Skip to main content

Dog in the manger

 

Dog Ross by June Huff

Fiction

Samson was irritated. There were too many missed calls on his mobile phone when he came back to the staff room during the break. Almost all the missed calls were from father-in-law. The son-of-a-bitch!

Samson had no choice but call back. After all, his wife was his last hope, the ultimate redeemer.

Samson worked as a teacher in a private school which paid him and all other teachers a salary that couldn’t meet even a week’s expenditure of a normal family with four or five members. Not that he didn’t try for other jobs. All good jobs were meant for people with some connections: wives of MLAs or nephews and nieces of Catholic priests and nuns or followers of people who claim to be political leaders… Finally Samson hit upon an idea for the sake of survival and possibly success in life. Marry a nurse and leave the country with her. Nurses get jobs abroad easily. Eventually their husbands can be transported too.

“You’ll be working at some petrol pump or supermarket,” Narendran told Samson, “if you go abroad. They’re not going to let you teach them English. Imagine you teaching English to the British!” He laughed. He was of the opinion that unemployed people in the country should make pakodas and sell tea on roadsides. “Didn’t our PM himself give us the example?” He asked.

When did the PM get the time for that? Samson wondered. He says he studied up to Masters in “entire political science” while also working as a fulltime Pracharak of the RSS before becoming a fulltime politician. He didn’t ask, however. Narendran was what they call a nationalist nowadays. It’s dangerous to ask questions to neo-nationalists; they’ll troll you if not lynch you.

Better to be pump attendant in London than a private school teacher in India. That’s how Samson decided to marry Daisy Leela Chacko who had already passed IELTS and OET and was just waiting for the England VISA. Daisy was the only daughter of Chacko. So Samson would inherit a house too in due course of time. Good arrangement any way you look at it.

“Sam,” Chacko answered the call as soon as the melodious voice of the woman who advised endlessly about Covid precautions ended. What a contrast was Chacko’s voice to that woman’s!

“Sam,” Chacko said. “I’m in hospital with Maria.” Maria was his wife. “She is under observation. On drips, you see. So we won’t be home for a while. Caesar will need lunch. During your lunch break you go to our house and give him a plate of biryani.”

“Biryani?” Sam said.

“Chicken biryani. Caesar doesn’t like mutton. You can buy it from one of the hotels near your school.”

Caesar was Chacko’s dog. A massive German shepherd who growled angrily most of the time.

There are no hotels near Samson’s school. Only a couple of small restaurants. But they serve chicken biryani every day for lunch. Malayalis can’t live without chicken biryanis. And every little chai shop is named Hotel so-and-so. Humility is not a virtue in Kerala’s hospitality industry at least.

Samson bought a chicken biryani as soon as he had finished his own lunch of rice, curd, and fried brinjal and rode his bike to Chacko’s house where Caesar was getting impatient like some of our politicians who are questioned bluntly by TV news anchors.

“Lucky fellow!” Samson said to the dog as he unpacked the chicken biryani. “I eat brinjal and you eat chicken.”

He shut the kennel having transferred the biryani into the dog’s plate.

“Hey.” Samson thought he heard a voice.

Caesar had called him, apparently. He went back to the kennel. “Yeah? Any problem?”

“What’s this stuff?” Caesar asked.

“Chicken biryani.” Samson said as innocently as a newcomer to neo-nationalist politics.

“Where did you get this from?”

“Hotel Lotus.”

The word ‘lotus’ pacified Caesar apparently. He calmed down. “It’s no good,” he said. “You should have bought some chicken from KFC or McDonalds.”

“I’ll bring you British mushroom chicken from London, sala.” Samson muttered as he turned the ignition of his bike.

Comments

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

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

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...

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

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...