Saturday 8 April 2017

Bombing Syria

As everyone knows by now, the Imperialist States of Amerikastan, under der Trümpfer, launched 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airport last night. About two thirds of the vaunted Tomahawk missiles actually failed to hit their targets; a number were shot down while the rest fell on adjoining civilian areas. Even so, 23 out of 59 struck the airport, destroying or damaging fifteen aircraft, killing six soldiers and officers, and igniting a fuel depot.

It was perfectly obvious that this wasn’t a strike made up on the spur of the moment; this was the same air base which, according to the Zionist entity, had dared to retaliate with S200 missiles when zionazi planes had bombed Syria a few days ago. Also, this was one of the airports, in Hama province, which was actively engaging ISIS, rather than Obama’s – and now der Trümpfer’s – moderate cannibals.

Sure enough, just as they’d done earlier after America and its vassals deliberately bombed a Syrian Army base in Deir Azzor, ISIS followed immediately with an offensive. If one were of a nasty suspicious conspiracy-theorist mindset, one might almost believe that ISIS had known that the attack was going to happen and were all ready to exploit it. But that’s just paranoid conspiracy theorising, isn’t it?

The official excuse for the attack – retaliation for “Assad’s gas attacks on Syrian civilians” – is so farcical that it doesn’t stand examination for a moment. But it was, of course, an ideal excuse to start a conflict, and der Trümpfer needed this conflict. Why?

The first reason was to defang the worst, most pernicious hypocrites the world has ever seen, the Amerikastani liberal. These vermin, who had been clamouring for war with Syria all through the liberation of Aleppo, found another excuse to needle der Trümpfer for “not doing anything” when Assad was “gassing his own people”. Their deity, the blood soaked war criminal Killary Klingon, crawled out from under the garbage to bleat that she would have been “more aggressive”. Having bombed the Syrians officially – his predecessor, the mass murderer Barack Hussein Obama, had done so “by accident” - der Trümpfer took that particular wind out of their sails. Albeit for the moment only.

Why for the moment? The reason is Russia. Russia has a large military presence in Syria now, and is deeply committed to annihilating the jihadi cannibals as well as ISIS infesting the country. Russia isn’t about to let this go unpunished, and has already withdrawn cooperation from coordinating air sorties to avoid clashes over Syria. This means that if any Amerikastani plane intrudes into Syrian airspace from now on, it is fair game.

This in turn means that, whether der Trümpfer knows it or not, he is faced with a dilemma. He can either back down or continue to escalate the situation. If he backs down, the howls of outrage from the liberals will rise to the skies. “This proves he’s Putin’s puppet,” they will say. If he continues to escalate, there will be war with Russia. It’s a corner he’s painted himself into, and there’s no way he can get out of it.

Actually, there are other reasons he bombed Syria, and these are all in favour of escalation. One is to appease the zionazis, who are desperate to prevent the Syrian government from winning. The apartheid Zionist colonial regime in Occupied Palestine wants a divided, weakened Syria. It also wants a “Kurdistan”, ruled by one of the Kurdish factions it controls, so it can exploit its resources. And what the zionazi regime wants, in any Amerikastani administration since 1967 at least, the zionazi regime gets.

Then, it was to get the military industrial complex on his side. As long as der Trümpfer was claiming to want to not engage in regime change wars, the complex was deeply unhappy, because war is just about the only industry the Imperialist States of Amerikastan still has. Now, he’s as suddenly acceptable to them as George W Bush became as soon as he attacked Afghanistan. Overnight, I predict, the talk about “impeaching” Trump will disappear from the media, and he will be rehabilitated as a patriot doing the best for his country.

That’s the idea. The reality, as the first battles with Russia will amply demonstrate, will be somewhat different.

Bring on the Apocalypse.


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Here are some cartoons. The first is a Statement of Gratitude. You'll agree al Qaeda has a lot to be grateful for.




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The second is actual and incontrovertible Proof Of The Syrian Regime's Chemical Holocaust. I'm sure you'll admit that we on the Assad side have no reply to it.



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The third is the phenomenon of al Qaeda's Air Force, which in 2001 comprised four hijacked aeroplanes and now consist of the entirety of NATO. I hope Americans are happy and proud of this. I know al Qaeda are.



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And the fourth is the Rescue Mission which the Emperor of the World had to embark on in Syria. You know how it is.


Did I use too little orange, or is it enough?

Thursday 6 April 2017

At The Hanging Ground

Ritik’s mum didn’t want him to go and watch the hangings, of course, but his dad insisted.

“He has to go,” he said. “He needs to see what we had to do to win, and what we have to do now.”

“I don’t want him to go.” Ritik’s mum, as was right and proper, had almost never dared contradict her husband before, and flinched instinctively, in anticipation of a blow. But for once he didn’t raise his hand.

“Try to understand, Aba,” he said. “If he isn’t there, people will notice, and word gets around. We don’t want to draw attention at times like these.”

“My class teacher told us we have to write an essay on the hanging,” Ritik said.

Ritik’s mum, who of course had never learnt to read or write, lived in awe of education. She drew a shaky sigh and wiped her face with the hem of her grey dress. “All right,” she said, with a twist of the lips that might have been an attempt to smile. “If your teacher wants you to watch it, then of course you must watch it.”

“We’ve got to hurry,” Ritik’s dad said, as they left the house. “If we don’t get there in time we won’t be close enough to see anything.”

The street was already full of people, all walking towards the hanging ground. They were forced even closer because the street was not just narrow, it was filled with debris and wrecked vehicles. The burnt, overturned hulk of the lorry which had lain there for months and on which Ritik’s mother had forbidden him to play alone filled up half the street. Some girls, too young to be declared women and therefore still allowed some freedom, were standing on it, as though they could see as far as the hanging ground from atop the wreckage. One of them recognised Ritik and grinned.

“So you’re going to the hanging?” she squealed. “Lucky you!”

“Yes,” Ritik muttered. He was embarrassed at his father seeing him talking to a girl. Especially this girl, Sima, was by far the prettiest in the locality, as well as the boldest. It was well known, though nobody admitted it openly, that her parents were secretly teaching her to read and write.

Sima slid down the side of the wreck until her feet were on a level with Ritik’s eyes. Holding on with one hand to the broken stub of a rear view mirror, she leaned down towards him. “After you come back,” she said, “tell me what you saw. Tell me everything!”

“Now, Sima,” Ritik’s dad said, quite mildly. Sima’s father was important in the local self-government council and he couldn’t slap the girl as he wanted to. “Be careful, you’ll cut yourself. And we have to be going.”

“Yes, Uncle.” Sima grinned, her tongue showing between her missing front teeth. “Bye, Ritik, I’ll see you later.” Toes as prehensile as her fingers, she clambered back up, to take her place with the other girls.

“She’s going to be a problem later, when she’s a teenager,” Ritik’s dad muttered. His fingers dug into Ritik’s shoulders so hard that he winced. “Her parents don’t keep her under any control. Come on.”

As they came out of the maze of lanes and into the larger street, the crowd thickened, until there must have been thousands of people. They were, of course, all walking, because the vehicles had all been taken away and but for the government there was no fuel to be had. Policemen in khaki carrying long rifles loitered at corners and under the porticos of buildings, watching the crowd, but there was no disturbance. Nobody seemed angry, just anxious to get to the hanging ground in time. Ritik saw a couple of women peering from windows down at the crowd. One of them saw him looking at her and jerked back so quickly she seemed to disappear, like a pricked soap bubble or a magic trick.

“We’ll never get there in time,” Ritik groaned. His father didn’t say anything.

Just then there was a commotion. Policemen with sticks came past in a line, pushing people to the sides, clearing the middle of the street. Ritik heard the unfamiliar noise of engines, and saw a line of lorries approach. A great Aaah went up from the crowd.

“What are they?” Ritik asked, tugging at his father’s sleeve.

“The hanging,” Ritik’s father said. “They’re going to the hanging.”

Ritik stared, open-mouthed. The lorries were old and rust-streaked, their paint peeling, and their engines bled blue smoke, but it had been so long since he’d seen vehicles of any kind that they looked huge and fascinating. Soldiers in green-and-brown uniforms stood on them, looking down at the crowd with no expression on their faces.

Despite the best efforts of the policemen with sticks, the crowd ahead was so tightly packed that the lorries slowed down to a crawl, and eventually came to a stop. The first in line was just beside Ritik and his father. A soldier in the cabin, sitting beside the driver, leaned out of the window.

“Hey, you,” he said to Ritik’s dad. “Do you live around here? Can you tell us any short cuts to the hanging ground, without so many people?”

Ritik’s father scratched his moustache for a few seconds. “Well, if you take the first turn to the left, past the old Polytechnic institute, you’ll get into the lanes on that side. They’re relatively clear, and you’d probably get there faster than by the main road, but it’s a longer way round.”

“Do you know the way?” Without waiting for the answer the soldier opened the door and gestured impatiently to the seats behind him and the driver. “Right, get in, then, and show us.”

Even Ritik knew that when a soldier told you to do something, you did it at once. You might sometimes be able to cajole a policeman, but not a soldier. Without a word, his father pushed him into the cab and got in behind him.

“I hope it’s not going to take long,” the soldier said. His uniform smelt vaguely of lime and there were silver stars on his shoulders. He was older than the other soldiers in the lorries, older even than Ritik’s father. His hair and moustache were silver and grey. “We’re running late as it is.”

“It won’t, sir.” Ritik’s dad’s voice was more deferential than he’d ever heard it before. The line of lorries began grinding forward slowly. “Here, turn to the left.”

The lorry began to turn. The back seat was small and rather smelly, squeezed behind the driver’s and the other soldier’s seats, and Ritik twisted uncomfortably, trying to find space for his legs. The older soldier with the stars glanced at him over his shoulder.

“Your son, is he? Taking him to see the hanging?”

“Yes, sir. He’s seven.”

“A good age. Well, boy, are you eager to see the hanging?”

Ritik blinked stupidly, and only realised that he was meant to answer when his father gave his thigh a vicious pinch. “Yes,” he said. Another pinch. He blinked back tears, and then remembered what he was supposed to say. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Excellent. And because your father’s showing us the way, I’ll make sure you get a place in the front line. How’s that?”

“That’s good...” Ritik saw his father’s frown beginning. “Thank you, sir,” he added hastily.

The soldier wasn’t done. “Do you know why we’re going to hang them?”

Ritik glanced quickly at his father, but saw no way of escape. He remembered what the class teacher had said, and made them memorise and recite. “Because they’re criminals, sir. Because they want to destroy our society and make us like the animals.”

“That’s right. We can’t have them getting ideas about their station, do we?”

Ritik did not understand. “Sir?”

“Which way do I go?” the driver asked, speaking for the first time. He had a high, plaintive voice. “Right, or straight ahead?”

Both the silver star soldier and Ritik’s dad turned to look through the windscreen. “Right,” Ritik’s dad said. “There’s another turn just past this turning, to the left. And then...”

Relieved that their attention was off him, Ritik sat back, and wriggled again to find a more comfortable position. He ended up with his back to the window and facing his father. There was a pane of glass set into the back of the cabin, just at his right shoulder, and to avoid having to look at his father or the silver star soldier he turned his head to look through it at the back of the truck.

At first all he saw was the soldiers’ green and brown clad legs. In between them, lying on the lorry bed, was a bundle of blue and grey. He didn’t for a moment understand what it was, and then he noticed the pale oval of the face, framed by dark hair. The woman was sitting with her back propped up against a box, facing the front of the lorry.

Ritik was so astonished at seeing a woman in a lorry that for a few moments he seriously considered drawing his father’s attention to ask him who she was. Then he noticed that her ankles were tied together, and her arms were behind her back, and then he understood what she was there for.

“Nasty, isn’t she?” It was the silver star soldier speaking, behind Ritik’s left ear. Leaning over the back of his seat, he pointed with a calloused finger. “Just look at that face.”

Ritik looked at the face. She was a young woman, he realised, probably not even as old as Sima’s mother, who was very young. She was also very pretty, though her face was pale and there was a smudge of dirt on her cheek. Her black eyes, wide open, stared at Ritik but seemed to see him not at all.

“What’s she done?” he wanted to ask, but didn’t. The silver star soldier acted as though he’d asked anyway.

“She’s one of the worst,” he said. “She organised resistance groups and ran a network of arms to the old government’s supporters. And apart from that she refused to obey the laws. Just like the others. Some of them were running schools for girls.”

“Schools for girls,” Ritik’s dad repeated. He sounded tired. “What next, giving jobs to women?”

“That’s what they want, don’t they?” The silver star soldier pointed again. “That’s the face of the enemy, my boy. Look at her properly, so you know the type next time.”

Ritik didn’t really understand, but looked. Something strange happened. The soldiers’ legs seemed to melt away into a greenish blur at the edges of his vision; he could only see the woman, and then, even her body melted away. He was looking into her face, and her eyes, which were so wide and dark and unblinking. He suddenly felt quite certain that she was so terrified that she couldn’t even blink, let alone move.

“It’s all right,” he wanted to say, the way his mum told him if he fell down and skinned his knee. “It’s all right.” Only it was not all right, and it wouldn’t be. And he couldn’t say it aloud, anyway.

There was a wrenching feeling, and suddenly he felt himself in her body, looking through her eyes. Her body felt uncomfortable and new, too large and bulging in the wrong places. And he couldn’t feel her hands and feet, which had gone numb because the ropes were so tight.

He tried to say something, but couldn’t move her lips. All he could feel was her fear, flapping like a trapped bird inside her head, tearing with metal beaks and claws at the back of her skull to set itself free.

“Please,” he wanted to shout. “Don’t be so afraid. Please, I’m here.” Only he wasn’t, not really, and the fear didn’t stop flapping at all.

Dimly, he heard his father giving more instructions, and then with a jerk the lorry stopped. He found himself back in his body, so suddenly that he almost fell off the narrow seat. His father’s hand steadied him.

“We’re here,” he said. “We’ve to get down now.”

The silver star soldier was already down on the ground, pointing at people and giving orders. He glanced round at Ritik and his father as though surprised to see them there.

“Oh, you two,” he said. “Go stand over there, just this side of the rope line. You’ll get a good view.”

The ropes were strung up on short poles, and there were already a lot of people on the other side. They watched Ritik and his dad curiously. He could feel them talking about him. Someone shouted and pointed. It was a familiar voice, a boy from school. Ritik waved at him self-consciously.

“Here come the other lorries,” Ritik’s father said, pointing. The rest of the line of lorries emerged one by one from the lanes, six, eight, nine, until ten had followed the one he and his father had arrived on. The drivers turned them and moved them back and forth until they were all in a line, side by side. Behind them was a long wooden bar, held up on posts. It looked like the framework of a wall of a house being built for a giant.

“What are they doing that for?” Ritik asked, and then he understood. The soldiers in the backs of the lorries had lowered the tailgates. Now they began looping rope over the top bar, one rope for each lorry. Other soldiers dragged boxes to the edges of the tailgates, like the box on which the woman he’d seen had been leaning. Then, one by one, they hoisted bound figures on to the boxes.

They were all women, of course. Ritik couldn’t see all their faces, but he could see they were all ages. Some were white-haired and dressed in traditional clothes, and some even younger than his young woman, who was closest. She looked straight ahead without moving, even when a soldier climbed on the box behind her to loop a noose over her head.

People were pushing and jostling, so that the rope barrier bulged, and seemed about to topple over. The silver star soldier strode angrily back, gesturing and shouting. The crowd’s noise fell to a low mutter and the pushing eased.

Ritik hardly noticed. He was staring at his young woman, trying to will himself into her head again, to see what she was seeing, to find out if she was any less afraid. He balled his fists, trying desperately to get into her again, but it didn’t happen. He was still trying when the lorry engine burst into life and the vehicle moved off.

Things began to happen in slow motion. For a moment the woman moved with the lorry, and then she seemed to lean forward and fell off it. The rope around her neck caught her before her feet could touch the ground, and Ritik heard a faint snap. Her bound legs slowly bent at the knee, rose, and straightened again. Her head twisted towards one shoulder, she swung round and round.

She was just the first One by one the other lorries began driving away, the women dropping one by one. Most of them fell like his young woman, but one or two bobbed and twitched and kicked.

The crowd roared, the noise washing over like the waves of the sea. It was a roar of approval. Ritik could tell that because the silver star soldier was grinning and waving. The lorries had stopped a short distance away, and the soldiers began unloading the boxes.

“They’ll be cutting them down and stuffing them into the coffins now,” Ritik heard someone say, close by in the crowd on the other side of the barrier.

“It was too easy for most of them, if you ask me,” someone else replied. “They broke their necks instead of hanging them properly. It’s just the two of them over there who got what they deserve.” The two figures were still twitching and kicking spasmodically. Little by little, the kicking stopped, and then they were just swinging like the others.

The silver star soldier, who Ritik decided must be an officer, came back up to Ritik and his father. He seemed in a very good mood now, his face split by an enormous smile. “Got a good look, eh?” he said, clapping Ritik on the shoulder. “Want a closer look, do you? Go on, then.”

“Go on,” his father repeated, pushing him forward. Ritik walked forward until he was looking up at his young woman. Her eyes were closed now, and there was blood still trickling round her neck. Her feet, like Sima’s earlier, were on a level with his eyes. Somehow, one of her shoes had come off as she’d fallen, and her big toe was poking through a hole in the sock. The toenail was painted dark red. It was the first time Ritik had seen nail polish. He wanted to touch the toenail, to see if the polish would rub off.

“Ritik,” his father called. “Go and look at the others.”

Ritik nodded, and turned away from his young woman for the last time. He wondered if the bird with the metal beak and claws had fought its way free, and where it had escaped.

Once more, he tried to get into her head, but of course now he could feel nothing there at all.

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There’s your friend,” his father said, as they walked into their lane. “You tell her what’s done to bad women, so she doesn’t end the same way. And then come in. Your mother will have dinner ready.”

“She’s not my friend,” Ritik muttered, but his father had already walked off ahead. Sima jumped off the wrecked lorry and came over. She was eating an apple, and juice ran down her chin. Ritik’s stomach growled with hunger at the sight. It had been at least a year since he’d last seen an apple.

“Well?” she demanded. “What was it like? Did you get a good look?”

“Yes,” Ritik said. “I got a good look.”

“Tell me, then,” Sima said. She stamped a bare foot. “I’ve been waiting and waiting.”

“It’s not interesting,” Ritik said. “You wouldn’t like it.”

“Go on,” Sima said, and brought out another apple from the pocket of her dress. “Tell me. Do you want this? I’ll give you this if you tell me.”

“Yes, well, thanks,” Ritik said, and took the apple.

Its juice filled his mouth with tart freshness, and he wondered for a fleeting moment when his woman had last eaten an apple, and whether in her last moments she’d focussed on that memory, thought about nothing but that at all.

"Boys have all the fun," Sima said.


Copyright B Purkayastha 2017



   Note to reader: This story is based upon, and written to exorcise, last night’s dream.

Wednesday 5 April 2017

Current Affairs In Cartoons. Plus one more.

As I Was Going To St Ives



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CЯEATUЯE FEATUЯE



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Interview With A Vampire



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Sarin For The Interruption



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Crash


Nightsglow

There is an imp which lives in the corner of my room, just below the ceiling.

By day, or even in the evening, it’s invisible. It is only at midnight, when I leave the bed, that it can be seen, a clot of pure liquid darkness, with rows of thousands of tiny teeth, like stars.

I do not think the imp wants to be seen. I think it is frightened of me.

Silently, then, I leave the room, ignoring it. At this hour of night, the world blazes with light, incandescent blues and greens and violets. The sky overhead is a white sheet sprinkled with black stars.

The stairs are cold and sharp, each step like a knife to my feet. I dislike the stairs; the walls are full of faces, distorted and smeared. They always look as though they want to shout out for help, but can only gibber and mouth silently. I don’t know what they are; the memories of passions, perhaps, trapped in the walls of the stairs. I pass them by, quickly, without looking at them.

The road is a river of shining silver light, in which parked cars are half-submerged dark humps, like rocks. The silver light usually submerges me up to the knees, but in recent days it has been creeping higher. Today it is nearly to my hips. Perhaps one day it will cover me.

Something long and smoke-grey, with dull red glowing eyes, follows me, swimming half-submerged in the silvery light. It follows me every night, as close as it can get, but it cannot harm me, not yet. Not as long as I’m clothed in skin and bone, blood and muscle; it is a predator, yes; I have seen it feed, more than once. But it can feed only on things not of flesh, on the creatures of the night.

Tonight I’m headed down to the river. I can feel it calling, a call just below the threshold of hearing, like a pull at my nerves. A few people, hunched shadows, walk past me up the street, hurrying home from late shifts, wading through the silver light without seeing it. They don’t look at me, and the thing that follows at my heels ignores them completely.

The river is dark and light by turns, speckled and surging with patterns that I can feel all the way from the top of the slope. There is something there, in the water, something that I have not yet seen, but which I know is there. The thing behind me knows it, too, and begins to lag behind. Finally it turns away and disappears. The thing in the river frightens even it.

The bridge across the river is a glowing golden thread, almost too bright to look upon. Grey curdled shadows punctuate both sides, imps or ghosts or something else altogether, I have never been able to tell. They never change position, never react to anything. More than once I have passed my hand through one of them. It was like trying to catch hold of smoke.

She’s almost at the far end of the bridge, standing looking down at the water. I see her from halfway along the span, and I know it’s she who’s been calling me, summoning me. Her hair is  loose around her face, and the garment she wears falls down from her shoulders to disappear into the golden glow around her feet.

She doesn’t look around when I come up, but she knows I’m there. I can see her shoulders stiffen, her hands curl into fists. She’s called me, summoned me here, but she’s not happy to see me. She is terrified.

I have no idea who she is. I have never before been at night with someone who would talk to me, who knows what I am. I do not know what to do.

I stand beside her for a while, not speaking. She’s close enough to touch, and I want to touch her, to confirm that she’s real, solid and corporeal, but I know I can’t, I shouldn’t. She’s almost vibrating with the tension of knowing I’m there, and that she can’t do anything about it.

There’s nobody else on the bridge, no vehicles or people, or a patrolling policeman. If there were, we would probably have looked like lovers watching the stars on the water. But lovers do not stand like this, one not knowing why he has been called, the other terrified of what she has summoned.

Finally, she breaks the silence. “Why are you here?” Her voice is something that I hear with my ears, but at the same time feel inside my head.

“You called me here,” I reply, feeling stupid. “You don’t know why?”

“I didn’t call you, but I knew you were coming. Maybe we’ll find out why.” She still won’t look at me, and her face, shrouded by her hair, is still invisible. “I have been waiting.”

“For me?”

“No, not for you.” She holds out her hands, and I see the blood crawling down her wrists, drops as black as the stars prickling the glowing sky. The blood drips into the golden glow and vanishes. “That is what I am waiting for,” she says. “The blood to stop dripping. But it’s taking a long tome.”

My mouth moves. “How long?”

“Months, maybe,” she says. “I don’t know. I have been bleeding months, and months, and months.”

“What do you think I am here to do?” I look around, feeling helpless, but there’s nobody else, nobody to help. And even if there were, what could they do? Even I can tell that it isn’t blood anyone can see.

She says nothing, just holds her hands out further, past the railings and over the water, and squeezes her fists. The blood stops coming in drops and runs down her arms in two little trickles, tributaries joining the speckled water below.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

At last she replies. “Giving. Feeding. You’ll see.”

Something rises from the water of the river. I have an impression of an immensely long neck, a gaping mouth studded with needle teeth, and two vast eyes as blind and hungry as the gulfs of space. It rears into the air until it towers over the bridge, over us, and before I can even move, it darts forward like a striking snake, taking her blood out of the air before the drops can even strike the water. For a moment it looks up at us, its blind eyes filled with endless hunger. Then it is gone.

I cannot bring myself to speak.

“That was my son,” she says at last. “He drowned last year, down there. He was three years old.”

Then, at last, she turns to me, raising the hair away from her face. We look at each other.

“I know now why you came,” she says. “You came because I wanted you to see. I needed you to see. What you have done.”

“I...I didn’t drown him.”

“But he wouldn’t have been alive but for you. And I wouldn’t be feeding him...and feeding him... and it never stops. Do you understand? It never stops.”

I move, my hand rising slightly. She backs away, a flash of panic in her eyes.

“Don’t touch me,” she says. “Don’t touch me.”

Then she turns and walks away, down from the bridge and away into the glowing city across the river, and I stand there and watch her go.

The stars are black and the sky is white, and the city is full of lights, and the shadows play as the cold eats my bones.


Copyright B Purkayastha 2017

Monday 3 April 2017

Blood and Pain and Suffering

As you all know, I enjoy inflicting pain and suffering on helpless victims, which include the pain and suffering I inflict on you all by forcing you to look at my handiwork.

Yes, I am a cruel sadist. Why on earth do you imagine I’m called Bill the Butcher? Huh?

All right, this 35 year old lady arrived with tooth pain in the lower right jaw. As you can see in this photo, there was an almost completely submerged wisdom tooth buried in the gum, with only the tip of one cusp showing.




I took an X Ray, which revealed a vertical impaction, in which the tooth is vertically embedded in the bone and gum. It’s quite a rare form of impaction, actually, and vertically impacted teeth are surprisingly hard to extract because they’re very difficult to loosen in the socket.



So I anesthetised her and started the job. Here you can see a periosteal elevator being used to detach the gum from around the tooth.



Then, with a Number 15 Bard Parker Knife, I cut a flap in the gum to expose the bone and as much of the crown of the tooth as possible. Here you can see the flap, somewhat obscured by already coagulating blood.



The tooth was mostly deeply embedded in the bone, with no way to grasp it with a pair of extraction forceps, so I cut a gutter in the bone around the crown, with a tungsten carbide bur mounted in a straight airotor handpiece.



Here you can see the gutter clearly, between the tooth and the jawbone.






This permitted me to introduce an Apexolever elevator between the tooth and the bone, and lever it  out of the jaw.





However, it did leave a gaping open socket...



...which I closed with a single black silk suture.




Any questions? Apartfrom asking me why the hell I inflict these on you, I mean?