Skip to main content

Out of Place

 

Canossa Castle

Fiction

Sitting on a boulder that looked rather out of place amidst the tall trees and thick grass, he watched the vehicles that plied on the ghat road. His car was parked in the shade of a tree on the roadside. The car also looked out of place there. Why would anyone stop his car at the edge of a forest? He did, though. Out of an impulse. He had nowhere to go, in fact. He was driving aimlessly. No destination. The Corona pandemic had kept him home for a long time. Months. It was like an imprisonment.

What else would he do if the pandemic wasn’t there? He had nothing to do. He was a retired clerk. He pushed files all his life in a government office. That was not what he wanted to do, however. He wanted to hold a high position in one of those government offices and bring about changes in public life. Positive changes. Radical changes. Reformation. For a better world.

Nothing happened but. He didn’t pass the required tests in the required age limit. He didn’t know how to please the right people who could have helped him with some internal promotions. He could only wonder how other people managed their lives so effortlessly. They were successful people. They moved from lower to higher ranks as smoothly as honeybees moved from flower to flower. Better flower, of course, each time. They possessed the required skills. He was out of place among all those skilful people.

He was a writer, nevertheless. He wrote stories and poems and a couple of novels too. A few of them were published in some obscure journals. Most of them found their places in his blog which was not particularly popular. The novels were e-books which hardly sold beyond a dozen copies.

Failed writer. Failed reformer. Failed human being. Out of place.

Something moved in the forest behind him at a little distance. He knew that there were elephants in this part of the forest. They must be hunting for food. Let them. At least they may not be out of place here. This is their place.

This must have been the place of dinosaurs once upon a time. Dinosaurs have to go too when their time is over.

Dinosaurs reminded him strangely of King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. Who is greater: the king or the pope? That was their problem. The pope should govern the spiritual dinosaurs and leave the earthly ones to the king, Henry said. The Pope is next to God, said Gregory. Even the King and his dinosaurs are subordinate to the Pope. Henry challenged that.

And Henry learnt the lesson the hard way. Gregory the Pope threatened to excommunicate Henry the King. You will no longer be a part of God’s people, the Pope told the King. God and his angels will spew fire and brimstone on you and your kingdom. You will live and die in misery like a wretched pagan. Your soul will rot in hell. Satan and his devils will drag you with a chain into the eternal hellfire where snakes and worms will crawl over you…

Henry was shaken. His knees wobbled. He pleaded for mercy. Forgive me, Your Holiness. I have sinned. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Repent and perform the penance, Henry was told. Stand with bare head and bare feet in the open air outside the Canossa Castle for three days. The winter of 1077 saw the King of England shivering like a beggar standing in the snows of Reggio Emilia. Then Henry was asked to walk barefoot all the way from Canossa to Roma, kneel before the Holy Father and beg for forgiveness.

Dinosaurs became extinct.

The sun had sunk beyond the trees in the western horizon. The road became increasingly deserted and formidably darker.

The forest seemed to move behind him. A herd of elephants? Probably. But he did not move. He did not want to move. He lay down on the rock and stared at the blank, bland sky above. And waited for the forest to move on to him.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Kejriwal’s Arrest in Modi’s Kurukshetra

For some mysterious reason, Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest reminded me of Haren Pandya. Maybe, because Pandya’s 21 st death anniversary is approaching (26 March). Have you forgotten Haren Pandya? He was the Home Minister of Gujarat before Narendra Modi assumed dictatorial powers in that state. Modi chose to teach humility to Pandya by making him the Minister of State for revenue. Pandya chose not to learn humility from Modi and resigned from that post in Aug 2002. Remember Gujarat of 2002? You should. A fire engulfed a train on 27 Feb 2002 killing 58 Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya where they had gone to discover their god, not very unlike Christopher Columbus undertaking a voyage to discover India and messing it all up. What caused the fire in the train? Lord Ram knows probably. The upshot was that there was a riot in Gujarat by Hindus against Muslims. Haren Pandya is one of the BJP leaders who gave statements in many places indicting Modi for the riots. He asser