A bedbug in my asshole

It wriggles. It tickles.

The annual social media plan for the entire year for a brand of phenyl is being worked out in front of me. The boss stands at the white board explaining the different kinds of things that needs to be done for the brand. It is a Friday, which means people who usually wear boring formal clothes can relax and wear t-shirts and jeans. A client servicing person looks attentively at the white board wondering where he could pipe in and add value to what the boss is saying. The boss, as he talks, looks at everyone seated inside the conference room one by one. He looks at the client servicing person next to me and then turns his eyes towards me. It wriggles.
For the last few days, I feel a few pairs of tiny feet amble up and down the hairy terrains of my thighs. How do I know it’s an insect? You know that feeling when a drop of sweat finds a way from your armpit to the waist? This is the same feeling, only upwards. I know it is a bedbug for sure because where I come from, there are plenty. Get where I am coming from? As I sleep at night, I feel a family of bedbugs faithfully perched on each of my limbs. It is after much deliberation that I have arrived at the conclusion that it is one of them that has found its way up my asshole, making it a temporary abode. It wriggles every now and then tickling the folds that cover the orifice.
How did they come home? They came home in an old sleeping bag that one of my roommates brought along with him. Apparently he hadn’t opened the bag for five years. It had also been given to him by his grandmother who had no use for it either.
It’s funny when I spank myself in the middle of the road. It’s a desperate way to say, “Shut the fuck up!” in the bedbug language. It seems to understand for soon enough, I feel it on the expressway between my buttocks and my knee. It is all the more funny when I am on my bike. To motorists passing by, I seem to be rubbing my thigh relentlessly. The worst of my fears is that the policemen patrolling near the Haji Ali dargah would see my actions as suspicious and open fire at me. My thighs are its playgrounds.
When at my desk in the office, I sit stiffly with a pained expression on my face. I learnt it from George on the Seinfeld show. He says, “If you want to seem busy, always look hassled.” But my stiffness had more to do with the fact that I was hosting another living creature. When the bedbug senses that my body doesn’t seem to be making much movement, it gingerly ventures out of its enclosure, its movements reminding me of how, in the olden ages, young men would venture out of their homes to faraway countries hoping to make their fortune. It takes a fast train from wherever it is to the front, only to get entangled in the much denser foliage.
I would only be too happy to play Noah and host as many creatures as possible, if only their movement didn’t cause me that itch.
Cut to the conference room where I am at the white board with the black marker in my hand when it moves across one of the most sensitive parts of the human body. The brain calls for an itch. With 12 eyeballs watching you with rapt attention and not even blinking, there is not much you can do other than what Sachin Tendulkar does before he settles down at the crease. The rest of what I talk is a blur. I write myself a mental note. Pull undies down tonight and check.
I reach home. Turn on all the lights, disrobe and bend down. I could imagine the way I looked from behind. Little Johhny once told a friend that he thought of a sun rising over two hills when he saw his father bend down to pick up a bar of soap on the bathroom floor. Over thirty minutes of careful, bent-over scrutiny revealed that I must deforest the region if I had to teach the encroacher a lesson.
My girlfriend is coming home this weekend. I must ask the visitor to kindly get out before that. I don’t want her to be interrupted in anything important by a pair of complex eyes staring at her, you see? It would be alright if she screams but it won’t be too pleasant if she bites down hard.

Grim, eh?

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