Terror Tourism 1

Jacob Martin Pathros was enthralled by the ad on terror tourism which promised to take the tourist to the terrorist-jungles of Chhattisgarh. Jacob Martin Pathros had already visited almost all countries, except the perverted South America, after retiring at the young age of 56 from an ‘aided’ school in Kerala. 56 is the retirement age in Kerala’s schools, aided as well as totally government-fed. Aided schools belong to the different religious groups in Kerala. They build up the infrastructure with the money extorted from the believers and then appoint as staff people who can pay hefty donations in the name of infrastructure. The state government will pay the salary of the staff. The private management will rake in millions by way of donations from job-seekers who are usually the third-class graduates from rich-class families. And there are no students to study in these schools because they are all Malayalam medium. Every Malayali wants to go to Europe or North America and hence Malayalam medium schools are obsolete. Only the government of the state and the managements of the aided schools seem to be unaware of the obsolescence of these schools. But both are happy to retain the rotting system because that is how politics is: religion and its institutions bring in more votes than anything else.

Jacob Martin Pathros’s children were all sent to CBSE English medium schools though he and his wife were both teaching in the church-managed aided school of their own parish. They had paid no less than one crore rupees to the diocese for securing their positions as teachers in the secondary school. A lion’s share of that sum had come as dowry. Celina, Jacob Martin Pathros’s wife, was from a rich family that was proud of its Christian origins whose roots went back to Saint Thomas, the disciple of Jesus. They believed that their ancestors were Namboothiris who were converted by the disciple of Jesus himself. Jacob Martin Pathros, like most people in Kerala, didn’t know that the Namboothiris arrived in Kerala only centuries after Saint Thomas did, if he did at all.

“It’s much better than putting all that money in the bank or in business,” Jacob will tell you if you ask him why he couldn’t have done so many other better things with that much money. “At school, you don’t have to do anything. Just sit in the staffroom or the classroom and tell the children to read something or do whatever they wanted. After all three or four children in a class, what harm can they do? They will go to sleep after some horseplay or something. And I get my salary every month. Now I get my monthly pension just sitting at home.”

That’s fantastic business sense. Recently Jacob Martin Pathros’s school wanted some developmental constructions. So the parish priest sent WhatsApp messages to all parishioners to make generous contributions for the modernisation of their own school. No parishioner ever questioned any demand of the parish priest. Faith does not question, they had been taught in their infancy. Jacob Martin Pathros and other infants of his generation were all rocked to sleep by their mothers who sang dirges for lullabies.

Death will come one day, remember you… The lines still run in Jacob Martin Pathros’s veins though he is now a sexagenarian who wants to see everything under the sun before he turns seventy because none of his ancestors lived much beyond 70 years of age. Those ancestors were not teachers in aided schools, of course. They were all farmers who tilled the hard ground in sun and shower and carried the smell of soil on their tattering clothes. They were people who didn’t rush to hospital when they ran a temperature or barked a cough. A few leaves of the Tulsi in the tea or some dried ginger would cure them. They couldn’t afford hospitals. The soil waited for them every morning. Death was a proximate possibility especially for the women who had to deliver children every year or so apart from cooking, washing, cleaning, and working in the fields. The children were inevitable byproducts in a time where social media and other diversions did not exist.

Jacob Martin Pathros had nothing to do in the day. The pension amount was accruing in his bank account. The government will eat it up in the name of income tax and umpteen other taxes. It’s better to spend it on travels. Jacob Martin Pathros loved seeing people, especially women who walked around wearing almost nothing. Don’t misunderstand me, please. Jacob Martin Pathros was not a voyeur or anything. He loved the Arab women who walked around looking like Penguins too. He liked these overdressed women precisely for one reason: it gave his hatred of Muslim men a rational foundation.

When Prime Minister Modiji annihilated the triple talaq affair, Jacob Martin Pathros burst crackers and celebrated it. He nearly wanted to drink some cow urine to prove his nationalist spirit, but Celina convinced him that cow urine was medicine only when it is sold in the name of Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali brand.

Celina did love Jacob Martin Pathros. It is a different matter altogether that he had never uttered a word of affection to his wife in the last many years though he loved the Penguins of Arabia. He had burnt their queen-size bed and bought two single beds so that he and Celina could fart in peace while sleeping. His most recent meditation is about whether he should shift his bed or his wife’s bed to another room altogether. After all there are two empty bedrooms in the house since their children, son and daughter, are both settled in Canada.

It is during one of those meditations that the tour ad caught Jacob Martin Pathros’s attention.

Contact details were given and Jacob Martin Pathros keyed in the given number on his smartphone that was giving a lot of problem these days because of the porn sites he visited frequently. “Welcome aboard, sir,” a sweet husky voice answered. And Jacob Martin Pathros jumped in. He wanted to touch a terrorist. 

To be continued

Disclaimer: This is pure fiction. Any resemblance to reality is unwarranted over-reading.

Caution: I started this as a short story. Now it is threatening to become a novel. Inconvenience is regretted.