In Pursuit of Sex

My friend Varghese, a short, dark, cheerful sort of a guy, has but one obsession in life – getting laid. And like all individuals singularly obsessed with getting laid, he has never ‘gotten’ laid. Sex for him was, as Nirvana to Budha, the ultimate goal and objective of life.


In his quest, Varghese has given practical application to all suggestions, rumours and advices that he had picked up along the course of his life.


For instance, somebody had told him that nymphomaniac aunties picked up young men outside Wilson College. “All you have to do is tie a white handkerchief on the left wrist and wait,” he was told, “Aunties in Mercedes will come and pick you up. What’s more you also get paid.” WoW!!! Getting paid to have sex was Varghese’s ultimate fantasy. For one full week, Monday to Sunday between 5:00 pm and 7:00 pm (which was when, he was told, aunties were on prowl) Varghese had stood outside Wilson College with an inviting smile on his lips and a white handkerchief on his left wrist.


Nothing happened.


When he was told pubs were the place to pick up ‘hot’ women, pubs were what he visited. “Stare hard at single women in short skirts. Blow smoke in their direction. Then offer to buy a drink. The chicks will do the rest,” he had been advised. Varghese did all these. He even exceeded the brief by declaring to a rank stranger, “I love you.” No luck here either.


By the time he was 31, he had tried everything and every place without any success. Though our friend Varghese was a perennial optimist, sometimes he would feel resigned and would brood that he just might die a virgin (except of course by entering the state of matrimony, which he could only after his elder sister was married off. That the elder sister was a very finicky and choosy woman and looked like the male version of Varghese didn't help at all). But by nature Varghese was a cheerful man and his despair was strictly temporary.

It was, while thus ruminating in a temporary state of despair, that a friend, just back from Dubai, gifted him, along with one litre bottle of Johny Walker Black Label and a carton of 555 cigarettes, a bottle of Spanish Fly.

Vrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooom! That hit him like a speeding Ferrari. Spanish Fly was the ultimate priority in his wish list since college days. Nothing, nothing at all, compared with the Spanish Fly. All you had to do was surreptitiously slip a drop or two in a glass of juice and the woman would do all the seducing. Scores of his friends’ friends at college had been thus seduced. “It takes a tiger to satisfy a woman who has consumed Spanish Fly”, his friends from Calicut Regional Engineering College had often told him. Of course, given the opportunity, Varghese was no less than a tiger. Perhaps a tiger without an opportunity, but a tiger all the same!

For the next 21 days, Varghese religiously slipped Spanish Fly into fruit juice, Coke, coffee and even plain drinking water of (for want of better prospects) his neighbour’s maid servant. He even kept on increasing the dose: initially one drop, then two, then three, then five. But, like all times in the past, nothing happened.

Today, he works as a journalist in one of the city’s leading dailies, prolifically filing stories. Twelve bylines are what he averages a week. But he still makes time to contrive new and old means for getting laid. Success of course continues to elude him. But Varghese knows one day he will succeed...