Brian Aldiss - A Soldier Erect - or Further Adventures of the Hand-Reared Boy

Those desperate wanks! It was a case of remaining mortally sane, not morally pure. It was never enough merely to lower your trousers – they had to come off, and ankle-putees and all, so that you could crouch there naked but for your shirt, frantically rubbing your shaft, as if by this nakedness you got a little nearer to the real world and further from your own useless dream. And to see the spunk spattering down into the throat of that lime-odorous pit was never satisfaction enough. Again I would wrench at my prick, red and swollen, until it spat out some of my longings a second time.

Sometimes these sessions ended in disgust, sometimes in a blessed feeling of relief. It was hateful doing it in the shitter, but nowhere else was private enough, not even your creaking charpoy , the rope beds on which we slept. As you crossed the sandy distance between barracks and shithouse, with your intention working in your mind, you could see the empty country beyond, tawny by day, blue by evening, and, as dark moved in, lit furtively all round the horizon by flickers of lightning. That world of freedom out there! The hand was a poor but essential substitute for it.

Kanchapur was only a small town. Perhaps it thrived, although to a squaddie’s eyes it wilted. The highroad from the barracks led straight to it, so that a sermon on the contrast between military order and the disarray of Indian life was readily available. We walked down from an outpost of England and civilization into a world where grotesque trees and monster insects dominated poor streets; and on those streets, tumbledown houses and shops had been built over reeking ditches.

Everything was terrible to us because it was strange. We laughed and pointed in horror at anything you would find in different form in Exeter or Bradford. The bright posters for native films, ointments, or magazines; the amazing script which flowed over shops and placards like a renegade parasitic plant; the unlikely beobabs and deodars that shaded the road; and particularly the smells and foreign tongues and wailing musics – all so closely related that they might have poured from one steaming orifice – these things seemed like the stigmata of some sleezy and probably malevolent god.

Desperately randy as ever, I tried to discuss this supernatural feeling with Geordie, when he and Wally and I were down in the bazaar one evening.

‘They’ve never been Christian here, that’s the trouble,’ Geordie said, piously. ‘I mean, like, they don’t go to church proper or sing hymns the way we do.’

‘No more do you, you hypocritical fuck-pig!’

‘Oh, aye, I know what you mean, like, but I mean I could go, like, if I wanted. Anyroad, I’ve got an Uncle and Auntie what goes to the Baptists every week. Or most weeks, leastwise.’

‘These Wogs’ve got a church down the road here, though.’

‘No, I know, aye, yes, they have that, but it must have come too late like, I mean they’ve been worshipping monkeys and all that, haven’t they, for millions of years. You know what I mean. That’s why you’ve got to be so careful with them. Folks at home just wouldn’t believe what goes on here, would they?’

‘I wish I knew what goes on here. Don’t you reckon the women must be like bloody wild animals in bed?’

‘They say the longer you’ve been out here the whiter they look. I saw a little one just now I wouldn’t sort of mind having a go at …’

‘I heard that one of their gods has got a dozen cocks!’

Geordie laughed. ‘I bet Jack Aylmer told you that.’

‘Stop talking shit and come and have a shafti at this stall,’ Wally called. Mention of any god annoyed him; he was a fervent atheist. Wally came from Dagenham, where he was a car-worker like his father, and we gathered that if God ever had the cheek to enter the factory, every manjack would have downed tools at once and walked out on strike.

‘Why don’t you pack in ordering us about, Wally?’ I asked, but Geordie was already on the move, in his submissive way.

Geordie and I made our way over a plank bridge spanning an open sewer to see what Wally was up to. He was standing in front of a wooden stall decked with magazines and pictures, mostly sugary ones of Indian film stars. Behind the little counter sat the owner, dressed in white and nodding and smiling at us, indicating his stock with a graciously inclined hand.

‘Hello, young masters, come to see what you are liking just now to buy very much! Yevery thing all at very cheapest prices, young masters, for suit the pocket. If you are looking pretty magazines with photographs of young ladies in the Yinglish language, I have very plenty what is to your likings.’

Ignoring him, Wally pointed to some pictures hanging from the beams of the stall. Each picture portrayed one fantastic personage. Their bright colours suggested that they were posters.

‘What a bunch of fucking savages!’ Wally said. ‘You were talking about their gods – well, there they are, and a right old bunch they look! You notice this cove don’t have no pictures of Winston Churchill here!’

‘You like the pictures, sahib? I hold light for you to make the close observation. Yeach and yevery one a Hindu god and lady-god!’

As we stared, Wally pointed with particular venom at one of the posters. ‘Look at this bastard here! What do you make of him, pulling his own guts out by the fucking yard! Wyhyrr, makes you want to spew up!’

He was stabbing his finger at a splendid and terrifying green figure with the face of a monkey. The monkey wore a crown and the elaborate and stiff golden garments of a prince. The garments were undone. The monkey was ripping his body apart from throat to pelvis, revealing a generalized mass of pink and red entrails. His face was distorted by something between pain and ecstasy.

‘Christ-on-fucking-crutches!’ exclaimed Geordie. ‘Them blaspheming bastards! I mean to say, anyroad, it’s bloody cruel, like, even in a fucking picture.’

‘Yes, yes, very terrible scene,’ agreed the stall-keeper, smiling from one to the other of us. ‘This is a depiction of Hanuman, young gentlemen, who fought for Rama and also Rama’s beautiful wife, the lady Siva. He is also called the Monkey God.’

‘He’s marvellous in a revolting way,’ I said. ‘What did he do?’

‘Sahib, Hanuman is fighting for the lady Siva when she is keeping by Ravana.’ He performed a little sword-play with his hands.

‘Who’s Ravana when he’s at home?’

‘Ravana is the King of the Rakshasas.’ His smile suggested he did not mind stating the obvious for us.

Geordie burst into laughter. ‘Ask a daft question, Stubby, get a daft bloody answer!’

But I was fascinated by the monkey god. I knew how he felt. Wally was furious that I was taking the matter seriously.

‘What do you fucking care what this monster did? The bloke who painted that ought to be put away for keeps!’ He thumped an adjacent picture, which showed an impossibly pink and rounded young lady with curly nostrils, busily balancing on one foot on a green leaf in a bright blue pool. ‘Who’s the pusher, Johnny?’

‘Yes, yes, this lady is Lakshmi, sahib, the lady-god of fortune and also the pleasure of the god Vishnu, according to our religion of Hinduism, sahib. If you like buy one or two picture very cheap?’

‘ I don’t want to buy the bloody things, do I? I’ve got no time for all that rubbish. It’s a load of fucking junk, if you ask me.’

‘The pictures demonstrate items in our religion, sahib.’

‘Well then, that’s your look-out, mate, ain’t it? Just don’t try to convert me to the bloody nonsense, that’s all!’

Ganesh, the elephant god, hung there too, with diamonds in his trunk. Wally knocked him and sent him swinging, to show what he felt about Hinduism.