Skip to main content

Sunset and moral police


Fiction

The sea became more restless as the sun turned crimson in the western horizon turning the distant waters resplendent with a riot of colours.  Raghav continued to stare into those colours as if some genie would emerge out of them and solve his problems.

“Thief! Thief!”  A middle-aged woman who was sitting a few feet away shouted.  A commotion followed.  The man who had snatched her handbag had already disappeared into the motley crowd on the beach.  People asked a few questions like “Did it contain many valuables?” or offered some counsel like “You should be careful!” and then the commotion subsided.   People returned to the sunset.

“Is there any way I can be of help?”  Raghav asked the woman when the sun had vanished into the sea and the people started moving away.  A few chose to settle down on the beach as usual.   

The woman looked at him for a moment and said, “Yes, in fact.  I’ll need the bus fare to go home.”

Raghav pulled out his purse and offered her a hundred rupee note.

“Thanks.”

“Will it do?”

“More than.  How will I return it?”  She paused a while, looked at him as if to assess him and said, “I’m Sheila.”  She mentioned the office where she worked as a clerk adding that he could come and claim his money the very next day.

“Does one Anil Kumar still work there?”  That’s how the friendship began.  When there is a person known to two strangers, the strangeness melts away instantly and friendship blooms quickly.

“I noticed that you were not too much upset by the loss of your bag,” Raghav said gazing into her eyes inquiringly.  Was he searching for something more than the answer to that question in those eyes?

“Well,” she said and gazed into the sea.  “I lost some important things.  Debit card, ID card, cash,  ...”

“Why don’t you ask your bank to block the debit card?”

“The fool won’t be able to withdraw more than Rs 2000, thanks to Modi ji.”  She smiled.  Wearily.  “I’ve already blocked it.”  She waved her phone. Listlessly.

Her phone was saved because she was trying to photograph the sunset on the phone’s camera when the thief struck.

“Have you ever wondered whether life is just a series of losses?”  She asked.

“Thousand times,” said Raghav slowly but promptly.  “There are occasional gains, however.  Like the music of these waves.”  He threw a pebble into the surf which was approaching them rather quickly as the tide rose.  “And the sunset.”

“God must have created human beings for fun’s sake,” she said.

“Man is a freak in the evolutionary process,” Raghav said.

“But a very successful freak!”

“Most freaks are successes though for a short while.  The success of the human species is a miracle.  A tragic miracle.”

“Sometimes I too hear the plaintive music of a tragic drama as I sit here watching the sunset.”

The surf had begun to wash their feet.  The sea lay undulating in the moonlight.  They realised that they had been sitting there for quite a while discussing the tragedy of the planet.

They got up to leave.  To return to their homes and the usual problems of life.  The beach was almost deserted.

A group of young men surrounded them.  Their dress indicated that they belonged to some religious organisation.

“Who are you?” One of the young men asked imperially.

Both Raghav and Sheila were too surprised to make an answer.  All the philosophy they had discussed so far sitting on the beach could not help them with an answer to that question.  Who are you?

“We know that you are not husband and wife.”  The young man who looked like the leader of the gang said. 

Moral police.  That’s what the group was.  Self-appointed guardians of public morality.  They looked more like drug addicts, thought Raghav though he could not see their faces very clearly.

The young men abused them, clicked a few snaps on their mobile phones, threatened them and one of them even planted a slap on Raghav’s cheek.  Then they moved away in search of other immoral people. 

Neither Raghav nor Sheila uttered anything as they moved away from the beach towards their respective bus stops.


Comments

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

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...