The Goddess of Koodathai

Jolly before her arrest

A serial killer named Jolly took the state of Kerala by storm ever since the police took her into custody a few days ago. She had fooled too many people for a decade and a half during which she killed at least six persons including a little child. She pretended to be a lecturer at NIT Calicut when in reality she had not even completed her undergraduate studies. She was apparently a very devout practitioner of religion in her parish. People regarded her as an exemplary woman in many ways.

How can someone fool so many people for so long?

Obviously the social, electronic and print media in Kerala celebrated Jolly in predictable ways. There have been endless TV debates on her, newspaper articles, and relentless posts on the social media. The jokes and trolls that descended like incessant bombardment on the social media revealed the average Malayali’s taste for the insipid as well as his latent cynicism.

The Catholic Church in Kerala was too quick to come out with official and unofficial statements about Jolly being not as religious as she has been portrayed in some of the social media posts. Why the Church should have taken these posts so seriously is not a mystery given the scandals that have buffeted the very foundations of the sacred establishment. Many priests, bishops and even a cardinal of the Church have recently been brought under the scanner because their cocks transgressed too many fences to feed on forbidden farms. The Malayali taste buds savoured the vapid tangs of clerical scandals with more relish than the fervour of their routine religious rituals.

I chose to remain a casual observer all through knowing the futility of questioning anything that has a religious flavour. I would only make a fool of myself by expressing any genuine opinion in a state where you are quite certain to meet the most virulent weekday social media troll leading the choir in the parish church the next Sunday.

I certainly don’t mean to make this a typical Malayali syndrome. Go to North India and you will find similar incarnations wearing the robes of passionate nationalists and pious lynch mobs.

Who is good and who is evil in this country is rather impossible to say now. What is good and what is evil here? Who is with god and who with Satan? [I find it amusing that my computer has capitalised Satan automatically while it left god alone.]

Jolly after her arrest

My ruminations hit an orgasmic climax when Killer Jolly assumed godly proportions in my weird [or perverse, as a friend suggested] imagination. Our gods kill with the same grace as Jolly, I thought. The floods and landslides that buffet Kerala with religious meticulousness these days have a supernatural grace. Lynching in North India has assumed a similar grace. We have successfully kept the people of an entire state shut within their homes for over two months with a grace that belongs to the heavenly milieus.

I live in Kerala where a flyover can collapse even before vehicles begin to run on it. I live in Kerala where sky-reaching apartments with paradisiacal elegance can be built and handed over to home-seekers and then get the judicial courts to order their demolition.

I live in India where millions of people can be thrown out of their homes and homelands in the name of infrastructure development. I live in India where thousands of people find themselves stripped of their citizenship every day. I live in India where a humungous statue can consume as much revenue as can feed a whole mass of hungry people for years.

Koodathai Jolly emerges as a symbol, a supernatural one, a graceful and gracious one, somewhere in the lurid horizons of my country. As flies to wanton boys are we to our jolly gods.