Dear Trumpji,
With this increasing pressure on you to ban guns, how will you equip the defenceless hordes who voted for you now? Presenting our zero-cost, eco-friendly weaponry. Please send a one-way ticket to America. I will train you in our famous Stare. Which, like our yoga and our bindi, you can now fearlessly (shamelessly I was to say, but then – that ticket!) appropriate.
No self-respecting individual here has grown up without learning the Stare. It was our primary education/entertainment before mobile phones took the pleasure away. Men, women, new-born babies, even our buffaloes stare with Olympic skill. Say you manage to squeeze into a train compartment, for example. As you stand and sway along with all your brethren and sistren (bhaiyyon and behnon – translated for you, T-ji), an old woman who has been noisily hacking up an impressive spew of phlegm, stops, and turns to fix you with a freeze-frame, end-of-sobbing-soap-serial worthy Stare. Do not smile back, it is bad manners to acknowledge it. Seriously, you foreigners know nothing. It is the same as you grilling your tenderloin (ouch, that word hurts!) on red hot coals. Does your steak smile back at you, eh?
The Stare is unrelenting, unapologetic, it does not back down. It is more stubborn than a torpedo, a heat-seeking missile, a two-year old tantrummy leg-clinger. And it does not undress you, like those Italian-made ones. No, it is an instant soul scan. In a few seconds, it deduces your relationship status, bank account and embarrassing ailments.
Now, on to its destructive potential: a true Stare can convert light energy into heat with absolutely no MIT million-dollar research grant involved. As you stand in an airport queue, you feel a red hot spear boring into your ear. The burn spreads up your cheek and down your neck, shoulders… You turn and squint into the distance, to see the heat-emitting twin eyeball source - six queues and 11 duty-free shops away. Stunning, the distance this Stare can cover. Over the heads, under the arms, through the bent elbows of multiple people in between.
Then, the Stare unleashes its lethal effect. It can make its recipient squirm. Like the fleas of a thousand camels have infested your armpits (Old Arabic curse that has been waiting for this moment). See ji, T-ji, the Stare is the strongest secret weapon you can own. Striking down targets, one by one, crumbling their self-confidence, searing through their souls, causing their hands to quiver, face to burn, legs to take them racing back across their borders. Now, my ticket, please?
Where Jane De Suza, author of Flyaway Boy, pokes her nose into our perfect lives.