The footpath of my memory is lined with manholes. It seems wherever the masons ran out of cement, they decided to leave a hole, an uncovered hole. I am not scared of manholes. In fact, whenever I encounter them, instead of getting off the footpath like some people do, I walk straight towards them and gallop exactly at the right moment so that I am not swallowed. My mother says manholes contain shit. Everything we eat goes out this way: we chew our food well enough to not mess with the digestive process, then we swallow whatever we eat (less spicy the better), then our stomach churns and we remember we should be careful about the spices. Depending on whether we were careful or not, we shit on a level between constipation and diarrhoea. After that comes the process of disposal. I did not know anything about this when I was younger. Until I found out about Salim kaku.
Salim kaku was a thin man with an amply muscular body; the upper part of his body was especially remarkable. So much so that when, in my adolescence, I thought of myself in a gym body, I imagined his muscles chunk by chunk on mine. I limited my imagination to the upper half of our bodies. When the imagination got out of hand, when it trickled down, it got really embarrassing. I would see my mother down on her knees, with his penis in her mouth. It wasn't what I intended to see, and the image only became clearer the harder I tried to resist.