Devils

Fiction

“Jet Airways acknowledges the valuable support we received from passengers like you for over 25 years. We regret to inform you that this is our last flight as we are suspending our services from tomorrow…”

Tony looked at the passenger next to him to make sure whether he had a sense of humour. The passenger’s belly that sat heavily on his lap led him to the assumption that he must have a sense of humour. So he said turning to him, “Hope they won’t suspend the service mid-air; may God save us.”

“What?” The passenger woke up from some reverie. “Did they say ‘May God save us’? Means there’s no hope?” And he laughed.

“Oh, no!” Tony hoped that the airlines was secular. At least the hemlines of the skirts of the airhostesses were secular, he had noticed. “They just said that their achhe din are coming to an end.”

“Hahaha,” the passenger laughed and his belly danced in his lap. “Achhe din came to an end for everybody in India some five years back, din’t they?” He laughed again. “By the way, I’m very reverend father Ambrose Mendelus. Basically from Goa, but serving in Mumbai and now flying to Delhi on duty.”

“I’m Tony Joseph from Cochin.” Tony extended his open palm for a friendly shake hand but the passenger took no notice. Tony was glad, however, that the woman passenger next to him had got down in Mumbai and a male passenger came in her place on the Kochi-Delhi flight, the last flight of Jet Airways. A historic journey, he thought. But the woman was a typical Malayali with the feminist version of the Malayali snobbery. “Just leave me alone,” she ordered the air-hostess at the first opportunity, “and wake me up as we’re landing in Mumbai.”

Very reverend father Ambrose Mendelus pushed his belly with his palm as he squeezed himself into the middle seat which had been warmed by the Malayali feminist snobbery.

“It’s achhe din for cows,” Tony ventured. He would be dodging the stray cows on the roads in Delhi from tomorrow onwards while driving to his office and back.

“Oh cows, poor devils,” Very reverend father Ambrose Mendelus said, “I miss beef steak with garlic.”

“Cows are like our gods, not devils,” said Tony. “We use them for so many purposes.”

“Hahaha, devils stand in need of greater versatility, you mean? Isn’t that why God created us human beings?”

The plane shuddered paroxysmally. “Is there god in an air pocket too?” asked Tony.

“God must be there in the veins of the chicken whose neck you slit for your chicken tikka masala.” He didn’t laugh.

“And in the cabbage you chop up…”

“And in the radish you chew down…”

“In the bread we eat…”

“In the wine we drink…”

“We are the devils…”

“Consumers of gods.”

Comments

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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth. He called it ‘preventive system’. The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed. Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault. For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy. Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves? Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian. In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically. Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification. In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog