Vacation at Deshnoke
Nov 9, 2022 1:00:58 GMT -5
Post by Radrook Admin on Nov 9, 2022 1:00:58 GMT -5
Vacation at Deshnoke
By Radrook
By Radrook
It was about five hours into my return flight to the states from India in a full-body cast, when I had noticed that this obese, blond, middle-aged lady, dressed in this blue dress decorated with small dafodils, and who spoke with a British accent, kept giving me the eye over her bifocal glasses. So I figured I might as well satisfy her morbid curiosity about my obviously critical state.
Well, after striking up a brief conversation about the weather, and so forth, she finally got around to ask me what she really was interested in, my physical condition.
"Why am I in a full body-cast on my way back to the states so soon, you ask?” I said, “OK, lady, let me tell you. I had just arrived for my vacation in India's small northwestern city of Deshnoke, and--"
"Desh what?" she says leaning forward toward my reclined seat that the airline had specially provided me with due to my grave condition.
"Deshnoke! lady Deshnoke!" I groan. "I was booked to stay right across the street from a temple dedicated to rat deities."
"Strange place to choose for a vacation!" she whispered.
"It was a prize I won at a game-show!" I managed to mumble above my agony.
"Really?
"Yeah really! Wasn't too happy about it, but I'm not one to look a gift-horse in the mouth!”
"Interesting! So what happened?" she whispered, leaning over from her seat across the isle.
"As I said, I had just gotten to my hotel reservation--"
"You didn't say that before!"
"Listen lady, are you going to let me tell you what happened, or what?”
"No need to become grumpy, old man!"
"I'm in paiiiiiin! Damit!"
"Alright! Alright!" she says, and I figure that I might as well finish the damned story. Maybe that would let me get my mind off my misery.
"Well, I was unfamiliar with the sacredness of these vermin in that part of town--"
"What vermin?"
"The rats lady! Their infernal, sacred obese rats! So I set some traps in the room just in case, and before you can say the word Sahib, this skinny, tall. gaunt, hotel clerk is banging on my door.
"What are you doing my friend?" he says as he points to the several mouse-traps I had set with pieces of Mozzarella cheese on the triggering devices.
"Listen," I says, " I' m paying my good money here, one-hundred American bucks a night, and I ll be damned if I let you tell me what I can or I can' t do in my rented room!”
For a long while, he just stood there with a sad expression on his brown face, an expression that I thought was humble acceptance. Then he turned and walked away down the narrow hallway and says: "Very unfortunate Sahib!" just before disappearing down the stairwell and before I could ask him what the hell he meant. Anyway, I placed two more traps, for extra insurance, set up the mosquito net around the bed, made sure that the ceiling fan was giving me a good breeze, and tried to get some shut-eye.
"Ah your first night in Deshnoke!" the lady says delighted, and I give her a dirty look fit for a sow.
"Anyways," I continued,
" I doze off after a while and start having these nightmares where rats are surrounding and attacking me, and several times I woke up in cold sweat and screaming for God and mercy. I hoped the clerk hadn't heard my blood-curdling screams. I didn't like the fellow, and didn't much appreciate his coming to my door and trying to boss me around.
"So then you went soundly back to sleep again?"
"No lady I didn't! No sooner had I gone to sleep, when again the hordes of rats, with beady, red eyes, and gaping jaws full of razor-sharp teeth were coming at me from all sides. Again I woke up screaming, and my heart pounding at my ribs like a wild horse.
Anyway, since the sun was beginning to come up, I figured I'd brew me some coffee. That's when I hear this hustle of voices in front of the hotel entrance just below my window. You know, like the way a crowd sounds just before a baseball game? So I figured the locals were getting ready for the marketplace or something. So I tried to ignore it. But that' s when the yelling of
"Killl him! Killll him!" began. You see, that scrawny, brown bastard, hotel clerk, had spent the entire night phoning friends and relatives about how I, the infidel, godless American, was savagely murdering their dear rat-manifested deities and rat-reincarnated ancestors, and how I had supposedly refused to make atonement by purchasing gold or silver rats for each rat I had murdered."
"Killlllll Hiiiiiiiiim!" they kept chanting, and began pounding against the hotel door like the damn ocean hits the chalk Cliffs of Dover. I knew that the clerk would much soon let them in, so I did what any blue-blooded American would do under those harrowing circumstances. I ran. There was a back-window facing a brick wall, and with a little luck, I figured they maybe didn’t know it. So I shimmy myself down one of those bamboo roof draining-pipes and hit the cobblestoned alleyway at a sprint.
"So when did you get injured if you got away?" the lady asked suspiciously squinting one green eye.
"I didn't say I got away lady. I said I shimmied down--"
"Yeah yeah! I know!" she says in a half-yawn on her porcine face.
"Just tell me what happened. Cut to the chase please." she added.
"So, as I was saying, I m running down the street in my jamies and hear someone shout.
"There he is! He s getting away!"
"So I start waving down this taxi coming in my direction up the narrow cobblestoned street. I see that the driver, this black-turbaned guy with a full beard, a Sikh, I think they call em, looks in his rearview mirror, sees the crowd closing in on me, yells something that sounds to me like, Ahiiiiiiii!! and puts pedal to metal. I see him make this extra wide turn and hear the screeching of tires, but don' t put two and two together. It s hard to think when your running for your life-you know?"
"Never had to," she says with a smug upturning of her pink, pug-nose.
"Did I say you had to, Mam?"
"No, but I just want you to know, I never had to," the lady says smugly.
“Anyway,” I continue, ignoring her snobbish asides.
"Before I forget what I was just saying, I soon found out why the driver had swerved that way when I made the same turn he had made and I ran into this old decrepit Brahma bull sitting on its haunches and defecating in the middle of the street. It would have ignored me, but since I injured his eye, he begins braying in agony and goring everything in sight. Which included me! He got me right square in the groin between the anus and testicles with his right horn.
"No need to be that specific sir! Groin is suffice!" she uttered indignantly, shaking her head slowly in disapproval.
"And then he got me in the rectum with its left. Then after I am lying face-down on the coble-stoned street, I feel it trampling on me with its sacred hooves as the crowd cheers him on. Then he urinates on me in its bovine indignation, as the attending physician expressed it later in the ER.
"Urinated on you? Oh my word!" the lady stared at me with wide eyes of astonishment and one plump palm of her chubby pale hand on her matronly chest.
"Well lady, that urine saved me," I says. “You see, the infuriated rat-worshiping crowd doesn't touch me cause of the sacred Brahma Bull urine I m soaked in. But it gets into my eyes and I m writhing on the pavement for fifteen minutes screaming for God, mercy, and the Virgin of Guadalupe before someone, this vacationer from South America, this Argentine, Hernando Salazar de la Vega, summons an ambulance.
"Why were you calling out for virgins?" the lady leaned forward in her seat towards me and whispered as if expecting my answer to be pornographic in some religiously mysterious way.
"I said the Virgin of Guadalupe lady! The Virgin of Guadalupe Hidalgo!"
"But why?"
"Cause I m Catholic Irish, lady. Cuz I'm Irish Catholic! Shouldn't that be obvious? Not all Americans are Protestants, you know?"
"No need to get nasty, sir! I m just trying to get the details strait, that’s all!
"Anyway, once I' m at the hospital ER-you see, they mistook me for another vacationing Anglo American patient who had just barely managed to escape the hospital via a back door. Despite my screams telling them that the damage was to the family jewels vicinity, this obese nurse, resembling this famous sumo wrestler, Yamamoto Sunahara, duck tapes my mouth, and straps me into this gurney and starts wheeling me in into the OR, where they promptly put me under and unceremoniously subject me to exploratory surgery for some goddamned brain tumor.
"No need to blaspheme sir!"
"What are you, some kind of Mother Capri? Anyways, after they find out they had the wrong patient, they patch me up, offer me this a perfunctory apology via a translator who has shit for brains, and provided me with free transportation back to the states Courtesy of the Deshnoke, city government my friend!" as the hospital administrator who physically resembled Mahatma Ghandi glibly put it.
That answer your question mam?
Mam?
Mam?"
The witch had fallen asleep and was snoring like a sow.