A Fictional Conversation

For about a year, I've wanted to share and write about my newfound interest in religion, nature, animals, science, and all sorts of things that never interested me before. I tried the essay format, but so far I haven't quite succeeded in writing anything interesting. It takes time, I guess, to find the appropriate language, words and tone. It's always a work in progress. But here is an initial attempt to discuss religion and science, using two individuals. The two individuals are merely puppets to get some points across; it's very artificial for sure, but still felt better than an essay. Not sure how this is going to read -- but how does one know unless one tries?
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“… but you still believe there is no conflict between religion and science?”

“It’s all about how you interpret it. It just depends on what you call ‘religion’.”

“To me, religion is belief in God, and that’s pretty clear cut.”

“Well, alright, let that be our definition of religion then: belief in God. It’s a problematic definition, but we can work with it.”

“Good. Now tell me how you can reconcile science with religion. To me science is about evidence and cultivating doubt, whereas belief in God is not.”

“Yes, that’s true. Science certainly provides more evidence than religion and also – if the scientists are honest – allows doubts and failures. You turn on the switch on and there is light – that’s proof that science works. The evidence is there in virtually all aspects of life, which we now take for granted…” 

“Whereas religion gets away with unverifiable claims: the presence of a soul, someone was enlightened thousands of years ago, or someone walked on water, or someone lifted a mountain…”

“But you cannot disprove these claims; these things could have happened. It would be unscientific to negate these possibilities outright, even if our current laws of physics suggest otherwise. A more apt way to phrase it would be to say that religious miracles, unlike everyday scientific miracles, cannot be demonstrated on a regular basis. You just take them on faith, which is really a blind faith, rather than saying: It could have happened but I cannot say anything for sure; there is no evidence.”

“Exactly! In science you have the burden of proof, whereas the burden of proof is not there in religion. One promotes skepticism, the other asks for blind belief no matter what. And then exploits that belief to create wars, divisions, ideologies. To me that’s an irreconcilable difference.”

“Well, science, if not practiced well, can also divide, create wars, ideologies and destruction. We humans are the problem, though we like to play the secular/scientific versus religious game. I have a more moderate view on the debate between science and religion. I think of it in terms of degrees of objectivity. In a relative sense, yes, science is more objective than religion, and there is no disputing that. But it would be incorrect to call science the ultimate truth or theory. We can instead call it the most objective truth we have, or what humans have collectively and gradually come up with, using the tools of logic and mathematics.”

“So there is something over and above?”

“I don’t know. Good science represents the limit – and it’s an ever expanding limit – of what humans can think of and explain. Beyond it, who knows what’s there. I simply don’t know. And that’s important: I don’t know – that space of not knowing is very important. Socrates said something about not knowing....” 

“I think he said: I know only that I know nothing…”

“Right. In my view, not knowing is where religion begins. Knowledge often leads to arrogance, but not knowing and being sincere and honest in accepting that you do not know is humility. This is the same humility that most of the world’s religions ask us to cultivate. But in general – and almost no one is immune from this – the more you know the more you think you can control, and you become egocentric and protective of your knowledge. In this aspect, science has a serious downside: the ability to know the laws of nature and exploit the natural world to suit human needs makes us feel supremely confident; we feel can achieve anything. We look only at what we have achieved, and feel tremendously proud as a species, but we ignore what we do not know at all.”

“But our lives are better…”

 “Materially better, yes, for now, but sooner or later, you run into a wall. Reality doesn’t quite function the way humans want. No amount of knowledge can capture the ever changing nature of reality. What the future has in store we have absolutely no idea. The universe and even events in our solar system may have some unpleasant surprises in store for us. Science is the effort to find answers, but no matter how deep you go, quantum mechanics, evolutionary theory and what not, you always reach a point where you do not know anymore. So you stop for a moment there and acknowledge, ‘Wow, this is too vast, too big and too complex, for my puny mind to understand.’ It’s the Great Unknown.”

“I understand that. But that’s still very different from belief in God…”

“Is it really? That’s why I said it is all in the interpretation. For me, the Great Unknown is what you can label, for the purposes of convenience, as God. I believe in this Great Unknown; I don’t know what it is, but it is there…”

“Well you know, you are sounding very mystical now!”

 “Why not! A scientific pursuit is really a mystical pursuit. I start with the feeling, ‘I want to know’ and you do get to know more, and you are able to explain more. It is a great feeling – you can compare it to the religious joy that a pilgrim or a monk or a yogi might feel. Einstein’s theories of relativity are aesthetically beautiful theories – they say it is the most elegant use of mathematics to show the intertwined nature of space and time. Darwin’s ideas make you feel connected to every living creature in earth – by his thesis, the animals and birds you see around you are your cousins! That promotes a wonderful feeling of unity! At the same time, there still are unanswered questions and new questions, and you realize you can’t know everything. That does not mean you stop – you can be thankful for the knowledge you have and you can keep the search going – but the illusion that you will know all begins to go away.”

 “Alright. Your ‘religion’ -- if you can call it that -- is quite different. Something like a poetic impulse with scientific bits thrown in. I don't have an issue with it. My main issue is with the monotheistic faiths that claim that there is a Creator, or that the world has been intelligently designed. I feel these faiths are quite arrogant – they prescribe that there is only one way and no other way, and in doing so cause all sorts of problems.”

 “Saying that there is only one way and no other way implies that the person who is making that very strong claim has complete knowledge – wouldn’t that be the opposite of humility? Is it possible for someone to claim, with tremendous sincerity and honesty and without a trace of doubt, that there is only one way to God and that all other ways lead to hell? And as for the existence of a Creator, one cannot reject the possibility: no one can disprove something that so far not been seen. But it does not matter anyway. Whether a Creator exists or not is irrelevant; the Creation exists – by that I mean this universe, this earth we live in, the sun, the moon, our senses and our thoughts which allow us to experience the world, they all exist, or at least seem to be vivid and real to us. That’s all that matters, and that itself is a miracle of sorts. This is actually an amazing fact: the Creation is everywhere and all around us, this table here that my eyes allow me to see, this chair whose solidity I can feel, this fruit that I can smell and taste! It makes you ask the question: What is all this? That itself can impart a sense of wonder.”

The Mysore story

In the early 2000s, I wanted to write a short story set in the south Indian city of Mysore. I had been inspired by my travels to the city. The style of the story was a typical response of someone who had just arrived abroad -- I had come to the United States just then -- and feels nostalgic about home. What had once been part of my milieu now was exotic even to me. I never quite finished the story -- there are many failed versions in fact -- but here is whatever I managed to put to paper.

I present this in unedited form, so the typos and awkward sentences have not been corrected -- that is intended to be part of the charm. Or so I hope.



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The line between the realms of mythology and reality is often thin and hazy, and sometimes a drifting vagabond never realizes when he has crossed one and is treading on the other. So it was, when, blown by an overnight storm and cocooned by a dark low-travelling rain-cloud, I was carried to the city of Mysore. Like a dream that is often forgotten when a slumbering person wakes up to groggy reality, the dark clouds that cradled me disappeared to reveal a shining morning and a smiling sun, and there wafted in the air the faint but unmistakable scent of sandalwood. I sniffed heartily to olfactory content, and saw a man-sized, live and moving toy, holding incense sticks that burned cheerfully orange at their tips and wore crumbling grey hats of ash.

“Welcome to Mysore,” said the toy. The orange flames burned brighter in acknowledgement. My guide was quite remarkable looking. Though made of sandalwood, his facial feaures and his limbs had the potential of free expression and movement. He had a great black moustache painted above his thick upper lip, and gold earrings dangled on his long Buddha-like ears; a huge red dot adorned his forehead, and a gold crown sat majestically over his head.

He walked and I followed him, but I really just had to follow the trail of scent that he left. We reached a roadside where a tonga stood; the horse that would give us a ride was nodding its head and clicking its hoofs musically in a slow foot dance. “Enter,” said the Sandalwood man grandly, and I did. He guided the tonga smoothly through the roads of Mysore. A quaint atmosphere enveloped me, and I absorbed it while my heart danced in it; there was a song on my lips to the tune of the undulating ride and the soft beats of the horse’s hoofs of the tar road. While I was thus singing to myself, my driver and escort started a lilting song too:

“ Tall eucalyptus and coconut trees
Rustle! Rustle! Rustle! in the gentle breeze
Cuckoos and mynahs sing their sweet songs
Tring!Tring!Tring! the bicycles respond!”

Indeed, there were lots of bicyclists right in the middle of the road, some on the sides, and the tonga had to weave through them as they waved and shouted and rang their bells. After a while we reached more crowded streets with the bazaars and the coffee houses where people chatted gaily, and sipped on coffee in ever-silver tumblers and cups. We were in the heart of the city, and the spectacular domes of the Mysore Palace had come into view.

“To there we head,” said the Sandalwood man with great hype. “We shall call on the Maharaja.”

We marched on slower through the traffic of people and reached the gates of the palace. The ochre domes shone bright in the sun. It was a great piece of architecture: European, Islamic and Hindu styles all merged into one fantastic palace.

“Indo-Saracenic, they call it,” said my guide, at whom I wasn’t looking, for the arresting sight that the palace had never allowed me to. We entered the palace, and armed guards bent in respect. If the exterior was majestic the interior was twice so: there were ornate dark brown wooden carvings on the doors of lotuses, peacocks, elephants, gods, and grazing deer of the forest; on the walls and stained glass windows there were intricately drawn designs and symmetrical patterns curvaceous as a swan’s neck and adorned with dots and geometrical shapes; there were paintings depicting the life of the king and his family, portraits of royal family’s ancestors, paintings of battles and those of celebration and horsemanship during the festival of Dasera for which the city was famous; and there was size, the immense size and height of the rooms, which ended in domes that made you feel dizzy with grandeur. All these I observed while I was being led to the Durbar room where on a golden throne sat Maharaja Wodeyar. He was attired with the best of clothes, those befitting a king; his robes flowed of silk and gold. And on his right side sat a strange-looking, furtive person, who looked like a puppet made of shining cloth. I caught a striking glint from his eye that seemed so powerful that I stood for a moment entranced, and then that mysterious bit of light disappeared.

“Welcome to Mysore,” said the Maharaja. His smile was bright and his demeanour cheerful; yet, if I was not wrong, I could detect the faint touch of a frown on his brow. Gesturing to the person on his right, he said: “And this is Silk, of the Mysore silk fame, that beautiful piece of everlasting luster. I can see that you have already met the Sandalwood.” He winked at me. “They don’t get along, the two of them; for both compete to make themselves famous in this city!”

“I am honored, O king, to be treated with such great hospitality,” I said with evident awe. All of us were seated now. A servant wandered in silently, and offered fresh coconut water to me. Sandalwood and Silk faced each other, their faces turned upward, each avoiding eye contact with the other. The Maharaja looked at me, and said:

“It is not without reason that you are treated with such special care.”

I arched my eyebrows, for there was something in his tone that suggested a burden.

“Yes, it is so. We got you from the real world for the stars foretold something about you. Our astrologer looked at the end of his long white beard in contemplation, and in his mind celestial objects floated – the planets, the stars, and the galaxies. His calculations matched with the date of your birth, the time, the exact hour – it seemed that you were the person we were looking for. Hence you were called to assist in a problem that bothers us.”

“This intrigues me. What is the nature of my assistance?”

“That has to do with your vagabond-like nature, your tendency to roam in the forests, and your knowledge of beasts.”

“A riddle it is all to me, and doubt resides like an dreadful intruder in my mind. Pray be clear.”

“In due time… do not make haste, although the issue at hand does require us not to be idle. We shall talk over lunch, which shall be soon, and my cook, who is also my vizier in matters of distress, shall join our talk.”

Lunch was served on banana leaves cleaned with water. The Maharaja ate with me while the cook supervised. The cook, whose name was Manisundar, talked a lot; he seemed quite an intelligent chap. His skin was covered with a formidable layer of oil and grease, and exuded the aromatic steam, heat and spice of the frying pan. He chattered on in a vocabulary that initially seemed strange, but later, when I was habituated to his “phrases”, I started to see light in his speech.

“Manisundar here has never liked anything as much as he has liked cooking. It is strange,” the Maharaja said. “Oh, how much he likes his cooking! He cannot stand anyone else in the royal kitchen, and does all the work himself.”

“Lord of all Vegetables, how will I survive without that?” asked Manisundar. “Cutting beans, snipping off those sticky ends of a ladysfinger, grating coconuts for chutney – of all these things if you deprive me, I shall have to fry myself deep one lunch in scalding vegetable oil!”

“There, there he goes again – stop that suicidal talk of yours!”

“Ah, okay, more mango pickle, tourist? Burns your tongue doesn’t it in a tangy-sour way! Quite my intention.”

“Er, yes, the food is quite delicious, delectable,” I said.

“Let’s talk of the pressing matters now that trouble the kingdom,” the Maharaja said importantly. “It is high time we did so.” There was a stern pause and I was all attention, with my ears straining and twitching with curiosity so much that they moved; and Manisundar watched them with glee and mirth.

“You may have heard of the buffalo demon Mahishashur, whose massive statue resides up Chamundi hill.” I nodded and he continued: “Well, he is the problem, the demon! He has the city named after him, what more does he want! Ages ago he was killed by Goddess Chamundeshwari, and the people of Mysore thought that was the end of that. But no, his spirit still moves, and he still troubles the people of Mysore; he is still as notorious as he was millennia ago, not giving up his mischief.

“You might ask what mischief he does. Ask what mischief he does not do! His apparition has been spotted in the night, moving about; people cringe in fear when he prowls around, troubling the innocent. But though that is a problem too for us, the real problem caused by him, I believe, lies elsewhere. His spirit is one with that of a living bandit named Marasuran, who lives, it is said, in the forest of Nagarhole. Occasionally, he comes to town with his cronies and wreaks havoc amongst the people, stealing their belongings, and even killing some. They come in strong and powerful horses, whose stamina is outstanding, far more than what our army horses can achieve. The most striking thing about this villain Marasuran is his capacity to elude. The forest is his home, and we have reason to believe that he has no one house or hideout; he lives all over the forest. Entire armies of men have gone about searching the thick dense parts of the forest, and they have sighted him, yes, but he has vanished strangely, and there is something miraculous about his escapades that has led me and my wise sages in court to believe that he is none other than an incarnation of the demon himself.”

There was silence for a while as the Maharaja paused and looked at Manisundar before he said in a low whisper, dramatically:

“Manisundar here believes that the bandit gets help from the birds and beasts of the forest.”

The cook nodded sagely, and said: “During my occasional visit to the forest to pluck some herbs and fresh leaves for the delicacies of the kitchen I have sensed and seen strange things. Steamed rice and round pumpkins, it was frightening! The whole living forest had its eyes on me, as if they knew I was from the Maharaja’s court. For some moments there was complete silence, and it is a terrible feeling; everything around you stands still, alert and frozen in time. I have never yearned for the sound of bursting mustards in hot oil more than in those chilly moments when shivers sneaked through my body. Once I saw someone running stealthily over rustling leaves and I followed the footsteps. At one point I was running parallel to the fugitive, and there were the trunks of trees between us. I saw the profile of a tall man dressed in shabby clothes, but remarkably athletic and lean. His running form went behind a tree and he evaded my vision for a split second or two; but what came out was utterly surprising and disturbing: a large croaking black bird, its wing flapping loudly, emerged from the other side to my astonishment, and a monkey, which I could have sworn was not there a moment ago, was suddenly climbing the tree. The fugitive was gone! I stood stunned and petrified; I felt deceived and cheated with a form of trickery that was beyond my comprehension. And as if basking in the glory of the deception, I heard a barking deer barking away somewhere; to me it sounded like laughter. Carrots are red, capsicums are green, and brinjals are violet, but after that little episode I felt the colour of all vegetables drowning into diabolical shades.” At this point his voice had reached a shrill squeak and tottered off lamely into silence; he gulped, and I could see his Adam’s apple bob up and then subside.

“What happened after that?” I asked

“Nothing. I just came back, and decided that I’d have to give up my fancy little herbs that could have enhanced the culinary treats that come out of the royal kitchen. There has been nothing more disheartening in life. I went to the masterful poet in the king’s court Devraya, told him of my problem, and to console me and ennoble my sorrow, he composed the following lovely verses:

Of cardamom and clove, I sing many praises
The flavour of coriander and cumin, I eulogize
Of these, I obtain, a good measure and plenty
But for the herbs of Nagarhole, I forever pine.”


He sighed and gloom hung over the room. Into this gloom came Sandalwood and Silk and joined us, exuding their scent and shine. The cook brightened and said: “These two great representatives of Mysore, they cheer me up so well! But I do hold a grudge against them for they never eat my food, not even the great, irresistibly sweet mysore pak that I prepare so often.”

It was well before dawn the next day that we set off for the forest of Nagarhole in two chariots. From Mysore, the forest was quite distant, and it would take a while to get there. Manisundar, Sandalwood and myself were in one chariot, whereas Silk and the Maharaja were in the other. It was still dark and the stars, if they weren’t hidden beneath pale-white scattered clouds, kept a twinkling vigil over us. Manisundar spoke to me almost incessantly, and whenever he was advising me to be cautious in my forest adventure, his voice dropped to a whisper as if he feared that the demon would listen.

“It is important for you to locate the bandit first. Like I locate those little worms than hide in grains of rice. Your skill with beasts is the way to do it.”

I nodded my head skeptically: “I know my way with beasts, and I have roamed in many forests, but that doesn’t mean I can deal with beasts who are under a spell of the bandit!”

“Enter the forest, and maybe you will see things differently. I know you agreed to this plan of mine as the allure of the forest is too much for you to resist! ”

He paused and said: “You may even meet people in forest, strange people, hermits, wanderers like you. Judge and do as you feel best.”

Sandalwood spoke for the first time: “Cut the wood of the tree closest to you if you need help or if you find something significant. The scent of a damaged bark of a tree is something I can detect early, and I’ll come rushing; it may take a little while, but I’ll be there.”

For the first time, I felt a tinge of fear tarnish the pure sense of anticipation and excitement that was within me.

Dawn was breaking and the eastern sky was starting to show light. The speed of the chariots had slowed, and after a while they came to a stop. All of us alighted. The Maharaja came to bid me goodbye: “You are almost in the forest now. This is where we leave you! I wish you good luck in your endeavour. The people of Mysore and myself cannot be more indebted to your courage and enthusiasm. May the great Goddess be with you! Remember, Silk and Sandalwood shall be in Nagarhole too, at some other points of the forest.”

The chariots rode away, and I was left alone. There were trees around me but it was not the dense forest yet. A thrill went through me as I inhaled the fresh air of the morning.

Things fall apart: The story of a conquest -- Part 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2. This part, the final one, continues from when the new king, AH, hurls a "box" given to him. For the sake of continuity, I have repeated the last paragraph of the second part. I have also provided a couple of pictures: first a rendition of AH's capture; and second a glimpse of the mountainous landscape of the region whose history this is (not to be confused with where the battle took place). I took the picture during a visit last December.

From the next post on, I promise not to speak in riddles and hints.

Please also pardon the typos -- will try to fix them in the next couple of days. The last two pieces had some horrendous ones.
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In his other hand, the oddly attired man held that looked like a rectangular box, which he gave to AH. But it did not "contain" anything. The cover opened to one side revealing a cluster of rustling, thin and creased pads, one laid over another, and with strange symbols on them. A wonderful aroma wafted from the pads. Though as beautiful as works of art, the symbols made no sense to AH. Yet, the interpreter, who was translating, repeatedly mumbled something about “submission”.

It sounded like nonsense to AH. Irritated, he threw the box from the perch of his litter.

And all hell broke loose.

Later, in captivity, AH would regret that gesture: had he not been so arrogant, he might have slyly outmaneuvered his opponents and trapped them later. But at that moment, drunk from his military victories and the triumphant march from the northern city, Q, to the provincial town, M, control of the kingdom well within his grasp, AH could not have responded in any other way.

The hurling of the “box” was akin to igniting a conflagration. AH had touched a very raw nerve. With loud cries that conveyed unequivocally the insult they had experienced, the warriors exploded out of their positions from the buildings surrounding the square. They seemed prepared for this very moment; the fact that they were impossibly outnumbered did not deter them. Mounted high on their beasts, they attacked with surprising vigor and speed.

But more than anything else, it was the fate of the king that left his massive army in a state of paralysis.

AH’s litter was being carried by his chiefs. The warriors slashed their sharp metal rods to deadly effect, severing off the chiefs’ arms. And yet, in a dizzying exhibition of loyalty, the limbless chiefs continued to support the shaking litter with their shoulders. And when they fell, others would take their place; the warriors would then chop fresh limbs. This continued for a while until the litter itself was tilted and AH was captured alive and taken by the captain FP.

It was inconceivable that the king, considered divine and invincible, should be kidnapped in this way.

The man pulling AH down from the titled litter is FP, the captain of the warrior army. To the left of the painting, holding aloft the symbol with the intersecting pieces is the same man who gave AH that puzzling thing with the strange symbols which he threw in irritation, triggering the warriors' fury. This rendition of the capture is appropriately the cover of Jared Diamond's famous Guns, Germs and Steel.

Taking advantage of the enemy's disbelief and paralysis, the invading warriors charged into the ranks of the countless foot soldiers. Seated on their beasts, which reared, neighed, raced and trampled, they killed at will. Stupefied at the capture of their new king, and terrified by the unprecedented assault, AH’s men fled. At the end of the battle, the plain was littered with dead men -- and all dead men were AH's men.

Incredibly, a hundred and fifty men had defeated an army of a hundred thousand men and had not suffered a single casualty. Only one of the invading warriors was injured. For that reason and because of similar successes in future battles, the warriors – and their beasts especially – would be regarded as powerful as Gods.

In captivity, AH was given his privileges; he kept his servants; he still wielded authority. The shrewd man that he was, he began to understand the weaknesses of his captors. He even became friendly with them; FP chatted with him quite amiably. AH became an expert at the game of moving pieces on a checkered board that FP had taught him. And with that, the invaders’ aura of invincibility faded. AH realized they were men just like him. He understood their greed: they were crazy for metals that shone; they had come to the kingdom primarily in search of them. AH cleverly negotiated his release by promising to deliver a roomful of these metals. There was plenty of it available in his kingdom: in temples and religious places and in shrines where the mummies of his ancestors were kept with care.

But AH ultimately underestimated his captors. These were treacherous and willing to go to any extent to achieve their ends. Once AH had delivered the metals, he was suddenly hanged, by the same men he had become friendly with. The men obeyed orders that came from some distant land, from a different monarch, to whom they proudly owed allegiance; and this distant land kept sending more oddly attired men who preached with great determination, an unparalleled sense of righteousness, and wore pendants that had the same symbol -- the ubiquitous intersecting lines – that AH had seen at the square of M just before his capture; but most importantly, this distant land sent more settlers and beasts – and what terror the beasts wrecked! – so that it became impossible for his people rebel successfully against them.

This was no simple kidnapping and ransom procurement mission; this was settlement on a permanent basis; plunder was institutionalized for perpetuity.


After AH’s death, another brother, TH, emerged and became the invaders’ puppet king; but he died of disease soon. Yet another brother, MC, came forward; he too was treated initially as convenient figurehead, but broke away and organized cleverly thought out rebellions. But in the end, the military might of the invaders and the manner in which they exploited alliances with the local tribes -- who had not forgotten their own subjugation, only a couple of generations ago, by HC and his ancestors -- ensured that MC had to recede with his followers into to the eastern part of the kingdom, where mountains jostled with dense jungle.

Society changed irreversibly during the conquest. The efficient administration the kingdom had possessed gave way to cruel system of exploitation where impossible tributes were levied by the settlers on the natives. The discovery of new ores for metals propelled a vicious cycle of forced labor, misery and demographic decline. The settlers also demolished what they saw was the idolatry of the natives, who worshiped the sun and the earth; they supplanted it with their own faith.

AH’s dramatic capture and his execution a few months later thus marked the beginning of the end. It was a pivotal moment in the history of his kingdom. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Things fall apart: The story of a conquest -- Part 2

Read Part 1. You'll find the preamble there as well.

For names of people, I use two letters; and there are only four characters in the story – three kings or princes, HC, AH, HS, and the captain of the invading warrior army, FP. For names of cities, I use a single letter; and there are three cities, C, Q and M. These abbreviations, too, could provide clues about the place and empire whose fall I am alluding to.

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Coincidentally, about a hundred and fifty of the famed warriors – the half men half beasts the kingdom had heard rumors about – were sailing along the coast at the same time, their progress parallel to AH’s victorious advance inland along the mountain range. The warriors were unaware of happenings in the kingdom but they soon made landfall and made their way up the mountains to a small provincial town called M, where AH’s victorious army, consisting of a hundred thousand men, was resting and partying boisterously at the outskirts.

M lay halfway between the northern city Q and the capital C. The main square had buildings on each side and a vast plain stretched from the square. Here, the warriors met the following day with AH and his army.

It was a surreal encounter that would, even centuries later, elicit utter disbelief.

AH had no idea that these curious looking visitors – completely unlike anything he or his people had ever seen – had downed an empire to the north. And that there were out to do something similar now. But AH couldn’t be blamed: however majestic and odd the much feared men looked, they were few in number and hard to take seriously.

Most of them had thick hair growing on their faces; it covered their cheeks, chins; the same shock of hair, sometimes smooth, sometimes messy, often drooped to their chests. They were dressed in some kind of hard metal that covered much of their faces and bodies. They held a long, gleaming rod in their hands. But, strikingly, each of them was in union with a beast that was six feet tall and had a long and powerful snout. The animals looked spectacular but benign. Each warrior’s torso was positioned at the back of his beast, straddling it. This gave them the advantage of height: they towered over AH’s foot soldiers, who held clubs and maces.

Only AH who was carried in a high, caparisoned litter looked down on the warrior army.

The meeting at the square of CM was supposed to be one in which AH sized up these strange visitors. The previous day the captain of the visitors, FP, had met peacefully with AH at the outskirts where the army was camped, and AH had promised to come to the square the next day.

He did come, but late and at an inexorable pace with his massive army. Like his father, AH was a proud man and held ferocious authority over his subjects. He led a lavish lifestyle; everything that he used was revered and retained by his servants. The bones of the meat that he ate were kept with care; as were clothes of his that were soiled. When he expectorated, the spit was not allowed to touch the ground, but a woman collected it in her hand. It was understandable that AH, well aware of the feelings of submissiveness he generated among his people – he was the son of the great, divine king HC after all – should treat the new entrants to his lands with disdain.

At the meeting in the square, one of the warriors was dressed in attire noticeably different from others. He started speaking passionately. He clasped in his hand an item that seemed to be made from two metal pieces: the shorter piece, two inches long, intersected near one end of the much longer piece. It meant nothing to AH, but in the coming years, this pattern of two intersecting straight lines would become commonplace in the kingdom.

In his other hand, the oddly attired man held that looked like a rectangular box, which he gave to AH. But it did not "contain" anything. The cover opened to one side revealing a cluster of rustling, thin and creased pads, one laid over another, and with strange symbols on them. A wonderful aroma wafted from these pads. It was beautiful as works of art are, but the symbols made no sense to AH and yet, the interpreter, who was translating, repeatedly pointed to the box, and kept mumbling about “submitting”.

It all sounded like nonsense to AH. Irritated, he threw the ‘box” from the perch of his litter.

And all hell broke loose.

(final part to come...)

Things fall apart: The story of a conquest -- Part 1

What I’ve tried here is to tell, in my own words, the story – only the basic outline – of a empire’s fall. The actual story is very famous, and some of you will be able to identify immediately the specific historical encounter I am recounting. But irrespective of how well read you are, it is hard to be knowledgeable about all things in the world. So, if at all you find such things interesting, I invite you guess, as I deliver this retelling in two or three parts, the place and empire I am alluding to.

For names of people, I use two letters; and there are only four characters in the story – three kings or princes, HC, AH, HS, and the captain of the invading warrior army, FP. For names of cities, I use a single letter; and there are three cities, C, Q and M. These abbreviations, too, could provide clues.

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Once upon a time there was a mighty but isolated kingdom. Its contours followed the entire length of a famous mountain range that ran in an unrelenting line from the north to the south. To the west of the range was a thin, largely dry coastal strip; to the east was dense jungle through which an immense river made its way, for hundreds of miles, to the ocean.

The king, HC, was respected by his people. His ancestors had laid the foundations of the empire, but he had expanded their realm both north and south along the range, blazing his way through fierce tribes that refused to give in easily. Indeed, at the time this story begins, HC was at battle in the north with the bulk of his army. The going had been tough and HC had been in this part of his kingdom for years now. The capital, C, the seat of power, was well to the south, and had been left to his regents; with the recent bloody imperial conquests, the kingdom had reached the limits of its expansion. Yet, its administration worked smoothly. Every day runners ran the length of mountain range – at breakneck speeds even at incredibly high altitudes -- to relay messages and keep the lines of communication open.

HC began to like the north; he contemplated building a second capital at Q, where the winter temperatures were milder than at C and the land more arable. What he did not know, however, was the fate that was to befall him and his people. A few hundred miles north of where HC was stationed, the mountains gave way to a largely impenetrable jungle; and further beyond, this difficult terrain narrowed to a strip only seventy kilometers wide, flanked on both sides by two vast oceans. When emissaries arrived from these unconquered parts to the kingdom, they brought news that sounded strange – too strange to be taken seriously.

The reports spoke of the sudden and violent conquest of a similarly large kingdom a thousand miles north of the narrow strip. The conquerors were a race of warriors who had come from the ocean. It was said they looked utterly different. The terrifying thing was that they were half men and half beasts, but with the added advantage that each man could detach from the beast and then rejoin at will. There was news that the warriors now had bases in the narrow strip, and were sailing in ships close to the coast.

Something even more deadly was afoot. Wherever the warriors went, the locals would develop painful rashes that pocked their faces and bodies, rendering them unbearably ugly. Most of them eventually died. The mortality was so severe that there was no one to bury the bodies. Entire villages perished. Not only that, this deadly epidemic of rashes seemed to precede the warriors, like a secret weapon, and never affected the warriors themselves.

HC died suddenly in one such epidemic: the rashes overcome him until he was bedridden, barely able to speak. He was in immense pain; he turned blind as the blisters invaded his eyes. Hundreds of thousands around him died too, but it was the king’s death that triggered what would eventually turn into a brutal civil war.

Or, more appropriately, sibling war.

It was traditional for a king to marry his blood sister; a son born of such a union was the most legitimate successor. It was also common for the king to have dozens of other wives, legitimate and illegitimate. This meant there were dozens of princes, anxiously awaiting their chance after HC’s death. But in his deathbed, HC seemed to prefer two princes: AH and HS. What he really wanted was AH to handle the northern part of the kingdom, with his new capital at Q, and HS to continue ruling from the ancestral capital C. AH in fact was with his father at the time of his death in the north.

What actually happened was no surprise: the brothers began a violent succession battle. Their armies clashed repeatedly. Thousands lost their lives. HS gained the upper hand initially; his generals captured AH and chopped a portion of his ear off. But AH escaped secretly with the help of his wife, gathered his generals – the same generals who had been with HC at the time of his death, and had been bogged down fighting the fierce tribes of the north – and launched a spectacular counterattack.

The northern army – AH’s army now – began to advance south, to the capital C, inflicting terrible punishments on those of the kingdom who sided had with HS.

AH was set to become the undisputed new king.

(To be continued...)

How I helped Obama win in eight states

In August this year, as I moved from Minnesota to Massachusetts, I drove through eight states. Amazingly – and I realized this just recently – Obama won all these states. So here goes a quasi-satirical, fictional piece that follows my journey: the places I mention here are places and people I actually met. But I’ve twisted the actual narrative to have some fun.

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I moved from Minnesota to Massachusetts in August this year. I drove for three days and through eight states to get to my destination: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and finally Massachusetts. Look carefully at that list. Do you notice something? Yes, they are all states in which Obama won; and they include some of his more memorable victories: Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.

I am here to take credit for his successes. I hope the Obama campaign takes notice. After all, I traveled and spread Obama’s word in Midwestern prairie towns; I climbed lonely silos and shouted, so his message of change and hope could reach every barn and every farmhouse. And when I crossed the Mississippi – that most important American territorial and cultural marker – and entered Wisconsin, I set sail large paper boats with a “Yes, we can!” emblazoned on them, so the message would travel down the river, all the way to St.Louis, in the bellwether state of Missouri, where the race still remains tied.

And that night - the first of my journey - I ate a hearty meal at King of Falafel, a restaurant in downtown Madison. I encouraged the Egyptian owner to vote for Change. When he complained that life was tough and business was slow because of a fierce Lebanese competitor whose restaurant was right across, I said to him:

“There is no Egyptian America or Lebanese America – there is only the United States of America.”

________

The next morning I was in Illinois, a state already well converted. As I drove through the notorious south side of Chicago – a place Obama had made home and where he’d done his community organizing work – I thought I saw a young and skinny Obama walking the streets, knocking on doors, helping frame and sign petitions, helping people pick up their lives as the steel factories closed.

I saw him slip on the sidewalk, fall, and twist his ankle; his papers, containing hundreds of signatures flew and scattered all over the street. But he collected them with the same patience and poise with which he ran his Presidential campaign. Later, I saw him addressing a group of just twenty people – yes just twenty people, not 200,000. Big audiences certainly do not develop in a day. I saw him stumble and stutter and lose his sentences - unfortunately there wasn't a teleprompter to channel his eloquence.

________

Twenty five miles south of Chicago is the town of Gary, in the state of Indiana. This predominantly black town would probably vote for Obama – unlike the state which was a toss-up – but I thought I had to do my part nevertheless. Every town counted; every person counted. White folks in Minnesota had advised me to avoid Gary; I was told to “gas up and avoid everything south of Chicago downtown; these are bad parts.” In America, as many of you well know, “bad” parts of town in the public discourse are generally an indirect reference to “Black” or “Hispanic” parts of town.

I made my way through Gary’s deserted main street, full of strangely empty buildings. I stuck a hundred Obama fliers on the walls, alongside tattered messages that said: “Gary: Celebrating one hundred years; Steel Strong!” But the heavy industry halcyon days were in the past. Now there wasn't much going on.

At a crowded gas station at the end of the street, I found the owners – an Indian-American man and his son – conducting transactions behind a bullet-proof glass partition. I said to them:

“Change is coming; it will break these barriers of suspicion and distrust that we have erected.”

I repeated this to a middle-aged black lady who arrived in posh red SUV. She was in a foul mood, and had begun cursing the two ragged men lounging outside the store. The men, she claimed angrily, were eyeing her car.

“Get a proper job!” she told them. Those behind me in the line grinned wryly.
________

A little farther east in Indiana is the town of South Bend. Here too, the downtown buildings were empty; the economy seemed to have stagnated. And as with other cities in the US, the demographic in and near downtown was mostly black. This contrasted sharply with the brilliantly landscaped campus of Notre Dame University a few miles away, where the rich sent their offspring. I wandered around the well maintained boulevards trying to find students who could energize the campaign in South Bend.

I came across a group of students and professors at a small hangout called Lula’s Café. Cosy and comfortable, the café’s interior was a world very different from downtown. The walls were full of murals; students discussed in groups. Some played drums; others played the flute: the atmosphere was very much like it is in organic cafes and stores. This was a community conveniently absorbed in its own world, its own bubble, seemingly impervious to the situation just a few miles away. Most of them were already Obama supporters, but I had something to say to them:

“We can't have a Hippie America and a New Age America and a Yuppie America and a Ghetto America. We can't have a rich college-going America and a poor high-school dropout America. We must have only the United States of America!”

________

Onward from Indiana to Ohio, yet another critical state. I drove and drove until I came to the town of Toledo. I was exhausted and slept long that night in one of the highway-side hotels. But next morning I was up early. I set myself up in the breakfast room, with other hotel guests – senior citizens, families with many children– shaking a packet of Quaker’s oatmeal, toasting English muffins, slicing boiled eggs, and having weak coffee.

I didn't have to do much. The television was on; Obama was addressing a large rally, reading eloquently from the teleprompter, his eyes moving left and right, following the prompts.

“Vote for him!” I said passionately. My audience in the breakfast room looked at me in the uncertain manner of undecided voters, but my passion must have roused something deep in them.

And I can claim safely now that that same passion came to fore in Ohio when Obama carried it last week.

________

I could go on and on: describe my stop at Cleveland, Ohio; my stops in the small towns of Pennsylvania, yet another battleground state; and finally the easy home stretch through Upstate New York and western Massachusetts, through quaint towns that were ready to vote for Obama anyway, and where yards proliferated with Obama signs. But that wouldn’t be interesting.

It shall suffice to say that I did my bit; that during this journey – from the plains of the Midwest to the hills of western Massachusetts, covering nearly 1200 miles, and experiencing, if only for a little bit, the stark social realities that face the country today – it shall suffice to say that on this journey, I planted a seed on all my stops along the way: an Obama seed that grew and prospered on Election Day.

The Bollywood Omnibus

More fiction. Nearly five years ago, I wrote a story with a narrative blatantly assembled from the kitschy elements of Bollywood. My purpose, I guess, was to revel in the kitsch, enjoy the exaggerations and generate humor along the way. What you see below are the first few paragraphs of that story. I was never completely happy with it, and have kept it aside all this time, but isn’t a blog the best way to test things out, even if they are embarrassing?

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Police Inspector Arjun Sinha, a dashing, curly-haired, mustachioed man with a gently protruding paunch, was a prolific apprehender of underworld dons, criminals, mafia lords and smugglers. He was endowed with special shock-absorber legs that enabled him to land without losing balance on fast-moving trains from tall cliffs; with rocket-propellant thighs that enabled him to make long leaps and ascend ten-story buildings almost instantly; with a sharp vision that allowed him to trace bullet trajectories and thereby dodge staccato bursts of machine-gun fire from his enemies; with special sparring talents that enabled him to tackle ten thugs at the same time – so powerful and gifted was he, and so strong was his commitment to justice that he had, in just a few years as a police officer, been the nemesis of such deadly villains as the bald don Shakaal, the petty smuggler Loin, the evil scientist Dr.Dang, the cult leader Kooka Singh, and, most recently, the despotic and Hitleresque Mogambo.

But the one evil-doer whom Arjun still sought for, whose mere mention made his blood boil with rage and whose extermination for very personal reasons was his only goal, was the dacoit Ganja Singh, who had gained his name from his liking for marijuana and whose notoriety stemmed not only from his merciless raids on the villages in his area but also from his recently burgeoning, globe-wide drug-smuggling ring. Ganja Singh’s foray into the world of drug peddling had not changed his dacoit-like, nomadic ways that he had maintained for nearly thirty years: he still lived in barren, rocky valleys with his gun-toting, sycophantic thugs, and his characteristic rumbling guffaws could be heard for miles, especially during the drugged and delirious celebrations that ensued after successful village raids. His opening gambit to all enemies was: “If you’ve drunk your mother’s milk, come see me eye to eye!” or “My name is Ganja; and I was born at the banks of the river Ganga!” Ganja Singh was famous for his antics in the river: he would hold conferences in it, and suddenly, without warning, would immerse himself completely in water for well in excess of a minute, much to the concern of his loyal ruffians, and would then rise up in dramatic fashion with a loud “Yaaahhh!” as if rejuvenated by this experience. His followers, genuinely thrilled to see the feat, would then culminate the ritual with claps, cheers, lusty whistles and celebratory gunshots.

Ganja Singh’s drug-network thrived on account of his association with some powerful and important men. The most influential of them was Swamiji, the long-haired, bearded Delhi-based saint and Godman, who sported fifty gold and silver rings on his fingers and a thousand rosary beads of various sizes on his chest, and whose hypnotic and charming demeanor attracted many spiritually starved Hollywood beauties, business tycoons and impossibly rich sultans. He was especially invaluable to depraved politicians who sought astrological advice from him on when to campaign for the elections or start a new party or splinter an existing one. In his younger days Swamiji’s interest in numerology had mistakenly inspired him to study mathematics but unable to withstand its dreary formalism and objectivity he had abandoned the pursuit quickly. However, he never missed an opportunity to parade his peripheral knowledge of the subject: his metaphysical thoughts were almost always peppered with number tricks and mathematical constructs. Once, at his plush ashram in Delhi, during the course of a theological discussion with those around him, Swamiji had said:

“The universe is a vector, each infinitesimal moment defined by a realization of one of an infinite set of choices, this one choice chosen by the random rolling of a roulette, and this one choice makes all the others impossible, even if the others had had greater chance of occurring. Who rolls this roulette? If someone does, who rolls this someone who rolls the roulette?”

One of the fifty politicians who took shrine under Swamiji was Karun Yadav, popularly called Neta Bekasoor, as he always professed innocence although there were hundreds of cases against him: of rape, bribery, illegal transactions, and murder. He claimed that his detractors dreaded his incorruptible character, and had therefore employed their party cadres exclusively to plant evidence against him, invent crime after crime to keep him busy in the courts. Bothered by the incriminations, he sought spiritual bliss with the soothing Swamiji, who, after listening to his problems, had looked at the end of his long beard, at faraway stars, galaxies, revolving roulettes, planets, particularly at the aspect of Saturn, and had suggested that Karun Yadav, to gain popularity and prove his innocence to the masses, would somehow need to show his generosity to them before the next elections.

Karun Yadav had mulled over this suggestion and decided to use a fraction of his large cash reserves in his Zurich bank account for the construction of the Karun Yadav Janata Center in his birthplace, the idyllic, picturesque and vista-filled town of Pipalkot. The center was vociferously advertised throughout the nation, with the motto Muft Me Milega (You’ll Get it For Free): it promised a fresh, free loaf of naan to all those who visited it every day; on special festive occasions of the year – such as New Year’s eve and Diwali – and Karun Yadav’s birthday, it promised a paisley-patterned sari with a matching blouse for women, and pajamas and kurtas –100% cotton – for men. The most enduring image of the campaign was the thirty-feet wide and twenty-feet long billboard of the smiling Karun Yadav donning thick black goggles – that he wore perennially, even at night – and dressed in his special starched-white, long-sleeved kurta that almost covered his fingers; whisker-like, graying hair sprang from the edges of his ears, symmetrically, on either side of his woolly astrakhan cap. Next to this endearing portrait was the message: “Come, you’ll get it for free from the only truly innocent politician you’ll see!”

______

And so the story goes on and on for ten thousand inexorable words. Here's another passage - the last one I'll share in this post, so you don't get too bored - that appears towards the end, just before the climax. It features Ali, Arjun Sinha's twin brother. Ali was separated from Arjun at birth, and while Arjun became a policeman, Ali went to Dubai and became a local gangster and petty thief. Ali, however, has now returned to India to meet Ganja Singh:

Incidentally, it was on the same day that Arjun’s twin brother and Ganja Singh’s new recruit Ali arrived in Pipalkot; he was dressed stylishly in a leather jacket studded with tiny blue and yellow light bulbs that he now and then flicked on and off using a switch in his pocket. He waited, arms akimbo, at the outskirts of the town, next to a dirt trail that disappeared into the jungle, for one of Ganja Singh’s men to take him to the dacoit’s camp. In a short while, he meticulously chose a Marlboro cigarette from its pack, nonchalantly flipped it several meters into the air, expertly intercepted it at the corner of his mouth, lighted it, drew deeply, and looked up at the sky. He was exhilarated after having flirted with two women on his flight from Dubai to Delhi: one, a beautiful Indian air hostess, dressed skillfully in a bright blue sari that allowed him long glances at her beautiful waist; and the other, an Indian passenger, seated next to him, equally beautiful, but dressed instead in a bright red sari, licking the richly colored tops of a maroon lollipop. Later in the flight, after one of his meals, he ordered strawberry and mango for dessert, and imagined the two beauties biting into the luscious fruits with slow sensuousness; he saw himself as a sheik reclining on a plush cushion, surrounded on either side by the two women in see-through veils, in a well-lit tent full of tapestry curtains and the silhouetted humps of resting camels. He also dreamt of a golden bowl overflowing with fruits and of placing purple grapes in the navels of the two moaning beauties and using their bellies as springboards to pop them into his mouth.

Just as his thoughts had been interrupted then by the crackle of the pilot’s voice, announcing their descent into Delhi, so was his pleasant recollection of the flight interrupted now by crows that had chosen the tree next to him to work up a ruckus. He glanced at his expensive Swiss watch that he had pilfered expertly from one of Dubai’s shopping malls, frowned and shook his head in disapproval at the absence of the promised escort to Ganja Singh’s hideout. He resolved to find the place himself, headed along the dirt trail and disappeared into the canopy of trees, fiddling with his switch restlessly, the colored blinking bulbs on his jacket making him look like a strangely illuminated apparition entering the jungle.

______

Ramesh's turnaround

Fiction, after a long time. Hope you enjoy this. All comments welcome.

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Ramesh worked and lived in a small Midwestern town. Life was generally dull, but not when it came to buying groceries. For spices, Ramesh went to the only Indian store in town, but for vegetables, fruits, nuts, cereals and lentils – yes even lentils, that indispensable Indian staple – he went to an “alternative” store called Good Organics. Ramesh felt pleased and excited about his choice. He made sure all his co-workers and friends knew he shopped there. At parties he brought expensive potato chips and made it a point to mention, much to everyone’s surprise and sometimes irritation, that they were organic and kettle cooked.

Ramesh’s enthusiasm for all things organic came from his uncle who owned a farm near Coimbatore in south India, and who had shifted from conventional to organic farming a few years ago. With an ardor that is to be found among converts, his uncle now campaigned fiercely for organic farming; he traveled to talk and evangelize in seminars and workshops in India. Ramesh had been impressed and had resolved to do his bit, halfway across the world, in the wind-swept American prairie town he lived in.

That was all very well, but Ramesh hadn’t accounted for the quirks in his own personality. Though good-natured, he was notoriously short tempered; he flew into a rage for the most trivial reasons, and stuck stubbornly to his own point of view. But even his closest friends – who well knew Ramesh’s eccentricities – could not have predicted his temper would turn against his beloved grocery store.

How did it begin? Probably with the organic and supposedly locally produced tomatoes that Ramesh, a few months after shopping at Good Organics, found to be almost tasteless. Maybe the mold-infested packets of organic blueberries, expensively priced, ticked him off too. As did the heavy emphasis on “fair trade” dark chocolate, which Ramesh, a lover of sweet milk chocolate, abhorred, but which all employees in the store waxed eloquently about. So the euphoria and prestige of buying organic and healthy was slowly beginning to wear, but there was one incident that pushed him decisively over the edge.

That incident, of all things, had to do with a small clarification that Ramesh sought regarding cooking oil.
____

Ramesh had recently begun using organic olive oil for his cooking – extra virgin olive oil, actually. He had been using canola before, but olive oil was extolled by just about everyone. Ramesh, who primarily cooked curries, had never used it for his high heat cooking and stir-frying before. Olive oil, he had felt, was only for salads and pasta. But on the Food Network channel, he once saw a ham and cheese sandwich being fried in a vat bubbling with extra virgin olive oil at a restaurant in Venice. Ramesh was indignant: If Italians could deep fry in extra virgin olive oil, then why couldn’t he stir-fry his vegetables, lentils and spices with the same?

He began using organic extra virgin olive oil profusely, anxious to compensate for the health benefits he had missed. A bottle would disappear within a week into his dals and sabzis. And as with everything else, he loudly announced this alteration in his cooking habits to his colleagues at work. He mentioned it so much that his friends had to remind politely that they already knew about it.

One day, while at Good Organics, Ramesh realized that all the bottles of organic olive oil were extra virgin. He asked Melanie, one of the store employees, “Just wondering – do you carry olive oil that is not extra virgin? You see - I do high heat cooking with the extra virgin variety, and was wondering if just olive oil may have better properties.”

It was an innocuous question; Ramesh was only idly curious and wasn't expecting to get an answer. It led instead to an unraveling he could never have anticipated.
___

Melanie was a short, young woman with an expressive face. She left her blond hair stylishly tousled and bunched at the top and used a long pin to keep it together. She always beamed at him when he entered the store, and was effusive in her mannerisms.

“Wow, you’re from India!” She had exclaimed when she met him the first time. “Do you cook vegetarian? You should share some recipes with our vegan deli – maybe we’ll introduce a curry sandwich into the menu!”

Ramesh had found her booming voice and pronounced friendliness endearing in the beginning, but lately they had begun to grate.
____

“Olive oil for high heat cooking!” She now cried in response to his query, her face showing alarm. “You use that for high heat cooking? Oh, no, no, no, you shouldn’t do that…Olive oil should not be heated at all!”

“Really? I mean, a little bit of heat…”

“No, oh no, you shouldn’t!”

“But you know, I saw a sandwich being fried in extra virgin olive oil in Venice…”

“Yes, chefs do it all the time, but they shouldn’t be really. Researchers have recently found that that isn’t good – it’s actually toxic for you!”

“Toxic!” Ramesh said, taken aback, getting genuinely concerned. “Toxic, really? But I’ve never deep fried, I just stir fry …I heard…”

“No, no you shouldn’t be heating it at all…Coconut oil is better for high heating.”

“Coconut oil?” said Ramesh, now confused. He had thought coconut oil was used only for hair - and how he hated it! He’d been forced as a kid to use it liberally to set his unruly hair before leaving for school, and over the course of the day it seemed to diffuse slowly onto his face, giving him a greasy look.

“Yes, coconut oil, research has shown is good for high heat and frying!”

Ramesh stood there uncertainly.

“I know it’s a bummer!” Melanie said, sighing. “But that’s what research says!” She pursed her lips and shrugged.

Ramesh walked around the aisles in a daze. He lingered in front of the bottles of organic extra virgin olive oil, recalling the amazing rapidity and gusto with which he had consumed them in past months. He felt slightly dizzy, half expecting to fall ill that very moment from toxicity. He clicked his tongue, admonishing himself and finally picked up a bottle of organic canola oil. There was no way he would have used bought coconut oil, even if it had been available.

He returned home, a frown on his face, determined to get to the bottom of the matter. He searched the Internet about the ill effects of heating olive oil. And he found that virtually all the websites stated that olive oil could be heated, no problems – it might lose its flavor but its nutrition, not much. As he dug deeper and deeper, it became even clearer that there was nothing wrong with heating at all. It certainly wasn’t toxic, as Melanie had so convincingly claimed.

For nearly ten minutes he paced around his place, Melanie’s statements playing repeatedly in his mind; the more he thought about about what she had said, the more incensed he became. Her voice and her demeanor annoyed him to no end. When he returned to the store, Ramesh was bursting with anger. The bells at the door tinkled urgently as he stormed in. One of the cashiers, a man with a Mohawk hairstyle, looked at him in surprise.

“Where’s Melanie?” Ramesh asked him.

“Melanie? Um… well, I think she’s in the bulk room. But why?”

Ramesh didn’t respond, and headed there, his face flaming with rage. He saw Melanie checking on the open containers of flours and cereals in the bulk room.

“Back for another round?” she asked laughing when she saw him, but quickly realized something was wrong. “Are you okay?”

“Who told you heating olive oil was toxic?” He was breathless with aggression now, and wasn’t very coherent.

“Hey now…cool down,” Melanie said. “I read it somewhere. Some researchers…”

“Which researchers? Name them now!”

“I don’t know… I read it in some magazine…”

“Which magazine? Name it now!”

“I don’t have to name anything to you, okay?” she retorted, her eyes flashing and voice rising. “I am not here to answer your questions…”

“Well, then are you here to give false information, huh?” Ramesh asked almost hysterically. “To scare people to death?”

He took out his wallet; his trembling fingers searched for his membership card, which gave him a ten percent discount. He finally squeezed it out with difficulty, muttering incoherently all the time. With an exaggerated gesture, he threw it to the ground, and ground it with his foot.

“You see that’s what it deserves! With liars like you…” He picked the card up again, and again threw it violently to the ground.

Ramesh was so engrossed in this that he hardly noticed anything else. He had lost his temper, but he hadn’t expected Melanie to lose hers. But she too was just as prone to unleashing her temper in unexpected ways. In one swift motion she hurled a fistful of wheat flour at him from the container behind her. And then another, and another! With her other hand, she grabbed raisins – a large jar of raisins was close at hand – and barraged them at him.

In just a few seconds, Ramesh, who’d had to time to gauge what had hit him, was covered in white. The raisins were of the sticky kind and some had stuck to his flour-laden cheeks. They slowly fell off but a couple remained.

“Get out!” She screamed

Ramesh came to his senses. He was startled but still angry. If he had waited a few seconds, Melanie might have sloshed him with honey next – in fact, she was reaching for a jar. But he stomped his foot, kicked the card – now half hidden in a small mound of flour pocked with raisins – one final time and left. The cashier with the Mohawk hairstyle stared at him, seriously for a while, and then burst out laughing.

“Holy freaking Christ - it’s like Halloween here!”

But Ramesh didn’t hear him; he had already left.

_____

And that was the end of that. Ramesh never set foot in Good Organics again, but store employees often found him on weekends picketing outside, with a placard that said: “Moldy blueberries and scabbed potatoes – Good Organics sells and deserves only rotten tomatoes!” He cut a lonely figure, but claimed to customers he was following the Gandhian form of “non-violent, grassroots protest”. A couple of times he exchanged frosty glances with Melanie and store employees. Melanie had actually apologized to him once and even asked him out to coffee, but he would have none of it.

When winter set in and snowstorms put an end to his protest, Ramesh resorted to a different strategy. He shot off formal letters to various supermarket chains, including Walmart, encouraging them to “takeover Good Organics”, and thus help in ending “the tyranny of local stores”. He claimed that these stores were perceived in the community to be “exemplars of local democracy, but were shams really, purveyors of all sorts of falsehoods.”

And yes, to make his point, he had begun to shop at a supermarket chain, where he now bought all his groceries, including his olive oil.

A conversation with Dr. Fulstac Nahbang

Here’s something old from my attic -- one of my many attempts at fiction that I never thought would see the light of day. Perhaps it still shouldn’t. But I guess there’s no harm in letting something like this loose on a blog.

I wrote this fiction piece sometime in 2003 and then abandoned it. I had then been thinking of the pitfalls of nationalism, or indeed any sense of belonging that might make us overly zealous. But I also was thinking of what might happen if we were to reject everything that contributes, subtly or otherwise, to what we are: our nationalities, communities, and religious beliefs. I wanted to write something about the tension between these two extremes - the extremes of strong attachment and identification, and total rejection - and this fictional conversation (it's an attempt at satire as well) is what I came up with. Needless to say, this is all very experimental.

___

“Dr. Nahbang, thank you very much for agreeing to be on this talk show.”

“My pleasure.”

“First, I’d like to ask where your name comes from. Fulstac Nahbang. It is a very different name.”

“It comes from nowhere. My name is made from a random permutation of letters, but with some care taken on the placement of vowels so that it is pronounceable. It has no origin, and it is as I’d like it to be.”

“Did your parents give you the name?”

“Yes. Their point was to not give it any particular racial or national feel. They obviously did not do a good job as many people ask me if I am African or Jewish or from Eastern Europe. Somebody once came to me and told me he was sure I was from Nigeria. This person had the peculiar hobby of guessing nationalities from names.”

“Your profession is a unique one – if I am not wrong you would call yourself as someone who cures your clients of the ills of nationalism?”

“Yes, that would be true, but I don’t restrict myself only to nationalism – there are other ‘isms’ that I am also capable of addressing.”

“How did you get into this profession?”

“I did not have to get into my profession; I was made for it. My ancestors for the last four generations or so are unique; they never married within their own communities. My maternal great grandmother was an Australian aborigine, and great grandfather a Swede; my paternal grandfather was a Navajo Indian and my grandmother Vietnamese. I don’t belong to any particular country or race. And nationalism, or, for that matter, any form of identity - religious or tribal or territorial or racial - is absent in me. The only identity that I care about is my lack of identity. All this and my interest in human psychology naturally led me to my profession.”

“How do you feel being one of a kind?”

“Lonely, because I feel there should be more of my kind. The greatest troubles in the world are because there are not more of my kind.”

“That’s quite a perspective…When did you seriously begin to form such a philosophy?”

“It was around eight years ago. One of my friends, who works at a law enforcement agency, sent over a convict with some psychological problems to me, and asked me to analyze him. This convict had a strong hatred of immigrant workers in his country. He had sent many death threats and had a history of assaulting immigrants. The source of his xenophobia lay his strong pride for his country, and in the belief that his country represented a certain race, and that that purity of race had to be retained. It was an easy and straightforward case for me. My law enforcement friend was pleased with the progress he saw after I’d treated him, and sent me more patients with the same problems. I was very good at solving their problems, as I view things from my own unique perspective: I lack identity and I view the quest for identity to be the cause for all troubles.”

“But don’t you think that violent reactions have their roots in economic problems?”

“It is a chicken and egg story. You could look at it the other way as well. Sure economics is intertwined with everything but the economically powerful usually claim to have some sort of value system –which comes presumably from their worldview, religion, race, anything. And they are chauvinistic about their value system and routinely – explicitly or implicitly – claim the superiority of their value system over that of the economically underprivileged.”

“How do you diagnose your client or patient? - if I may refer to the person that way.”

“It depends but let me give you an example. I had someone the other day who wanted to know how patriotic he was. I had him wear thin pads over his forearms and showed him maps of his country, pictures depicting its history and its present glories. At the end, my surround sound system played the most stirring rendition of the national anthem – I have a huge stack of CDs with national anthems and spend quite some time selecting the most soulful one for each nation. The pads over the forearms are connected to an instrument that detects how many goose bumps he’s had. That gives me a preliminary assessment…I also checked his pulse rate and heart beat.”

“Don’t you think that patients, since they are aware that they’re being diagnosed, might not respond…”

“No matter how dampened one’s responses may be, there is enough inadvertent reaction to make a judgment. My instruments are calibrated well enough to take this into account.”

“How about treatment – if a certain client wishes to be rectified of his or her problem?”

“Again, there are a variety of methods. One of my techniques is to let the client go through a rehabilitation session. One aspect of the session usually involves having a client in a room with the walls being projected in very different colors. Sometimes we show them flowers of various colors from all around the world– all these are treatments if somebody has a problem with respect to skin color. Then humans in all shades and colors from different parts of the world are shown; we take care that a variety of physical features – high cheekbones, flat noses, blue eyes, thick lips – are thrown into the mix. For those with religious problems, we have a collection of holy books and pictures of animistic practices from all over the world; we lock a patient in a room with these books and images for two days. This often yields very good results.”

“Are you typically busy? How many patients do you meet everyday?”

“Many, after the word spread that I treat patients who are too attached to their own countries or specific ideologies. I am always busy. I get patients who are not a social threat, but nevertheless want to get diagnosed. Maybe it has become fashionable in social circles, particularly those who consider themselves to be liberal or secular or think they are above petty things like nationalism. What is interesting is that they themselves are unaware of precisely what worldviews they hold and when they come to me, they get to know themselves better. Most of them want to be something – so that they can fit into a group – but have conflicts internally that fetter them. Since all of what I do remains strictly confidential, they feel free to speak their hearts. And some truths are bitter.”

“How is it that you are so popular? I mean how do people know about you?”

“Well, I am here on this talk show and though it might not have a wide reach, it still gets to enough people to sustain me. I get my advertising done through alternative radio stations like yours – I would like to call them liberal but it goes against my belief since such labels go a long way in creating categories. Every province or region in the world has some sort of alternative media, and they’ve been generous enough to give my work some exposure.”

“You say every province or region in the world – do you travel that much?”

“I cannot settle down in a particular country; I have to keep moving from place to place. I fear that once I stay in a certain place, I’ll develop an attachment to it and that will undermine my unique perspective.”

“But you must like some places more than others?”

“True, but I am not attached to any of them.”

“Please don’t feel forced to answer this question. But I am curious: Does your perspective have any implications about whom you marry?”

“I would have to marry someone who was as mixed as me. That’s what everyone in the world should be trying to do: mix yourself up so that there are no races and no countries. Actually – I wanted to say this earlier but it slipped my mind – my theory is that if aliens were to suddenly attack us, we would, to some extent, forget our differences and rally towards a common goal. I’d like to see the world in that state. In fact, in some of my rehabilitation sessions, I show clients a continuous staple of science fiction movies in which evil aliens attack the earth and diverse peoples unite. Such things can be quite motivating.”

“That’s quite extraordinary. Not to stretch the point, but what if such an invasion was to happen? Would you then encourage intermarriage with an alien?”

“We’ll get to that when it happens. There are more pressing problems now.”

“Indeed. Dr. Nahbang, thank you very much for agreeing to be on our talk show. It’s been a pleasure having you here; it’s been eye opening conversation and I am sure our listeners will agree with that. Thanks very much again.”

“My pleasure.”

Excerpt from an unfinished story

It was a day in January. I was on the terrace with Virang scouting the skies, when I spotted a bright red kite severed in some duel of threads heading our way. It was dipping fast, and went between the building we were in and the one next to us; it dipped further and went beyond, but only just beyond.

Later, from the bedroom window of my parents’ first-floor apartment, I saw the kite wedged in the roof of a patchworked hut. The hut was part of the slum that sprawled right next to the flats we lived in. Our window framed the disconcerting heart of the slum. The view was one of disorder and squalor: cramped, hastily built huts, somehow erected using long sticks, rags, sackcloth, cardboard, and tarpaulin. The abjectness of it all was brought sharply into focus by the well-defined colors and box-like symmetry of the 3-story flats that seemed to victoriously overlook the slum.

Miraculously, the kite stayed wedged, and interested no one. After a few months, it was still there – like other kites trapped in trees and electric lines – and though it was torn and crumpled, I could easily pick it out from the window owing to its bright color.

I would come to know their names only later, but since they lived in that low hut marked by the presence of the kite, I felt I had always known them. I saw Valli almost every day, thin and frail until her belly began to swell oddly. I saw Murugan in his ubiquitous colored dhoti and nothing else, his skin dark as chocolate, hair neatly curled on his chest, squatting outside the hut. Afternoons, when he came back from work, he used a rusted can to splash water over himself. Valli sometimes brought out a blackened stove, and a few utensils that she cleaned using the coir of coconut.

The slum was full of quarrels. Valli and Murugan quarreled too. And I wasn’t sure if Murugan was abusing Valli physically, but in some of these verbal fights – which, because of their intensities and overlapping voices, remained mostly unintelligible – I could sense that something physical was involved, for Valli’s wails would stop rather suddenly and start afresh, louder, fiercer than before. In these discontinuities, I thought I heard vague noises that sounded like slaps – sharp, I imagined, when the open palm landed on bare skin, muffled otherwise. Finally, Murugan would come out with a blank stare that conveyed nothing of what had gone on while Valli would stay inside; her wails ebbed until they were lost the din of the slum.

The Picaresque Narrative

I was for a long time under the spell of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I couldn’t get the narrator Saleem Sinai’s voice out of my head, and every time I sat down to write a story, I found myself using the Picaresque narrative. The Picaresque narrative involves a narrator who usually a loser of some sort but describes in a funny, quirky way the circumstances around him. The narrator is also usually very egocentric.

I thought I could use Picaresque narrative in a rural Indian setting. My protagonist was the son of a Brahmin farmer in Tamilnadu who has failed to finish his high school education, is just lounging idly around the farm and the village, and is interested in the flower vendor’s daughter. The summer that year turns out to be exceptionally hot and monsoons are delayed.

I haven’t finished the story, and am thinking of abandoning it – the Picaresque style at the least – but the ideas are still there in my mind. Below are some excerpts. They are in no particular order; I’ve just put some of the sections that I like.

I

There was once a time when I liked sugarcanes because in the lands that my father farmed, there grew long shoots of them. I liked walking between the rows and rows of them in the fields, treading the dark, moist earth, or squatting, or sometimes sitting long hours teasing the earthworms that either disappeared deep into the soil or emerged from the depths. I used to pick the squiggly creatures up, place them on my forearms, and feel them crawl aimlessly on my skin so that I could feel the tickles and the goose bumps.

II

She, with textbooks and notebooks held against her bosom, and I would then walk to Selvam’s food stall on the highway, where we would exhort him to start cooking for us, despite his protests that it would be a while before the buses came. What could more mesmerizing, what could be a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than to watch Selvam vigorously knead the dough, pinch off portions from it and shape them into small flat, half-an-inch thick circular pieces, and lay them symmetrically on the large, black griddle? Ah, to watch him make his barottas and korma! To watch him stoke the burning sticks and branches below the griddle through the opening in the brick enclosure, to watch him swell his cheeks and blow at the fledgling fire!

III

For the next month or so, with the little money that I had to travel in local buses, I roamed farms around the village with my Kodak camera and rolls, most of the time sitting under trees on hot afternoons, watching the leaves wither and fall in the sapping heat, my ears alert for any slithers or rustles so that I could capture snakes on film. You may question as to what such endeavors could have accomplished for me; today, sitting at Selvam’s stall, I too shake my head and wonder what had possessed me then. Was it the sheer boredom and emptiness of those scorching days? Or was it, as I increasingly think it to be, just a stupor that I fell in during the relentlessly long summer months till the late-arriving rains came and poured sense into me? For chasing snakes was only one of the many strange things that I was involved in, each of which I have difficulty in explaining today.

If indeed dizzyingly high temperatures were what afflicted me then what of others in the village? Was I the only one who succumbed to the delirium of the heat wave? Were not others in the village equally freakish, were they not concocting rituals and superstitions and wandering through the village, exhorting others to join?

I admit that I was present at that most unusual of marriages but so were others; I made a plea that the marriage and the parade of the newly weds around town should bring rain and cheer to the village, smiles back on the faces of the farmers, but so did others. Yes, I helped with the wedding; yes, I washed the donkeys in the water tank, yes I dressed them in garlands, yes I smeared them with sandalwood powder yellow and red, yes I dodged their vicious kicks, yes I helped tie the knot that secured the beasts in the wedlock and joined the procession as it made its way around the village. I remember the media people taking a picture of us that appeared, as someone later told me, in the Sunday edition of The Hindu and, and as my cousin from the US told me, on the BBC website.

So what if we arranged a wedding of donkeys? Was it not for a noble cause, to bring succor to parched land? Is it really that bad to hope for rain, to believe that the monsoon will come soon? How is it a shame, or how is it different from other acts of devotion? Why do people go to temples and pray everyday? Why do they flatten their palms over the supposedly divine flames in the hope that they’ll receive blessings? Why do people worship idols of gold and silver and stone? Why are idols anointed in milk of cows when frail, legless and handless beggars can only look on helplessly at lactating gutters? Why do priests have to empty fruits and butter into ritual fires?

That was how I defended myself; I shudder to think of how utterly uncompromising I was. But it didn’t stop then for the Sunday after the marriage, I was involved in yet another plea to the heavens. This time, I collected stems of bitter-smelling neem leaves that were strung onto a thick fallen branch, but it took a while to find a frog – they might have never found one had I not learnt of their dwellings through long hours of sitting under trees, next to dry creeks and pools. I held the poor wriggling thing by its leg, jumped and pranced my way to the temple where a crowd had gathered, helped the priest tie the slippery leg with a string to the neem-laden bough, and joined the retinue that toured the village. We clanged the metal grilles of gates, collecting alms, and encouraging families to pray that the temperatures would subside and the monsoon would arrive soon.