Millions of Views Dangling from the Sky #Women'sDay #2025Wome'sDay #Women'sDay2025

 

They said, “The hoardings! Arrgh.”

Yes, they said the hoardings were making the city sky dirty. Even they had some taglines, floating without a title, “The faces are covered under the ads.”

I was less than ten years old then. I wanted the truth. I wanted to see how dirty the hoardings were.

My mother was too supportive. She promised herself to fulfill all my wishes. She made it very clear to me even then, before I turned ten.

She went to war against everything that stood against fulfillment of my wishes. It was not easy for me though. But I had her fighting some of my battles.

So when I spilled to her, “Ma, I wanna be up, among those hoardings …” she clearly laid out choices before me, “Either you are on the hoardings or you’re flying much above them.”

It seemed unfair. She asked me to choose between my own wishes. But it was true that the week before I wished to become a fighter jet pilot.

She explained, “To become anything, you’ve to put time and effort. Till you’re twelve or even fourteen, you could have time for both of your goals and some preparations may be the same and some are similar. But after that, there would be a point of no return from which you'd have to choose one or the other. Because, money can be arranged somehow, but time can never be borrowed.”

So my time was divided between advanced level physics, calculus, karate and kathak. I loved all of them like my siblings, which I never had. I could barely leave any one of them. But while flying from my aunt's place at Agartola to home in Kolkata, I realized that jets fly farther above and I could barely see the ground from above, from so high. So, on the decisive birthday, I chose the hoardings.

My mother explained to me very clearly, “Whatever you want to do, do it early. You can never learn a hundred percent of how to live your life. Everybody learns to live by living. So start early.”

So my journey took off on a ramp in the city. Then, I stepped into some beauty pageants. And, before entering the second decade of life, I stood out on those hoardings, in my city and in other cities in the nation and abroad.

My agent loved me. She used to price me the most and used to earn the most from the shares of my performances. She used to pamper me for my eccentricities, too. She put on every contract of the hoardings with my photo that I must have a chance to touch all the flex banners before they were fixed to skyward iron frames. She used to tell the agencies, “Attitude and tantrums, you know.”

She told me, “Better than nagging for a bite from a poisonous cobra.”

I did not understand if I was throwing tantrums or if it was less tantrum compared to the tantrums thrown by my colleagues. But I kept attaching cell fragments from the pupils of my eyes to those flex banners by gummy tapes.

Yes, I was rich by that time. Rich enough to carefully remove a few cells from within my eyes and trap them in between contact lenses, alive with some elixir I purchased from an eccentric chemistry professor from Princeton.

Rich enough to preserve eggs from my strong young nourished vibrant body in cryogenic fluid to have my biological offspring at a well planned pause in my career from thirty-five to forty-five. If I could not decide about the mate by then, then I would buy sperm. If my body would not support pregnancy, then I would hire a surrogate.

It was the time when I was carefully choosing my expenses and saving a lot for the future. My only fancy was the retina cells scratched from my eyes through the pupils and preserved in the elixir from Princeton.

Sole purpose of this eye cell scratching was to see the surrounding of the hoardings and experience it. Those cells used to send me remote signals from all over the city. It was fun. Seeing the parting between the central incisor teeth of my colleagues, the annoying irregular sudden hair strand in the eyebrow of an world class model even after rigorous photoshopping, the impossible furrows of a six pack in a sculpture like male body.

There used to be the “Aha!” moments, occasionally. In autumn, after sunset the whole sky was painted pink as if by a potion of blood and milk! 

Those moments were, “Finally. I’m part of the scene.”

The solace was that no fighter jet seemed any closer from those high hoardings. They remain as high and as far as they used to be from the ground.

For the change, I once observed a rally of women in blood stenched skirts on the streets below. They claimed that those bloods were menstrual blood.

Funny. Hypocritically funny.

Menstrual blood, if it could overflow, always caught in the hemlines and about six inches above it. It could never seep up against gravity towards the waist. The fakeness of the stance, failed the cause in no time. 

Hand in hand to the fake menstrual blood people came the ‘Me too’ army.

“Fuck ‘Me too’.”

Oops! That came out wrong. “Fuck! What’s ‘Me too’?” 

Did ever anyone touch my body for their sexual pleasure without my consent arousing my discomfort and displeasure?

I broke the limbs that sought opportunities with my body.

Didn’t I tell you? I was a karate black belt.

Besides, kathak lessons not only made my moves scintillating on the ramps, but they also strengthened my legs. My kicks were jaw breaking. 

Yes, I lost a few jobs. I was hot headed. Thick headed. I was naive and young. Too young. A teenager.

My calculus and physics lessons were too live then for alternative career choices. But I never thought of that. All I knew was that the sneaky losers never had the confidence and courtesy to ask for my permission before touching my breasts and genitals and hence, their lack of confidence would prevent them from assassinating my character and career.
My character and career were not formed yet. I was building my character and career then and any job proposal used to go through my mother. She had a proven iron strong character and a profound career as a Physics professor. Nobody would pay heed to the rumors that she sold me out for a few more bucks. Money was not a problem in my family. Fame was never enough enticing to compromise peace of mind.

After all, my entire life seemed like an experiment of living by the conditions I laid myself.

Those conditions excluded desperation. I never shied away from a quarrel. I enjoyed my fights.

And those brawls with sneaky losers? Those further strengthened my limbs.

Cry babies could never get justice from anyone or institution, administration and all heavy wordy suckers (I should have said ‘pillars’) of society. Cranky bitches could get all and a few bites and beatings always sped them up their ways.

Besides, sneaky losers never had enough strength to cancel my assignments on the grounds of their broken fingers, jaws and penises. It would have been the announcement of their respective defeats and attestation of their own characters or lack of characters.

Plural? Yes. There were a few of them.

This hypocrisy, of course, did not kill my wish to hang by the sky. I enjoyed the view of pregnant women doing yoga in the park. I enjoyed swimming elderly people trying to stay fit and celebrating aging.

I found my new philanthropy targets on the streets. I established ‘Schools on the Trucks’ for little kids working on the streets during the day. The trucks were their school and shelter. I purchased spaces and built toilets and bathrooms for them. 

There were similar services and shelters for the elderly people on the streets, too. The sister-in-law of the ex-chief minister of the state was among them. Hence, there were facilities to take care of psychological ailments, too.

My life on the hoardings was paying me enough to keep all these afloat. Besides, there was international recognition followed by national recognition. I was planning to start a career in politics.

I was on my way to a meeting with my agent to discuss the opportunities in politics. A mild storm has just passed. My car was on the downward slope of a bridge. A flex banner came down swiftly on the bonnet of my car covering the entire frontal view of the driver.

The driver stopped the car abruptly. We were not hurt. But the third car on the trail got hit from behind. The rider was an octogenarian neurosurgeon of the city. His vertebrae broke. He later succumbed to his injuries in a city hospital.

That evening I launched my political party. Our primary promise was to clean up the city from ugly and dangerous hoardings and cutouts. 

I had enough of skytime. I was glad that I had. My time in the sky gave me so many purposes and goals in life.  

But it was fatal, not to me, but to others. Since, it had already been made about others, it would certainly bring me win over power.

Then, I could have an opportunity to ride fighter jets, too.

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Other stories of flamboyant women :

1. La Chica - An Unapologetically Narcissistic Tale https://projectionofnaught.blogspot.com/2021/12/la-chica-unapologetically-narcissistic.html
2. Granny’s Philosophy https://projectionofnaught.blogspot.com/2021/08/grannys-philosophy-freedomofspeech-wep.html
3. Woke https://projectionofnaught.blogspot.com/2021/04/woke-freedommorning-wep.html
4. আবহমান নারীদিবস https://projectionofnaught.blogspot.com/2015/03/blog-post.html
5. সুকন্যা বৃত্তান্ত https://projectionofnaught.blogspot.com/2015/08/blog-post.html
6. অতিরিক্ত যৌনতার দাবিতে https://projectionofnaught.blogspot.com/2016/03/blog-post.html

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La Chica - An Unapologetically Narcissistic Tale

 

“Dumbass, stop thinking. Act. Now.”

Even this snub did not work.

She slipped further  into thoughts, “Not dumbass, but numbass.”

Then her entire being shook again with the floor and the walls of the lavatory of the cabin. After three peaceful nights the fourth morning brought all these commotions.

The evening before, wood-pickers from Dhaksabandh village saw an elephant herd crossing the pebbly bed of Dhaksa River. There were three female elephants and two calves in the herd. The villagers alerted Dhaksabandh forest block office. Later in the evening, radio transmission officially alerted all the forest blocks of Dhaksa Division.

Everyone at the camp dinner table heard the bulletin. The duty officer created a vigil roster for fourteen pairs of men, pretty equally distributed for all trainee officers but one. The commanding officer being at rest in his Cabin a few miles away, there was nobody to decide over her fate.

She felt relieved by the break in the nightly show of chivalry, helpfulness, kindness and whatever. The greater question of survival, though in a probable struggle, with a lesser being, kept the men occupied. The threat of doomsnight looming at the doorstep made them oblivious of her.

She waded through the blinding darkness along a quarter of a mile long forest path to her cabin from the men’s barack and the mess. The visual union of the light bugs on the ground and the scattered stars in the night sky rejuvenated her wilder self .

After an hour the first pair on guard woke her up, “Chatterjee!”

Chatterjee left her bedding spread on the creaky wooden floor, held three feet above the ground on termite-eaten wooden posts, and muttered underneath her breath, “Foolfuckers.”

Then she stretched her hand over their head through the hollow of the missing window pane of the only bedroom of the cabin to receive the radio set. She grumbled, “Damn, Public Service. Just made custodian of a public property! Now I’m bound to report elephant sightings.”

The men left marching as soon as they finished performing their duty to their own satisfaction. She vented, “Shallah! It's a half an hour nightwatch for each of them. Whole night for me!”

Her thoughts wandered, “Men and their complexes about their shortcomings! Like Maknas, lacking tusks unable to attract female pachyderms in oestrus! The Commanding Officer, to keep me safe, made me sleep in a separate cabin with missing footboards in its hall which can bring both reptiles and rapists! For using the lavatory at night, I must cross the dark hall with my flashlight on, as only the bedroom at one end of the hall and the lavatory on the other have electric bulbs.”

She realized that she was merely ruminating what Dinesh jabbered the other night, “Everybody praises Chatterjee’s bravery. Nobody speaks of her compulsions.”

She kept the radio set by her pillow beside the flash light.

The alarm at four thirty in the morning woke her up. She needed an empty bowel to survive the daylong treks through Teak Plantations, also a bath to soak the heat, before breakfast at the barack mess by six o’clock, preceding fall in at six thirty.

Besides, bathing in daylight seemed awkward. The lavatory had a window, but no door pane. Opposite to it, a tread apart, was the bathroom with door panes, without any light. Through the opening of the imploded roof over the passage between the bathroom and the lavatory, the neighborhood children enjoyed peeping in, during daytime, dangling from the branches of the Sirish tree by the cabin.

Chatterjee turned impatient, “Numbskull dhoi. How has it become the matriarch of the herd with this much intellect? There’s no Chalta tree nearby. Can’t they find the Chalta plantation? Flocking here they’re wasting the public money, though we don’t know if they belong to us or to the country across the Dhaksa river. Their proddings to the cabin would soon throw me on a historic poop pile! (probably pulverizing tip of my backbone) My ass’ scared numb.”

Chatterjee, however, finished her business, literally restless. She uniformed herself up, rolled her bedding and stuffed her belongings in the rucksack. The intermittent shaking made it quite clear that the elephants would not leave until the cabin would rupture and bare open its secrets.

She stepped outside, rucksack on her back, clanking tree measurement equipment inside her haversack, slinged to her neck, radio set tucked to her waistband, the flashlight in hand. The early spring predawn wrapped her in grayness and chill.

She never locked the cabin in the last three days. Yet nothing went missing. With its imminent crumbling to the ground, locking the cabin appeared ludicrous. 

Chatterjee pointed her flash light to the moving massive figures outside the cabin lavatory. A cry of annoyance startled the sleepy neighborhood. Chatterjee turned the light off and reported the location of the elephants over the radio.

Next she checked the hollow beneath the cabin. The light reflected from the posts and empty trashed bottles of hooch here and there.

She noticed a man crawling beneath the cabin, towards the Sirish tree, away from the elephants. She caught him as he emerged out and snatched his bottle of hooch. Then, she dropped a little hooch on the overgrown grasses in the front yard of the cabin. The elephants turned towards the hooch patch. She created a hooch trail across the street in front of the cabin to the Chalta plantation a mile away.

Approaching the mess, she met two men on watch. They whispered, “Responding to your message.”

It reminded her of the radio and the responsibility. She paged, “Left the herd at the Chalta plantation.”

Breakfast was abuzz with the trick of the hooch trail.. 

Later, walking towards the felling blocks, Madhav said, “Chatterjee, nobody here’s half the woman you are.”

Chatterjee replied, “Don’t even aspire ever. Because transplanted uterus, genitals, ovaries, mammaries won’t give the X chromosome pairs to your every cell. After all, it’s all in our DNA.”

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Have you ever managed wild animals in a weird manner? Let me know in the comment.

Please comment on what you have dis/liked in the story.

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Would you like to know more about Chatterjee?

This is who she would become very next year: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NKGLBKT

(Edit: December 18,2021 9:40 AM Indian Standard Time)

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