Hidden Treasure

Fiction

The hill looked absolutely desolate in spite of the massive and aging rubber trees. The flourishing undergrowth bore a solemn testament to neglect. The air grew heavy as I ascended the hill in the evening of a cool and dry day in the monsoon season in Kerala. My destination was the mansion on top of the hill. It had belonged to my uncle who is now no more. His lawyer informed me a few months back that Uncle Jo had bequeathed the mansion to me merely because I loved books just as he did.

As a child I used to climb up this same rugged path quite frequently just to visit Uncle Jo who lived all alone in his palatial mansion with the company of Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Dostoevsky and so on. I inherited my admiration for these writers from Uncle Jo. Uncle was married once upon a time, people say. But I knew Uncle as a man who lived a reclusive life on top of that hill. His income came from the rubber trees which were tapped by a few labourers who all left the place when the trees grew too old for tapping and Uncle grew too old for bothering.

A sense of desolation seeped into my bones osmotically from the rubber trees whose swaying branches broke the quietude with an occasional creak. Most of the hill had been sold, I was told by Uncle’s lawyer. The mansion and a part of the hill with the rugged path leading to the mansion were left to me. I was one of the rare creatures who dared to visit Uncle Jo who didn’t like people. He liked books and his cats. And silence. And me, to some extent, for reasons that I never deciphered. If your love is genuine it will be reciprocated, I guess.

It was rumoured that Uncle Jo killed his wife because she talked too much. But I never believed the rumour. For me, Uncle Jo was the most benign person on earth. He was like the purr of a cat. I inherited his love for cats long ago when I was a kid. Now I am an old man who finds it hard to climb up stony uphill paths invaded by thorny weeds. I am inheriting those weeds too from Uncle Jo.

So climb I did. In spite of Maggie’s forbidding and foreboding. “It is a haunted house,” she said. Someone had told her that Uncle Jo was a monster who killed his wife brutally just because she talked and that the wife’s ghost haunted the mansion. I never believed all those old wives’ tales. I remember how some men spread rumours when I married that I, being a sort of megalomaniac, would kill my wife quite like Uncle Jo. Maggie and I have disproved self-righteous men’s tales too.

Memories gave me the energy required for climbing up Uncle Jo’s hill. Bad, sad memories are like electrons in an atom. Restless and vindictively invading spaces.

Uncle Jo’s mansion stood majestically atop the hill as it always did. It carried all the possible marks of neglect, however. The rosewood front door looked like a dying ghost now. A dying ghost! Maggie would have laughed at the simile. She thinks ghosts are immortal like gods and other spiritual entities.

Some of the window panes were broken. There were cobwebs all over. Dry and rotting rubber leaves lay like a thick blanket in the wide exterior that Uncle had all around the mansion.

The rosewood door creaked as I opened it with the key given by Uncle Jo’s lawyer. I fought with cobwebs and lizards as I entered the mansion. Uncle’s library stood intact still though the room was full of dust and dirt like the other rooms. The books in the almirahs with glass doors looked immortal. Kafka and Camus are like gods, Maggie, I muttered, not ghosts. They were the treasure that Uncle Jo bequeathed to me. The lawyer had mentioned the possibility of finding some treasure in the old mansion in order to persuade me to accept the gift.  

And just then, just as I remembered the ghost that Maggie had warned me of, there was a breath behind my ear. Like a ghost’s breath.

I turned back in horror. There indeed was a man, a very weird-looking chap, standing rather too close to me.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” he said. I stared at his clothes which looked otherworldly. There was something alien, if not eerie, about him. A ghost?

“I landed here by mistake,” he said.

I continued to stare at him. My heartbeats had become audible like the ticking of a digital wall clock in a new gen horror story.

The alien pacified my heart with his story. He belonged to the year 2101 CE. He was travelling using the latest technology of Virtual Human Transit (VHT). You choose your destination and let your VHT App convert you into a bundle of digits. Just as you convert a hard copy of a book into a soft file. VHT converts you into a soft you and takes you to your desired destination within the snap of a second. You convert yourself back into your hard version at your destination. Simple.

“Why the hell did you choose this web-ridden mansion as your destination?” I asked the alien.

“Virus. Probably,” he said. Something went wrong with his VHT App and he landed in a wrong place. And wrong time too.

“But I felt that I belonged here,” he said. “I mean, my DNA seems to recognise this place as very familiar.”

“All human beings share 99.9% of DNA,” I helped him with my little knowledge of science. “Only 0.1% of genetic variations are responsible for the phenotypic differences, you know.”

I had read that in a new gen horror story the other day. I verified its veracity on Google. You can too. You should, in fact. We can’t trust writers nowadays, you know.

When you actually learn that truth about DNA, you know how ridiculous it is for us humans to divide ourselves into so many cultures and religions and castes and what not. We are all the same stuff. The rest is a fabrication of some villain or the other who wants to keep people under his power.

“I feel that some ancestor of mine lived here once upon a time,” the alien said.

He told me that he lived in some space station just outside the earth’s troposphere. Elon Musk is the God there since he had built the station originally when the earth turned rather uninhabitable with scorching droughts and marauding floods.

“My ancestors lived somewhere in Kerala,” the alien said. “I have a feeling that a great, great grandfather of mine lived here. It’s a vague feeling, of course. A weird old man who could only love books and cats. His crankiness drove his wife back to her parents’ home where she gave birth to a child before dying in the agony of some cherished dream.”

Is this alien a descendant of Uncle Jo? I wondered in silence. How should I extend hospitality to him, a guest from the year 2101?

I don’t know. You tell me how to deal with this treasure I found in the mansion bequeathed to me by Uncle Jo, thanks to Blogchatter.

PS. This story began as a frivolous thought as I lay awake lazily this morning meditating on the writer’s block I was experiencing in the last few days. What provoked the meditation was Blogchatter’s weekly prompt. I had never  imagined, when I started writing this, that the prompt would break my writer’s block to this extent.