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
47 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
8 comments
Read more