Skip to main content

Emptiness

Fiction

“Hey, aren’t you Karia?”

The question woke up Scaria from his reverie. He looked at the intruder for a while. “Hello, Jose.”

They were meeting after many, many years. Scaria had left the village half a century ago when his family migrated to North Kerala. He was a migrant ever since. As soon as he completed his plumber-electrician course, he left home to take up a job in the Gulf where he lived most part of his life. He married Cecily who was a nurse in the hospital where he worked as the plumber-electrician for a while. In the autumn of their life, they returned to live in Kerala. Their only daughter was married and Cecily spent most of her time with a Charismatic prayer group which was eminently active in the village and nearby towns.  Scaria was very religious too. Religion helped fill the emptiness which he experienced time and again in life. But God alone could not fill the void. That’s why he decided to visit his old village, the place of his childhood memories. Memories fill the void within. Can they also tear you apart?

“I was trying to recall the granite hill that was here,” Scaria said to his childhood friend.

“Stone mining. They made the hill vanish without a trace,” said Jose. 

“A lot of things have changed. That bridge over there, it used to be a three-foot wide wooden thing with some planks missing in between.”

“We used to run on it and jump over the gaping emptiness!”

“So much change!”

Jose invited his old friend home. “Have a cup of tea with us, at least.”

Scaria excused himself. He wished to spend a little time there looking at the emptiness that reigned where the favourite hill of his childhood had been. Climbing that hill up and down, up and down was his beloved game as a child. Sometimes one boy or another would chase him. He was not interested in the chase anyway. The climbing itself was his passion: up and down.

His life went through a lot of ups and downs after that. The usual ups and downs of life. Some estrangement with Cecily. His daughter’s love affair with someone whom she met on a Facebook chat. Her marriage and eventual fading away from his life.

This is life, he contemplated. Everything is so evanescent, even a granite hill.

He had come back to his childhood assuming that hills lasted beyond humans. Can a little faith bring back a mountain? A little dynamite can move a whole mountain!

Cecily must now be preaching to her prayer group about the power of faith to move mountains.

Can you move my mountain here, Cecily? Can you? Can you at least make the emptiness bearable?






Comments

  1. Anita SabatMarch 7, 2019 at 10:47 PM

    Philosophical story.
    I am alarmed at the way our mountains are disappearing. Future generations will not know the beauty of mountains if all are blown away by granite for selfish motives of the builders. Who gives them permission to raze? Aren't these public property?
    Sadly, we cannot rebuild or remake or restore certain things...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 8, 2019 at 6:08 AM

      A lot of environmental degradation has taken place already because of human greed. We are paying the price too. See how the climate is changing.

      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
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more