Skip to main content

Jenny, the Witch


Fantasy

The witch looked like somebody I knew.  That’s why she didn’t scare me though I should have been scared since she resembled the woman whose hobby was messing up people’s lives.  No, the witch wasn’t wearing a sober-coloured sari like this woman I knew.  Nor was her hair silver grey.  In fact, her hair was red.  And her teeth were green unlike the pearly white teeth of the woman she reminded me of. She wore a ragged gown which smelt of cremation grounds.  In fact, there was nothing about her that matched this woman I knew. But she resembled her. It was her smile.  Yes, that smile was deadly.  You knew the smile was meant to kill.  Whenever this woman I knew smiled, somebody’s end was sure.  End does not mean physical death.  This woman was the boss of the institution where I worked for some time.  Whenever she smiled, somebody lost his or her job. And this woman made sure to fabricate some charge against the employee so that the latter wouldn’t dare to fight back.  He or she wouldn’t even get another job with that sort of a history in the curriculum vitae.  That is worse than death.  Like that guy in T. S. Eliot’s poem, the employee would be glad of another death.

I was blessed; the woman had never smiled at me.

“Fair is foul and foul is fair,” wheezed the witch through her green teeth.

“Is this a formulaic utterance of witches” I asked remembering Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth.

“Isn’t every witch a formula?” she asked.

“How did you become a witch?” I was curious.

She laughed and her green teeth glistened in the gentle light of the setting sun.

“I am Jenny Greenteeth,” she said. “Heard of her?”

“Hmm,” I said.  Jenny Greenteeth was a lonely old water witch who was supposed to carry away bad children.  Mothers used her name to scare children into behaving well.  Jenny lived in the waters.  The water moss made her green.  They made her teeth green.  Thus went the story. We are the stuff that stories are made of.

“We are stories,” said Jenny as if she had read my thought.

Stories can be rewritten, I suggested to her.  “We rewrite even histories. Want to try?”

She looked amused. She grinned at me. Greenteeth.

“You can change the colour of your teeth, for example, if you want.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, just anything can be changed.  We have the technology.” I explained to her about beauty parlours and plastic surgery and cosmetic products.

“We have Ayurvedic toothpastes manufactured by a godman who produces a lot of other miraculous things like Male-offspring-seeds.”

She was not interested in male offspring. But she was not entirely averse to experimenting with the toothpaste.

“Oh!” she screamed at herself after the toothpaste had turned her teeth pearly white. She stared at herself in the mirror. “Who will recognise me as Jenny Greenteeth anymore?”

“Why not be Jenny Whiteteeth now?”

“How callous you are?” She stared at me. “You have taken away my identity.”

In that case thousands of people are losing their identity everyday in beauty parlours and other cosmetic centres, I wanted to tell her.  But I did not wish to be callous.  I only meant well. Like the Jihadists, for example, I was trying to better the world by converting a witch into a proper woman.

“But how will mothers tame their children anymore?” Jenny worried.

“Oh, they will invent a new witch,” I consoled her.  

I suggested her to dye her hair silver grey and don a sober-coloured sari.  She obeyed like a child.

“Now you are ready to be a boss,” I said.  I sent her to the woman whom Jenny had reminded me of.  “Keep up your smile,” I  reminded her.

I wondered how I could be so callous as to send an innocent witch to that woman. I’m still wondering.


Comments

  1. I tried to find the meaning to the whole thing, ofcourse a picture comes to me about some mystic creature, coorporate baba and then I found a deep satire on religious mischiefs

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's nothing more than the satire... Yes, the corporate lady is from my life, a face that will haunt me more than any witch till the end of my life. So a personal blog to some extent.

      Delete
  2. "I wondered how I could be so callous as to send an innocent witch to that woman. I’m still wondering."- Ha,Ha. ha wonderful!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for appreciating my punch line, Rajeev. In fact, "that woman" ( a real woman as far as I'm concerned) and such people are infinite times more dangerous to humanity than any witch or devil.

      Delete
  3. I am reminded of an incident in 1986 or 87: When we were pursuing our BEd there was a girl Rai (I forget her first name) whom you wanted to change by giving her a book by, I think, Ayn Rand. Because, you wanted her to shed her conceit as well as illusions. Was that a precursor to this callousness of today?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hahaha... I have grown beyond Rai and Rand ☺😉

      More (be)witching women ploughed through my life lately 😑😑

      Delete
  4. It was kind of cathartic, sending an innocent witch to a bewitching one.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True. After all, fiction serves a cathartic purpose too.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

The Blindness of Superficiality

An Essay on Anees Salim’s novel The Blind Lady’s Descendants Superficiality is a deadly human vice though most people seldom realise it. It is easy to live on the surface of everything from one’s profession to religion. Anees Salim’s novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants , tells us a story of superficiality as lived by quite many people. Amar, the protagonist of the novel, is 26 when he thinks that life is not worth living. He became an atheist at the age of 13. He had become a half-Muslim at the age of 5 when his little penis was circumcised partly since he ran away in pain during the process. Amar’s atheism, however, is as superficial as most believers’ religion is. What initiated little Amar to atheism is “Dr Ibrahim’s farting fit.” Islamic prayer has to follow many a rule. “If you break wind during namaaz, you break a big rule, and you are to discontinue the prayer then and there, with no second thoughts.” Little Amar was unable to control his giggles as Dr Ibrahim struggled to