Skip to main content

The Patriot

Fiction

India's new Lady of Justice

Raju is shocked out of his deep sleep early in the morning by the doorbell that rings rather imperiously. His mobile phone shows the time: 4.04 am. Who can come visiting at this unearthly hour?

Raju looks out through the window and sees a saffron-robed man with a saffron shawl wrapped around his torso standing outside. An alarm bell rings in Raju’s heart.

As soon as Raju opens the door, the saffron man hands him a sealed envelope and walks away into the darkness without uttering a single word.

The letter is addressed to Mr Rajashekharan, LD Clerk, Shantigram. It is written in extremely formal language. The letter charges Raju of being antinational and orders him to prove his patriotism to concerned authorities at the earliest failing which he will have to face severe consequences under some section of the Naya Nyaya Samhita, New Penal Code.

Raju sits with a tremor in his heart on the sofa in his small living room. He doesn’t want to disturb his wife and children who are sleeping unthreatened by the treason of the man of the house.

Where did I go wrong? Raju asks himself. Cleopatra, his beloved cat, comes from somewhere and snuggles up to him on the sofa. He pats Cleopatra and wonders whether his love for a cat, especially one named after a foreign Queen, is an act of treason in a country where good citizens are expected to worship the cow. He had refused to adopt a cow a few months earlier when the local MLA had made the suggestion. Was Cleopatra a colonial ruler? Raju wondered. His knowledge of history wasn’t quite strong. He named the cat after the queen merely because he thought Cleopatra was quite feline and his cat was quite Cleopatraesque. He got that notion not from history but from Shakespeare.

Could the roots of his treason be lying asleep in his bedroom? His wife, Jennifer, was from an orthodox Catholic family. Theirs was what is known in the country as ‘love marriage’. But their marriage had taken place long before a Hindu loving a non-Hindu became a crime in the country.  

Raju picks up his mobile phone and checks his social media posts to see whether he had wittingly or unwittingly posted a comment against the government. It is not quite likely since both Facebook and X, the only social media where Raju makes occasional appearances and leaves his markings mostly in the form of readymade emoticons apart from a few photos of Cleopatra, have fixed bots to instantly delete any comment that can be deemed antinational even by the remotest interpretations.

“Why don’t you seek the help of Amina?” Jennifer asks when she gets to know about the curious letter from the government. Amina is a lawyer in their neighbourhood, the only one of that community to have studied enough to become a professional because of which she is held in high esteem in the neighbourhood.  

A few days pass. Amina has been unable to find out anything about the charge against Raju though everyone in every government office is aware of the charge. She has not even been able to find out where she can fight the case to get Raju justice whose statue has recently been liberated from her blindfold and has also been draped in the country’s traditional dress.

Raju has gone to the MLA and expressed his readiness to adopt not one but two cows. But it’s late. The MLA admonishes him saying that opportunities don’t knock twice on your door. Raju remembers that the saffron man didn’t pay a second visit.

To which authority should he, Raju, prove his patriotism? Raju asks the MLA. The MLA shrugs his shoulders. “The highest authority is like God, invisible and inaccessible except to the chosen few.” Raju doesn’t understand what that means.

Soon, everyone is aware of Raju’s treason. His office doesn’t suspend or dismiss him but his colleagues and seniors have stopped looking at him. His neighbours keep a distance from him. Even Jennifer seems to avoid him, Raju thinks. She has moved her bed to the children’s room and has asked children not to disturb father with unnecessary conversations. “Your dad is a very important man now to his country,” Raju hears Jennifer tell the children.  

“How do I prove my patriotism?” Raju asks Jennifer.

“Not sure,” Jennifer muses. “Maybe, you can kill a Muslim and claim that the fellow was a killer of cows.” Raju is not sure whether Jennifer is indulging in black humour.

Raju joins all the rallies and processions organised by the ruling party and its brother-and-sister-and-parent organisations. He wears saffron robes whenever it doesn’t look absurd to do so. He deletes Cleopatra’s pictures from Facebook and X and puts up the national flag and the ruling party’s flag instead. He composes some poetry too in honour of the nation.

O, my dear land, so wide and free,

You’re the greatest place for me to be!

Your mountains stand so tall and proud,

And your ruler stands with a higher head.

            Finally, after months of struggle like Hanuman who left no mountain unturned and no seas uncrossed and no fire unburnt in order to accomplish his mission, Amina manages to arrange a tribunal to hear Rajashekharan’s case.

The tribunal finds that Raju has done nothing significant to prove his patriotism. Therefore, the tribunal decides that Raju’s job must be changed. He is assigned a new job to identify the antinational elements in his neighbourhood.

Raju goes home, takes out a sheet of paper, and writes the heading: ANTINATIONAL PEOPLE OF SHANTIGRAM. 


PS. The seed of this story flew into my soil illegally from Franz Kafka’s literary landscapes.  

Similar story from 2017: Halley’s Fishes

Comments

  1. Is Raju a relieved man finally? I hope the new job doesn't weigh heavy on his conscience.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sonia from A Hundred Quills. Just realised the previous comment didn't take my name.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Sonia, some jobs aren't going to be easy on the conscience in certain countries.

      Delete
  3. Hari OM
    No action needed by the tyrants other than to place a letter in his hands. The rest he undid for himself... this is how it is working now. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And Kafka would have written umpteen novels on the situation.

      Delete
  4. This feels like something from a not-too-distant dystopian future.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...

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...