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
47 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
10 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
11 comments
Read more