Heyy naati...

One of the more important aspects of psychological development, they tell us, is Associative Learning. (No, this is no nerd talk; read on, premature ejaculator). One of the better known forms of this Associative Learning is Classical Conditioning/Pavlovian Conditioning. You all know about the famous dog that drooled all over the place every time that man with a doormat for a beard decided to get the bell to go 'Tink!'

(Yes, that one.)

We, much like the dog, react by association. Much like the dog, or more perhaps, is the case of a friend who looks like she consumed an overdose of Organophosphorus poison every time *Johnny Depp* is mentioned. So much so, i expect a newspaper mentioning him, to be sodden wet in her hands. (Even if it carried his obituary.)
The same goes with most guys i know when mention is of Salma Hayek and Most People Her Kind. Keira Knightley somehow gets involved in all this too, but one must remember a good face can attract. Occassionally.

So, you get the drift. Association.

I grew up associating things as well, like most normal human beings.
(Only, my mother thinks i was some kind of a whizkid, hardly normal. Aww. Reminds one of that proverb in Kannada that goes 'HettOrge heggaNa muddu, kaTTkonDOrge kODangi muddu', roughly meaning parents love their children even if they turned out to be gutter scrounging ugly black fat rats. Awww.)
Mom's flaring nostrils meant, 'man, am i getting flayed today.'
An aunt meant, duck for cover.
A neighbor meant, get your handkerchief out/be prepared to hold breath for all the time he is around.
Among other such associations,

Silk Smitha meant, sex.
Disco Shanti meant, SEX.
THAT, is the point of today's post.

Silk Smitha and Disco Shanti and their Pavlovian Influences on my Understanding of Sex.

Now, for those of you with refined tastes and Mozart for lullabies, an introduction to these curiously named entities is, ahem, sine qua non.
They were my association to, er, 'leave the room'.
Why?,
because parents grudge their children a view of the greener, meaner side.
These two women, these two healthy buxom women, these two healthy buxom lustrous-eyed women, apparently, induced 'wrong thoughts' in our innocent-as-a-fawn minds. Bah.

Anyway, just WHO are these two women? Well.
These two women happen to be the ULTIMATE item girls. Divas in their own right. (Mallika Sherawat, go jump in a dry well, or get some more silicone.) They managed to titillate all of South India for more than two decades, with movies running solely because of their 5-minute show of cleavage and hyper-kinetic pelvic thrusts. And they did it with so much aplomb. Hideous wigs, godawful Amrapali costumes, Srirampur graveyard dance-steps notwithstanding. Every time they entered the frame, the atmosphere turned electric. Palpable sexual tension. No knife sharp enough. Sample a few.

Situation 1 :
A bleeding hero would be tied up in the cool looking multicolored dungeon of the pipe-smoking villain, with the hero's mother and his love interest generally thrashing about. Why? Because they could never get their figures to look half as oooh as our lady Silk Smitha's, who would have emerged from god knows where, in a blond wig and a red sequin nano-skirt, with her 3-inch long RED fingernails tracing the hero's amply ketchup stained pectorals. And, always grooving to a song whose beat went more often than not, ding-chakk-digi-digi-chakk.
And the lyrics, something like, 'Silku, silku, silku, mysooru silku silku...'.

Situation 2 :
Another less climactic situation would include Vajramuni or some such son of Satan trying to score with our lady Disco, also known as The Original Thunder Thighs. She wasn't much of a talker though. Most she was required to say was, 'hehehehe, youu youu naati baay, heheheheh'. And make those righteous noises, from within bitten lips, that went, 'haaaaan...haaaaan'.

Situation 3 :
Disco/Silk in a saree, flowers in head, child in arms, crying her sexy lungs out. And telling a patriarch type character that the father of the child was 'none other than your son', the hero. Just when you thought the world had wronged our lady, she'd appear before a vile-looking man and say in that husky voice, 'Baass, work over'. The man would then utter an all encompassing Muahhahahaha. The camera would then pan to the fiery eyes of a taxidermic cheetah, that being the chosen item of interior decoration of the 80's villain. (Have you ever wondered why? I have.)
And then for the coup de grace, by the time the camera could pan back to Disco, she would have cast her saree off like it gave her a bad skin reaction, and greet us in a characteristic two piece!

Other such situations convinced me almost hypnopedically that these women meant sex. (These two, by the way, were invariably called Rosee, Daali, or just Baybeee)
Every time i was asked to leave the room, or the channel was changed, my rather diseased brain would weave scenarios involving the two. The background music to it was always the 'haaaan, naati' which would repeat in untiring cycles.
I would think that Disco Shanti would cook also in leather hot pants and whip people before serving them. And that every one of her sentences would end with her biting her lower lip to the point that it bled. You know, like, 'The keyboard *hussky voice* i type on, is... black', and then bite her lips.
(Yeah, i was a rather prurient, gutterboy type in my childhood.)

These association type characters always leave indelible marks on one's psyche. Which was probably why i was rather sad when Silk Smitha died some years ago. Committed suicide, that one. Sad sad. One only hopes she is doing the 'heyy naati' routine to all those Indra type lascivious characters up there.

As for Disco, i hear she got married (to a Telugu villain, no less) and settled for a life that does not quite involve leather chaddis and whips (it perhaps does, who knows?)

And those of you who have not quite known the magic of these two, i suggest you stop by some regional channels sometimes. (It wouldn't give an abscess in your angrezi-fied kewl butts.)

They truly don't make 'em like these two anymore.
Yo Silk! Yo Disco!

Clown

He instinctively wrinkled around the corners of his eyes;
sunny orange of the curtains too bright, for his eyes, and him.

Nights, with their camouflaging neon lights, comforted him.
Days, with their consuming clarity, caricatured him.

He reluctantly tore himself apart from the remnants of night,
and looked hesitantly towards the remains of the day.

Portmanteau film.

I am swimming fast.
The waters are murky. An intense green, barely showing the long, distorted shadows cast by the long palm tress that line the waterway on either side.
The fabric of water is crisscrossed by many tangled, tortuous water-plants.
I peel them apart; yet never forgetting to swim.
Swim fast.
An odd lotus, a lone lotus, a surprising white against a depressing green.
In bloom.
In full sway.
In total contrast. The lotus makes a fleeting appearance in the far corner of my busy left eye.
The emotion on my face is indiscernible.
I am sweating, perhaps.
I am out of breath, perhaps.
But,
i swim.

----------------------------

I walk in gliding movements. Like i am stuck to the wooden foot of a horse in a merry-go-round. Only, i am not going round. I glide.
The world around me is empty; and monochrome. With a tinge of the sun.
And dingy. (Unobtrusively so.)
I see no faces, i hear no sound.
I don't see myself, i don't hear myself.
I see what my feet see. Low and gliding.
Cobbled stone, well-worn pavement rocks, urban refuse.
Warm, water-soaked air in spurts; breaths of weary street dogs? I don't know.
But i know i am not stopping moving. And gliding.

Until,
a jerk.
A strong tug; at a sensitive solar plexus.

(And,
an unenthusiastically staid, weary, rhythmically squeaking fan.)

----------------------------

These are the only two recurrent dreams i get. I am sure they have definite psychoanalytical interpretations.
I don't know.
I wouldn't want to know.
I like the dreams too much.