Skip to main content

The Artist Makes his Funeral Pyre



Fiction

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there was a kingdom.  The King was very particular about law and order, discipline and cleanliness, uniformity and conformity, and so on.  So he ordered that no one should criticise the administration overtly or covertly, explicitly or implicitly.  He had soldiers and spies throughout the kingdom to catch anyone who disobeyed his orders. 

Divyanshu was arrested by one of those countless, nebulous officers.  His crime was that he had painted a portrait of the King.  In fact, the King looked more handsome and imposing in the portrait than he really was.  The King was displeased by something about the portrait.  Divyanshu was never told what it was that displeased the King.  He thought he had made a magnificent portrait.  He had placed in his prayer room along with his gods.  But the King was angry.  Without even seeing the portrait.

Divyanshu was given the usual punishment.  He was ordered to set up his own funeral pyre before sunset.  At sunset he would be executed and placed on the funeral pyre.  He had the liberty to make the funeral pyre as beautiful as he wished.

With whatever pieces of wood he was given, Divyanshu began making his funeral pyre as beautiful as he could.  Being an artist he had a clear vision of how the funeral pyre should look like.  He made it on a platform.  He gave it the shape of classical tombs he had seen in pictures.  By the time his body would be burnt the platform would catch fire too.  The entire thing would collapse with a thud which he imagined to be loud enough to shake the heavens.  Artists have such big egos that they imagine heavenly participation in their funeral too.

“You idiot!” The soldier who was guarding him shouted.  “Finish it up quickly; there’s only an hour left for sunset. What do you think you are making?  A monument?”

What else?  Divyanshu asked himself.  Don’t I have this freedom at least?  What sort of an artist would I be otherwise?

The sun was beginning to show signs of sinking beyond the horizon.  The soldier approached.  He looked at the funeral pyre with some dismay.  “Beautiful!” he mumbled in spite of himself.


Labels:

Comments

  1. parwatisingariAugust 24, 2017 at 7:29 AM

    :) I was awaiting him creating a prototype of himself for the pyre while he vanished.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 24, 2017 at 8:07 AM

      Does our country today give room for such optimism?

      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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 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

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...
12 comments
Read more