[...have you ever imagined what life (and death, as you will know in a short while) would be for one strand of a straw? So, you thought I asked this just as a rhetorical question at the end of Part VIII, to give an essay a feel of a closure (which I never seem to have, according to some of my readers). No, it is just the beginning sentence of this essay. I do intend telling you here, how it is like, to be one strand of a straw. Aishwariya, (no, I won't ask if your last name is Rai), check if it is profound enough for your liking... Proceed]

...strange feeling it should be. You are born already dirty and yellow. Living makes you dull yellow. You are itchy, lean and slanky*; naked, bent and blondie. Most of your life you strive to maintain a mutual coexistence piled amongst fellow straw-heads, without adequate legroom. You are nobody, just another brick in the wall.

Not even that particular Just Another Brick in the Wall popularized by the Pink Floyd but only an ordinary just another brick in the wall, hard to be noticed by anybody. In fact, you as a single straw in a bundle, are more lost than found all your life, much like a needle in the haystack.

All your life, you just wait and wait, to be mashed to partial death and dimensional restructure in the mouth of a thick-tongued bovine specimen. And when finally you, as a partially dead straw, think it is all over and you have reached your afterlife, the bullock chews the cud and you realize it is, after all, a mid-death crisis. You finally reach the Nether World of the Bullock Belly, the abode of the dead straw-heads where you realize you are not just your single self but part of a bigger Unified Mash of Nirvana.

Yes, I agree with you, readers. Death, as a straw, is much gory than life as one, which anyway is much more sorry. That is why, even as a boy, about to be transformed by the cart-driver's imagined curse, I preferred the gold bug.

Today, I have grown enough and thankfully, not as a gold bug either. I have also grown ignorant of the innards of the third pocket of the belt around a random cart-driver of Srirangam. I now have reasons why I possibly can never know. For instance, even today, I am still younger than those cart-drivers, so they wouldn't oblige by revealing their secret.

Perhaps, to know the truth, we should ask the gold bugs of Srirangam. I used to know so many of them as friends...

Proceeding with the narration about the bullock-cart drivers, other than the decorations mentioned in Part VIII, these guys are bare bodied, with white hair covering their chest and red bandanas with a silver talisman around their arms to ward off evil spirits in solid or gaseous form (you can ask me, why not in liquid form; frame the question in your mind and you will know the answer immediately, if not earlier). There is usually a small beedi (low-tech cigar) in their ear, if not in their mouth. Of course, I don't find it alight when stuck inside the ear-head slit.

While traveling, to make the cart run faster (sometimes, to run at all), these guys would coax their bullocks with strange cluck & creech sounds made from the tongue striking the upper palette, resembling the strike of a match. Accompanied were verbal cries like hai, hai, oadura Ranga oadu (Go Ranga, Go) with a deft flick from the lash followed by the twists in their tails so that the tails looked more like a sailt.

* Slanky - portmanteau of slouch and lanky (ref. SPOTSOI# Dic. p 1.2 e +12.8)
# SPOTSOI - Sagacious People Of The School Of Irrelevance

To be continued...
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