HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE. Forbidden love

For two days, perfect peace reigns in the building. Which is wonderful. Then on the third day, I hear a faint scratching at my front door. I open it to find Jiggs wilting on the doorstep all teary-eyed and desperate. I let him in. “What’s the matter?” I ask. “Mrs Manju,” he whispers, “I have done a bad thing.”

“Only one?” is what I want to ask, but restrain myself and offer tea instead. “Miss Suzie” — that’s DingDong’s real name — “is a wonderful lady,” says Jiggs. “Really. She is a goddess. She has….” “Okay, okay — enough!” I say. “Just tell me what the problem is.” He cannot meet my eyes. “I ... I ...” he begins, before giving up and burying his face in his hands. “I can’t say it. It’s too bad. It’s horrible. I will kill myself.” I offer him one of his own laddoos while saying, in what I hope is a kind voice, “What, are you crazy? You’re a vegetarian! You can’t kill anything, not even yourself!” And definitely not on MY doorstep.

He looks up, his lips quivering. “But Miss Suzie says she doesn’t like vegetarians. So if I want to stay in her house, I must eat meat. So ... so ...” He buries his face in his hands once more. “What did you eat?” I ask, instantly regretting the question because of potential x-rated answers. “Nothing,” he says. “But I made a god-promise. So now I MUST DO it. Or she will throw me out of her house.” In other words: solve my girlfriend’s heartless hatred of herbivores or I’ll move in with you.

Right then, Bins returns home in high good spirits. “See!” he says, waving papers in the air. “I have got my taxi-licence!” Then he registers the pall of gloom hanging over the room. I explain the situation. “Poof!” he says. “No problem. I will go speak to DingDo -- uh -- Suzie.” He gallops out. I have no idea what his plan is so I just shrug and glance at Jiggs. He’s looking at my studio with the hungry eyes of a soon-to-be-resident. Before I can re-direct his attention, Bins waltzes in once more, with DingDong in tow.

She’s dressed in her usual assortment of straps and nothing, with high-fashion stilts on her feet. “Jiggsie honey!” she yodels, holding out both arms, “Why didn’t you TELL me? OF COURSE I won’t force you to eat meat! I’m not that kind of girl!”

Whereupon Jiggs leaps up, flies across the room and splashes down into a totally non-vegetarian embrace right there in the hallway. “Oi, oi,” says Bins as he shoos them out. “You’ll set off the fire-alarms!”

I’m so impressed. “What did you tell DingDong?” I ask. He says, “Jiggs talks about culture, caste purity and tradition so DingDong throws him out. That’s ancient mumbo-jumbo, makes no sense. But when I say to her, Jiggs has a FOOD ALLERGY, ah! THAT she understands, THAT she respects. Same old mumbo, but served up as jumbo.” He taps his forehead. “These humans are crazy, huh?”

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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