Skip to main content

Lost Paradises

Fiction

Reverend Father Lawrence Marangodan was restless.  He walked up and down the rubber plantation of the parish church while the parish priest, Reverend Father Daniel, was preaching a Charismatic retreat to the parishioners.  The cries of ‘Praise the Lord! Alleluia!’ rose and fell like the frenzied waves in a disturbed ocean.  Father Marangodan’s mind was even more disturbed.  The spiritual masturbations of charismatic retreats could never ease his mind.  Worse, he had just received a note from Reverend Sister Prarthana.

Dear Father,
I need help.  Benjamin is becoming a serious pain in the neck...

Benjamin was a boy in class three of the primary school run by the parish church and Sister Prarthana was the class teacher.  Whenever Sister Prarthana’s heart longed for the proximity of Father Marangodan, Benjamin became a pain in some convenient part of her body.  

Father Marangodan did not like what he called the spiritual masturbations of charismatic retreats.  Otherwise he was a committed priest of the Roman Catholic Church, the assistant of Father Daniel.  He wanted the church to be more orthodox than charismatic, austere rather than boisterous, more compassionate than exuberant.  He liked Sister Prarthana’s approach.  She cared for the individual children of her school.  She patted their cheeks and ran her fingers through their hair.  She threatened to beat them with the cane that was kept perennially on her table.  Occasionally she would even threaten to shoot them or chop off their heads with an imaginary sword.  Like in: Children, don’t force me to take out the pistol from the drawer or Kids, I have a sword hidden beneath my tunic.

Father Marangodan overheard her once and thus became her counsellor.  “Don’t use such violent metaphors in front of children,” he said to her.  He exhorted her to imbibe the forbearance and stoicism of Our Lord.  “Always keep in mind the image of the Lord in Gethsemane.”

Sister Prarthana tried her best to keep the image of the Gethsemane in her mind.  But the more she met Father Marangodan, the more Paradise kept invading Gethsemane.  Instead of the Lord, it was Adam that entered the Eden of her mind and she was Eve there.  She was troubled by the strange resemblance which her Adam had with Father Marangodan. 

“Don’t let Satan into your soul,” warned the priest.  “You and I are religious and our way is strewn with pebbles and thorns.  Gethsemane is our only garden.  Take the Eden out of your mind.  Embrace the cross...”

“The Eden refuses to fade from my visions,” confessed Sister Prarthana days after she had carried out the penances stipulated by Father Marangodan. 

Sweat drew Father Marangodan’s  soutane close to his skin.  These days the very sight of Sister Prarthana made his body hot and it sweated profusely.  He wished Sister Prarthana did not have such beautiful dimples on her rosy cheeks.

Praise the Lord! Alleluia!

The chanting from the church brought Father Marangodan back to the present.  Back to Sister Prarthana and her Benjamin-the-pain-on-her-neck and the dancing dimples on her rosy cheeks.  Father Marangodan’s soutane was wet with sweat.  The breeze brought down some dry rubber leaves on him.  It cooled his body too.


Comments

  1. Reminded me the novel "The sands of time" by Sydney Sheldon.But there Reverend mother Benito and her group of sisters..!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gosh! It is hilarious! Hope you are not banned from church.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Happy to have got a reader who grasped the hilarity... I excommunicated myself from the church long ago.

      Delete
    2. Instead of excommunicating yourself, I think you ejaculated yourself .....to use your metaphor....lol

      Delete
    3. The nuns in my primary school taught me a lot of ejaculations. According to them, they would fetch a lot of indulgences. LOL

      Delete
    4. The world belongs to Marangodans. LOL

      Delete

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

Whose Rama?

Book Review Title: Whose Rama? [Malayalam] Author: T S Syamkumar Publisher: D C Books, Kerala Pages: 352 Rama may be an incarnation of God Vishnu, but is he as noble a man [ Maryada Purushottam ] as he is projected to be by certain sections of Hindus? This is the theme of Dr Syamkumar’s book, written in Malayalam. There is no English translation available yet. Rama is a creation of the Brahmins, asserts the author of this book. The Ramayana upholds the unjust caste system created by Brahmins for their own wellbeing. Everyone else exists for the sake of the Brahmin wellbeing. If the Kshatriyas are given the role of rulers, it is only because the Brahmins need such men to fight and die for them. Valmiki’s Rama too upheld that unjust system merely because that was his Kshatriya-dharma, allotted by the Brahmins. One of the many evils that Valmiki’s Rama perpetrates heartlessly is the killing of Shambuka, a boy who belonged to a low caste but chose to become an ascetic. The...

Maveli in the Pothole Republic

Illustration by Copilot Designer I was trying to navigate the moonscape they call a ‘national highway’ when my shoe vanished into a crater big enough to host the G20 summit. Out of it rose a tall figure, crowned and regal, though with a slight limp. “Maveli!” I exclaimed. “Yes,” he said grimly. “Your roads are terrible. I thought the netherworld was bad, but this—this is hell on asphalt.” I helped him up. “Don’t worry, Maveli, our leaders say we’re heading toward becoming a global economic superpower. See, even Donald Trump is impotent before our might.”   Maveli frowned. “Yes, yes. I saw your leader guffawing in the company of Putin and Xi Jinping. When he’s in the company of world leaders, he behaves like a little boy who’s got his coveted toy.” “Are you a little jealous of him, Maveli?” I asked. “I have reasons to be, but I’m not. Let him enjoy his limelight. A day will come when history will put its merciless foot on his head and send him to his own Patala.” Tha...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...