They tell us not to think of what if’s, that this leads to thought bombs that explode like shrapnel in our minds. That may be, but what if the ‘what if’ is just a question, a musing on a dot on the horizon or a mere fleck of mental dust to be played with, in the manner of a cat with a ball of yarn or an unlucky mouse.
So the question I propose is what if humans had tails? What if they hadn’t disappeared into those tiny vestigial bumps at the base of the spine and we had, instead, glorious, magnificent, expressive tails?
Why there’d be newspaper headlines and TV talk shows and social media posts whistling on the nuances of tails. Ministers would breathe exhortations on the Divine Plan for tails that were written on Moses’ great rocks and only recently discovered in scrolls hidden in the sand under bones in the Sinai and photographed by the National Geographic in a special edition. We would be warned that tails were not designed to be stroked for sexual pleasure, but rather, were to be uplifted in praise, in starched perfection, to the Almighty.
Powerpoint presentations would be created on the proper etiquette for tails in the workplace, like how to sit with your tail neatly tucked behind your trouser or dress hole, not dropping and hanging over the chair’s edge in the manner of the lesser primates. Tail stroking would be banned in schools. Great discussions would ensue on the gender differences in tails. Plans for tail education courses would be heatedly discussed on social media and in the schools.
There’d be all sorts of tail tattoos, tail piercings and arguments on the length to keep your tail hair and what to do if, God forbid, you got tail mange, which you’d have to report to the Board of Health as a contagious disease and suffer quarantine.
Then the vexing question of how to deal with tails in times of war would arise as tails would offer an easy handle to grab in hand to hand combat. Would there be tail helmets to wear as codpieces were in olden times? How would a soldier be compensated for the loss or mutilation of his tail? Would this constitute a disability?
If we had tails like chimps, the big question would be, if a thousand monkeys tapped away on computer keyboards while stroking their tails, would they, as the philosophical study of change has surmised, write Hamlet? And if they did, what could we do for an encore, if that is, we had tails?
Suchin Rai