ENNIUS BEUVANT ESCRIVOIT, ESCRIVANT BEUVOIT
Thank god, he did not write:
ENNIUS BEUVANT GUERRISOYT, GUERRISOYANT BEUVOIT
Rabelais languished on the other side of the rive, pryingly eyeing the bottle of wine in my hands, which had swung by now, for the cyclist leaned against me as he wanted to go past me past the cycle track past the pedestrian pathway and brushed against my elbow giving me a sharp pain in the muscle. Before I knew Baudelaire had transformed to blood, and I had stuck the cyclist clean with a blow of the bottle of wine, with the resulting catastrophe, that he fell with a bang from the cycle and a fount appeared from his forehead, with the bang, as red as a cyclist’s wine spouting on the yellow sand next to him.
Quickly, I fled for I did not want to pay a fine for crossing the pedestrian lights when the lights were green, anyway what could I have told the gentleman, a gentleman who was vulnerable and floundering, after having picked up the fight himself. To his credit, he did not want to pick up a fight, and to my credit, I did not stay there to inflict more injuries or to provide him succour, for I figured out the Hôtel de Ville was just around the corner, and he could have cycled to it, if he wished, hopefully with the mask on, for whether or not he was dying with profusion of blood from his forehead, one should not infect one’s fellow beings with coronavirus.
I had nothing to say, but to my credit, I did not wear the mask on. I was now the perpetrator, or in law I would be taken as such, though I had not provoked the fight, and I had still the good sense to leave the white strings of the mask in the pocket, because on principle I would not cover my face on the public sphere, even though by principle I had just shattered the forehead of a fellow citizen with a bottle of wine because he brushed against me with a cycle and threatened to go past me on the pedestrian pathway. He was technically wrong, but the punishment I inflicted on him was a little too much, anyway after the French had suffered so much hearing Macron say again and again: ‘Je compte sur vous…’.
I walked gingerly, I never fled. I did not cover my mouth (with a mask). I only looked at the dome of the Hôtel de Ville and wondered if I should step in in the Intercontinental Hotel lodged in the premises, and have a drink at the reception bar, to calm my nerves. I did nothing like it. I walked through the whole breadth of the city, with a bottle of wine in my hands, not scared of anything, not regretful of anything, though always wondering if I had killed a man?
I wondered, though I figured out I was exaggerating, and I meant to cross the mountain towards a park and have my bottle of wine in pique-nique in reflection of what had passed today, and perhaps tabulate it to Meursault’s act in Camus’ L’étranger, when a police car intercepted me. So far I had forgotten about the police, I thought it was a matter between men, anyway the police still worked during coronavirus? They hushed me into a car, and I got situated next to a pert brunette who started flirting with me:
‘It is your first time?’
‘Huh? ’
‘Yours?’
‘First time’
‘And yours?’
‘Ah I have had many…picked up in cars, I mean’
‘You used your arme?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The arme?’
‘My arme?’
‘The arme I mean, the bottle, the arme par destination as they called it in legal terminology… ’
‘I had to, I had no choice’
‘You do it often…’
‘Yes, but with first timers, it is rare…’
The girl addressed me as such, and by now I had been put under a mask by the police, handcuffed behind my back and taken to a police station. At the police station, they did not interrogate me. They released my handcuffs, allowed me to have a coffee and made me sit on a chair. For the first time, I was grateful for the mask for as I was led from the car to the police-station, a distance of barely 10 metres, the organic pork ham shop owner where I bought my morning filet and the organic steak-shop lunchhouse where I had my daily supper, and the (not) organic bar where I picked up many girls and watched horses jumping over the hurdles next to the PMU.
Inside, I was sitting under a fan, or I was not sitting under a fan, but I still had the reflection of the crimson-green eyes of the pert brunette, who was sitting not far from me, and smiling, and stroking her hair. Maybe she has an attraction for dangerous things?
The head man, who was a bald man, reminiscent of Eric Ciotti, came after a phone call. They did not put me in the lock-up till then. They told me later it was the bottle of wine which helped them identify me, without that it would have been searching for a blade of grass in a stack of hay. The bald man came with the telephone and told me he had had a conversation with the gentleman who was offended, and he had decided to let me go.
‘Let me go,’ was strange terminology, as if I was a lover which had stuck to him for too long or a pet one grows too fond of. They found out that I had no criminal antecedents, and that I was a Professeur in a local school entrusted with the job of professing morals to the local populace, in the form of young children who would be tomorrow’s Frenchmen.
Anyway, I had taken a leaf out of Camus’ booklet. They placed the bottle of wine in front of me on the floor:
‘At least, let us hope…it is a good bottle of wine’, the bald man said, looking at me with a smile, and suddenly very respectful.
‘Non, Monsieur….in that case, j’aurais pas risqué…the bottle I mean’ I do not know where that bit of repartee came from and they all boomed in laughter in the police cell.
I showed them the mark on my elbow to claim that the attack was not unprovoked, and they seemed satisfied, and I rubbed my elbows and Roland Cassard (C.R.) walked into another day under the sun in France, Free France, under the planes and the election posters of the various parties standing up on billboards on two sides of the footpath.
Before the age of 26, Arjun Razdan was writing useless journalistic pieces for uncerebral Indian magazines and unintelligible academic pieces for useless English universities, but it is in the Great Republic that the truth dawned upon him. By the power of the tannins of Bordeaux wine, by the whiff of Frenchwomen’s chignons, by the haunting senteur of a French so-si-so-on (saucisson), he transformed into a writer, and he has not left ever since. This Kashmiri prose-maker has seen 12 works of his appear in 15 literary magazines in eight countries around the world, guided by the pen and wit of Farzdan, his friend and mentor.
Once It is Done, Pedestal Magazine, Issue 78, July 26 2016, Charlotte, North Carolina (NC), United States
https://thepedestalmagazine.com/arjun-razdan-once-it-is-done/
Slightly Pink with the Sun, Muse India, Issue 95, Jan-Feb 2021, Hyderabad, India
https://museindia.com/Home/AuthorContentDataView
The Parable of Mahendra Namardi, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, February 21 2024, Illinois?(IL), United States
Fiction: The Parable of Mahendra Namardi
For a Pint of Plum Liquor, Adelaide Literary Magazine, No.64, June 2024, New York & Lisbon, United States & Portugal
https://adelaidemagazine.org/for-a-pint-of-plum-liquor
For a Pint of Plum Liquor, Vol.1 Brooklyn, October 20 2024, Brooklyn, New York (NY), United States
An Eyes called Green, Pandemonium Journal, November 8 2024, Karachi, Pakistan
03.03.2026, Inverse Journal, December 23 2024, Srinagar, Kashmir
The Misanthrope, Synchronized Chaos, January 1 2025, Davis, California (CA), United States
https://synchchaos.com/essay-from-arjun-razdan/
Mme Lapoule, BlazeVox, Spring 2025 Issue, Buffalo, New York (NY), United States
What Happens Under the Dinner Table, Remains Under the Dinner Table…, Mediterranean Poetry, May 25 2025, Gothenburg, Sweden
Arjun Razdan | Mediterranean Poetry
Cherwell Attack Claimed by Al-Ghustachye, Superpresent Magazine, Summer 2025 Issue, Houston, Texas (TX), United States
https://superpresent.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/V5N3-5.4.pdf
Peter, EgoPHobia, #85, June 13 2025, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
https://egophobia.ro/?p=15797
Mme Lapoule, Jonah Magazine, July 2025 Issue, Montréal, Québec, Canada
The Abdullah Dynasty of Kashmiri Homaridae, DoubleSpeak Magazine, September 30 2025, Noida, India (forthcoming)
Peter, Twenty-two Twenty-eight, October 3 2025,Medford, Massachusetts (MA), USA
(forthcoming)