Pax Feminica

By Ajit Chaudhuri

Imagine a society ruled by women, where women are the administrators, judges, and military commanders. Would it be free of want, injustice, and violence, as feminists would have us believe, or would it be much the same as any other society?

This novel describes such a world, with its rules and norms and its philosophical underpinnings, from the viewpoint of patriarchal outsiders. Two middle-aged male wannabe adventurers, one an inveterate womanizer and the other a family man, stumble upon this world via a series of accidents in this work that takes the reader from Delhi and Kiev to a remote valley in the Indian Himalayas and flits between the thirteenth century, when Mongol hordes invaded Europe and a group of women decided that they had had enough of men, and the previous decade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jun 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543702927

Ajit Chaudhuri

The author sits in the rabbit warrens of middle management in the Indian corporate sector, where he thinks up stories as a means of fighting sleep at meetings and pontifications on issues such as global warming, stakeholder capitalism and triple-bottom-line accounting. He had previously written the novel ‘Pax Feminica’, a sociological exploration of a world ruled by women.

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Copyright © 2018 by Ajit Chaudhuri.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cast Of Characters

PART 1:   THE BEGINNING

I   An Introduction to Vineet Vasudev (Early August 1997)

II   The Road to Leh (August 1997)

III   Getting Leh-ed! (August 1997)

IV   The Trek

PART 2:   THE BEDA SETTLEMENT

V   Life with the Beda (Spring 1998)

VI   An Introduction to the Khampa and the Takmo (1998-99)

VII   A Journey to the Takmo Settlement (Late 1999)

PART 3:   THE VOLOST

VIII   Dazhda of the Dregovichi (Late 1999)

IX   Life in Vasmo Volost (1999-2001)

X   Dealing with the Khampa Question (2002)

XI   Talks with the Khampa (2003)

XII   A Temporary Fast Forward (2003-2009)

PART 4:   THE VERV

XIII   The Journey to the Verv (2008)

XIV   A Meeting with Aristocracy (2008)

XV   Jumping Back in Time: A Prelude to the Great Migration (1221-1223)

XVI   Jumping Back in Time: The Great Migration (1237-1242)

XVII   The Proposition to VV (2008)

PART 5:   BACK TO THE VOLOST

XVIII   The Return to Vasmo Volost (2008-10)

XIX   The Reunion (2008-10)

PART 6:   THE WAR AND THE END

XX   The Opening Gambits (2011)

XXI   The Battle for Vasmo and its Aftermath (Summer of 2011)

XXII   Back to the Beda (Autumn 2011)

XXIII   Return to the Kharij (Autumn 2011)

Author’s Note

Glossary Of Terms Used

This effort is dedicated to –

Anjolie and Raja Menon

Muby and Jitu Pasricha

Usha and Pandu Chintamani

‘If you were not you, I would not be me!’

CAST OF CHARACTERS

(In alphabetical order)

Balotar: A Mongol soldier who recovered from an injury in a Dregovichi settlement during the scouting excursion into Eastern Europe in 1221-23.

Batu Khan: The Mongol general and grandson of Genghis Khan, who was co-leader of the Mongol Army during their western campaign in 1237 onwards. He is the only character in this book that is not a figment of the author’s imagination – he went on to found the Khanate of the Golden Horde.

Dazhda: The Voivode of Vasmo Volost – or, in plain English, the Governor of Vasmo region – a beautiful and driven Dregovichi woman.

Jody Morris: A young woman and passing flame for Vineet, which she is not too happy about. She makes a dark prediction that the story follows up upon.

Morup: A young Beda man who becomes friends with Vineet and Shankar.

Nabi: An older Beda woman, who helps Shankar recover from his fall and is worried for both of them upon their travels.

Nawang: A Beda medicine man with a curiosity for what lies beyond the mountains – he joins Vineet and Shankar in their adventures in the Skadar.

Perunia: A gigantic redheaded Dregovichi blacksmith and respected resident of Viada pogost (village), she becomes the only Dregovichi to have a relationship with a man.

Shankar Bhalla: The narrator, and friend and sidekick to Vineet who is with him for most of the story, through thick and thin.

Shivani: Shankar’s wife in Delhi.

Skalzang: An older Beda man, and resident of the household that take Vineet and Shankar in upon their entry into the Skadar.

Skarma: A young Beda woman who is entrusted with caring for Shankar.

Svarogya: A young Dregovichi woman who is next in line for leadership of the Dregovichi community.

Tundup: A young Beda man and a friend of Vineet and Shankar.

Velesia: The muzhi (or leader) of the Dregovichi community in the Skadar, she is obsessed with being ruthless.

Vineet Vasudev: The protagonist, a Delhi-based photographer and also an alpha-male with a deep and enduring love for women (in the plural).

PART 1

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THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER I

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EARLY AUGUST 1997

An Introduction to Vineet Vasudev

I t was a fine, fine morning. The weather was great, no rain, the sun out, pretty girls on the roads in all their finery - but then good weather and scenery are just minor components of a fine morning. Much more important was that my half yearly sales targets had been met with two months to go and, to top it, the wife and kids had left last night for a three week visit to her parents, which usually extended to anything between one and three months. Let me correct that. It was a perfect morning. Just perfect!

And so there I was, sitting in office, contemplating a few weeks of cutting out vegetables from my diet, stepping up the beer consumption and monopolizing the sports channel on TV (ah! the pleasures of forced bachelorhood) when in burst Vineet Vasudev.

Ballsy, I need to leave town! I’ve just got to leave! This place is getting on my nerves. Look at the pollution. Let’s go! Somewhere peaceful, where we can’t be contacted, he spouted, and then, as among his many strange habits is one of singing songs which match his widely varying moods, burst into All I want is a room somewhere.

The reader would require a little background on Mr. Vineet Vasudev.

Friendship is a strange thing. Who you are is often decided by the company you keep, as important as the car you drive and where your wife shops. One’s friends are therefore delicately cultivated and discretely changed, a function of various complicated matters such as one’s current and aspiring station in life. It is socially (and sometimes professionally) disastrous to be seen more than momentarily with those on the way down, and there isn’t much need to accumulate credit points for the time when the person on the downward track happens to be you - the people you meet are going to be a different lot. Sounds cynical, but meant in all sincerity. There’s a saying - life’s a big shit sandwich, you either bite into it or you starve.

I’m a marketing man whose life depends upon the public buying a certain brand of detergent in sufficient quantities in north India for me to meet my targets, and if they don’t for two consecutive six month periods I return my car to the creditors, my house to the company, take my kids out of their fancy school and look for selling something else at a third of the salary. And if this doesn’t happen for long enough, it’s a race between cirrhosis of the liver, heart failure and a nervous breakdown to finish me off.

VV, on the other hand, is an unmarried fashion photographer with no worries in life other than those caused by his abnormal testestorone level. He lives for the day, does not care about what he is wearing, the state of his shoes, where he sleeps, and with whom. Many is the third person who, upon seeing this tired, unshaven, ragged fellow, a living replica of the face on the Say NO to XXX or YYY posters, lounging around my house, comments upon whether I am running a shelter home on the side and is shocked when told (on the rare occasions that I bother to do so) that he is a successful man, well known in his field, and what we service-wallahs make in a month he would turn down for an hour’s work. We have absolutely nothing in common unless you count an interest in the fortunes of FC Barcelona, AC Milan and Ajax Amsterdam.

And therefore I find it difficult to consider VV (as he is called by everyone) a friend - he just doesn’t come into what my parameters of friendship are. He’s not somebody I can discuss work with, or anything else for that matter apart from football. I don’t get to meet him once in a while over cocktails on social evenings, it’s a lot more often than that. He makes no effort to get along with my friends, and positively glows in the looks of scorn cast upon him on the occasions when I am entertaining and he turns up uninvited. He bums around the house at all odd hours and I never know when I am going to step on him. Introducing him in a respectable way, `Meet one of Delhi’s top photographers, Vineet Vasudev, he’s done ZZZ magazine’s cover and is a passport to introduction to many, many beautiful women’, only makes him behave in a fashion matching his attire in destitution, and therefore I have long stopped bothering with anything more than `This is VV’ and letting people think that he is some poor relation of the wife who has come to the city to break a drug habit. No, VV is not my idea of a friend.

My wife and I inherited him, there’s no other word for it. He was an acquaintance of a colleague of mine whom we had met at the latter’s house one social evening. After having consumed my quota of liquor and exhausted various topics of conversation such as the then status of my targets and the reunification of Germany, there was nothing to do while waiting for dinner to be served, which was being delayed due to some unexplained reason. My stomach finally overruled good manners and I made a sign to the wife that I was about to raid the kitchen and, notwithstanding her dirty look, went off to do so. In there, I found that I had been beaten to it by this fellow whom I had vaguely been introduced to and who was in the process of grabbing a sneak preview of the food himself. With the conspiratorial look of partners in crime we reintroduced ourselves and joined in bullying the cook into serving us out of turn before going off to some corner, away from the public eye, to tuck in. Once matters of the pallet were adequately taken care off we got into an analysis of Italia `90 and an argument on the relative merits of Holland’s strategy for the tournament. I found his opinions educated despite not completely agreeing with them - I mean, just imagine being under the impression that the only team capable of beating West Germany was Cameroon or that Holland would have been better served had they had Winter instead of Rijkaard spitting on Voeller - while he, in the process, decided to bestow upon us his friendship. Shivani, my long suffering life partner, and I did not have the slightest say in the matter, he just started coming over uninvited any time he felt like some company and before we knew it he was friendly with the kids, familiar with the servants and started treating the fridge and bar as though they were his property. He was impervious to our initial hints that there existed certain limits which he was overstepping in a big big way, and by the time we knew him well enough to physically throw him out both Shivani and I had resigned ourselves to the matter.

Vineet Vasudev has many, many bad points about him, and this book would be excruciatingly long if I went into all of them. Not among them, and that’s what probably just about tilts the scales on the side of bearability, are dishonesty and pessimism. He spends hours teaching the kids to call their teachers things like `bloody fool’, exhorts them to flash at classmates, and shows them how to wave to our friends with the middle finger slightly bent in an imitation of the international signal of rudeness. He bought one a real cricket ball on his sixth birthday last month (and proceeded to organize a game inside the house in which the number of runs scored depended upon what was smashed), and the other a trumpet for his eighth which has since proved an unmitigated disaster for the whole neighbourhood. On the other hand, when they have been cranky for a long time and Shivani is at her wit’s end as to what to do, VV swoops in and whisks them off for an ice-cream. He can keep them quiet and occupied for hours with his stories, in all of which he is the hero doing all sorts of impossible things like saving the world from mutant monsters while assuring Miss Universe that he would be back with her once this was done, and therefore not to enroll in a nunnery. And when my Mother-in-law (an old harridan at the best of times - the sort you would like to send for a long tour of northern Siberia in winter) spent two months with us recovering from something or the other only VV could exercise any control on her. She ended up eating from the palm of his hands and even today every letter of hers to Shivani has a paragraph dedicated to his virtues.

As you can no doubt make out by now, Vineet Vasudev is a strange man. He is a man of strong likes and dislikes. When we met him, he did not like cricket to the extent that he even didn’t like people who liked cricket. And when that changed he would wake up early to hear radio commentary of the likes of Zimbabwe play, and bully my kids into bowling to him for hours on end, cheating to bat longer and running away with the bat if he was out. He has a mind which can handle only one thing at a time, focussing on the activity that occupies it to the exclusion of all else. When it’s cricket, it’s cricket. And when it’s work, it’s work. I think that is why he is so successful, when his mind is on work it is only and completely on work, for days and weeks on end.

The only trait consistent in him is his weakness for women. It is the only area of life in which he overtly displays a semblance of ambition and a zest for competition - the need to sleep with as many women as possible. He gets attracted to a person of the opposite sex easily, and loses the attraction just as easily and in almost as short a time. He just has to see a woman for something to happen to him, changing him from Dr. Jekyll to a Mr. Hyde on the prowl, not letting minor matters such as looks, age, figure, marital status, his current partner status or propriety interfere in his need to get into the sack with her. And in that respect, he and his work are made for each other, the latter ensuring that he gets to meet and share close confines with some really beautiful women.

While I am able to understand that there are some demented characters who fall for every woman they come across with no adherence to quality or any other control, it has been a never ending source of amazement to me that the opposite also happens. While VV has height and is fair of face, he is always uncaringly turned out, his permanent stubble on the painfully thin body giving him a distinctively scruffy and pathetic appearance. To add to this, he is wholly lacking in charm and, while extremely generous with friends and their children, is loath to use his bucks for what he insists God had intended to be free. And yet women return his affections with an alacrity that make the like of me feel that we have a lot to learn about the fairer sex. And, mind you, not all of them are from the modelling world to whom an encounter with VV could result in a career break - a listing of those who have had a short and intimate association with him would read like a Who’s Who of the city’s most desirable.

Such a list would, however, be difficult to obtain. His recipe for success, he says, is first, never be choosy, and second, never talk about it. And he is assiduous about following the second rule. I don’t know about the first.

When VV wants to leave town, as seemed the case on this fine morning, it is not because of either the crowds or the pollution, both of which the bloody so-and-so thrives upon. It is for one of three reasons. One, some lady has broken the rules and fallen in love with him, resulting in feelings of possession on her side and the desperate need for space on his. Two, some lady has come to know of the existence of some other lady/ies in his life, resulting in feelings of acrimony in the minds of one, two or more ladies towards him and thus in a need to make himself scarce for some time. Three, some husband or father has put out a contract on him, needing a disappearance until tempers and passions cool down. I never did get to find out exactly which it was on this occasion.

Listen here, VV, this is my office, not some playground. I work, you know, as in sit here nine to eight six days a week, for which I get paid. I can’t charley off every time you find the pollution unbearable. You need to leave town, you leave town. Far be it from me to stop you.

What bullshit, Bhalla, you pompous old twit. You’ve got nothing to do but sit here and ogle the typists and both of us know it. Your leave has piled up and there’s no one at home. So save the `I am important’ act for others and take some leave starting from Monday. We’ll discuss to where this evening.

But the house? And Shivani? What do I tell her?

Lock it up. And tell her you’re with me. She’ll know that you’re in safe hands.

And off he went, to the tune off `I’ll go, where the music takes me’.

Except for the last bit, essentially, he was spot on. So I put in an application for three weeks of leave beginning Monday and started pondering over where to go.

CHAPTER II

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AUGUST 1997

The Road to Leh

L adakh! That’s where we finally decided to head. The huge and sparsely populated eastern part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, a mountainous high altitude desert that is considered among the most inhospitable regions on earth. The whole area is supposed to be a series of mountain ranges lying almost parallel to each other, with passes from fourteen to over twenty thousand feet through them connecting the valleys which lie interspersed in between. Just reading about it is scary - the fierce, harsh but astoundingly beautiful terrain where nothing grows, the jagged peaks, the high altitude air with a minimal oxygen content making each breath an effort, high levels of ultra violet radiation that play havoc with one’s skin, and the extreme cold and huge daily temperature variation. Romantic tales about this area abound; of mystical kings and magical kingdoms, of monastic Lamas following Zen Buddhism and ancient religious ties with neighbouring Tibet, of traders who slit the nostrils of their mules on the higher passes to enable them to inhale more air with each breath, of bandits preying upon the traders whose cruelty know no limits and of barbarians from the north who scoured the area looking for ways through the mountains to loot the treasures of India.

What a place! I said when VV came over home that evening, after a long discussion and comparative analysis of the merits and demerits of a variety of possible destinations, That’s where we’ve got to go.

He was equally enthusiastic. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. And let’s get some trekking done once we are there. What say you, Ballsy, to a pleasant walk through some beautiful mountains?

Hmmm! Nothing like some of that to forget the pollution, eh?

VV was too busy singing `We got the way to do it Baby’ to react to the slight sarcasm as we made a series of lists. List one, unofficially called the Ladakh Know-alls list, was of people who would know something about how to get there, what we would need and where to go for a trek. List two, the what-we-need list, consisted of four sub-lists, food, clothing, equipment and medicine. List three, the activity list, was a PERT chart of all that we had to do in preparation for the expedition, including meeting those on list one, shopping for items on list two and trying to get our asses into shape with whatever little time we had before we embarked upon the adventure. And list four consisted of possible trekking options along with their duration and degrees of difficulty.

The first discordant note was struck when I tried to buy air tickets to Leh, the headquarters of Ladakh. I was offered tickets which were 184th and 185th on the wait list for Saturday morning. What on earth were so many people going to do in Leh at the same time, for cripe’s sake?

Hey, I didn’t ask for tickets on today’s Rajdhani to Bombay, I want air tickets to Leh for four days later, I told the Indian Airlines fellow, thinking that a little humour might soften him up. It didn’t. I bought tickets on the Delhi-Manali bus run by Himachal Tourism instead, they assured me that they also run a daily bus service from Manali to Leh if the road is open (ominous!).

The second discordant note was struck by one of my younger colleagues, a trekking enthusiast who got to know about the proposed expedition.

But Sir, are you sure you know what you are doing? I mean, Ladakh is not exactly a holiday paradise. Even if you do absolutely nothing and just sit around in Leh you need to be very fit. And you’re planning to do some trekking ….. ?

Yeah, Bhalla, have you looked at yourself in a mirror recently, that was my Boss, you’re paunch is hanging over your belt and you’re ass looks like a balloon. Better have a helicopter on standby within shouting distance.

If you do come back alive you’ll be minus those tyres around your waist, that’s for sure, said another colleague. Maybe you’d be able to make it in porno films if you don’t meet your targets.

While trying to look dignified through this onslaught and attributing it to the tirades of those who would be sitting through monsoon in Delhi while I was in the mountains, I had to admit to elements of truth in what they said. Sitting on a desk for ten hours every day worrying about detergent sales had not been wonderful for my figure. And as for fitness, the less said the better. I had gone to the park the day before expecting to run ten rounds and then, depending upon the extent of my tiredness, do five or ten more. I am ashamed to say that I ran half a round, for less time than