As most people reading this will know, the age of 13-17 is a very difficult time in the life of boys. At that time, they can only think about sex, and what’s more, they never seem to be getting any. Many will say that this phase does not end at 17, but we will leave that for another post.

The topic for this post is the stories boys make up to survive this time period. They are never able to speak to girls and girls never seem to want to take their clothes off, so they resort to telling each other stories.

These stories are usually very interesting. Women will probably like to hear some of these, so here they are.

One of my friends once told me that he had seen a girl’s nipple. This was when we were 14, and the girl was a mutual acquaintance. Therefore, I was, of course, incredulous, but he clarified. She had apparently been wearing a (normal) salwar-kurta suit, and she had bent down in front of her bicycle, and there it was!

Now, anyone with an elementary grasp of physics will tell you that this is actually not possible – or at least, very, very improbable. But why would we want to believe that when we could believe in the Miracle of the Holy Nipple?

For the next fortnight at least, we used to come downstairs whenever she did, and we used to pretend to be doing something else, yet glancing at her in the fervent hope that the miracle would happen again. This friend, meanwhile, claimed to have seen the same spectacle three more times. But because the rest of us had been present every time she came down, we stopped believing him.

Other stories of the sort include the classic “I went in and she was (a) bathing with the door open, (b) changing or (c) completely and utterly naked for no apparent reason.” ‘She’ is usually either a friend, a particularly good-looking mature neighbour, or a friend’s mother (a good-looking female friend’s good-looking female mother is the best bet).

There are many other such stories, and if you want to know some of these, all you have to do is catch the nearest boy in his late teens and torture him till he confesses. This manoeuvre does not apply to me, of course.

Seriously speaking, ever since I became an adult, I have been an ardent and total opponent of the objectification of women. But when I was in the time range mentioned (13-17), I was much too busy thinking about sex to bother about the objectification or otherwise of anyone other than vapid little moi. What I mean is that I have indulged in telling one such story.

I know a guy who lives in Mumbai, and till about three years ago, I used to tell him the exploits of myself and a fictitious girl called A--- (name concealed to protect fictional privacy). So you can see that my rampant imagination is not recent, although the use I put it to has changed somewhat over the years.

This girl A--- was supposed to be totally ‘with’ me – for no apparent reason (none that I can think of, anyway) and I used to tell this guy about my adventures with her. In the end, A--- almost seemed to be a real person, if you disregarded the fact that the only thing she could ever think of was passionate, unbridled sex.

Indeed, it became so ludicrous that I started to keep notes on where we were last time so that my stories might not become inconsistent. I don’t think that this guy actually believed me for an instant, but I honestly thought he did. He probably used my stories as fodder for his own fantasies. In the end, I went to Mumbai armed with a brilliant story about a threesome with A--- and another fictitious girl, but just before I was going to tell him, I stopped for a moment and thought, “Not even I would believe this!” And that was the end of that.

Sad, isn’t it?

To the women reading this: if you were offended by this post, I assure you this was not my intention. I only want to give you some first-hand knowledge of the male of the species. Armed with this knowledge, you can now blackmail them very easily. You only have to say, “... Otherwise I will tell your mother what you told your friends when you were 15,” and they will do absolutely anything you ask them to.

Best of luck.

PS: After this post, I will be leaving this country, because all my male friends will soon be experiencing an uncontrollable urge to tear me into little pieces and to buy dogs so as to feed them those pieces. My next post will be from an unnamed country.