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.