Skip to main content

A mad man’s Christmas

Fiction

Atami was sick of the blood on his sword.  He wanted to vomit.  That’s why he walked into Helga’s brothel.

“Get me some water to wash first,” he ordered when Helga’s nose puckered involuntarily at the stench of blood.  Helga shuddered at the sight of the blood-drenched sword.  “Then send me your best girl,” Atami growled.  “With enough wine,” he added.

“Not me, please,” Naomi said when Helga asked her to carry the water.

“Why not?” Helga shot an angry glance.

“He is Herod’s soldier.”

“And he looks majestic,” added Helga.  “Maybe you can please him enough and he’ll marry you.  Think of your future girl.”

“I hate Herod and his beasts.”

Naomi had reasons to hate Herod and his soldiers.  She was a descendant of the Hasmonean family which was ruined by Herod.  On Cleopatra’s request, Mark Antony had decided to make Aristobulus Hasmonea the king of Judea.  Herod’s beasts killed Aristobulus and haunted Hasmoneans like a vampire.  Naomi escaped into Helga’s brothel. 

“I’ll kill him,” Naomi said to herself as she carried the water to the ablution. 

“Wash away that,” Atami ordered when Naomi reached with the water.  He was asking her to wash away his vomit. 

“Pour it on me,” Atami ordered when Naomi brought the next pitcher of water.

Water became wine-red as it flowed down Atami’s body.  “How can he bear this cold, cold water?” Naomi wondered. 

Atami dried himself with the linen brought by Naomi and put on the robe given generously by Helga.

“Kings are mad people,” said Atami as he sat in front of the fire lit by Helga who had taken possession of whatever the soldier possessed as she helped him strip himself.  “Herod wanted all infants to be killed because some other kings came from somewhere and said that they had seen a star somewhere….”

Herod’s soldiers went all over the country killing all male infants because three people who called themselves kings from the east visited him and said that a child was born in Judea who would be the king of the Jews. 

“The East is mad,” said Atami as he sipped the wine that Helga kept supplying copiously.  “They have given their madness to Herod now.”

“Wasn’t Herod always mad?” Naomi blurted out.

Helga threw an angry glance at Naomi.

“You’re right, girl,” said Atami.  “I’m sick of him now.  Sick of Herod.  Sick of Antony and his bitch Cleopatra.  Sick of all Caesars.  What are kings but dogs in perpetual heat?”

Naomi and Helga looked at each other.  Helga served more wine to the soldier.  Wine seemed to enlighten him.

“I’m thinking of god,” said Atami. 

“God?” Helga was amused.

“Yup.  Someone told me that God was born on the earth and that’s what set the fire to Herod’s ass.  Some dream or prophecy or whatever shit, you know, the religious people.”

Helga winked at Naomi.  Naomi planted a kiss on the soldier’s stubbly cheek.

Atami pushed her away.

“I’m thinking of god,” he said.  “How will god wash away his sin of killing thousands of infants?  Thousands of innocents!  Thousands of innocents butchered for god’s sake.”

Helga and Naomi stared at each other.  They wondered what they would do with a mad man.


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
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more