Dionysus

‘I have something to show you’, I whispered excitedly to Mu. Grandma.

Whispering was fun, they made things seem more exciting than they usually were.

Lifting out all the neatly folded clothes I’d never wear that summer, I took out my secret for the year.

A black and white poster of Jim Morrison. The Christ stance on the cover of ‘The Best of the Doors’.

'Who is he?', Mu playing along, whispered back.

Handing over the poster to her, I whispered the name that made my stomach turn somersaults inside.

A reverential silence.

'He’s so thin', said the woman who was my grandmother.

'He’s almost naked', said my grandmother who was a woman.

I laughed. Mu who’d seen men wearing fewer clothes than Jim Morrison actually saw his nakedness.

Running her hand over his body, Mu paused when she reached his nipples and blushing she let her fingers run the full course till the end of the poster. That’s how he affected the white haired 60-year-old woman in my life.

'Do you want to hear his songs?', I asked her.

That’s how she heard The Doors, the round band of the Sony Walkman sitting ridiculously on her head, like a line of black flowers marching towards nowhere.

It was sinful, such music to ears that had heard nothing but songs of devotion. I blushed on thinking if she ever understood what he was saying, how horrified she would be. But maybe she did for she blushed too.

Laughing to dispel the blush, we both put up his poster on the dark side of the wall in my room that summer.