Skip to main content

Godse’s ghosts

 


Asharam Bhakt woke up in his dream. A figure that looked supernatural and possibly divine in spite of its resemblance to Nathuram Godse said, “Who controls the past controls the future.” The apparition vanished instantly but Asharam found himself standing in the Ambala jail where Godse was being readied for his execution. Gandhi’s killer looked scared to death. Asharam could see Godse’s knees wobbling.

Is this the man who fired bullet after bullet into the frail body of a man who was uttering God’s name? Asharam wondered. Not that he had any sympathy for Mohandas Gandhi. On the contrary, he was an admirer of Godse and his advocacy of the Brahmin superiority. And all the more his hatred of Muslims. If Godse were alive today wouldn’t he be pleased to see how India has become the kind of nation that he wanted it to be: an exterminator of Muslims and slow killer of the low castes?

No, Godse says to Asharam. The executioner is getting the gallows ready yonder.

What! Asharam cannot believe his hears.

It was all mistake, Godse says. His voice cracks. Is it fear or regret that moves Godse now? Asharam is not sure. I was wrong, Asharam hears Godse clearly. I was driven by hatred. Gandhi was driven by love. I was wrong. Wrong.

The executioner drops a black cover on Godse’s head.

Asharam trembled in his bed. Was it really Godse that he saw? Or was it the ghost of the man whom Asharam and his friends had lynched the other day for taking his cow home in the evening? A roar of bulldozers followed. The heart of Delhi was being bulldozed by some ghosts of history.

PS. Inspired by Indispire Edition 379: Mr Bhakt wakes up in a dream. Who controls the past controls the future, he is told. He starts rewriting history... #TwistInHistory

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.

Note: Not all of this is mere fantasy. Godse’s fear of death and the regrets in his last moments are recorded by none other than Justice Khosla who was part of the three-judge bench that heard the killer’s appeals. In Justice Khosla’s own words, Godse “repented of his deed and declared that were he to be given another chance he would spend the rest of his life in the promotion of peace and service of the country.”

Comments

  1. Hats off for today's write up ! I could feel every single word of this fictional truth. By, the time one repents his/ her actions, it is always a delay that can never compensate anything.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm sure towards the end everyone will realise the futility of hate and such vices and will also regret all their evil deeds. But as you say it'll be too late.

      Delete
  2. Hari OM
    Excellent stuff, sir!!! A well-imagined near reality. Oh if only this message were heard where needed... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I too wish if certain powerful people in the country today understood the most fundamental truths about life...

      Delete
  3. I have not read much about Godse but he sure seems to be an intriguing person, someone who managed to pull off such a huge thing. This was brilliantly written, I could imagine the entire episode

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Only intelligent people will go to the kind of extreme that Godse did. But his brain was perverse too. Perverse intellect is deadly.

      Delete
  4. Hello, Your blog contains useful content for humanity, we think it is a work that should be appreciated. You can participate in the web awards event organized by different categories among websites. In this way, you provide visitors to your web page through organic promotions about your website on the toplist, and you also strengthen your place in the channels where blogs gain effectiveness by creating your brand value with promotional evaluations and various social events. If you want to apply with your blog now, you can check the link where you can review the details and Join now.

    Mail: contact@blogaward.tk
    Join: www.webawards.tk
    Web: www.blogaward.tk

    ReplyDelete
  5. A creative piece, blending fact and fiction. Thoughts for everyone to ponder on.

    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

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

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...