A Love Child Of Hope And Hype

YOUR reporter, 30, popped his first Viagra around 11 on the night of July 15. The chemist has sold the pills—two 100 mg sky-blue diamonds, each for Rs 800—loose, so there is no bottle, no product literature to enlighten oneself on how to consume it. But, hey, who needs to read to know this? Every Ram, Dick and Rahim who has followed Viagra's rise and rise into the biggest erection on Ball Street, as the Bongs might say, can spell phosphodiesterase backwards before climaxing.

So, one already knows that "1 or 2 tabs as needed" should be taken (orally) about an hour before it's time to act. One also knows that a little alcohol will do nothing to get the "mighty engine" to rise and roar. At least, it will bung in some atmosphere. But the wife, 29, has a sense of humour—fashioned by a hazaar B-grade Hindi flicks. The beer stays in the freezer, while she plies a plantain, a plum and an apple, and lots of giggles, to turbocharge my turgor.

The hour is drawing to a close. The only highlight so far—if you leave out the chemist who said, "Ek, do khane se kya faayda? Tees lena hai!"—has been three trips to the bathroom to pee. Viagra at work? Heck, no. I have downed two bottles of water after I get a feeling that the Thrill Pill is still stuck in my throat. (And who hasn't heard the one about what happens when that happens!) And before I can promise myself "Is raat ki subah nahin", the clock strikes 12. The wait is over.

I still haven't felt a thing. Everything seems normal. There's no welling up of you-know-what, you-know-where. But Viagra's hype-meisters have already warned me about that: It is not an aphrodisiac. It won't act in regular guys. It won't act without desire on the one hand and stimulation on the other. Mercifully, the wife also knows that. So, as the nitric oxide packs in the heat between the pelvis and the solar plexus, I wait for the next paragraph of prose that Viagra has inspired to unfold.

At this very moment, Viagra should be "increasing the blood flow to the penis necessary for establishing and maintaining an erection... by inhibiting the enzyme phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5) which is trying to act on the cyclic guanosine monophosphate which is trying to bring down the erection." Blah, blah. Let it work, I have paid for it.

Whether it was the food or whether it was the drug, I don't know. But at this stage of the proceedings, I feel an incredible urge to simply drift off into sleep. That would mean wasting 800 bucks. Here time is money. Determined for paisa vasool, we carry on gamely. When the end is near, the only person in a position to offer a verdict, pronounces, "It was longer". Could it have been the duration, I wonder. Harder, better are other adjectives that come my way.

Certainly the earth didn't move, although I must admit it felt like Neil Armstrong might have in the beginning, "a giant heap for mankind" and all that. Charles Laurence wrote in The Daily Telegraph, "I felt no horns growing on my brow, no warrior spirit of gender-war aggression suffusing the loins and no steel inserted by scarcely pronounceable, highly profitable enzymes." Ditto and likewise.

Friends abroad have been telling us for 100 days now, how Viagra's helping them do it at midnight, three and six. Either we are lousy lovers or Viagra is a drowsy drug. It caught us napping when it was time for an encore. But the claim that its effects last four to six hours is true: the evidence was still there before the cock could start crowing the morning after.

The media sex guru Dr Ruth West-heimer writes somewhere: "Even if a man has an erection from floor to ceiling and can keep it that way for an hour, it will not be pleasurable for a woman if he is not sexually literate." With its extraordinary emphasis on length and strength, it feeds on society's obsession with penetration sex, without ever setting to cure impotence.

The only evidence after 200 mg down the drain was a headache at first, and then a stuffy nose that quickly turned into a cold and has endured into the fourth day. Side-effects that Pfizer warns about? Maybe, maybe not: the missus has been sniffing all week. Does it work? As an ad-line for a toffee once went: Viagra khao, khud jaan jao.

Is it worth it? Yes, if your office pays you to screw your wife. No, if your partner whispers in the ear that each pill can fetch one leg of Levi's—or feed one UNICEF kid for a month. But after two nights on it, I'm convinced: Viagra—a love child of hope and hype—is a miracle drug.

Partly because what its makers claim it does below the waist, mostly because of what its users feel above.