Punchline: Part 3 of 3

[Read part 1 here and part 2 here.]

Mrs. Mehta came about after we sprinkled water on her face. We shook her shoulders and gently slapped her cheeks to push her into consciousness. She still looked slightly disoriented when we helped her on to a chair.

It wasn’t what she had done that was more frightening, but what she kept repeating to herself, under her breath: “Don’t forget to laugh.”

She looked at the faces staring down at her; some with genuine concern, others with sadistic interest. People tend to show their worst when something untoward happens to someone in a crowd. Everyone rabidly huddles around the person of interest and just…stares.

“Are you okay?” I ventured, putting a caring hand to her shoulder. She twitched at my touch and I promptly pulled my arm back. She was straight up shivering now, perhaps from being wet with the water we splashed on her face. Or so I told myself.

“Did you guys all laugh?” She asked me, whispering in my ear. “TELL ME! Did you?”

She clutched my shirt collars and tugged tightly, pushing me almost off balance. My face was now obscenely close to hers, and all I could smell was her strong perfume.

“No-no! It wasn’t that good a joke, really…” I struggled to break free.

“Oh you dumb bastards!” She let go of me and crumpled in a weeping mess. Her hands cradled her head and her shoulders bobbed from sobbing. There were some subdued murmurs from the party crowd. Some had lost the initial interest and were contemplating leaving the party.

Mrs. Shroff decided to speak up.

“What the hell is wrong, Reshma? You’ve been acting completely nuts all evening. Tell us, what’s the matter?”

At first, it didn’t appear like Mrs. Mehta had heard her, but she eventually stopped sobbing and looked up. Her eyes were bloodshot and her kohl had spread to her cheeks. She looked like a total mess.

“You won’t believe me.”

An instant change had come over her: she was suddenly no longer crying or cursing. He face turned expressionless and she spoke with no intonation, drowned of all emotion. It was as if she had resigned herself to whatever had been gnawing at her from inside.

“Give it a shot,” Mrs. Shroff persisted.

Mrs. Mehta did not respond. She kept sitting in the same posture, looking though everyone with a spaced-out gaze. This lasted for about ten seconds.

Finally, she said, “The joke Avi told us is cursed.”

There were collective gasps from the thinning group of guests in the hall.

“What? What do you mean,” inquired Mrs. Shroff.

Mrs. Mehta heaved a long sigh, the one you do before embarking on a long, perilous journey.

“I’ll tell you everything, but none of you will believe me.”

“It’s okay with me,” replied Mrs. Shroff and looked around, “and I’m sure the rest of us don’t mind.”

“Yes,” replied her husband a bit too cheerfully, “always ready for a good long story.”

The mood lightened up ever so slightly, but Mrs. Mehta remained dead serious.

“When I was about 18, I was told the same joke by a eunuch. Not exactly verbatim, but the bare bones were the same. He claimed to be the very eunuch in the joke. He told us – me and three of my friends – how he had been banished from the kingdom by the ungrateful king and had been wandering over the world ever since.”

She paused for breath. No one moved an inch or made a sound. She looked at me.

“Where did you hear the joke, Avi?”

All eyes in the room turned in my direction.

“I-I can’t remember,” I spoke in a small voice.

I sprinted through my vague memory of the joke in search of its teller. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Trying to remember jokes is no joke, try it yourself: trace back any joke you’ve heard to the person who told it to you. In most cases, I’m sure you’ll have little success.

“Anyway,” she replied after a pause, “it doesn’t really matter now. At that time, when I heard the joke, there was something in those few silly lines that made me guffaw just once. I didn’t think too much of it; it could easily have been the other way round. My three friends did not. In hindsight, I would rather not have laughed and saved myself a lifetime of paranoia.”

“What do you mean,” Mrs. Shroff asked.

“My three friends who hadn’t laughed, they all died within a span of a few years. And the creepiest part is…they all died funny deaths.”

A few people across the room gasped, while others simply exchanged glances of shock and disbelief.

“What do you mean…funny?” I asked, surprising myself.

“One of them died of a heart attack after her cousins pranked her, another had a coconut fall on her head…you catch my drift.”

Silence prevailed over everyone like an ominous shadow. We suddenly seemed defenseless and threatened; at least I did.

“Since then,” she continued, “I have encountered many suspicious deaths and connected them to similar jokes that might be cursed. You can never be sure, right? For four decades I’ve lived with the burden of forced laughter, literally having to smile through the ordeal. You never know which joke, when insulted with no reaction, can kill you.”

I could feel an invisible weight crushing me from the inside, compelling me to take support of the wall next to where I was standing. What if what she was saying was true? Were all of us doomed? Wait – had I laughed?

“Which is why I ask you, again: did anyone laugh at the joke?”

I thought back hard. Had I?

Mr. Aravind, who had been quietly hearing her all the while, spoke out.

“I don’t believe any of this. It’s a make-believe situation in your head, Reshma.” His words were firm but not impudent.

“I hope so myself, really. I genuinely pray that my friends died as part of a remarkable coincidence. But the evidence of the contrary stacks up pretty evenly for me.” She looked around, surveying the scared faces around her.

“If that’s how it is,” contested Mr. Aravind, “then what is the exact time period within which these deaths are supposed to occur? Of course, you can connect any death to a joke that was not laughed at, since everyone has to die one day.”

The argument was solid, but my sense of reasoning was hardly working right now. Mrs. Mehta appeared to be lost in thought, her face dug into her palms. She emerged a few moments later.

“You are right, I might be wrong. As I said, I can’t convince you to believe me. In that case, I’m sorry for having ruined your evening. Maybe I’m genuinely in need of medical attention…”

Mr. Aravind, who seemed to have taken upon himself to dispel everyone’s fear, continued ruthlessly.

“You better. You have no right to scare people with your crazy-“

“WAIT,” interrupted Mrs. Mehta, “where is Rajen?”

She was referring to Mr. Mohanty. I looked around the hall but could not find him. Then I remembered – he had stormed off midway.

“He left the party,” I replied. “When you were unconscious.”

She looked at me with crazy bulging eyes, the blood veins ready to pop. True or not, she was well and truly scared.

A mobile phone rang out, cutting through the silence in the room like a knife. It was Mr. Aravind’s.

“It’s…Mohanty.” He looked fixedly at the mobile screen, as if double-checking if he had read right. He picked it up and put it against his ear very slowly. 

“Hello, Aravind Aga speaking. Yes…yes sir…OH MY GOD!” 

He exclaimed loudly and let the phone slide down from his hand, which fell on the ground with a metallic crash. His mouth was wide open in absolute fear and shock. Mrs. Shroff rushed to his aid in a bit to support him, but he flopped to the ground.

“It was…it was the –cops. They said that...Mohanty died in a car crash…” 

The hall full of people did not react with any immediate display of fear or panic. Some stood rooted to their places, others sat down and some hung their heads in despair, but everyone asked themselves the million dollar question:

“Did I laugh at the joke?”

THE END

PS: Let me know how you liked it in the comments below :)

Punchline: Part 2 of 3

[NOTE: I had originally intended this to be the concluding part of a two-part story, but I changed my mind. The story has come out slightly longer on paper, so there's another epilogue-ish part left after this.

If you're new here, read part 1 here before this. Thanks!]

Jokes have never been my thing, I’ll tell you that.

The first time I remember being truly frightened of what others my age found funny was during a trip to McDonald’s. I remember how the one-way opening doors at the entrance swung open on my way out and I first noticed the figure of Ronald McDonald sitting alone on the bench. I’d seen all sorts of clowns in my day, but there was something singularly sinister about a full-grown man, with a snow-white face and blood-red splotches around his mouth, sitting all by himself on a lonely bench and smiling maniacally at onlookers. The other kids loved to snuggle into his lap and pose for photographs, but I’d stiffen up at his very sight or mention.

From that day on, the KFC versus McDonald’s debate was a one-sided affair in my head. I would happily sacrifice a happy meal for a good night’s sleep free of murderous and bloodthirsty clowns haunting my dreams; thank you very much.

To my 7-year old self, that fear was as real as the time I encountered The Hijra. 

I must have been 17, unaware of my growing youth and the onset of societal expectations from a ‘grown up woman’. I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to perform or behave a certain way at home. Papa was the absent dad type, and ma let me be on my own as long as my grades were not an issue. I had always held a sense of muted pride in calling myself, or having myself called an ‘army brat’. It was a tag that I wore proudly on my sleeve, which probably made me look a tad uppity outside the army circle. I was also something of a ‘siren’ in high school, with my premature puberty (and what comes with it) the subject of many hushed exchanged among the boys in my class. As a result, I was taller than most boys and bouncier than most girls of my age. Of course, I appeared to be blissfully unaware of all this, and that worked to my benefit.

I had a gang of girls to call my own, all of them army brats just like me. There was the neighbourhood bimbo, Ananya, colonel Gill’s iklauti beti (only daughter), who thought herself to be my ‘bestie’, but knew deep inside that she was, at best, my sidekick. Then there were the inseparable Tanushree and Shonali, the Bengali Seeta aur Geeta of our vixen-pack. Both were distant cousins whose families had served the country through generations. Shonali was the cleverer of the two, but not as endowed in the sharp Bengali features department as her voluptuous cousin. Tanushree was drop dead gorgeous, but also drop dead dumb to strike a conversation with. As a result, all the mindless ‘hunks’ of our batch would make a beeline for her, and we all gossiped, sometimes jealously, about her more-than-active sex life.

Fun times, in short.                                   

That winter afternoon, our quartet was haunting one of the endlessly meandering bylanes of Pune’s Camp area. If you are familiar with the city, you’ll know that the cantonment area houses the Southern Command Headquarters of the Indian Armed Forces, which is sort of a big deal; a lot of army officers’ residences also lie in the vicinity.

As you enter the snug, uncluttered boulevards of this urban retreat, you are bound to be bowled over. The sights and sounds here are quite unlike the rest of the city: the constant honking of angry horns is replaced by the early morning singing of the mynah. The one-way roads, invariably jam-packed with vehicles of all shapes and sizes (and their drivers, of all shapes and sizes too), give way to narrow, pedestrian friendly pathways, sheltered against the sun by a thick canopy of overhead trees. If Jehangir had found paradise in Kashmir, I’d found my own here, in the heart of Pune, the city of ‘punya’ (virtue).

If there’s one more thing this area is famous for, it’s its safety. Women and girls feel absolutely free and safe to venture out during odd hours on these army-occupied roads. I wasn’t wise enough to appreciate it then, but I lived a sheltered life there, liberated by a sense of security and unrestrained mobility.

It was one of those harsh winter afternoons when the sun was absent and the overcast skies seemed to cut off all daylight, drenching everything in a blanket of grey. While others preferred the indoors to the roads, my gang of girls would have none of it: we were out there for an untimely loitering-session in the open. That’s when we met Him/Her/It.

The Hijra was walking towards us from the far end of an alleyway which, curiously enough, tapered in a dead-end. I knew this not because I could see its end, which in fact sort of devolved into darkness, but because I knew the geography of this place by heart. I was, naturally, the first to suspect.

“Hey, that guy-“

The others didn’t need to be told; they had stopped in their tracks already. The Hijra stumbled towards us in a zig-zag pattern, probably under the influence of questionable substances. It had draped its bulky frame with a flashy pink coloured sari, a shade that hurt the eye and stuck out like a light bulb in darkness. The densely growing trees sheathed the lane from any overhead sunlight, instantaneously giving it an even eerier appearance.

“We better get going,” suggested Ananya, already backing off.

Tanushree agreed. Shonali stood her ground and turned to me. I didn’t know why, but I stood rooted to my spot, despite my heart filling up with a strange anxiety. Something about the Hijra was off – maybe it was the way it walked, or the way it wound the pallu of the sari around its shoulder or his very presence at the dark end of a narrow alley at midday. I looked back and Shonali and found myself smiling at her with a look of anticipation.

She nodded back at me, coiling her lip up ever so slightly.

“Don’t be fucking pansies,” I said to Ananya and Tanushree. “It’s harmless.”

The Hijra was now only about 50 metres away from us. From this distance, we could begin to make out a strange singing sound.

“Abhin na jaao chhod ke, ke dil abhi bharaa nahin…”

The situation was undoubtedly absurd, but it’s hard to reproduce the sense of dread it came with. The singing was off-key, off-tune and screechy, but there was a mystical attraction in the quality of its voice. The baritone reverberated across the empty street, seeming to amplify it without any electronic equipment. It left all four of us entranced, like the Mughal court during Tansen’s alaaps. It was when the Hijra was close enough to spot us that it stopped singing and the spell was broken.

“Hey, girls!” It scampered towards us emphatically.

Ananya and Tanushree edged further back but we held them by the wrists. My fingernails dug into Ananya’s hand and she didn’t try too hard to prise away.

The hijra broughts its palms together, producing a crisp, dry clap that the Indian trans-community is famous for.

“Hello, ladies,” it spoke as it sauntered towards us, still clapping. We could only look on.

“What do you want,” asked Shonali.

The Hijra encircled us and stared us up and down, clicking its tongue a few times.

“Haaye wallah, what curvy city belles! I’d die for one of these.”

It stared at its own waistline, which was wider and rounder than all ours put together. Maybe not really, but you catch my drift.

“What’s stopping you,” I ventured.

The Hijra stopped in front of me and drew closer, probably taken aback at my impudence. Its mouth stank of ruminated paan masala and tobacco.

“Your tongue stings, like your eyes,” it taunted as one of its spindly hands held up my chin to have a better look. I recoiled in reflex.

“Ah, Ms. Touch-me-not!”

“Enough,” I said, “Let’s go.” Being adventurous with a stranger was one thing but being physically accosted by them, quite another. I had had enough.

“Not so fast, ladies!” It held back my arm. I jerked it free.

“Won’t you like to hear a joke before you leave?” It smiled evilly at us. I cannot be sure now, but I’m positive I had sensed a weird desperation in its eyes. It was the face of a person who had bottled a story in their heart for too long and couldn’t wait to spill it to someone. In that moment, some of my anger vanished and I almost pitied it.

“No, thank you,” I spoke, betraying my instincts. “Let’s go girls.”

We began to walk away from the Hijra and the dead-end and the impasse.

“Are you sure,” it shouted back at us, “you’ll be inviting the wrath of a Hijra, afterall, and the ill-will of a chhakka is very potent.”

I did not want to, but Ananya held me to a stop. I saw that Tanushree had forced Shonali similarly to a halt.

“What do we do,” Ananya asked under her breath.

“I-I think we should like him finish his fucking joke and get going,” said Tanushree, shuddering from fear.

“Yes, let’s,” suggested the fucking fountainhead of wisdom Ananya.

“What happened,” the Hijra prompted, “in a fix? A joke’s just a joke, I promise.”

I swore to myself and turned about. We walked towards it for the joke it was dying to tell. How bad could it be, I asked myself?

Oh hell yes, it was bad. It was overlong and stretched on for a solid five minutes, but we listened intently to a voice that commanded to be heard. It had its fair share of twists and turns, but the one in the end stole the cake: it was an autobiographical joke, and a scary one at that. In fact, it was so unfunny that it was funny to me; out of all four, only I braved a sarcastic laugh.

“Why don’t you laugh, you ungrateful bitches,” it demanded of my friends in a sudden fit of anger.

“Because it wasn’t funny,” spoke Shonali with characteristic bluntness. I was proud to call her a friend.

“Oh, it wasn’t? We’ll see who’s laughing the last.” It said, spitefully. Its eyes were back to their furious, glistening glory. It glared at the three of them with wide eyes and then turned to me.

“You’re lucky you laughed.”

Its voice changed and dropped into a coarse, ethereal whisper as it turned to my friends and said, “You have been warned, ladies.”

It laughed the most beastly laugh I have ever heard and walked backed into the dark dead-end while singing the wretched golden oldie.

"Abhi abhi toh aaye ho, bahaar banke chhaaye ho..."

Tanushree and Ananya were cowering and huddling together, as if to shield their bodies from cold.

“What did it mean?” asked Tanushree, her face taking a pale hue.

“Gah, probably nothing,” I said, dismissing her fears. “Just a lot of bullshit. That’s what they survive on: fear and manipulation.”

Years later, I tried to shake the memory of the creepy experience off my back, but my mind kept returning to the strange Hijra and its autobiographical joke and the manic laughter. I guess we all tried to, and superficially brushed away the unpleasant incident to some success.

But I’m sure it would still have haunted Ananya, Shonali and Tanushree to this day – had they been alive.

You see, barely a week later, Shonali was comically struck on the head by a falling coconut while ona family vacation to Kerala, and died instantly. Her death was featured in the ‘That’s Bizarre’ column of the local tabloid, probably becoming the laughing stock of many readers.

Seven months after Shonali met her maker, Ananya followed suit after suffering from an untimely cardiac arrest, triggered by a prank played on her by her kid cousins. Her family thought she was only playing dead as part of a double-prank, thereby literally laughing while she breathed her last.

Oh, and Tanushree had her head sliced clean from her torso in a freak accident involving a kite-thread. A FUCKING KITE THREAD!

As poetic justice would have it, the three people who had found the Hijra’s joke too unfunny to be graced with laughter had died funny deaths.

The joke was about a childless queen who’s cursed with a transsexual kid by an angry sage. And now, forty-two years later, the joke was on me again.

[To be concluded]

Punchline: A short story in 3 parts

PART 1 OF 3

Everyone knew her as that aunty. She was one of those boisterous menopausal socialites who laughed at every joke they heard, however lame. It would take her only a fraction of a second after the punchline to break out into bouts of uncontrollable laughter. Dhruv had told me about her in the last party we both attended.

“What’s the worst joke you know?”

 I looked at him with a slightly puzzled expression.

“Why?”

“Just tell me if you know one that won’t make anyone laugh.”

I rummaged internally to catch hold of the elusive memory of that one unfunny joke I might have heard in the past.

“Okay,” I said, being a sport, “but don’t blame me if it makes your dick shrink.” We chuckled. “So, there’s this one king-“

“Wait, wait; don’t tell me! Recite it to Mehra aunty and see if she still laughs.”

I looked into his eyes and sensed mischief. A look of mutual understanding passed between us and we moved towards her group. She was standing with friends from her kitty, with a glass of wine held daintily in her hand. We stopped next to her and she wheeled around, smiling pleasantly.

“Hi, boys! What are you two up to?” she spoke animatedly.

“We’re fine, aunty,” responded Dhruv, putting on a slick voice. “Actually, we were just talking about a joke Avi heard. Would you like to hear it?”

For a split second, I sensed her smile vanish and her face lose color, as if we had asked her to donate her kidneys to the one of the inmates at the charity home she ran. She regained her composure sooner than she had appeared to lose it.

“Why, I am in the middle of a conversation with Mr. Shroff! Come back some other time?” she spoke with an artificially chirpy voice.

I said okay and began to turn around but Dhruv held me back.

“I insist you hear it now, since Avi here can be quite forgetful!” he spoke, grinning with malice and ill-intent. She sensed his eagerness but didn’t drop her guard.

“Erm, okay, go ahead.”

By this time, Mr. Shroff and Mr. Aravind, both of whom were in the same talking group as Shreya aunty, looked at us with curiosity.

“You have a joke to tell? Tell it to us too!”

Mrs. Mohanty and Mrs. Shroff also bundled together to hear us. It is amazing how jokes, or even their mere anticipation, knit together people from all walks of life. Suddenly, I could sense the crescendo rising as our audience of five demanded they be told the joke without any ado.

The fact that the joke was about as likely to tickle them as a heart attack did not ease my rising tension. Dhruv elbowed me, side-glancing at me with his half impish smile.

“Go ahead, tell it,” he said.

“Okay, so here it goes: there was once a very wise king who ruled over a huge, peaceful kingdom. He had served his public diligently for more than 50 years, and was now very old and on the threshold of his demise. There was only one thing that worried him: he had two beautiful daughters, but no sons to carry forward his legacy.”

At this point, I think it wise to inform the venerable reader that Mrs. Mehra’s face began to lose color and her eyes grew few sizes few large for their sockets. She looked like she had seen a spectre than was invisible to everyone else. No one else noticed them, but I, keen to gauge the reaction of my audience, caught her expressions in their autumnal retreat. In that instant, I knew she was a woman possessed.

“So, one day, he called over a most revered saint from the Himalayas to suggest a way out of his quandary. The wily Brahmin had amassed a great following not only for his meditative abilities but also, erm, his…most potent seed of Adam.” I smiled to myself, knowing I was getting to the meatiest part.

At this juncture, most of our audience scowled and some even put their palms to their mouths, probably to stifle their disapproving tongue-clicks. Some might have expected an adult joke, but I’m sure a sex-crazed ascetic did not feature highly in a group of middle-aged, middle class Indians’ idea of a joke. The men, sporting as they are, dared single chuckles.

Mrs. Mehra’s face was inscrutable; she seemed she could use a warm bear-hug. Something about the joke made her stiffen with fright; I could not place what exactly it was, but it made her body grow rigid with every line I spoke. Seeing her display such real horror made the hair on my arms rise and my spine tingle with unease. Her eyes exuded a feeling so indescribably terrible that I almost skipped a beat and stopped the joke midway, but I chose to look away and continue.

“Anyway, the great sage instructed the king’s wife to remain celibate for 108 days and not even encourage the mere thought of carnal desire. Only after agreeing to this strict guideline would he ‘bless’ the queen with his holy seed.”

Mrs. Mehra was worryingly pale by now. I nudged Dhruv and signalled towards her with concern. He followed my gaze but did not react immediately. Unfazed, I continued. I could sense the others getting uncomfortable with the joke, too, but none as much as her. It was like she had seen the devil.

“The king agreed to his demands and convinced the queen to take the severe vow of sexual abstinence. The queen, accustomed to the king’s lack of sexual vitality, readied herself for the near-impossible task of avoiding her own means of…self-pleasure. For 107 days, she kept her oath and veered her thoughts away from any sexual feelings. On the eve of the 108^th and final day of the vow, she tossed and turned in her bed, unable to withdraw her sexual cravings any longer. She turned to her side on the bed when the king was fast asleep and pleasured herself in the dead of the night-“

“Enough!” Exclaimed Mr. Mohanty angrily. While I was so focussed on Mrs. Mehra’s expressions, I had completely overlooked Mr. Mohanty’s rising discomfort with my joke.

“I’m done with your sick, disgusting jokes. And you know what, Reshma ji,” he looked at Mrs. Mehta, “I’m done with this goddamn party.” He threw his glass on the ground and started walking across the hall in short, impatient strides.

When Mrs. Mehta spoke next, it was in an ear-shattering scream.

“WAIT!!! DON’T YOU DARE WALK THE FUCK OFF!” She shouted in a voice not quite human. All heads in the room turned in her direction. Her eyes, already popping out of their lids, emanated a fury unmatched even by the terrifying illustrations of Kali from my Amar Chitra Katha paperbacks.

Mr. Mohanty looked back in disbelief.

“COME BACK, AND LET HIM FINISH THE JOKE!” Her voice thundered and reverberated across the spacious hall. Something unspeakable had come over her, and we could not help but pay her all our attention.

“Excuse me?” Mr. Mohanty asked, still reeling.

“Just COME BACK and hear the joke through!” Her anger had now a tinge of desperation in it. “Please,” she added.

Mr. Mohanty, perhaps too stumped to question the woman, walked slowly back to where he was a few seconds ago. He did not take her eyes off her, nor did anyone else in the room. Everyone wondered what the fuck was suddenly amiss with Reshma Mehta, the high-flying, cool-as-cucumber, life-of-the-party socialite.

“No one leaves this place before the joke gets over,” she ordered in a booming, monotonous voice. Then she looked at me, and her furious gaze made me recoil. “And you; continue.”

And then she screwed her face in one of the most horrific smiles I have ever seen a human perform. “Go on, what happened then?”

There was something hypnotic in the way she looked at – nay, through – me. It was like she held an invisible gun to my head, ready to blow my brains out if I didn’t finish the joke. I couldn’t help but continue.

“Then…when the sage arrived that night to impregnate the queen, he saw her shifting in the throes of self-induced orgasm,” I continued awkwardly, the discomfort in my audience’s faces no longer encouraging me. “He got angry and cursed her with impotency. The queen pleaded copiously to him, asking for one chance at forgiveness. At first, the sage was unmoved, but upon testing her genuine concern, suggested a way out with a peculiar demand. He wanted her to make sure that the instant the baby boy is born, there would be loud clapping in the court to announce his birth. The queen thought to herself: that isn’t too bad, is it? I just have to arrange for a group of clappers who would be present at the time of the delivery and clap the moment I give birth. The sage thus smiled and went away, blessing the queen and leaving her to sleep.”

I paused for effect. Mrs. Mehta looked at me, expecting me to continue. She appeared exhausted and embattled. Her body stood strangely rooted to her place and fat beads of sweat formed on her forehead.

“Anyway, so the queen decided not to tell the king about the infraction and kept the secret to herself. Nine months later, the ecstatic king decked up the kingdom in the most beautiful adornments and threw open the palace gates to the public. Everyone assembled in the hall to witness the birth of their new heir. As per the queen’s strict commands, a group of expert clappers positioned themselves at a vantage point to begin clapping the moment the baby boy emerged from the mother’s womb and uttered a cry.”

The absurdity of the joke perfectly mirrored the absurdity of the situation in the hall. It was supposed to have been a regular light hearted get-together but Mrs. Mehta had lost her marbles over something.

I entered the final act of my joke, sighing to complete the rest in a single uninterrupted breath. The tension in the room assumed a palpable character.

 “As soon as the queen began to wail in labour pain, the court musicians started playing their instruments to drown out her voice. The public waited with bated breath for the baby boy to emerge. Within a few minutes, a baby form emerged from the queen’s body and the clappers readied themselves. Before anyone could clap, however, the baby brought its tiny hands together and clapped them together sonorously. The clappers sat dumbfounded, realizing they had been beaten to it. You see, the baby was not a boy or a girl, but…somewhere in between, which is why he, or she…well, clapped.”

The joke was over, but no one had reacted. Everyone stood in absolute silence as I looked from person to person in hope of any response. Only Dhruv, who stood beside me, stifled a soft chuckle and diffused the situation. Mrs. Mehta suddenly broke into a raucous fit of forced laughter, her beastly voice thundering over everyone.

“LAUGH!” she ordered everyone, but no one did. We all saw incredulously as she stumbled across the room, laughing wildly, before finally collapsing to the ground and fainting.  

Dhruv was right: Mrs. Mehta would laugh at anything.

READ PART 2 HERE.