Skip to main content

Dirty Saints


Fiction
Tony left.
There were only four members in the WhatsApp group. When Tony left, the group became 25% less.
Less than what? 3/3 is 100%. Vijay texted.
Isn’t it now ¾? Andrew asked.
What the hell is happening to Dirty Saints? Husain wondered after a long silence and never wrote anything more in the group.
Tony, Vijay, Andrew and Husain were the Dirty Saints, the renowned clique in the senior secondary school. After school, they all went their own ways. Tony took up computer engineering and joined Infosys, Vijay opted for medicine and became a doc, Andrew pursued literature and teaches at a university, and Husain joined his father’s business after graduating in commerce.
Tony was showing signs of frustration from the time Narendra Modi was elected the Prime Minister for the second term. His posts in the group became increasingly vitriolic against the ruling party at the Centre and its blatant communalism.
Ur Congy was the communal party, man. Vijay texted in response to one of Tony’s texts.
‘Congy’ was Vijay’s word for ‘Congress’ just as ‘Commie’ was for Communists and Marxists. Tony, in return, called Vijay a ‘Sanghy’.
Dirty Saints became a battlefield between Tony and Vijay.
Beware u Commie, Vijay responded to Tony once. How Tony metamorphosed into Commie from Congy remained a mystery, however. Trust me, a day is coming soon when a man will step out of the majority and shove cowdung down ur throat. Vijay didn’t stop with that. He added: Dare to make fun of a Muslim guy about his circumcision in an Islamic nation? U wont have head on ur shoulders. Respect the freedom u have in a Hindu nation.
Husain didn’t take the Islamic bait. He was quiet all through. He stopped interacting in the group.
Andrew texted Husain privately asking whether he was okay. I’m Muslim, bro. Silence suits me in present India. Husain answered.
Husain didn’t quit the group, however. He chose silence.
Tony didn’t believe in silence. Tolerating bullshit was never in his blood. Cowshit is no holier, he texted.
The name Dirty Saints was chosen for the group by Tony. All the four members were naughty at school but good at heart. They never harmed anyone. They didn’t bother about anyone, that’s the truth. They had their own private fun, private jokes, and intellectual conversations. They quoted Albert Camus and Dostoevsky, Albert Einstein and T S Eliot.
A decade after they left the school, after many holidays together, Dirty Saints WhatsApp group was formed. Now, a couple of years after the formation of the group, 25% of the group left, 25% is silenced, 25% thinks the remaining 25% is either Congy or Commie and hence unworthy of living in the emerging Hindu nation. The Hindu nation is for holy saints? Andrew keeps wondering.

PS. I must acknowledge my gratitude to Thomas Kuriakose for forming a WhatsApp group of some old friends including me and suggesting the name Dirty Saints in one of his comments. I also acknowledge my old student Gulshan Parmar’s contribution to one of the texts quoted in the story. I dedicate this story to Prakash Kumar whose brief conversation today on FB Messenger triggered this writing.


Comments

  1. Rajeev MoothedathJanuary 13, 2020 at 12:29 PM

    Interesting.. I also had left my school What's app group when all they were doing was forwarding unverified forwards, some of them vicious. when the group admin himself turned out to be a culprit I said "enough is enough" and quit.

    ReplyDelete

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

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
16 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
15 comments
Read more

The music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more