Skip to main content

Halley’s Fishes


Fiction

Arjun was contemplating with considerable amusement on how Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica came to be rejected by its first patron, the Royal Society. 

“You are under arrest.”  The steely voice jolted him out of his amusement. 

“But why?  What have I done?”  Arjun asked as he extended his arms for receiving the handcuff without realising what he was doing.  Life was always a mechanical thing for him.  When his wife served the meals he ate them.  If she was not there, he wouldn’t eat.  It wouldn’t make any difference.  When he saw the handcuffs, his hands stretched themselves as naturally as the sunflower turns towards the sun.

What was the action of mine which attracted this reaction?  He asked himself as he felt the steel of the handcuff scalding his skin.

They were silent, the cops, as they led him out of the National Museum where he was looking at a copy of the cover page of The History of Fishes which jettisoned Sir Newton’s Principia.  The cover showed a flying fish.  The book was written by the scientist Francis Willughby and sponsored by the Royal Society.  The Society went broke after publishing the book.  There were no takers for a book of ichthyology, study of fishes, that is.

It was then that Edmond Halley – yeah, that very same man after whom the comet is named – suggested the publication of Sir Newton’s masterpiece.  If fish cannot sell, how can mathematics?  The Royal Society put its foot down heavily on Halley’s recommendation of Newton. 

Halley sponsored the publication himself.  Sir Newton didn’t bother a bit to help.  He was as cool as when he inserted a bodkin into the space between his eyeball and the frontal bone and turned it there a number of times just to know what would happen.  It mattered little to him whether his book was published or not. 

“So, Mr Husain, you are antinational,” said the Inspector of Police as soon as Arjun was brought before him.  The Inspector’s face strangely reminded Arjun of a shark.

Arjun turned back to see the anti-national Husain.

“What the f**k are you turning back for?”  The inspector roared and implicitly accused Arjun of doing unimaginable things to his mother and sister.

“Answer my question, you BC MC,” demanded the Inspector.

“But I’m not Husain. I am Arjun.”

“What do you think this is?  Melon City?  To change your identity as you please?  We’ve got clear reports from our nationalist wing that you refused to stand up while the national anthem was played in the cinema hall.”

“I never visit a cinema hall.”  Arjun was flabbergasted.

None of the police tricks could establish beyond doubt that Arjun was Husain. 

“Do you have an ID card with you?” asked the Inspector finally.

“I have an Aadhar card, a ration card, a PAN card...”

“I see.  Then why the f**k don’t you show us one of them?”

“They are at home.  Even my cow is going to get an Aadhar soon.”  Arjun thought that the mention of a cow would prove his nationalism beyond doubt.

The Inspector glowered at him.

“Sir!” ventured one of the constables.

“What?”

“There’s one way of proving that he is not Husain.”

“What’s that?”

“Check his dick.”

The other constable giggled.

“Hey, I think you’re right.”  The Inspector turned to Arjun and ordered, “Come on, open up.”

Arjun stared blankly at the Inspector.

“Didn’t you hear, you BC MC, what I told you?  Open your zip and show us your dick.”

Arjun’s hands wanted to move to the zip but he was handcuffed.  Mahatma Gandhi winked from the faded portrait nailed behind the Inspector.

The Inspector motioned to a constable to open the handcuff.

Arjun stood with his trousers lying in a mocking curlicue around his ankles.  One of the constables tapped on his organ with his baton before raising it and staring at it. 

“This thing has that thing, Sir,” said the constable.  “He can’t be Husain.”

“Come and show us your Aadhar card tomorrow.”  The Inspector ordered as Arjun walked out of the police station.

Halley was working also as the Royal Society’s clerk.  Arjun continued recollecting the story from where he had stopped when the cops took on him.  Having run out of money after publishing Sir Newton’s Principia, when he demanded his pay, the Soceity gave him the unsold copies of The History of Fishes

Newton’s laws are wrong, chuckled Arjun, in the world of human affairs. 


Comments

  1. A masterpiece. A perfect blend of modern political scenario with history and science. Might I say a kafkaesque work. Somehow it reminded me the absurdism mr. K faced in The Trial by kafka. Yet another brilliant work.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Glad to see you here after a long time.

      Yes, it is a Kafkaesque world. Similar to contemporary India.

      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

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...

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...