Backlog of Karma

Fiction

My car growled on the first gear as it negotiated the steep ascent. It was a narrow road flanked with mammoth rubber trees that had outgrown their natural lifespan. Among those trees stood here and there like aberrations a few cashew trees and an occasional mango tree. Tall grass and weeds covered the entire ground.

Why did Ananthavishnu buy a house in such a place? I wondered. But there was nothing surprising about it on second thoughts. Vishnu, as we called him usually, was always weird. He needed reasons, clear scientific reasons, for everything. When a girl of our class professed her love for him, he asked her, “Tell me at least one reason why you feel this way for me.”

Vishnu and I studied five years together in college: pre-degree and graduation. He went on to study further until he obtained doctorate in astrophysics and landed a job in ISRO. I changed from science to literature and then became a teacher.

Soon after his recent retirement he bought this mountain villa and shifted here. All alone. His wife had left him long ago, just a few years after their marriage. People joked that he must have demanded some chemical equations of her love.

The ascent to Vishnu’s villa reminded me strangely of Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. But Vishnu was no Heathcliff; if anything, he was the antithesis of Heathcliff.

“What a place, man, for a retired old chap to live!” I did not conceal my disapproval of his choice.

“Ah, this is my Innisfree, Tom,” he said with his characteristic mysterious smile. “Peace comes dropping slow,” he quoted Yeats, “Dropping from the veils of the morning.”

We chatted for a long time sipping Teacher’s whisky.

“I bought Teacher’s in honour of you,” he teased me.

“Cheers to mediocrity!” I raised my glass to him. When I decided to take up teaching for a career, Vishnu disapproved of it. “Profession of the mediocre.” That’s what he said.

Our conversation crossed the midnight. An owl hooted from somewhere not very far.

“Can I leave the window open?” I asked as he was about to leave from the guest room to which he had accompanied me.

“Of course,” he said breezily. “And watch the glimmer of the midnight and the purple glow of the moon.” Yeats again.

“Good night,” I said.  I was drunk and sleepy.

As I was about to turn off the light, the book that lay on the table caught my attention. Backlog of Karma by Augustine.  Something prompted me to pick it up. As soon as I did, a strange sensation shot through my veins. It was as if the book was trying to tell me something. I flipped through the pages before opening a page at random and read:

Only God is pure. Everything else is tarnished by the touch of matter. Man is the vilest of all God’s creation because in him matter mingles with passions. Man has to burn his vile passions moment after moment in the flame of divine purity.

I remembered one Augustine who was our classmate at college. Is this the same Augustine? He was a profligate, but.

“Why do I feel this strange creepy sensation?” I asked myself. “You’re drunk, man” the yellow glow of the moon told me. I put the book down on the table, drank a glass of water and turned off the light. I lay down looking at the rubber branches nodding lazily in the gentle breeze outside. The breeze put me to sleep in spite of the eeriness left by the book like an unsavoury aftertaste.

During breakfast next morning I enquired about Backlog of Karma.

“Oh, that was left behind by a friend who was with me a few days back,” Vishnu said. “Do you remember Augustine?”

“Is it the same Augustine?” I did not conceal my surprise.

“But he was a scoundrel!”

“Scoundrels make good saints, don’t they?” Vishnu smiled mysteriously. “He’s now a monk. In some weird monastery, a cloister, which does not allow visitors.”

A few months after we completed college Augustine met with an accident, Vishnu told me. Bike. He was in coma for a few days or weeks. When he recovered he was an entirely different man. He said he had visited heaven and hell during his coma. “You know the human mind is a vicious trickster,” Vishnu concluded.

“Can we visit him?” I asked. “After all we are both retired and have time on our hands.”

“We can try. But there’s little chance of success. Are you ready to drive to Yercaud?”

I love driving and with someone like Vishnu near driving is an intoxication. His conversations combine astrophysics and metaphysics into poetry.

We followed Google Map until the car stopped in front of a grey building that looked more like a prison than a monastery. There was not a soul in sight. No other buildings in visible neighbourhood. Orchards lay sprawling all around.  The pears and oranges looked tempting.

We rang the bronze bell that was hung in the portico and waited. After what seemed an eternity, a peephole opened in the door and a face appeared.

“We’d like to meet Father Augustine,” I said.

“Why?”

“We were his classmates at college.”

“Why do you want to meet him?”

“To discuss backlog of karma.” I don’t know what prompted me to say that. I had read the book whose main contention was that human life is an accumulation of evil. And all that evil snowballs into a gargantuan backlog of karma. Only prayer and penance can save man from his backlog of karma.

The eyes stared through the peephole. “Please wait. I’ll ask him if he’d like visitors.”

“Ora pro nobis.” Vishnu read the inscription beneath the image of Mary in a grotto opposite the monastery building. “Ora pro nobis, pray for us. Latin sounds better, isn’t it?” He asked. “Ora pro nobis.” He repeated it many times as if it was a magic spell.

“I’m sorry.” The peephole opened and the eyes stared through it. “Father Augustine does not wish to receive visitors.”

“But we’ve come from very far just to meet him,” I pleaded.

“Ora pro nobis,” Vishnu mumbled.

“I’m sorry.” The peephole closed.

“We should clear our backlog of karma before we try again,” Vishnu said as our car rode through the orchards of Shevaroy Hills.

Our souls are restless until they rest in you. Saint Augustine. I read the inscription near the gate of the monastery as we were exiting it.

PS. I dedicate this story to Sitharaam Jayakumar whose latest comment on one of my blogs spurred my fantasy for fiction. The title came from a WhatsApp message from an old friend who is a Catholic priest.  But Augustine in the story bears absolutely no resemblance to him. The illustrative pic is of a real place somewhere near which the story is set. But Vishnu is pure fiction.