Godman

Once upon a time there was this godman who called himself Paramanandaswamikal.  He appeared from nowhere on a day that stood drenched in a cloudburst.  A few trees had collapsed in the storm that accompanied the cloudburst.  This man with shabby clothes and criminal looks was sitting on one of the fallen trees when the rainstorm abated.  The villagers were as suspicious initially as they were of any stranger. 

“I am the poem of the almighty,” he said very solemnly when the village elder asked him who he was.

The villagers thought that he was a lunatic.  Then the stranger said, “Your children are not your children.”  The villagers were amused.  They nudged each other.  Marital fidelity was not considered a particularly great virtue in that village since many men were working in faraway places and came home to embrace their wives only once in a blue moon.  “Your children are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself,” the stranger went on after a solemn pause.  “Life is the greatest miracle worked by the almighty.  You are the greatest miracle of god.  Each one of you is a miracle…”

More villagers gathered.  They loved to see themselves as some great miracles. 

Food and money began to move from the village huts to the stranger who called himself Paramanandaswamikal.  In return for the food and money Paramanandaswamikal gave profound spiritual lessons to the villagers every evening.  Since the name Paramanandaswamikal was too long, the villagers decided to call him simply godman. Godman is a good name.  Easy to pronounce.  Highly fashionable too.  The people were very happy that their village was blessed with the physical presence of a godman. 

Those were the days when the villagers didn’t have much work to do.  Those were the days when petrol prices zoomed sky-high taking the prices of all essential commodities along with it.  GST and SGST and many other mysterious ghosts were haunting the village.  People were falling prey to depression, melancholy and opium.  Opium made them think that they were living in achhe din.

The godman brought them a new kind of intoxication.  He made them believe that each one of them was a miracle.  The people inhaled the fumes of paramanandam delivered every evening by their own godman.  They surrendered themselves to the greatest bliss that flowed like honey through the eloquent utterances of the godman. 

Words have the greatest power.  Paramanandaswamikal had learnt that while he served his prison term for a rape.  He was a fervent devotee of the television in jail.  He watched the channels that brought spirituality live to the prison. 

“Surrender, surrender yourself to the divine,” he preached to the villagers who found a new meaning in life when they had lost everything else in the process of what their government called ‘nation building’.  They surrendered themselves and their wives and their children and their little lands to the godman. 

“The kingdom of heaven is within you,” godman taught the villagers as he built up his kingdom in the village with the lands surrendered by the villagers.  The people were happy.  They were building the kingdom of god.  They had an occupation, a divine occupation. 

Everyone was happy.