Saints, Then Sinners

By noon, just a few hours after the Ramazan celebration which brought hundreds of thousands of Muslims out into the streets of Kolkata, the devotees had dispersed, and the same road and its adjoining park were mostly deserted.

I am meandering through the park, doing my usual routine of stopping to take pictures of flowers and sheep (at right), when I sense that I am being followed.

I speed up. He speeds up. I slow down. He slows down.

I stop and whirl around. A twenty-something guy in a red shirt stops also, just a few feet behind me, and stares at me boldly.
"What do you want"?  I ask. "Why are you following me?"
He mutters something in Bengali. The only word I can understand is "photo."
"No photo. I don't want your photo. Leave me alone."

I continue walking and he continues following closely behind. I sit down on a park bench and pretend to read, hoping he'll get bored and disappear. He sidles up next to me and stands there, fidgeting. After 10-15 minutes, he shows no sign of moving on. I look up and look him in the eyes.

"Get away from me! Get the hell out of here! I'm not taking your picture!"

He sticks his tongue out of his mouth and slowly moves it over his lips, moving his eyes suggestively downward. When I look "downward" I find that he has pulled his weenie out of his pants and is pointing it at me, clutching it with both hands.

I burst out laughing. "So small?" I say, bringing two fingers together to indicate size.

Yeah, I know, insulting a potential rapist is probably not a smart move. But the absurdity was just too much for me to hold back the laughter. The tongue action looked like something out of a bad porn flick. And he was clutching his pathetic little treasure like it was a gold brick, as if he expected me to be dazzled by it!

I assume that shock and fear were the reactions he was aiming for, and I wasn't about to satisfy him with either. Shock and fear, no. Rage, yes. In the next split second, the thought crosses my mind that he could have a knife, and then my amusement turns to rage. And I do what they teach you to do in self-defense class 101: make noise.

I turn to him and start yelling, not a frightened, little girl scream, but a gutteral voice that comes from somewhere deep down in my belly. It doesn't even sound like my voice at all, not even to my ears.

No need to repeat here what I screamed; much of it was probably unintelligible and nonsensical. Suffice it to say that it was a multilingual (English, Polish, and Tamil) stream of every rageful word that came to mind.

He steps back just a bit, looking confused. I push him back with my arms, lashing out at him on his shoulders, chest, and back. After a few moments of indecision, he turns on his heels and runs off into the park.

What would Kali do?