Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...

Illustration by Gemini AI Fiction Why does the sea rage endlessly? Varghese asked himself as he sat on the listless sands of the beach looking at the sinking sun beyond the raging waves. When rage becomes quotidian, no one notices it. What is unnoticed is futile. Like my life, Varghese muttered to himself with a smirk whose scorn was directed at himself. He had turned seventy that day. That’s why he was on the beach longer than usual. It wasn’t the rage of the waves or the melancholy of the setting sun that kept him on the beach. Self-assessment kept him there. Looking back at the seventy years of his life made him feel like an utter fool, a dismal failure. Integrity versus Despair, Erik Erikson would have told him. He studied Erikson’s theory on human psychological development as part of an orientation programme he had to attend as a teacher. Aged people reflect on their lives and face the conflict between feeling a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction (integrity) or a feeli...

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...

Fiction Mathai went to the kitchen and picked up a glass. The TV was screening a program called Ask the Doctor . “Dopamine is a sort of hormone that gives us a feeling of happiness or pleasure,” the doc said. “But the problem with it is that it makes us want more of the same thing. You feel happy with one drink and you obviously want more of it. More drink means more happiness…” That’s when Mathai went to pick up his glass and the brandy bottle. It was only morning still. Annamma, his wife, had gone to school as usual to teach Gen Z, an intractable generation. Mathai had retired from a cooperative bank where he was manager in the last few years of his service. Now, as a retired man, he took to watching the TV. It will be more correct to say that he took to flicking channels. He wanted entertainment, but the films and serial programs failed to make sense to him, let alone entertain. The news channels were more entertaining. Our politicians are like the clowns in a circus, he thought...

Courtesy Copilot Designer Fiction At some point in K’s narrative, I became enlightened. He’s telling the truth pretending it to be a lie. No lie can have such emotional underpinning. That realisation was my enlightenment. We were a group of nine men, all sexagenarians like me, gathered at Adithyan’s residence for an alumni get-together. We were meeting together after many years though a few of us met each other once in a while on some occasions like a wedding or a funeral. While the third round of drinks was being poured, Dominic said, “Hey, why don’t we play a small game before dinner?” Each one of us had to speak about himself for three-four minutes continuously and tell only lies. “Telling lies credibly is a political skill and a literary art,” Dominic added. We all took the game with the characteristic enthusiasm of intoxicated nostalgia. Dominic started the game on everyone’s insistence and spoke about his sleeping through a landslide that had brought down to slush almos...

Preface One of the songs that has haunted me all along is By the Rivers of Babylon by Boney M [1978]. It is inspired by the biblical Psalm 137. The Psalm was written after the Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar II, conquered the kingdom of Judah and destroyed their most sacred temple in Jerusalem. The Jews were soon exiled to Babylon. Then some Babylonians asked the Jews to sing songs for them. Psalm 137 is a response to that: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?” There is profound sorrow in the psalm. Exile and longing for homeland, oppression by enemies, and loss of identity are dominant themes. Boney M succeeded in carrying all those deep emotions and pain in their verses too. As I was wondering what to write for today’s #WriteAPageADay challenge, Boney M’s version of Psalm 137 wafted into my consciousness from the darkness and silence outside my bedroom long before daybreak. How to make it make sense to a reader of today who may know nothing about the Jewish exile ...

Fiction  She looked so emaciated that I would have mistaken her for a beggar. But she had said, “Hi Tom.” There was no way a beggar would know my name since I was not a politician or any such public figure that appears in the media. Moreover, her dress, a simple but elegant churidar suit, bore the fading shades of some bygone aristocracy. I stared into her eyes, deep and stagnant pools of grief, which reflected a different me, a young me.   “Mercy!” I cried. “Yes,” she said. And she smiled like a moonbeam trying to pierce the winter fog of a terribly polluted city-sky. We were both sitting in a park in the horizon of which the sun was sinking rapidly into the Arabian Ocean beyond the trees in the park. An old man with grey hairs all over his head and face: that’s me. And an old woman with grey hairs that seemed to be lingering on out of some sympathy. That was Mercy. Mercy and I were classmates at college. She was a brilliant student who could solve all the problems ...

Fiction D riving 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 sh...

Fiction The hill looked absolutely desolate in spite of the massive and aging rubber trees. The flourishing undergrowth bore a solemn testament to neglect. The air grew heavy as I ascended the hill in the evening of a cool and dry day in the monsoon season in Kerala. My destination was the mansion on top of the hill. It had belonged to my uncle who is now no more. His lawyer informed me a few months back that Uncle Jo had bequeathed the mansion to me merely because I loved books just as he did. As a child I used to climb up this same rugged path quite frequently just to visit Uncle Jo who lived all alone in his palatial mansion with the company of Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Dostoevsky and so on. I inherited my admiration for these writers from Uncle Jo. Uncle was married once upon a time, people say. But I knew Uncle as a man who lived a reclusive life on top of that hill. His income came from the rubber trees which were tapped by a few labourers who all left the place when the tre...

Fiction When Lila sent a voice message on WhatsApp asking Anna to join her on a pilgrimage, Anna was naturally surprised. They belonged to two different religions. And nowadays no two religions are supposed to love each other. Hindus and other religious believers are supposed to hate each other in India, for example. The raison d’etre of the Jews of Israel seems to be killing the Muslims in their neighbourhood. Similarly, the God of the Muslims is too eager to exterminate all non-Muslims from the face of the earth. Why does Lila, a Hindu, want Anna, a Christian, to accompany her on a pilgrimage? It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, thought Anna, though she couldn’t recollect who had coined that extended metaphor and in what situation.   Lila and Anna were classmates in high school. They belonged to nearby villages and studied in the only English medium convent school of the nearest little town. The nuns who ran the school ensured that no two girls ever touched...

It was the eeriness of the song that woke up Kavita. She looked at the time on her mobile phone. 1.23 am. Ah, there’s something musical about that number too. The song came from the hill behind her house. Kavita and her husband Vijay had shifted their residence to this village just a few days back. They worked in the city but didn’t like to live in the city. They would agree with Shelley that hell must be a city. The city is a roaring rage, Kavita said to Vijay many a time. I want the sound of cicadas in the night coming from green all around me. Vijay found her a lush green habitat. Kavita was the music of his life. Her desire was a command for him. No wish of hers would go unfulfilled as long as Vijay had the ability to fulfil it. You want the saugandhika and I will go to Gandharvamadana to get it. That was Vijay. Kavita’s own Vijay. When he took this lovely house on rent, Vijay was warned that the hill that towered behind the house was haunted. A haunted hill? No, not the wh...