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 Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

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
44 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more