Two very short stories

For the Prime Minister, leading the country was no walk in the park. Not only did he have to deal with the embittered loser in the leadership race, but he also had to find ways to coexist with a domineering predecessor, who so many years after “abdicating

But the Prime Minister was trying to implement a revolution, perhaps oblivious to the truism that revolutions have a long history of eating their progenitors. Moreover, attempting a revolution when you have two other centres of power in your fold might turn out to be nothing short of a reckless gamble. Much to the annoyance of those closest to him, the Prime Minister was probably inspired by an “easy come, easy go” philosophy.

As the saga unfolded, it became increasingly clear to one and all that the arm wrestling between the Prime Minister and his predecessor would eventually harm the Prime Minister.

The spectators included the political class in the neighbouring country, a dictatorship. The relations between the Prime Minister’s party and the dictatorship had a chequered history, but the most important aspect for the purposes of our story was that the dictatorship viewed the Prime Minister’s country as a satellite.

The Prime Minister received a message from the dictatorship’s secret services. While his predecessor would be bathing in the usual cove, a diver would grab his leg and hold him beneath the surface of the water for some minutes. The ensuing death would appear as an accident, and the Prime Minister’s problem would be quietly and efficiently solved.

But the Prime Minister was a man of principle, and declined the offer.

The Notary and the Two Ladies

There was in the mid-2000s a notary whose father was a very close associate of the then Leader of the Opposition.

One dark wintry evening, two women visited the notary in his office, purportedly to ask about the expenses associated with buying a house. Had they been yin and yang, the bespectacled one would have been the yang, the symbol of masculinity. That said, both women had a mannish hairstyle and their attire was unmistakably dandy. The notary could not fail to notice that they were intimate with each other, as if they were a married couple.

The notary had never met them before, and did not know them even though one of them was probably already a public figure militating for minority interests. He tried to answer all their questions to the best of his knowledge, but kept struggling with a nagging inner voice suggesting that they were not re- ally interested in buying a house but had used it only as an excuse to meet him.

The meeting did not last longer than half-anhour, or 40 minutes at most, after which they quietly stood up, thanked him, and left the office. The notary gently closed the door behind them and went back to his desk and to whatever business he had been engaged in before the two women had paid him their visit. He never met them again after that dark wintry evening.

It was only in the mid-2010s that the notary realised that his inner, nagging voice had been right (as usual). Those two women had visited him only because they thought they could get in touch with the then Leader of the Opposition through him. Clearly, they had succeeded in having his successor’s ear, who brazenly uses them whenever he needs to distract the electorate from the shenanigans of the Fox (his closest aide and right-hand man) and the Cat (his favourite minister).

My personal library (3)

Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) occupies a place of importance in my personal library not because it is a great work of literature (it is not), but for its honest depiction of the inner world of lesbians. It is a sincere novel, and – though one might disagree with the ideas it promotes espoused by the German psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing but disregarded by the psychoanalysts – it certainly makes a persuasive case against isolation and derision.

My only real objection to this novel is the foreword by Havelock Ellis, a progressive who experimented with psychedelic drugs, entered an open marriage with a lesbian, and was impotent until he turned 60 but claimed to be an expert on sexology. He was also a eugenicist and believed that abortion should be widely available in order to weed out certain bad elements in the human genetic pool and allow only the fit to perpetuate the human race (an orthodox eugenicist, he wrote The Task of Social Hygiene in 1912). His lover was Margaret Sanger, the founder of the organisation that would eventually become the abortion-providing behemoth Planned Parenthood.