Skip to main content

Children of Lust


Lot and his daughters - a painting
Self-righteous fool that Iam!  Lot beat his chest and lamented.  His cries rose to the heavens, “Yahweh!  Forgive me, forgive me.” 

Lot’s sin was manifold.  Lust and incest.  He copulated with both of his daughters.  His daughters’ children would not be his grandchildren as it should have been.  How disgraceful!  The mountains off Zoar echoed his laments.

Lot had fled Sodom because of its immorality.  The people were like pigs wallowing in filth: they wallowed in sex and sensuality.  Bored of the women, the men of Sodom sought and found their delights in male bodies.  Left to themselves, their women too discovered their own delights: in the bodies of each other.  Bodily pleasures.  Damnation.  Death.

The wombs of Sodom cried to the heavens for seeds to germinate.  The heavens heard the cries.  Yahweh opened the gate of the heavens and told Lot to move out.

“You have been a temperate man,” said Yahweh to Lot.  “You did not forsake the ways I had ordained for humanity.  So shall I save you from the perdition that is about to fall on your land and its men and women as well as their offspring.”

A dream.  A dream of a man who wanted something more than the body and its pleasures.  A dream of a man who wanted to dream of the heavens.

Dreams can end up people in caves.  Lot wanted to save his daughters from the evil world.  He took them out from the world.  To a cave in a mountain off Zoar. 

Caves narrow down dreams.  Caves shrink one’s horizon.  In the cave Lot saw only his daughters.  There was nothing else to see in the cave.  Young daughters.  Beautiful daughters.  Daughters who should be married off.  Where are the men who deserve to marry them?

The soil longs for seeds even in a desert.  Ova need fertilisation by spermatozoa even in a cave.  Especially in a cave.

“When will we get husbands to fill our wombs with children?” lamented Lot’s elder daughter.

“When will we get men to love us?” lamented Lot’s younger daughter.

We are doomed to die in this cave, they said to each other as they hugged each other.  Their breasts met with the softness of the flesh of each other.  Sodom rose in their groins like a volcano ready to burst.  The heat of the volcano scorched Lot’s veins. 

Lot took out the wine from the cask to quench the thirst of his veins.  The wine flowed in his veins.  Wine mellowed his veins.  Wine infuriated his sperms. Infuriated sperms long to fertilise.  Long to mate.  Long to meet a mate.  Sodom had killed meeting and mating.  There is no life without meeting and mating.  There is no life where the sperm is spilled like swine’s swill.  Where the ovum is thrown out with rags that had been stuck in the foulest places. 

Lot said, “Come my beloved.  Lie with me.  Let my sperm meet your ovum.  Let there be life.”

Lot’s wife was not there to heed his invitation.  She had been turned into a salt pillar.  She had defied Yahweh’s orders. 

But Lot’s girls had heard his mourn.  They took off the rags that had been smothering their stinking bodies.  Let our bodies find liberation.  Let there be life.  They said. 

They lay on either side of their father.

The night passed.  Sodom was burnt out totally by the volcano.  But life was stuttering in the wombs of Lot’s daughters.

“Oh Yahweh!  What have I done?” lamented Lot standing on the mountain outside his cave looking up to the heavens.  I wanted a moral world.  I wanted morality.  Oh Yahweh!  I have spurned a brood of vipers.  Children of lust.  Oh Yahweh!


Yahweh promised a “Promised Land” to Lot’s offspring.  Lot dreamt on.  Lot’s dreams crossed the Jordan river.  Beyond all rivers.  Beyond all oceans.  Lot dreamt of a world where his morality would be in practice.  In practice.  A world of dreams.  Dreams of a caveman.  The Jordan formed a few ripples which died out soon.  The dream of the caveman continued.  In scriptures.  In the same Arab Land.  Dreams.  Dreams.  Dreams of the children of lust.  Oh Yahweh!

Note: This is a fictionalised version of an episode from the Bible, Genesis, chapter 19.  I have taken much liberty with the Biblical version. 

Comments

  1. Does the word 'Sodomy' come from the name of the city 'Sodom?'

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Ravish, the word 'sodomy' owes its origin to the Biblical Sodom.

      Delete
  2. Now this is where Sodomy comes from

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Lot is supposed to have lived more than 4000 years ago. My point is that the world wasn't much better in those days. Evil is nothing new. Evils coeval with man. Evil of all kinds...

      Delete
  3. Electra complex.....sodomy refers to much inferior activities nowadays...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Even in those days, Mani, it referred to those "much inferior activities". Otherwise Yahweh wouldn't have been so angry as to destroy two entire cities. [By the way, I'm not a believer and don't take the Bible literally. I take it as literature and interpret it in my own way.]

      Delete
  4. The children of Lust! Such an apt title for the post and the story is definitely touching. The bible indeed!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Bible has so many instances of the "Fall" of man. Right from the first couple Adam and Eve, there are so many characters in the Bible who "fell" (sinned). The theme of evil never ceases to fascinate me. After Yahweh destroyed the whole human population except Noah and his family, He said that He wouldn't do it (destroy man) anymore though the heart of man is filled with evil. I have always wondered why He couldn't fill it with goodness.

      Delete
  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  6. If lust had been interpreted with goodwill, mankind would not have suffered from sexual abuses. The word 'lust' would not have acquired negative connotation. How evil entered this world is still intriguing.

    PS.: Tried to post a comment in the afternoon. Not successful. Ended up posting a comment to the previous blog on Sheldon.

    As usual good read.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Can lust be interpreted with goodwill? If excess of anything is bad, lust can never be good.

      Evil is an integral part of life, I guess. I have implied that in the story.

      If you log in first and then post the comment, it works much faster.

      Nice to see you after a long time.

      Delete
    2. Then let me correct it. What I mean to say is that the word 'lust' need not have come into existence at all. That's my wish, precisely.

      Delete
    3. If wishes were horses beggars would ride Madam.

      Delete
  7. I always learn something whenever I visit your blog. This one was quite interesting too, even a little disturbing in some places.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I tried my best to mellow the story, Shreesha. But the theme is such the story has to be a little 'sleazy'.

      Delete
  8. What a scary portrayal... I find even cannibals feasting around a wood-fire less repulsive :-/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True, Anunoy, our religions give us more than what we can chew sometimes.

      Delete
  9. Another twisty tale.. and to think this is a spin off from religion!

    Richa

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Most religious scriptures have such tales or bizarre texts, Richa. If all the people really read the scriptures there would be no terrorism or fundamentalism, no religion itself perhaps.

      Delete
  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  11. hmm.. now here is the real question of morality.. I haven't read Bible.. Now I feel like I want to.. But did Lots or his daughters really sinned? I mean who defined incest?? Scriptures?? Who wrote them?? God?? Then how Adam n Eve, just two humans, could grow into such a huge population without incests between brothers n sisters, fathers n daughters.. Does that mean the whole premise of human race is based on incest??? Did the same God not want the humans to grow?? Then why the biology?? The act by the family was a weak moment arisen by circumstances but it might be seen as providence as Taote has written:
    The Tao doesn't take sides;
    it gives birth to both good and evil.
    The Master doesn't take sides;
    she welcomes both saints and sinners.

    Lots truth, tears and lament washes away any sign of lust. I would never judge and still respect people like Lots and his daughters.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af