Angel

 Fiction

Angel woke up a little later than usual that morning. It was drizzling outside and that gave him a convenient excuse for pulling the blanket over himself once again. He should have been tapping the rubber trees. A little drizzle didn’t matter because the rubber trees had been given plastic skirts precisely to let the tapping go on irrespective of the weather. Moreover, Angel was supposed to be a good young man doing everything sincerely like the angels.

Angel was not his real name. He got that name after he played the role of an angel in a play directed by Father Joseph, the parish priest. Not only the people of the parish but also Father Joseph thought that the young man was as good as an angel. Well, almost.

Angels are as good as God, according to Father Joseph. Not as perfect or omnipotent or omniscient. As good. Goodness is innocence. Angels have absolute faith in God because of their innocence. They don’t doubt or question God’s ways. Some angels did doubt. They rebelled too. They became devils. Angels and devils are the opposite poles on the faith-doubt continuum.

The opposite of faith is not disbelief. Disbelief is as certain a thing as faith. One is an absolute Yes and the other an absolute No. All absolutes are a kind of faith. The opposite of faith is doubt. Father Joseph always warned his parishioners about the doubters, those who are neither here nor there. Such people are more dangerous than the devils. The devils have better chances of being redeemed than the sceptics.

Oh, sorry, this is supposed to be Angel’s story and not a lesson in theology. The problem with characters like Father Joseph is that theology is inseparable from their very being. Knowledgeable people will say that it is an ontological relationship. It is because of such a relationship that Father Joseph can easily identify Angels and Devils and the more dangerous Doubters.

Our own Angel, however, was not quite sure about the validity of Father Joseph’s theological insights and judgments. Angel knew very well that he would rather sleep in bed for a longer while than get up much before sunrise and go to tap the rubber trees. He would eat fish and chicken to his heart’s content rather than observe all kinds of abstinence from Advent to Lent. How much he longed to hold Rosa in a loving embrace! But he won’t ever do it, of course, because he knows that it is a sin even to look at a woman with unchaste intentions.

Rosa was his old classmate in high school. The very sight of her set his heart ablaze. But he would immediately ask God’s pardon and recite a Hail Mary or at least a part of it, depending on how much time was at hand.

Angel took to farming after school while Rosa had just graduated from a college in the city. They met occasionally on the road and smiled at each other. Rosa surely could feel the warmth of the fire in Angel’s heart. Her smile was proof of that awareness.

She even went to the extent of winking at him one day. Really? Angel could not believe it. He thought he was dreaming. Can a good girl like Rosa wink at a man? He could not ask that to anyone. The village would be rife with unwarranted rumours. But Angel made certain enquiries in his own ways which were not too subtle. Subtlety is not part of angelicity, Father Joseph would have said if you asked him about it. Angels are straightforward. Theirs is a one-track mind.

His enquiries culminated in a rather unpleasant realisation that Rosa was a confirmed feminist. “Why should boys have all the fun?” That was her line of thinking.

“Where is my fun?” One day Angel gathered the courage to ask her when they met each other on the village road. “Tapping rubber, cultivating tapioca, weeding the farms…” Rosa was having all the fun, after all, going to college and so on.

Rosa smiled. And Angel’s heart burned like a furnace.

“I have a long-cherished dream,” he managed to confess.

“What?” Rosa asked.

“I want to touch you.”

“Hmm,” she said meaningfully. “Naughty guy. You’re not as angelic as people think, eh?”

She asked him to come home on Saturday when her parents would be attending a wedding somewhere far away and she would be alone at home.

Angel waited impatiently for Saturday, cursing the week for being unnecessarily long. Every moment, he dreamt about fondling Rosa’s golden-brown skin. He could feel its softness in his deepest heart even without touching it. Just a touch, that’s all he wanted. The touch would bring him bliss, he knew.

Finally when the day and time did arrive, he put on his best dress and threw a lot of Ponds dream flower talcum powder all over his body and walked through rubber plantations avoiding the main paths and ways where he might be noticed.

Rosa welcomed him with a beaming smile.

“Hope you’ve brought a condom,” she said without much delay.

“What?” Angel stood transfixed unable to decide whether he had heard it right. No, he didn’t want to know it – whether he had indeed heard it right. Such absolute certainties are dangerous. He turned and walked away. No, not walked. He was running as fast as he could.