THE COMMON THREAD THAT HOLDS ALL OF US TOGETHER

I was giving Sopan his daily massage. Sopan had severe and advanced early onset Parkinson’s disease that had rendered him completely paralysed. He was 46 years old and had been married twice, but the second wife couldn’t handle the responsibility of taking care of a husband who was completely paralysed in a developing country with no healthcare and had left him at Nirmal Hriday. His body was stiff as a board, frozen into a permanent 135 degree reclining position. His tendons and muscles were as hard as tree roots, his arms crossed his chest and his hands were folded into themselves as if slowly being crushed by unseen forces. You had to turn him every half hour and each time you did this, he would groan in tremendous pain. The only thing that he had control over were his eyes. Eyes that would bounce back and forth as if trying to escape the confines of his bodily cage like a pair of suffering birds while the rest of his body shook uncontrollably. 
Yeah, it was pretty fucked up dude. 
Which was a pity because I really liked Sopan, he was a sweet guy and a good man who was totally conscious and with it mentally, enough to endure every waking moment of his tortured condition with total unbroken awareness. The guys with dementia who had no one at home, were in a way, the lucky ones. Whenever I was working with Sopan, I couldn’t help imagining what he would have been like before his terrible affliction. What his body language would have been like, how he would of expressed himself and whether or not he had enjoyed dancing. I was sure that if we’d met in better times, we could have had a beer and a laugh together. 
Instead I was now working on his arms and legs like an angry baker kneading dough. I was going as deep as I could to release his muscles. I must of released something because suddenly a tremendous fart tore through his pants. It went on forever, piercing the air like an air raid siren and putting Rahsan Roland Kirk’s longest sustained musical note to shame. I instinctively covered my ears so I wouldn’t go deaf. It kept going. Had his asshole mastered the art of reversed circular breathing? Finally it came to an end. Sopan and I laughed. All the patients, attendants and other volunteers around us laughed. We all laughed together. Then Kumar said something in Hindi that made everyone laugh even more and then something else after that which made everyone laugh again. I laughed too. I wasn’t sure why I laughed or what was even being said but I was sure it was funny because everyone had laughed and that meant it was funny, also I didn’t want to feel left out but like I belonged and was part of the group.
In a striking epiphany, I realized at that moment that fart humour was one of the only truly universal currencies of man. Like music and dance, fart humour transcended all language and cultural barriers, overriding all of our seeming differences, forming the glue that connected all of us together as one united whole. A vision broke open inside me like a splitting egg. A vision of a world where all global conflict was resolved through the shared communion of the humble fart joke. It wouldn’t even have to be a joke. Someone would just fart and everyone else would laugh at them. Then the next person in line would fart and everyone would laugh at them. And so on and so on, marching and farting into the neverending Utopian future of endless peace, as Arabs farted with Jews and North Korean gays farted with South Korean homophobes and the transgender misogynist European far right hunter survivalists farted with their autocratic vegan capitalist Syrian refugee mothers and racist whales farted with their Japanese harpooners and pacifist viruses farted with the militant immune-microbiologist defense committee and yet everyone still hated taxi drivers but hey nothing was ever perfect and at some point you had to call it quits and enjoy what was still pretty great instead of letting the minor imperfections get to you right?
Right??