Accident

So what do you do if you're cycling along an empty road, whistling a merry tune, thinking about your lady love as you look adoringly up at the periwinkleblue sky and dream of the twinkle in her eyes, feeling the wind rushing through your hair, smelling the delicious vapours from the nearby "Bhola Pandey Roll Corner" guy's frying pan, when your reverie is very rudely interrupted by something pitching you off the saddle and dashing your bermudaspared knees to the unkind gravel?

The friend whose story I tell also had had the handlebar driven into a rather painful nook next to the groin.

So I won't wait for your answer to my question. Because he couldn't think one up at the moment. He had bitten his lower lip and sniffed back an accidental tear. As many (of course, pain of this description is a masculine privilege) before and after him had felt when they had narrowly escaped traumatic emasculation, he had thought that he had died, for his field of vision had filled with stars.

As comprehension had dawned upon him, he had put two and two together in his slow pate, and had calculated that after all the hell he had put his unfortunate parents through, and all the money he had nicked from his dad's purse to buy cigarettes or an occasional White Mischief, and all the sweet epithets he had bestowed upon the much-hated teachers when their backs were turned, and all the sites he had visited on the internet that would have made NetNanny blush scarlet and hand over a bashful resignation- he should have been seeing hot, boiling, glutinous orange, bubbling lava. Not stars.

So, he had inferred, he wasn't dead.

And then, he had seen the cause of his pain.

For there, four feet off, standing very still with its ears pricked up and its eyes small and fearful, breathing very fast, looking ready to bolt, was the flatsnouted corpulent porker that had so effortlessly knocked him over.

"It was the fattest pig you'll ever see," he had told me.

I won't waste time giving you my observations about the way in which most teenagers tend to exaggerate their problems, and comment that the pig may not have been as gigantic as my friend had made it seem, but somewhat average-sized, I mean, pigs are always somewhat fat, maybe they find it fashionable...........oh, never mind!

But here's what he had done.

He had racked his brain for a bloodcurdling malediction to throw at the offender. He had thought and thought. He had opened his mind's Lexicon Of Unprintable Adjectives and turned the pages from A to Z, looking for something to...............

And then he had understood the depth of the soup he was in.

What the hell do you call a pig?

But with uncharacteristic intelligence, he had found the answer in a moment of glorious inspiration...

"MANUSHER BACHCHA!!" he had screamed at the top of his cracking, adolescent voice.

The pig's eyes had narrowed, if such a thing is possible. Then he had given vent to his unconditional disapproval of this conduct with an earsplitting "OINK!"

Then, he had turned up his snout, and left.