'And you're not my wife!' the man shouted back as he hurriedly removed his hand from inside her blouse.
'I should have known!' the woman sighed, lowering her voice.
'It was too good to be true,' the man agreed. 'Still, why don't we -?'
'George!' The voice roared out from across the barroom. 'There you are! And you told me you were just going to the bathroom!' The lady who'd shouted charged across the room.
'Hi, honey.' A man popped up alongside the woman seated at the table behind me. 'Having fun?'
'Yes. I've been having fun. Come on.' She stood up. 'Let's go home now.'
'Okay. I'm dead tired myself. All I want to do is get to sleep.'
'That,' the woman sighed one last sigh, 'figures!'
Behind her George was still trying to explain things to his irate wife. My attention was distracted from them by a sudden shout from a man standing against a side wall. He'd been standing there a long time, it seemed obvious, embracing a lady who'd seemed more than willing to be embraced. With the lights out, they'd been attempting the vertical fulfillment of a horizontal desire. They'd almost succeeded when the lights went back on. Nor did that stop them, since they both had their eyes squeezed shut. But now he'd just opened his eyes, and as he focused on the woman, his shock sounded out over the general furor. 'My lord!' he screamed. 'It's mother!'
'Well,' she replied, 'I brought you up to stay out of bars.'
'If you want to talk,' I told Singh during the wave of laughter which swept over the place after her remark, 'we'd better get out of here.'
'My hotel isn't far,' Singh suggested.
'Okay. Let's go.'
My sheet and smudged face drew some stares as we walked throught the lobby of Singh's hotel. But most people jus shrugged off the sight. It wasn't the night to question the most bizarre of sights. Anything could happen – and it had. So why puzzle over a man with a dirty face wearing a bedsheet?
'What did you mean back in the bar when you said you knew who I was?' I asked Singh cautiously when we were alone in his hotel suite.
'Just that. I know who you are and what your mission is. Also, I have a similar mission. I believe we may be able to help each other.'
'You mean in furthering the work of S.M.U.T.?'
'Come, Mr. Victor, there is no further need of us playing cat-and-mouse with each other. We are on the same side. You have infiltrated S.M.U.T. in the interests of your government. And I have done the same in the interests of my religion.'
'What makes you think I'm a spy?'
'I don't think it. I know it. I have received instructions to cooperate with you fully.'
'Instructions from whom? The Indian government?'
'I am not an Indian, Mr. Victor. I am from Nepal.'
I remembered then that he'd told the cops I was the ambassador from Nepal. But why had he pretended to be an Indian? And what was his purpose in passing himself off to S.M.U.T. as a fellow member from New Delhi? How much could I trust him? And just what was his angle?
When I put these questions to him, he seemed frank enough in answering them. And there was a certain logical pattern to the answers. Logical, even though his story was pretty outlandish in spots.
According to Singh, S.M.U.T. was engaged in a complex operation involving both Nepal and India. What this operation boiled down to was well-organized thievery on a large scale. The object of this thievery was the priceless erotic temple art of Nepal. Having explained this much, Singh digressed to fill me in on the history and value of this art.
First this involved explaining to me the development and ramifications of religion in Nepal. In ancient times the tribes of Nepal followed pagan gods similar to those worshipped by peoples the world over. These ancient Nepalese were of Mongol origins and were known as Bhotias. Their gods were based on primitive concepts of sun and moon, climate and weather conditions, beasts – both real and imaginary – and cloud structures. It was this last which deviated most greatly from the primitive god concepts held by other peoples.
This phase was followed by the Gutpa dynasty which ascribed divine powers to its founder, Ne-Muni, for whom Nepal is named, and to his descendants. After the collapse of the Gutpa dynasty, Buddhism took root in Nepal. However, rather than sweeping away the older god concepts, it merged with them. The result was that Buddhism in Nepal became a far different sort of religion than Buddhism in most other parts of the world.
Then, in 1768, the Brahmans and Rajputs were driven out of India by the Muslims. These two groups, known today as Gurkhas, pushed into Nepal and eventually conquered it. The Gurkhas were Hindus, and it wasn't long before their religion was assimilated into the Buddhist-dominated, but much combined, religion of Nepal.
It should be pointed out, Singh insisted, that the Buddhists, Hindus, and other religions neither strove to overcome one another nor held themselves aloof in an attempt to maintain their purity. On the contrary, they merged to form a combined religion to which all Nepalese subscribe today. Singh would have liked to go into the nature and beauty of that combined religion at length, but he restrained himself because it was not the religion itself, but the art which had grown out of it with which we were concerned.
From the early pagan days, Nepalese worship involved all sorts of idols. As the more sophisticated religions absorbed the older ones, the religious sculpture became more elaborate, and more precious materials were used. By the time the Gurkhas and their religion had become assimilated, religious art and architecture had become something of a national pastime and the creating of it was a highly developed national skill.
Today there are 2,733 shrines in the valley of Nepal. Each one of these contains artworks of inestimable value. These sculptures and temple decorations and rugs and tapestries have a worth apart from the gold and silver, rubies and pearls and diamonds, precious silks and fine-spun velvets of which they are made. They represent a craftsmanship which outshines that of the Florentines. And they accurately reflect the collection of beliefs which make up the religion of Nepal.
It is this accuracy which sometimes shocks the Western visitor. From the time of its ancient origins, eroticism had played a large part in Nepalese religion. Their concepts of ancient gods ascribed great phallic powers to them. The Gutpas were 'elephant men' – which is to say that they were god-men with large trunks between their legs. Buddhism in Nepal – as in China, Japan and India – contributed an exaggerated concept of the size of genitalia, both male and female, to the temple art of Nepal. And to these erotic god powers and outsize organs the Hindus contributed the sophistication of the
From my researches with O.R.G.Y., I already knew some of what Singh was telling me. I knew, for instance, that in the Buddhist temple art of Japan and China, the size of the sex organs is enlarged out of all proportion to the figures shown. Biological studies among the peoples of these countries, on the other hand, point up the fact that the actual size of Chinese and Japanese sex organs – both male and female – tends to be noticeably smaller than the world average. Psychologists have hypothesized that the actual smallness may be the subconscious reason for the artistic enlargement and exaggeration.
However, the Nepalese, with their strong Mongol bloodline, are not only more impressively endowed phallically than the Chinese and Japanese, but are also much larger in that area, on the average, than the Caucasian peoples of Europe and America. Yet the erotic temple art of Nepal succumbed to the Buddhist influence and stresses unrealistic size just as if the Nepalese were suffering from the inferiority complex of the other 'pure' Buddhists.
Liberal sociologists will throw up their hands in horror at the idea of caterogizing an ethnic group in terms of the size of its sex organs. They would prefer to think it a canard that the native African, for instance, has, on the average, a larger penis than the European. Admittedly, there has not been enough investigation in this area. But what investigation there has been points to the truth of a difference in sizes of sex organs among the various ethnic groups.
Nor is the point being belabored in an effort to provide aid and comfort to racists. There is nothing to indicate that any one group is any 'sexier' or more 'animalistic' than another. Degrees of sexuality seem much the same the world over. And, genetically speaking, miscegenation tends to combine the strong points of the various peoples, rather than their weaknesses.
So the real question to be faced by both liberals and racists is why the very idea of a difference in sizes should be threatening. After all, the difference is almost never so great as to interfere with the sex act, or to harm either of
