Married Chips

This was an email forward.

After nearly 50 years of marriage, a couple was lying in bed one
evening, when the wife felt her husband, begin to massage her in ways he hadn't in quite some time.

It almost tickled as his fingers started at her neck, and then began
moving down past the small of her back. He then caressed her
shoulders and neck, slowly worked his hand down, stopping just over
her stomach.

He then proceeded to place his hand on her left inner arm, working
down her side, passing gently over her buttock and down her leg to her calf.

Then, he proceeded up her thigh, stopping just at the uppermost
portion of her leg. He continued in the same manner on her right
side, then suddenly stopped, rolled over and became silent.

As she had become quite aroused by this caressing, she asked in a
loving voice, 'Honey, that was wonderful. Why did you stop?'

To which he responded: 'I found the remote.'

And he took flight

Fearless was the young ornithologist who went by the name of Arjun. Keen of the eye and sharp of the mind, unquenchable was his thirst for adventure. And insatiable his hunger for knowledge.

Early one morn, at the crack of dawn, the intrepid ornithologist rose from bed and set out to find a treasure of knowledge in the dingy alleyways of Jumeraat Bazaar. Two streets down, he came upon a scrawny and dubious looking peddler, towing a cartful of literature, bound in leather. He scaled walls by night, peddled by morning and called himself Ali. Alas, books, to him, merely balanced a weighing stone on the other side of a balance.

A sparkle set itself ablaze in his eye the instant they fell upon the dirty pile. And Arjun began sifting the sand for the nugget in gold. Grains dropped through the hourglass in torrents. As did perspiration through the pores. Arjun, keen as he was, kept on, regardless of the hour. Regardless of the heckles raised on the peddler. Regardless of the incessantly growing din in the dingy bazaar.

Rise he did, clutching a leather-bound hard enough to inspire white on his knuckles. When he did, triumph wrote an allegory across his forehead. He held the chronicle of a hero, a man who coerced an entire generation to look skywards. A man who taught the world that a bird was an angel in disguise.

Fleet of the foot as he was, he reached his den in no time, and threw himself headlong into the chronicle – an account of the experiences of the hero, in pursuit of the White-tailed Tropicbird from Samoa. One of only three species of the Tropicbird, the bird was magnificence written across the inconceivably blue Samoan skies.

Less of leather and more of adventure the chronicle smelt. And it unravelled the tethers of imagination in the young man. The expectation put a resonating throb of a concoction of young blood and adrenalin in his temples. Tatters were how his resistance and reason lay, and a deep breath did Arjun take. He willed the Samoan spirit into his veins.

Three weeks passed but the passion survived. And down set the young man his foot on Samoan soil. Along snaked the road from Apia to Sa‘Moana, and with it sped the young man they called Arjun.

He set his sails southwards on small vessel and in search of the island of the White-tailed Tropicbird. Across the sky the sun stretched. The salt of the sea met the salt of his perspiration. Soon enough, out of the blue sea grew a speck of green. That spec grew to a mountain. And so did his eagerness to set foot on that land.
Suddenly, the vessel sputtered and choked itself to a fuming death. The maritime beast had a hole in its heart, and away she bled across the ocean for miles behind, leaving her tanks dry. With the island in site, and an oar without, the young man and his vessel bobbed at the mercy of a ruthless ocean.

For this alone he lived, this relentless explorer. He tore a strip of metal off the boat and made an oar of it. Short as it was, he moved slow. But move he did. Alas, he was no match to the massive white waves of the mighty ocean and tumbled into the sea.

The ocean thrashed him with rocks, dragged him along urchins, and doused him in water. But the boy was steadfast. He reached the beach and screamed at the sea, “Is that all my friend?” And his laughter tinkled.

His vessel in shambles, his garb in tatters and his hope on the decline he screamed for help. For three days and three nights he screamed. And his voice found no mate. Dejected, hungry, and utterly out of hopelessness he looked up towards the mountain. And he heard it thunder. Boulders rolled down. The earth trembled. Birds flew from their perches. Even the ocean succumbed into silence. And it rose to the sky from the top of the mountain. A plume of smoke.

**********

Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia or Abulafia was a thirteenth century Jewish scholar and philosopher. Among all of his deeply philosophical pursuits and passions, he had this obsessive belief that alphabets, numerals, vowel-points and their infinite permutations hid the purpose of human existence and the “truth”.

Umberto Eco wrote this incredible book called Focault’s Pendulum. Now related to as the intelligent man’s Da Vinci Code (I got this from Wikipedia!), the book is about these three nerdy editors who think they’ve stumbled upon the truth of the universe and get into a world of trouble and, of course, adventure! One of three editor has a computer, or a “Word Processor”, that he called Abulafia.

This guy (for the frailty of memory, lets call him Bob) is a really interesting character. He believes, like a lot of others, that the true name of God is one particular combination of the several million characters of the Torah. And that Abulafia and Basic Programming (can you believe this!) could be the key to cracking the right combination of God’s name. In other words, the “Password” to the truth.

The third editor (the first one is our protagonist) believes that the point of the belief that the combination of characters makes God’s name and the pursuit of finding that is to give people a purpose in life, a religious direction, and other theological implications of that. So he is completely opposed to the idea of using Abulafia for this purpose (even though both know that the piece of medieval hardware they call Abulafia would take close to 30 million years to get all the combinations in place, let alone find the right one).

So the story begins with Bob going missing. One night he calls our protagonist, the first editor, and tells him that their “Plan” or theory about the truth of the universe was true, and that the details of it were in Abulafia (all this while vacillating and scaring the large intestine out of the protagonist). Bob manages to tell the hero that his life is in grave danger (in true bollywood, no hollywood style) and hangs up, abruptly.

Our hero reaches Bob’s apartment at the speed of light, tumbles over an assortment of books, paraphernalia and other nonsense a complete nerd would have in an apartment, scampers over to Abulafia, turns it on, and wheezing like a pug with an asthma attack stares into the screen, dumbfounded.

The screen says, “Do you have the password?”

The hero has this desperate sense of urgency to save his fellow nerd (Bob). So he gets about the business of hacking into Abulafia so he can understand what Bob is really stuck in and exactly where in hell he is. He works all evening, all night, the whole of the next day, the whole of the next evening, punching password after password. He tears his hair out and that of a stuffed toy lying on a shelf next to him trying to figure out what the password could be. Names of girlfriends (not that Bob had many), dates, books, places Bob liked, absolutely everything. But each time, Abulafia returns the same answer. “Invalid password. Do you have the password?”

Just as he snubs out the last cigarette in the apartment, in a fit of utter frustration, he tries his last attempt before he puts Abulafia under a train. And he types “No”.

Abulafia flickers to life.