The Other Silence

Image by Microsoft Copilot AI

Fiction

Father Gabriel had learnt early in life that there were two kinds of silence. There was the silence of the chapel after Compline, the good silence, the silence that seemed to have a place for everything.

And there was the other silence. The silence that came when two priests were talking in the corridor and stopped when he approached. He had never been able to prove that the silence was about him. That was perhaps what made it worse.

Gabriel had entered the religious congregation when he was only sixteen. He had completed school. His father had been a farmhand, his mother worked in other people’s houses, and the family lived in a small house at the edge of the village. The priests from the monastery had given him books, helped him pay school fees, and built into his psyche a semblance of self-respect which his parents’ social class wouldn’t ever offer. They had belonged to an untouchable caste until they chose Christianity and whatever dignity that came with it.

It was quite natural for Gabriel to join the congregation as an aspirant as soon as he completed school. He was ordained a priest in due course of time. All the philosophy and theology he studied in the meanwhile didn’t take away the stigma of untouchability from his neurons. Not quite.

The boy who had once stood outside the village tea shop because he knew where he belonged had followed him into the seminary.

At 30, Gabriel had been too busy to notice him.

At 40, he had begun to feel his pulse.

Now, at 52, the boy had become almost impossible to silence.

Not that anyone in the seminary or outside openly insulted him. That would have been easier. Open insult could be confronted.

Instead, there were little things. A joke about his English, maybe. A superior who unconsciously assumed that another priest would handle an important assignment. A visiting priest who asked him, “Which part of Andhra are you from?” with the mild curiosity people reserve for unexpected furniture.

And sometimes nothing at all happened. That was the worst.

Gabriel would sit in the community recreation room, along with others who had all gathered to celebrate a birthday, and listen to them talk about books, universities, Rome, protean politics in the country and the future of Christianity in India. No one asked his opinion ever. Even if he dared to express one, they wouldn’t hear. So he sat there in a corner and sipped the whisky that was served for those who wanted to have a drink or two on such occasions of light-hearted camaraderie. Gabriel’s glass was filled many times and probably no one noticed that too.

Do I really belong here? The question was always there in the back of his mind for years though he had moved from seminary to seminary or monastery to monastery whenever the transfer was required as per the congregation’s policies.

For years he had fought that inner question with prayer.

Then, one evening, he discovered that whisky was a more efficient theologian.

What began rather innocently as part of birthday celebrations after dinner turned into a stealthy drink or two in his own room. He would get the cook to buy him a bottle occasionally.

He made sure that he followed certain rules. His own rules. Like never drinking in the daytime. Initially. Then never before any important activity. Never before the morning Mass anyway. He followed rules. His own rules. Rules helped him imagine that he was sticking to certain discipline.

But slowly another burden was added to the one he had carried all his life. The inferiority he had learnt to live with began to acquire a new companion: guilt.

He could no longer tell himself that he was merely a man who felt inadequate. Some angel started appearing in his meditation-time reminding him in a zombie voice that he was a priest and hence he was doing something wrong.

That feeling made him drink more before bed. The more he drank, the quicker did the zombie-angel vanish.

Gabriel thought he was becoming a zombie now. “I’m sorry,” he muttered to that zombie before falling asleep in his clerical habit most nights.

*

“I’m sorry, I have sinned…” Gabriel knelt on the confessional and mumbled.

Father Rosario, the confessor, was an aged man. Nobody in the seminary seemed to remember when he had first taken the chair behind the wooden grille. His body was reduced almost to angles and bones. His movements were slow enough to make impatience seem foolish. His white hair had thinned to a soft halo around his head. His hands trembled slightly when he turned the pages of his breviary.

But there was something remarkably steady about his eyes.

Generations of seminarians had knelt before him carrying their small and large secrets: temptations, doubts, broken vows, jealousies, ambitions, sins they had committed and sins they merely imagined. Father Rosario was a good listener.

He had never been a man of many words. He did not rush to explain a person’s sin, nor did he ever seem particularly impressed by his own wisdom. He merely listened. And absolved sins.

The younger priests sometimes joked that Father Rosario had heard every sin known to mankind. Father Rosario smiled when he heard such remarks. “Not every sin,” he would say sometimes, “only every excuse.”

“Why don’t you come to my room tonight after the Compline?” Father Rosario suggested to Father Gabriel at the end of the confession.

“No one can save another person,” Father Rosario said when they met in the latter’s room after everyone had retired to their own rooms. “Not even God can save you, unless you wish to save yourself.”

Gabriel didn’t say anything. He looked into the eyes of the kind, old man sitting in front with a benign halo around his wrinkled face.

“You have spent your whole life trying to prove that you are not inferior,” Father Rosario went on. “Perhaps that is why you’re tired.”

And soon enough, he said, “Your problem is not that you drink, Gabriel. The bottle is only where the problem becomes visible.”

Gabriel stifled a sob that rose somewhere deep within him.

“When did you first decide that God had called you?”

“When I completed school,” Gabriel said.

“No. When did you decide?”

Gabriel understood the question. Its implications. Its depth. His thoughts went back to the boy he once was: to poverty, humiliation, the first experience of being noticed by a priest, his desire to escape his social circumstances, his belief that priesthood would finally make him somebody.

“You have spent half your life trying to become worthy of the priesthood,” Father Rosario said. “Perhaps you should spend the rest learning that you were worthy before you became a priest.”

Gabriel stared at him.

“The boy outside the tea shop was not inferior. He was only made to believe that he was.” The old priest said.

Gabriel realised that the whisky had been offering him only a temporary escape from certain realities he didn’t dare to confront about himself.

Father Rosario encouraged him to come again tomorrow. Any day. “My door will be open for you. Always.”

As Gabriel walked back to his own room, the silence of the monastery gathered around him. It was the same silence he had known all his life: the kind that could both shelter a man and make him feel utterly alone.

He stopped for a moment in the corridor and listened.

Somewhere deep within him, the boy who had once stood outside the village tea shop was no longer asking whether he belonged.

For the first time, he seemed willing to wait for an answer.

PS. This story was inspired by a conversation I had with a priest yesterday.