Clove Oil and Other Lovers

It was the first day of the war. Everybody was laughing on the other side of the fence.

“I am very serious Clove. How could you come up with such a thing?” Ripon kept on laughing. I am sure he did want an answer. But like everyone else, he wanted euphoria of this war to persist. I didn’t know what those savages might be thinking. Are they prepared with guns? Using guns … what a cliché. Although killing with a gun is serious and immediate. There is some kind of urgency associated with this thing called gun as if the moment I utter the word gun, I am supposed to demonstrate what it is meant for. You know why Ripon and other commanders are laughing today? Because they know that this war will not have a single dead person. There will be a lot of people who are going to be hurt … mentally.

The Structure decided to ban all the weaponry from the face of the planet. Enough of that threat perception and mistrust. It was a load of bullshit fed to a lot of people. The last war in which people were killed also ended up to be an orgy of sorts. Thanks to the brave seductive revolutionaries of my time, all the rights of the men to make love to other men (and not war!) were intact and obviously disease, urban loneliness, individualism, and most a shift in the sexual politics helped us to establish the new structure. I think the shift was from the feudal to personal in sexual politics. The body ethic moved towards the experiential rather than being based on the principles. The experience was the first principle. Being loved in the true sense by this unknown stranger. The stranger after the revelation turns out to be mere attachment. Like, once Swollen Lily wrote in her memoir about her lover: “I may take thousands of years to forget you, or may be this moment.” But I don’t know how human beings could overcome attachments. May be they tried and changed the terms of engagement. I am sure the revolutionaries did away with all the attachments and started living in the communes. There was no question of anomaly creeping inside this commune.

From then till now, the eve of this war that we are fighting with ourselves. The savage occupied territories still burnt in rage over the question of owning their own bodies. They were defending their right to engage in feudal sexual practices (and also their will to own vast amounts of territories). We called them dogs that did not like their pictures to be taken while fucking. On the other side, this so-called war was an experiment on our own. The practitioners of ancient pornography prepared monobiots to click pictures of every possible problem in the savage occupied areas. Earlier, we respected them, and they respected us. However, revenge as a feeling had crept inside The Structure. Ripon doesn’t call revenge as revenge, war as war…he calls everything a corrective measure. That way I am a throwback, so I use similar phrases used by the earlier generations. Sometimes, they suspect if I still have my savage mafia tendencies. Here is the textual news report that appeared in the war:

“At 0935 hrs in the first half of the Lunar Cycle, 2109 Common Era, the first attack on Savage reservations occurred. 700 monobiots entered the savage occupied regions. Dastard and his Men of Skills, whose expertise on filming all the genders in their sexual activity has been an object of academic interest, controlled Monobiots. As it was predicted, the obvious body ethic of the feudal savages paved the way for the images of their own sexual scandals on large Unavision screens installed by the savage technicians. For next two hours, there was intense activity in the region with people cocking up their rifles to kill the other men for sleeping with their wives or daughters or sisters. Then, suddenly realised that someone who is not a part of the Greater Savagery did it. There was consensus of sorts as Shaak, the Savage leader addressed everyone through a public announcement system, while the technically superior monobiots had already placed its bugs in the image pools of the Savage computers that relayed images of young Shaak as an Inspector for the allied forces in 2050 CE brutally raping a convict inside the prison. His wife, as captured by one of the monobiots, was bewildered, was about to shoot herself with a gun, when monobiots quickly relayed the image cutting Shaak and the rape visuals. Shaak’s son reached for the gun as soon as he saw the image in the smaller Unavision downstairs and saved his mother. By 1600 hrs, Shaak issued a statement of surrender of all weaponry. However, it remains to be seen how The Structure makes Shaak surrender his feelings of hatred, jealousy and de-feudalises the Savage society. The Structure has called back all the monobiots back to the base and congratulated Dastard and his team for the success. -------static------