Skip to main content

Illusions

Fiction

Driving is what I do when I want to get away from. From what? From whom?

Well, you see, I’m sort of an escapist. I would get away from anything. From my job that I am incredibly passionate about. From my home which is the only paradise I can ever afford. From my wife, whom I love a lot and who loves me even more.

Well, you know, I’m that sort of a disgruntled old man who is unable to shed his narcissism in spite of all the bangs and bashes it has received for decades from well-meaning self-righteous religious people.

I suppose you must have understood by now what kind of a man I am. I am old. I am disgruntled according to those around me especially the religious sort of people. And, if you ask me, I don’t really care for other people which means I should be an ascetic.

I get overwhelmed, rarely though, by a desire to know what lies beneath the banality and morbidity of human life. That is what asceticism is about, I guess. My wife thinks I’m a bit cranky and hence she doesn’t care for my supernatural longings. She goes to church every Sunday and prays. I don’t go to any religious place to pray. But we, my wife and I, have come to an understanding that we are both free to practise spirituality in our own personal ways. It is very seldom you will find a woman who will allow her man to believe in a god different from hers even though the god is nothing more than a weekly hobby for her.

My weekly hobby is a drive. And that’s how I met this man who is apparently an ascetic. He lives in a hut in a forest.

While driving my calf muscle developed a cramp. Left or right, I don’t remember and I suppose it doesn’t matter. Left and right are like Tweedledee and Tweedledum now. What matters really is that the cramp is an indication of my growing old. I don’t want to grow old. So I stopped my car on the side of the road and walked into the forest just to challenge some wild elephant or tiger and thus prove that I am still young. Nowadays a lot of elephants and tigers appear all over our towns and highways in Kerala. We, homo sapiens, ate up their habitats and they are coming back to reclaim them. History is vindictive, you know. If you don’t know, ask our Prime Minister who has won a third term of royalty.

I know you will now smirk at my notorious obsession with our prime minister. Don’t be too harsh while you judge me, my dear reader. The prime minister has a role in this adventure of mine.

Wild elephants and tigers didn’t attack me though I went on and on into the forest. It was an ascetic that scared me.

He didn’t mean to scare me. I felt scared. This is called maya, illusion. If you want to know more about maya, read the Brihadaranyka Upanishad. Or sit in meditation on the Vivekananda Rock in Kanyakumari with a score of media cameras all around.

Who would expect a homo sapiens in the thick of a forest? I mean, aren’t they, the homo sapiens, supposed to be meditating in the middle of some ocean or on top of Mount Kailash?

This guy, Devendra his name is he tells me, was inspired by our prime minister. “Such a spiritual person he is, our prime minister,” Devendra tells me. Well, I hope you understood that I met Devendra in the deep of a forest that I was wandering through hoping to encounter a wild elephant or a tiger.

The media, both print and electronic, tell us about these wild elephants and tigers that come to the civilised world of homo sapiens. What I come across when I search the wilds is this homo sapiens who says he has become spiritual following the example of our prime minister who sat in contemplation on Mount Kailash and the Vivekananda Rock.

“But prime minister ji went back to his palace after all those dramas,” I said.

“I have no palace to go back to,” the homo sapiens in the wilds says.

This sad homo sapiens has a wife at home. Nobody else. Both his sons were in Canada. “I renounced my wife,” the homo sapiens tells me. “Gods are much easier to live with.”

I understood. You understood too, I know.

I took my hip flask and sucked in the cheap brandy that was already mixed with enough water to dilute the spirits that suck a GST of 300%.

“Can I have a suck?” Homo Sapiens asks.

Labels:

Comments

  1. DawnanddewJune 30, 2024 at 10:25 PM

    Homo sapiens is thirsty for diluted brandy and he says he renounced his wife. Who is the escapist? The narrator or this HS or PM ji?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yamini MacLeanJune 30, 2024 at 11:31 PM

    Hari Om
    Never mind illusion, first deal with delusion! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Liz A.July 1, 2024 at 5:17 AM

    Too bad you didn't meet up with a tiger. But at least you got some conversation out of it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. magiceyeJuly 1, 2024 at 6:49 AM

    Identity crisis!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Jose D. MaliekalJuly 1, 2024 at 6:38 PM

    The openness to appreciate freedom and the freedom, to appreciate the differences is the algorithm of spirituality.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 1, 2024 at 10:24 PM

      That's a profound view. How many people arrive at that level of spirituality, I wonder.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more