Landlords and Wi-Fi

Image credit: Zdlpwebb

“The hell is it?” DM asked into the receiver, at the apex of his workday.

“Maa, I did it maa!” Amrit said, like a kid who had taken his first solo potty.

“Ugh, what.”

“I found a place to move maa!” Amrit was so excited and also nervous that he was opening and closing his free hand double-quick.

“I have a feeling it’s not in Ajman.”

“No maaa!” Amrit whispered suddenly. “Priya won’t allow it. Too cheap ma-“

“I’m not sure if she can afford to be a snob.”

“Bladdy bitch snob maa! You’re right maa! I told her ma I told her! I tried ma!”

“Are you drunk?”

“Just little for courage ma! Meeting the landlord.”

“For the new place?”

“No maa! Our place now. But we found new place also so he’ll have to give us lower rent. We use lowerage.”

“Leverage. What’s the new place?”

“Maa! We found 1 bedroom less than our studio! Recession good ma!”

“How much?”

“Ma less than our studio.”

“How much?”

“28,000 ma. Less than now.”

DM sighed. “You remember what I said about the deposit.”

“Remember?”

“How much is the deposit?”

“5,000?”

“With DEWA, commission and deposit, you need to have half in hand. What is half of 28,000?”

“Half?”

“Calculate it on your phone and then see if you have enough.”

“Maa I did my research ma! I looked all the places. Dubailand, Silicon, Sports City-“

“You’re blabbering and wasting my time.”

DM cut the phone and Amrit was left saying hello to dead air.

“You have Wi-Fi?” he poked his head through the door.

“Taal,” the thin man in a purple shirt and pants said, scribbling on a pad.

The thin man handed Amrit the Wi-Fi password, which Amrit used right away and began his search.

“Best friend hung up on me. How fix,” he typed into Google.

“So what you want say?” the thin man said, taking his place next to the older man in the kandura who was sitting. Though he spoke like an Arab, he was a Malbari who spoke enough English to translate to his boss.

“Now see,” Amrit kind of shrieked, turning his phone screen off. “We want reduction. Less rent.”

The man in the kandura laughed before any translation was done.

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha…” he went on for a while.

Amrit went red.

“How to fix all life problems,” he typed into his phone browser.

“Ahm effendi, hatha maeaq,” the translator said, making a face with one eye partly closed and lips pulling in opposite horizontal directions.

“Oh,” the older man said, suddenly concerned.

“How to talk to local,” Amrit next typed.

“Baaaaibve they think you’re retarded,” Priya, his girlfriend, boomed from the corner of the room.

She had become so fat that she was in a red motorized scooter, head down like she was looking for something.

“When is girlfriend too fat I have to break up?” Amrit typed into his phone.

“Haatha maeaq min almukid,” the thin man whispered to his boss, gesturing at Priya.

Priya in response revved the little engine of her scooter.

There was an awkward silence.

“When is girlfriend black too black?” Amrit typed.

The Moot

Amrit was having the time of his life. Holed up in a studio flat in Mumbai, him and his friends had danced the night away on a cocktail of drugs that included acid and ecstasy.

Now, lying on a sheet on the floor of the flat, he shivered a bit as the last throes went through his pudgy body.

Lying on his back, completely with not a thought of the how he had fallen from having 3 degrees, he slid his hand across his bare belly as the other one went down to his lullee, which was erect and ready like an old ghurka, who, though tired from life, had had its orders and formations drilled in so well that it was ready to go at any time.

As he pumped away at the shot glass he had between his legs, a tiredness suddenly hit him after the 5 hours of dancing.

Out of closing eyes, he saw the butter chicken the group had bought that he had forgotten to eat, lying splattered on the floor. Nabil, his partner in crime, had scooped some of the floor chicken into his mouth before heading off to sleep in the bathtub. But Amrit had been too horrified at first to eat off the floor. Now he wanted some, but was too tired to do so.

Which of the morons had put the food on the ground? They would never know. At the next dance-off they would all accuse one another and someone would yell “What idiot did that?” There would be no culprit found.

As he drifted off, Amrit felt that something was about to happen, even as his arm slowed down. A jolly feeling was building in his special place.

He awoke sweating as always, having soaked the sheet he was lying on.

Grunting, Amrit blinked and wondering if he had taken out the tissues he kept under his moobs to soak the sweat. Having a quick feel, he realized they had fallen or been removed at some point over the night.

Suddenly Amrit was aware of a sort of presence. There was sweat all over his body. However, when he had felt between his moobs, they had squashed together, and he had felt a thing of some sort.

It was not sweat between his tits. It was something thicker, solider.

It was cum.

“Yuck!” he screamed in the empty room in the early hours of the morning. “Who did this?! Stop doing it!”

He sat up, feeling the cum adjust a bit and slide down a bit.

“Nabil!”

Amrit stormed into the bathroom and found Nabil, a skinny man with shoulder-length hair, lying in the bathtub injecting his rubber tube-adorned arm.

He punched him, making him look at the wall because his neck was so weak from all the drug use.

“Why you hit me?” Nabil sort of droned in a voice so low that Amrit with his drug-induced tinnitus did not hear.

“Tunne mujko moot maara! You came on me!” Amrit exclaimed, pointing between his moobs with the other hand on his grey-stained briefs.

“Menne kya? Nahin! I what? No!”

“Tho ye kidarse aaya? So where did this come from?”

“Arey tunne kiya! You did it!”

“Kya bakwaas! Kesse? What bullshit! How?”

Amrit pantomimed how when he came, he always did so on downwards, and therefore onto the floor or maybe his thighs.

Nabil huffed and took off the tube, getting out of the tub.

“Tu dekh,” he said, grabbing a small piece of crumpled paper and stump of a crayon from the floor. “Jab tu sote ho, tumara moot ka angle ayse hota hein. When you fall alseep, your cum angle goes like this.”

Nabil drew a short horizontal line, and showed the angle of the smaller perpendicular line growing smaller to one side. He illustrated how Amrit shot upwards while falling asleep.

“Ohhhh…” Amrit’s voice squeaked.

Nabil shook his head and grumbled, heading off to the bathroom again.

“Tunne kya kiya Amrit?” the remaining man said to himself in the mirror. “You have to know better.”

For now there were bigger issues – he still did not want to wipe the cum off his chest. It was getting dryer and stickier.

He wiped with the sheet he lay on, and then lay on it again. As he began to fall asleep, his hand went down again towards his lullee.

And hence this was a scene that would happen again, and had happened before, in this flat.

Unemployed Rivalry

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“Maa I went to massage,” Amrit began on stage, with the audience already in fits of laughter. He scratched his stomach. “Not massage like thaa. Girlfriend won’t let me. Some Tamilian man.”

“Oh this is going to be good,” a tall Brazilian woman said in the packed room of some hotel comedy club. “If I went on laughs alone I would sleep with him. But obviously not with a body like that dwarf.”

“He told me be on maa knees and hands and then he massage my ass maaa!” Amrit put one chubby arms behind his head, reliving the shock.

“Oh this Amrit fellow,” a British man said. “I’m so glad we quit India so we could get comedy like this.”

“I try to stop him maaa!” Amrit squealed and put up one hand. “I turn around, but then I fall!”

He fell back at this point mimicking that moment, with a loud thump as his fatty back tissue made contact with hard wood.

“Maa but then he was on me in the full mount position maa!”

“Oh my is he talking about being raped?” a Turkish woman said as she covered her mouth.

“Look at him,” a squat Belarusian man next to her said. “He’s the kind of guy that would be okay with rape as long as he’s doing it. He just doesn’t like being the rapee.”

“Maa he put his lendha inside me maaa!” Amrit screamed as he got up with some effort.

“Wow what a great way to learn Hindi,” a Belgian woman who worked at an Indian company said.

“This guy is awful. Why are you all laughing?” a medium built white guy at the back corner whispered.

“Are you daft?” a man next to him said. “This guy is hilarious.”

“There’s nothing intelligent about this fool,” the disgruntled audience member insisted.

“Beats the idiot that used to be here often,” the man next to him pointed out. “Some Emirati wannabe idiot. Gross hair.”

“Who’s this guy? He sounds cool,” the anti-Amrit said.

“Oh god he was just shit,” the Brazilian woman inserted. “That moron looked like a grease trap and he wasn’t even funny. Went on about being a vegan or something.”

“Pescatarian,” the man corrected.

“Shut up maa, it’s my show,” Amrit suddenly yelled from the stage.

“You shut up,” the anti-Amrit shouted back, getting up and pulling a soft cap off his greasy long hair.

“Aye maa, you that not funny guy,” Amrit said.

“I’m Hamza, the Emirati comedian!” Hamza revealed, expecting more of a gasp from the audience.

“You look white maa!” Amrit declared, wiping his ass where he had fallen.

“That’s because I’m half Scottish, you Paki,” Hamza declared, again to less support than he imagined.

“I’m not Paki maaa!” Amrit declared back. “I’m Indian, Brahmin. Highest caste.”

“What a winner,” Hamza dressed him down. “What are you, 5 foot high?”

“What about your hair! Looks like spaghetti that fell on the floor!” It was a Russian woman in the audience who had had the misfortune of sitting behind Hamza.

“I just don’t like using too much water,” Hamza sort of stammered.

“Maa you even have a job?” Amrit asked from the stage.

“No, do you?” Hamza shot back.

“No maaa,” was the surprising answer.

Hamza looked up, shocked.

“I, er, live with my wife,” Hamza found escaping from his mouth. “She works.”

“Girlfriend, maa,” Amrit said, pointing at himself.

“It’s hard to get it up because I don’t work or do anything except write comedy,” Hamza said, looking down.

“Well god, it is emasculating,” the American man said. “I’d just kill myself.”

“Not me maaa,” Amrit declared from the stage. “I jack off 5 times a day.”

“It’s amazing how he can have no shame at all,” a Norwegian woman said, shaking her head.

“Don’t worry maa, no work life, best life!”

Amrit got off the stage and walked over to Hamza. They looked at each other. And then Amrit jumped to high five the latter.

Debt Collectors at Your Birthday

On a not-too-warm-because-of-cloudseeding April day, several laughing voices could be heard in JVT, also known by the financially aspiring as Zaaveetaa.

Gathered around the pool area of a tall residential building with excellent (till they get blocked if the recession does not get worse) views of the skyline, DM and Kayo with their partners cheered the errant Amrit, who was shamelessly wearing a Batman t-shirt.

Having received his birthday present like a 12-year-old from his girlfriend Priya with wide-mouthed surprise to be posted on Facebook, he now stoked the fire of a charcoal grill.

Kayo stood over him, not wanting to waste time since Amrit had disappeared for 20 minutes earlier with DM to tell him his repetitive life problems, leaving everyone else with nothing to eat and no way to start the grill.

“We’ll barbecue soon,” Amrit chimed, sweating as always under the smallest amount of work.

“Baaaiibe it’s called a braaai,” Priya, Amrit’s obese dark girlfriend said in her South African accent.

“Hey so is brai the barbecue process or noun?” Kayo asked suddenly.

“What?” Priya’s voice shrunk under the least bit of questioning.

“Is to brai a process? Because what Amrit is doing is actually grilling since he’s using direct heat. Only the use of indirect heat is barbecuing.”

“Oh.” Her voice was even smaller.

She would later that night post the party photos as a barbecue, being passive aggressive.

“You’re creating a mess with the coal residue,” DM told Amrit.

“No problem maaa, the watchman will clean it,” Amrit proclaimed as he mixed drinks.

“How much did you give him?”

“Nothing, he cleans my car.”

“This isn’t part of car cleaning,” DM said, crossing his arms.

In the silence the sound of lapping flames could be heard.

“How sad,” Priya said in a small voice. However, neither she nor Amrit offered to pay the man that would later clean their mess.

“I’d expect more from a Brahmin,” Kayo said, trying to guild Amrit.

He forgot that Amrit had no such guilt.

“Yeah such high caste,” DM echoed.

“Oh is he high caste?” Priya asked, looking away.

“Yeah of course,” DM said. “Aren’t you?”

“Yeah bro highest,” Amrit said, measuring out a vodka that was in a bottle that looked like Smirnoff.

It was called Flirt Vodka.

“Thanks sir,” a thin wiry man in a blue suit said, taking the glass.

“Who are you?” Amrit said, incredulously.

“Ah I’m from the bank,” the man said, taking a seat. “Well, one of the banks.”

“One for me too,” a fat man in more casual grey but still business clothes said from behind the wiry man. “Put some soda in mine.”

“And who are you?” Amrit’s voice began to squeak.

“From one of her many credit cards,” the fat man said, biting into a lamb chop and using it to point at Priya.

“Huu,” Priya looked down like a wind-up toy that had run out of energy.

“What you guys doing here?”Amrit asked.

“Well,” the wiry man said taking a sip. “Priya hasn’t been making minimum payments so after so many unreturned calls, we thought to join your little party. Nice spread by the way. Is that a 200 dirham artisan cake?”

“Um, yes,” Amrit chuckled and rubbed his belly sheepishly.

“Not the kind of thing one would expect your sort to eat,” the fat man said.

“What sort you mean?” Amrit sort of challenged, but dropped his voice towards the end.

“The unemployed sort,” the wiry man said. “Ooh I’d love a piece of the cake when we cut it.”

And they indeed stuck around, having drinks and chatting as if they were part of the event. They even went upstairs once the pool curfew kicked in, listening to Amrit explain all of Priya’s design ideas as if making excuses for a retard (she collected snow globes).

Priya the whole time was just feeling slightly jealous that with the two mean, Amrit had 3 times as many people at his party than she had at hers. And that counted the fact that hers was made up mostly of Amrit’s friends and friends of his friends.