Uriel the gargoyle-maker

Uriel was a multifaceted personality. He could stab with words, sting like Mike Tyson, and distort reality charmingly with the precision of a gifted cartoonist. He was sedate now and passionate the next moment. He could don the mantle of a carpenter, a plumber, or a mechanic, as situation demanded. He ran a school in Shillong in those days when I was there. That’s how I landed in the magic circle of his friendship.

He made me a gargoyle. Gradually.

When the refined side of human civilisation shaped magnificent castles and cathedrals, the darker side of the same homo sapiens gave birth to gargoyles. These grotesque shapes were erected on those beautiful works of architecture as if to prove that there is no human genius without a dash of perversion. In many parts of India, some such repulsive shape is placed in a prominent place of great edifices with the intention of warding off evil or, more commonly, the evil eye.

I was Uriel’s gargoyle for warding off the evil eye from his school, I think.

I was teaching at St Joseph’s school when I first met Uriel in his own privately owned school in another corner of Shillong town. We had a common friend and that’s how we happened to meet. Eventually Uriel drew me into his magic circle. We drank together on weekends. We dined together sometimes. I even spent a few nights in his school on some such wild and witchy occasions. Something deep within me knew I was in the wrong place, I think, because on many such nights I would get up after one short sleep feeling out of place and would walk out of the place. I would walk back to my own residence ignoring the terrible cold in the mountains of Shillong. Ignoring other potential hazards too. The local people wouldn’t have looked kindly upon a dkhar (outsider) who walked around in the middle of the night. My nocturnal drunken outings taught me the plain truth that neither the antisocial elements of the society nor the supernatural creatures of the dark bothered to disturb the calm of the misty nights in the hills. So those outings became an additional intoxication for me. I would leave Uriel’s place when the whole hills were in sound sleep. Was it the charm of the hills that drew me or an internal repulsive mechanism that couldn’t accept Uriel for some reason that I never deciphered?

It would be ungrateful to write like this about Uriel because I ate a lot of his rice. Both Uriel and I belong to a culture that ordains ingratitude to one whose food you have eaten as a great sin. Why did I accept that friendship at all if something was revolting deep within me all the time? It is impossible to imagine that it was just the greed for Uriel’s whisky and dinner that drew me to him. I hardly ate anything in those days. Even today, food refuses to charm me. I eat little. My physician keeps telling me I am underweight.

Was Uriel an open flame and I a moth that flew into it?

Uriel was the sculptor and I was the gargoyle. Uriel was dreaming up a utopia and I was the gargoyle he would erect right in front of the edifice of his dream.

Eight years after I met Uriel first, I got a lecturer’s job in a premier college in Shillong. Within days of my appointment as a lecturer, Uriel took me in his car from my residence to his school for a celebration. He picked up another common friend too on the way. This friend opened a beer bottle on the way and we shared it while the car kept moving. By the time the car reached in front of the college that had appointed me, the bottle was empty. The friend, who was also a lecturer in another college, threw the empty bottle right in front of ‘my’ college’s gate and laughed with a lot of mirth. Uriel laughed too rather uncharacteristically. The message that they were trying to convey was not lost on me: the college had made a drastic mistake by appointing me.

Soon Uriel left Shillong rather unceremoniously. He didn’t want to run the school anymore. Some kind of religious fervour had swallowed his spirit. “He always had the passion and now he has found a cause,” a friend remarked.

Religion is the ultimate solace for those who have the passion without a cause. And religion loves to mould gargoyles out of those who are perceived as evil. Monstrous shapes that carry the filth of the holy. Symbols of Satan that should motivate the struggling virtuous. Uriel’s entire life has been dedicated to noble spiritual causes ever since he left Shillong. Since I’m not there anywhere in the vicinity, he may have created another gargoyle in his new place. One of the inevitabilities of religions is the creation of gargoyles at appropriate times.

 

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