cry in the wilderness of the sexing up of disasters in the media. Disaster sells. Quiet suffering doesn’t. When the monks took the streets last year in Burma, images were splashed across the world. “This is a momentous time,” reported the BBC’s Andrew Harding in hopefully authoritative tones. But nothing changed, the monks got bashed and beaten and gassed and things went back to abnormal.

Aung San Suu Kyi quietly entered her thirteenth year of house arrest during this time, no doubt feeling even more isolated from her people and the world than ever before given the circumstances they now face. I wonder if from the window of her house she watched the Americans slinking away with their aid relief.

Now I am left scratching my head wondering how it is that America could invade Iraq on a raft of sexed up charges that were later proved to be false, can deny the truth of the suffering of the Burmese people?

Then words of another BBC reporter rang hollowly in my ears from five years earlier when reporting on the invasion of Iraq. “There is no doubt,” said Matt Fry, “that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world and especially in the Middle East is increasingly tied up with American military power.”

Then I cheered myself up with the thought that all that unused relief aid sailing out of South East Asia might get diverted to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people who are without such basics as clean water, medicine and food. After all they have been waiting five years now for their liberation with no end in sight.

Sorry Burma seems you just weren’t sexy enough.

Arabian Nights

Dianne Sharma-Winter — Thu, 5 Jun 2008 03:07:35 EDT

“So how’s the terror situation over there?” said my friend in Mumbai when he heard I was visiting Kuwait.

“Umm, what terror?” I respond. Perhaps he knew something I didn’t. All I had seen so far was shopping malls and clean streets, fancy cars and restaurants, handsome men and beautiful women, confident and indulged children and so much bling it hurt my eyes to look at it.

“Well, you know. With the Arabs.”

This friend had witnessed the 2006 bomb blasts in Mumbai. At the time he was pretty upset to see bloodied and broken bodies littering his normal path to work; it’s a sight no one would forget easily. In fact Mumbai would have to be one of the most bombed cities I have visited in recent years but there is no mention of that in my governments travel advisory.

“Actually, there is no terror here that I have witnessed. In fact the whole place is blinging.”

“Oh well. Keep safe there and watch out for those Arabs.”

I would have engaged him in further discussion if I hadn’t had to look up Kuwait on a map to get her precise location in the Middle East when I accepted a friend’s invitation to visit him here. Until earlier this year all I knew about Kuwait was that it has been invaded by Iraq sometime back in my dim distant memory, sparking the largest American overseas operation since the Vietnam War and went down in history as The Gulf War.

Sine then there has been peace upon these peaceful people and things have pretty much returned to normal. At least for the Kuwaiti, in fact it might be one of the best kept secrets in the Arab world. Life seems very comfortable for the one million or so Kuwait citizens, with their imported workforce of almost triple their population.
But recent events in the Middle East have turned the whole region into a place of the Unknown Other, a people apart and unknown, a place where they have too much oil and so therefore power over us at least that’s how it seems to be perceived by most people.

“Watch out for those Arabs” and “Keep safe” has been the travel advice dished out to me by people safe in the comfort of their own ignorance.

The culture of fear that has gripped people since George Bush seized power has resulted in some serious misunderstandings of people and cultures, and allowed an atmosphere of intolerance and prejudice to flourish under the umbrella of ignorance. Kuwaiti people don’t have any track record of harboring ‘terrorists’ that I have been able to discover. Why would they? It’s a peace loving oil rich country; they have no grudges to bear against the oil hungry west in fact we are their biggest customer.

So why would I be at risk? Perhaps it’s the men. These Arab men dressed in the traditional a robe (thob) and a head scarf (ghutra) with a head rope (agal) looking like romantic heros straight out of the Arabian Nights? But they are unfailing polite and respectful. If by accident one of them bumps or brushes against me in public their apology is immediate and heartfelt. That in itself is a delight after India where such assaults are a deliberate and common daily experience for women. To join a queue here has proved impossible, men will stand aside and insist I go to the head of the queue as if I were doing them the favor and I can’t think of any other place in the world where that has happened to me.

Can it be the women then? The supposedly oppressed women in burqa I see smoking shisha in public, holding hands with men in public, or those who choose haute couture over burqa looking so damn sexy that I can hardly tear my eyes from their beauty? If they catch me staring, they will smile like beauty queens sublimely confident and assured. So they are no danger either.

Maybe it’s the traffic. People drive fast and furious here and after a year in India where everyone drives on the right side of the road, I have to be careful remembering which way to look when crossing the road.

But then from what I have seen and experienced, most people will stop to let me cross if only in surprise to see a pedestrian on streets.

When I protest the innocence and warmth and hospitality of the Kuwaiti I am often met with disbelief or cynicism.

“I only hope they don’t let the fundamentalists ruin what they have,” remarks another friend of mine who often visits Kashmir, a place that is listed as ‘extreme risk” in any travel advisory.

What fundamentalists?

The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, in his essay on Creative Unity, East and West said that ‘while our minds have faculties that are universal, its habits are insular.’

“But in a foreign land we try to find our compensation for the meagerness of our data by the compactness of the generalization which our imperfect sympathy itself helps us to form… the dealings between different races of men are not merely between individuals; that our mutual understanding is either aided, or else obstructed, by the general emanations forming the social atmosphere. These emanations are our collective ideas and collective feelings, generated according to special historical circumstances.”

One of the biggest fallouts of the so called war on terror which is in fact a war for oil, is that while the Arabs have what we want we will behave like myopic fundamentalists ourselves. We are the ones wearing blinkers which have blinded us more effectively than any burqa.

Pedicures and Paedophiles in Paradise

Dianne Sharma-Winter — Sun, 1 Jun 2008 10:55:18 EDT

Writing is a difficult gig for a social butterfly like me, there are long hours of hunching over a keyboard while the sun is shining and butterflies are dancing on spring flowers. There is enduring the excitement in people’s eyes when you mumble your occupation if you do happen to release yourself long enough to stumble upon a social occasion...

“A writer!” They will breathe almost enviously, “That must be exciting.”

Sure, if you specialize in reporting from Iraq or chasing wild animals across a game park.

But while I may get my thrills from other more physically challenging adventures which I may then write about, generally writing is an isolating experience. Like any job there are ups and downs; freedom of expression is assumed but not an automatic right for writers who work the paying market. However it is from this isolation that great ideas are born and come to light so it’s also a necessary pre requisite.

For me the biggest pull of this job is that I get to go to work in my pyjamas and there are not many people who can say that about their job.

I try to keep a balance between long hours crouched over a keyboard and muttering aloud by including some form of exercise in the day. The body needs exercise and the brain needs fresh air and sunshine, and my pj’s need to go to the laundry at least once a week so I tend to maximise that downtime into an opportunity to explore my environment. If I am writing exceptionally well I will shout myself a pedicure or a manicure as a reward.

More recently whilst in Pokhara the sub tropical lakeside town beneath the Annapurna Range in Nepal, my daily routine included hiring a boat and rowing whilst I meditated on the many shades of green God has given us. It’s also one of the few places to be and not be harassed by Tibetan jewellery sellers or in fact sellers of any kind, I used to think smugly.

Until one day recently something happened that not only disturbed by meditations but also my smugly ignorant idea of being somewhat apart from the usual tourist concerns of whether the mist will allow an early morning view of the ranges or hiring porters for the compulsory trekking jaunt. I am slicing my way across the deep green waters of Phewa Lake when I notice a young boy calling from the boat jetty.

A lone tourist woman is making her way around the opposite shore of the lake and the boy seems to know her or at least think she is worth the effort of leaping into a boat and paddling across to meet her all the while shouting “Sister, Sister!”

The tourist sees the approach of the boy and waits for him on the shore. I keep an eye on developments because of my insatiable curiosity for a story and because I am aware that tourists have been robbed whilst making their way through the forest to the Peace Stupa perched high on the hill above. The boy and the tourist meet, there is some discussion and the tourist walks on.

The boy turns his boat towards me and I swear under my breath. Now he has me in his sights, I realise I have two choices. I can put a spurt on my rowing in an attempt to outdistance myself from the boy who is now paddling madly in my direction thus risking a keystone kops chase or I can wait and see what it is that he wants. Either way my peace is disturbed, I swear again and put my oars down and wait.

His boat is listing madly as he nears me; his skinny frame is outlined in his thin and poorly fitting cotton shirt. He may be fourteen years or so and has the unkempt air of one of the many street children who make Pokhara their home.

“What do you want child?” I ask him as his boat bunts mine and he reaches to steady himself. “Sister, I have good smoke. You want?” He fumbles in his shirt pocket and brings out a newspaper wrapped cache of hashish.

“I don’t want.”

“But sister, I give you good price! Just try.”

“No thanks, son. Try someone else.” I pick up my oars and start rowing. Nothing daunted the boy starts rowing alongside of me. “OK, OK but sister you want a boyfriend?”

“A boyfriend?” What the hell? His gaze is almost professional as he slides his eyes over my body and then motions to the opposite shore.

At first I want to laugh at the situation. The last time I was propositioned by a fourteen year old boy I was a fourteen year old girl, now I am a middle aged woman! Then I want to smack him with my oar for his impertinence, but then I ask myself do I look like a woman who would pay to have sex with a child? Do I look like a degenerate paedophile?

Its a sad fact but true that Pokhara is a favourite destination for foreign paedophiles.

A quirk in the Nepali Law means that while sex with an underage girl child is punishable under law, paedophilia of boy children is a big enough grey area to incite and invite these people to operate with impunity. They live openly in the community as an open secret.

Its a thoughtful writer who makes her way along the shore of Lake Phewa and back to the isolation of her room. On the way I pass a high walled house commonly known to belong a paedophile operating under the name of Krishna, two middle aged men with teenage boys, an orphanage known to be supported by foreign paedophiles and another street kid who looms out of the shadow of a tree to offer me a massage. I close the door to my room, get back into my pyjamas and hunch thankfully over my keyboard again.

Kingdom of Tides

Dianne Sharma-Winter — Sat, 31 May 2008 05:42:43 EDT

The muffled thrum of the boat is the only sound in the mist coated forests of one of the world's largest estuarine deltas. The mangrove forest of the Sunderbans forest breathes in an out in drips.

Trees emerge eerily in the dew soaked exhalation of the land. Within the rise and fall of the tides, mangrove forests that by low tide revealed strong petticoats of latticed roots holding them stubbornly in place, now seem to rise and float.

A lone egret takes flight from the skeleton of a waterlogged tree, slicing its way through the mist with a lonely cry.

We tourists are still recovering from our early morning wakeup call and the world here seems reluctant to free itself of the cloak of night. It feels as if we are navigating the lungs of a Nation.

Formed by silt washed down from the Himalayas by the River Ganga and Brahmaputra, the vast tract of the Sunderbans stretches along two hundred and sixty kilometers of the coast of the Bay of Bengal, spanning India and Bangladesh in an area covering nine and a half thousand square kilometers. Big portions of the Sunderbans are protected by the status of UNESCO World Heritage Site, Tiger Reserve, National Park, Biosphere Reserve, and Reserve Forest.

A seemingly endless landscape of mangrove studded islands, small streams and vast rivers, this almost silent world is inhabited by glimpses of shadows and shapes half guessed at. A furl in the water ahead could be a crocodile or a Gangetic dolphin, maybe even the famed man eating predator of the Sunderbans.
The Royal Bengal Tiger's preference for human flesh, which is particular to this region, is thought to be part of the animals' adaptability to the inhospitable saline environment.

As far as the eye can see, two and a half thousand square kilometers of this tidal kingdom is the sole preserve of the Royal Bengal Tiger.

The Sunderbans claims the distinction of being the only tiger reserve in the world with a growing tiger population. Currently the number is 274, according to the 2004 census. That's roughly 9.1 tigers for every square kilometre.

But are we the watchers or the ones being watched? Scanning the shrouded forests, I begin to feel that a tiger has more chance of spotting a human then the other way around.

In fact we are the ones in the zoo as our guide explains. Visitors are permitted to the park by boat and to selected watchtowers where cleared corridors in the forest allow for game spotting. But one is given a sense very quickly that we are the ones in a cage while the true inhabitants of the park will reveal themselves or not as the mood and the tide takes them. We could just as easily be a leaf in the currents that ebb and flow around the Park. Or - to a hungry tiger watching from the shadows - a floating Continental Smorgasbord.

Every creature living in the Sunderbans adapts necessarily to the tide that swarms in from the Bay of Bengal twice daily then slowly drags itself out again in estuarine fingers. Home to an amazing variety of birds, crocodiles, dolphins and otters, there is a precious interdependency here that is both protected and endangered. Sunderbans supports more than ten endangered mammals and reptiles as well as four million human souls living on the fringes. Gathering firewood and honey as well as fishing, the people have wrestled a living from the mangroves, literally from the jaws of the tiger.

The result until recent efforts towards sustainable tourism was a situation of the landless in opposition with the endangered . With over one thousand ‘Tiger Widows" in the area, that's 3.6 humans for every tiger. The Tiger seems to be on a winning streak.

A precarious balance appreciated through the legends of Bon Bibi, a forest maiden who was chosen by Allah to protect the people from the tiger.

Those who enter the forest with a pure heart and empty hand, says the legend, can be assured of the protection of Bon Bibi. The tiger is said to be Hindu demon who morphs into a tiger to satisfy his craving for human flesh. The story of Bon Bibi is a lesson in interdependency, religious harmony and ecology that walks hand in hand with survival. Even the boundaries between religions dissolve in this borderless land.

A small mud temple on the shore is barely visible in the mist as we drift by. I notice that the guide bows his head to the guardian goddess. As do I, but not before wondering if that means it will bring good luck or bad to the tour. Good luck to us would be a glimpse of orange stripes through the dappled tangle of the Sundari forests, while our guide has come from a culture where they pray daily not to see a tiger. Our hopes ebb with the tide, the best time to see a tiger is at low tide when they have less distance to cover as the swim from shore to shore. As we hug the shoreline, peering into the thick vegetation, I cannot shake the sense of being watched

Gradually the sun burns off the early morning mist, the forest awakes with screeches and flutters. Beneath and endlessly blue sky the tide begins to recede, exposing the spiked roots of the mangroves. Tiny mudskippers cling to the mangrove trunks, monkeys clamber in the branches. At the Forest Headquarters viewing platform we see a deer marking its way gingerly through the mud, a monitor lizard with a nasty slash on it's rump ignores us with an air of wounded dignity. Not surprisingly, there is no tiger crossing the clearing although two sightings have been recorded in the park in the last week. Back on board the boat, we putt on dreamily, slowly turning a lazy arc in the river.

Our guide motions the boat close to the shore.

Fresh pug marks in the mud leading down to the water and back into the forest.
The tiger had come to the shoreline and watched as we patrolled the opposite side.
In the spirit of true eco tourism, the Royal Bengal Tiger had taken nothing and left only footprints.