Good People

Fiction

“The good people are utterly boring, aren’t they?” Joshua asked me as I was driving him to Vagamon, a popular tourist destination that is about 50 km from my home. Joshua was in Kerala on a short vacation from Mumbai where he did business.

I laughed looking at the winding road ahead. I was going to negotiate yet another hairpin bend. What makes driving an intoxication is the road. Straight and smooth roads like the national highways don’t fascinate me. Roads must have bends and slopes. And views on the sides. When it comes to people too, I guess the charm lies in their being not so good.

“Do you remember Peter?” Joshua asked as I manoeuvred my car against a truck that was crawling down the hairpin bend.

“The good-boy Peter, our classmate in high school?”

“Yup. Peter the pet of the teachers.”

Peter was good. Good at studies, good in behaviour, and good in every way as far as teachers and the society were concerned. Everybody liked him. No wonder he went on to become a priest. But I had no contact with him at all after we left school.

“Do you have contact with him?” I asked rather surprised. Joshua and Peter had as much in common as between a lion and a lamb. Joshua was a lion who led a whole gang of boys in school against everything that the school had forbidden. Not that the gang disobeyed the rules openly. That was impossible in those days. The social system was more stifling for children than Indira Gandhi’s Emergency was for citizens. Joshua had his own unique ways of circumventing the rules and regulations of the school as well as the society. The headmaster of the school was a Catholic priest who would never be seen without a cane in hand. “He’s as sadistic as his God,” Joshua once told me about the headmaster-priest. “He beats the hell out of us here and his God will throw us in hell when we reach there. Hell is their only business.”

I recalled the many lashes I had received from the headmaster. I couldn’t remember the reasons for them, however. That was how the system was. Cane-lashes were inevitable. If the cane is spared, the child will be spoilt – that was the maxim in schools as well as homes in those days. Did we all become good because of the cane? Well, Peter did, at least. He became a man who fitted neatly in the good box of the society. But he had never been caned. That’s one of the many ironies of life.

“Will he be using the cane in his school?” I wondered aloud. I had learnt from Joshua that Peter was the principal of a school somewhere in Chhattisgarh.

Joshua laughed. “The cane is out of fashion now, Tomichan. Pamper the child and make money – that’s the new maxim.”

“Why do you keep in touch with Peter anyway?” I asked.

“I had no contact with him at all. I got his phone number with much difficulty after contacting many people. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry before I die.”

“What!” The mention of death rattled me for a moment.

“What what?” Joshua asked calmly. “Is it the mention of death that bothers you or my seeking apology from Peter?”

I wasn’t quite sure which bothered me more. “Both, I guess,” I said.

“We’re growing old, aren’t we? Many of our contemporaries are no more. How many years have we left? So I thought I should erase certain things from memory.”

Joshua had insulted Peter when we were in class 10, the last year of school. There was some argument between them and Peter kept on spitting out platitudes which irritated Joshua. “Shove your hypocritical morality up your arse and get lost,” Joshua hollered.

“You are my arse,” Peter retorted.

That was unexpected. Unexpected from Peter the Good Boy.

Joshua stared at Peter for a moment, went near him, gripped his ears tightly in his hands, and spat on his head. Peter was stunned. Joshua walked away without uttering any word further. He thought he was a lion. But he had become a hyena in my mind. And Peter was a carcass.

Now half a century after that, Joshua wanted to erase that act of scavenging from his consciousness.

Joshua had undergone a lot of transformation. I knew that since I was in touch with him quite regularly. He had mellowed down. He was not a lion now but an elephant – majestic but vegetarian. So to say. Life had altered him. His wife had died of cancer a few years back and his only daughter had married an African Muslim in America where she was sent for higher studies.

We had reached Vagamon already and we were sitting on one of the many rolling knolls enjoying the cool breeze of the late afternoon. Vagamon’s knolls don’t have trees. They are just meadows. There’s nothing to block your vision on them. Sit on one of them and you can see so many others of them all around. It is like sitting on top of the world. You can see a whole world around you.

“If we can see everything so clearly as this, life would be much easier,” Joshua said.

“Did you apologise to Peter?” I asked.

Joshua looked at me. “No.”

I looked at him. The knolls looked at us both.

“When I introduced myself, Peter’s instinctive response was: ‘My arse?’”

Some memories never fade. Some wounds remain.

I imagined Peter in his priestly habit offering the holy Mass every morning and praying to his God: Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

“Look at those mountains,” Joshua pointed out the distant mountain range beyond the knolls. “They look so nearby, but they are farther than they seem.”

Mountains are the earth’s undecaying monuments, as Nathaniel Hawthorne said. They stay and stay. And forgive too. Did I hear someone say that? I sat on my knees and bent down. And kissed the knoll of Vagamon. Those knolls had taught me something. The good people aren’t utterly boring!

PS. Vagamon is a popular tourist destination in central Kerala – 100 km from Kochi, 60 km from Kottayam. Here are some pics from the place. 

A lake amid the knolls of Vagamon

Thangal Para, a Muslim pilgrimage centre

Pine Forest

On one of the knolls

PPS. There are many other tourist attractions in Vagamon. My visit was not in the garb of a tourist.