According to this theory of creationism-evolutionism, the product of the second coming of Darwin, in the beginning there was nothing but void. Then God created the Western Ghats, the famous mountain range to the east of Kerala. This was the very first mountain range in the world. Not even the mighty Himalayans were there let alone the Alps, the Atlas Mountains, and the Rockies.
The Western Ghats became lonely in no time. God then stepped in and presented the mountain with a playmate. Her name was the Arabian Sea. The Western Ghats acted as the sentinel to the Arabian Sea, which spanned the entire world. God complimented himself for creating this pair of sublime beauty. He had created them in his own image.
The heavens filled with the joy that accompanied the union of mountain and sea. But this happiness was destined to be short lived. Soon, a shadow of gloom fell on the earth. The pair was lonely without a baby. They wanted a baby desperately. That wish was granted in the course of time. God incarnated as Parasuraman. He recovered land from the sea by throwing an ax into it. The water receded, and land emerged, rising from the seafloor. This is how Kerala was born as a daughter to the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea.
A number of events that accompanied the origin of Kerala were chronicled in frog-Charles’s book. These were, in fact, eerily reminiscent of the rapid-fire transformations that the primordial soup of matter and energy had undergone just after the famous big bang that marked the beginning of time—just ask your friendly neighborhood physicist for details. However, the transformations on the heels of the big bang were unique in the sense that it took unimaginably few split seconds for them to transpire, whereas the biological transformations referred to by Darwin took millions and millions of years to complete.
Mahavishnu’s famous incarnation cycle that originally involved ten stages was modified by frog prince-Charles to have just six cycles. Fish begot Turtle, who begot Boar, who begot Sphinx, who begot Parasuraman, who begot Malayalee. The native of Kerala was the culmination point of the epic transformations. Malayalee was none other than the sixth incarnation of Mahavishnu.
Parasuraman threw his famous ax into the Arabian Sea, and Kerala was born. Thereafter, Malayalee was born to take the helm from Parasuraman. Malayalee was the direct descendant of Parasuraman, who was a divine entity. This enabled every Keralite to claim a piece of divine ancestry.
Malayalee was born to take possession of a beautiful land and to lay the foundation stone to the Kerala civilization.
Even though this was a spiced-up version of the old theory of evolution, God was happy that some recognition was given to him. He was pleased enough to grant a penthouse in heaven to the famous scientist when he was done with his sabbatical at Amballore University.
As it happened, the frog-prince Charles Darwin was kissed by a heavenly beauty upon his second arrival at heaven’s footsteps and was instantly transformed to a human prince. The pair lived in heaven happily ever after.
***
It was in the year 1920 that Eli applied for faculty member position of the anthropology department at the Amballore University. She was interviewed by all the faculty members. What stood out in Eli’s mind of the interview day was her meeting a female faculty member of the faculty.
She was greeted by the only female professor of the department. The faculty chair and the rest of the faculty positions were all held by males. At the moment she reached the professor’s office, the professor was preparing coffee for the rest of the staff. She mentioned to Eli that it was hard to get a faculty position in a male-dominated department. She had to deploy her dumb-blonde tactics and intelligent-brunette tactics (she dyed her hair blond or brunette per the needs of the day) to survive in the highly competitive academic environment.
It was no surprise to Eli to learn that professor’s field of research was the extinction of womankind—not mankind, just womankind. Her work was to try to explain why women were becoming less and less important in the current world. Her theory, published in the Amballore Anthropology Journal, stated that womankind was soon going to be an extinct species. Naturally, Eli was worried. An opinion coming from a sensationally famous anthropologist worried her.
The professor excused herself, served coffee to all the male staff members, and came back. She was exhausted. She and Eli sipped coffee and engaged in an interesting conversation on the Amballore dynasty and its genealogy going all the way back to Kerala’s origin.
In the middle of the conversation, there was a knock at the door. The professor opened the door and let the visitor in. He was a male colleague. He closed the door behind himself and joined Eli and professor.
Eli had this funny feeling, a strange uneasiness, the moment the door opened and the male professor stepped in, that something was odd about him. Her female intuition told her so. She could not place exactly what it was. However, these thoughts soon drowned in the interesting anthropological discussion that the three had. She thought no more about it.
Then a strange thing happened. While the discussion was going on, the man suddenly stood up, approached the closed door, locked it, and while both Eli and the female professor were watching, started stripping! Surprise of surprises! Lo and behold, he slowly started removing his shirt and pants!
Eli was afraid that he was going to rape them both! She just did not know what to do; her thinking machine lost its ability to function; she was probably seeing things, she told herself. She just sat there with a half-open mouth, overwhelmed by the preposterous act. Her eyes popped out of their sockets, transformed into five-foot diameter spheres, gravitated toward the stripping man, and started staring at the incredible scene. Finally she managed to regain consciousness. She pulled back her staring eyeballs to their habitual habitat, her eye sockets. She turned her back to the scandalous act, refusing to see it further, still afraid that rape was on the way.
As if this shocking experience was not enough for her system, she was further aggravated to see that the famous anthropologist was sitting at her desk, watching the entire scene of the stripping man with an absolutely neutral expression on her face. Eli was afraid she came to a strip joint instead of the venerated halls of a temple of knowledge.
“Eli, look back and see who my male colleague is,” the professor told her. Eli looked back. There was no man there. Instead a woman was standing there! She was wearing a green sari.
The female professors owed it to themselves to explain the mystery of the stripping man to Eli. They did.
The visitor explained that she was that male professor who stepped into the room moments ago. She was staging the fraudulent act of impersonating a male faculty member! She had been previously working as an anthropology professor at Kerala University. She was fired on technical grounds for making an unforgivable error in her PhD thesis, discovered during her annual review.
She then started job hunting and approached Amballore University for a position, but could not get one, by virtue of her being a woman. She approached the university again for a second time, this time disguised as man, wearing a mundu and shirt and sporting a moustache. This time, she/he got the job.
She knew that the moment news was out that “he” was a woman she would be booted out of the university.
Eli always fought for women’s rights, and her heart got saddened to hear of the poor plight of women. After her interview with the faculty members, she became resolute to try to uplift females as much as she could, if and when she could. There could be brainy females, talented and skilled but unknown to the world for lack of exposure. Half of all human talent was unused and wasted by skipping women, and Eli was determined to make a change in her own way, whenever occasion arose.
Eli was not offered a faculty position.
***
Parasuraman’s ax-throw maneuver and the consequent emergence of Kerala from out of the Arabian Sea’s waters was in itself a bone of contention among anthropologists. Some believe it was a fairy tale belonging to the realms of mythology. However, most of Amballore University’s anthropolo
gy faculty members were ardent followers of this theory and elevated the status of this myth to an axiom, thereby bestowing infallibility on it. Elevating the status of a blind belief to a dictum took a lot of arm twisting, but every bit of the effort was worth the final result of universal acknowledgment of the supernatural feat underlying Kerala’s formation.
Difficulties remained with the famous theory, though. For one, the legendary ax was not found at the shore of the Arabian Sea, where it was supposed to have landed. Its discovery could have infused some credibility into the fairy tale–like fib, and therefore researchers who searched for it were disillusioned by the lack of supportive evidence. These dedicated anthropologists decided to leave no stone unturned and visited every nook and corner of the world in search of the Holy Grail—the ax. The far-reaching search locations were to account for the continental drift.
The scientists traveled far and wide in search of the legendary ax, including the Museum of Natural History in New York City, but their efforts were to no avail. Sadly, the only notable aftermath of the search turned out to be that one of the investigators got mugged in a New York City subway. The mugger did not steal any inflated rupees from the said scientist’s wallet; he was only interested in research material, which he promptly stole. Putting one and one together to make two, the press reporters claimed that the mugger was none other than an educated Malayalee. Who else would be interested in Ancient Kerala?
These hardworking scientists ultimately managed to fulfill their dream. Finding the ax at a distal location, in fact at a considerably farther location from the shore than anticipated, was what these scientists did. The weapon of land acquisition was buried just under the seabed, and its discovery marked an important milestone in Kerala history.
The Amballore Times reported the following:
Scientists from Amballore University unraveled the mystery surrounding the missing ax. The ax, purportedly lying in the seabed off Kerala’s coast, was nowhere to be found near the shore during the “search and retrieve” operation. This discouraging development was followed by a long period of research and conjecture. The persistence of these scientists finally paid off when they discovered the ax in the ocean bed.
They did not discover the legendary ax at the shore. Instead, they found that Parasuraman’s weapon was buried in the seabed far outside the anticipated range, giving credence to the belief that the ax ricocheted to a location farther downstream. The weapon did something similar to skipping a rock on water. The god Parasuraman accomplished the superhuman task, no surprise there, of skipping an ax on the water’s surface and consequently retrieved a wider swath of land than originally estimated. He is hereby confirmed as a skilled cricket player who could control his throw expertly to optimize ball range.
As ill luck would have it, most of the land acquired during ax’s second lap flyover was engulfed by sea subsequently. This was caused by a gigantic tsunami that rocked Kerala’s coast during ancient times, and therefore records are unavailable to substantiate this historic event. There is, however, evidence of lost civilization in the seabed off Kerala’s coast, thereby providing corroboration to the ax’s ricochet to a downstream location.
The department did a computer simulation of where Parasuraman stood on the Western Ghats on that historic day when he created Kerala, the superhuman force that he used to throw the ax, and the unique angle he made the ax to describe in order for it to reach the ocean and then ricochet downstream. The computer spit out the range by doing kinematics calculations. A forty-five-degree throw angle for the first lap parabola and the second lap parabola ensured the maximum possible travel range.
They sent a submarine to the calculated location, and voila, there it was—the long-missing ax, just under the seabed, rusted and resting in peace!
3HELL’S HIGHWAY AND AMBALLORE HOUSE
There was a secluded compound in a settlement in the eastern outskirts of Amballore, a few miles east of the main thoroughfare, which was named National Highway 47, with an abbreviation NH-47. The gravel road to this property from NH-47 was known as Hell’s Highway, for reasons both mysterious and scary. It did not resemble a highway in the loosest sense of the term. It was anything but a highway. It was a wide mud track littered with rocks, tiles, and any trash that passersby threw out generously.
Hell’s Highway was extremely inhospitable, with potholes that one could spend a lifetime counting. When the monsoon rain came to Kerala like an annual unwelcome guest, the potholes transformed into innumerable puddles resembling tiny ponds that wandering ducks used as swimming pools.
The road was dangerous and out of this world, so much so that prospective travelers would have wished they had known of the devastating consequences before undertaking a passage through it. As if the noncommutable road did not give free rein to the imagination, the scenes on its sides appeared to have been taken right out of an eerie movie that Lucifer played in hell daily.
Hell’s Highway ended in a cul-de-sac. The one and only building greeting visitors at the road’s end was the imposing Amballore House. The property was estimated to be five acres in total. It was more of a mansion than a simple house.
Amballore House was haunted, so the people believed.
This extraordinary nature of the highway and the scenes along its path merit description that one needs to be aware of as a prelude to opening the gates of the mansion and seeing what lay inside.
A traveler with smart eyes to spot things vividly would register a number of interesting sights on his way along Hell’s Highway. One could not help noticing an old tile factory built during the British rule. This building was taken over later on by a drug dealer of the name Samuel Soman, nicknamed Sam-Som. He named it Sam-Som’s Entertainment Center.
This was followed by a mental asylum and Amballore Prison. Judas Toddy Club was next in line. The famous Amballore Court was housed there. Also, the Amballore Investigation Bureau had its distinguished multistory headquarters there. In addition, there were countless residential and commercial properties on either side of the highway. One remarkable building located close to Amballore House was an orphanage called Home for Homeless.
These highlights were interspersed with paddy fields, mango groves, and untamed forest. The wilderness was the abandoned child of the Kerala Forestry Department. It was usual to see wild animals loose in the outgrowth of wilderness. The forest hosted jackals, coyotes, gray wolves, tigers, monkeys, wild geese, and elephants.
The pauper’s graveyard by the side of Hell’s Highway was once a paddy field. A whole new burial ground evolved from the paddy field, and it was used to bury people caught in the crossfire between the warring drug lords of Sam-Som’s Entertainment Center. Also buried were the customers butchered by pimps of the prostitution ring for not paying up their dues. It included bodies from the black magic altar of the demigod temple. Last but not least, it hosted those who could not afford a plot in the cemetery of Saint Joseph’s Church.
Across from the mental asylum was an abandoned temple, with a sizable pond in its compound. The temple had stopped its regular worship and other festivities a long time ago. It was now used as a sanctuary of star-crossed lovers and a worship center of the demigods. Once upon a time, it was a famous temple, and it was now abused to host black magic and animal/human sacrifices.
Once upon a time, the now-abandoned temple had been well known, attracting devotees from across Kerala. The main deity of the temple was the Kodungallore goddess. She was somewhat related to the goddess Kali through their common passion for animal sacrifice. Even now, in spite of the fact that the temple was abandoned, some hard-core devotees assembled there to conduct worship, invoking the demons of the underworld. The goddess Kali was hailed, and animals like chickens and goats were sacrificed to please her.
The worship performed for the demigods sacrificed people abducted by the prostitution and drug ring of Sam-Som’s entertainment center. It was rumored that the temple was just a cover for killing Sam-Som’s rival gangs.
The temple was reputed to be inhabited by apsara virgins at night. They descended upon the temple at midnight. These legendary creatures were like mermaids, and they came right out of the pages of Indian mythology. Even though they assumed fishlike properties out in the ocean, swimming easily miles on end, they transformed into beautiful teenage virgins while on land, with mystical powers to boot. Needless to say, they drew innumerable men to them, men desperate for romance with a heavenly virgin, whatever that meant. They were also considered skillful enough to entice unsuspecting men to them, cleverly leading them to their dooms. However, wise men and women kept away from this area for their own good.
The temple was set amid a thick growth of ezhilam paala trees, alternately known as Indian devil trees. These trees hosted yakshis, also known as nymphs who are female spirits, symbols of fertility. Needless to say, the abandoned temple and its multifarious mystical elements were mired in mysteries.
The apsaras performed their mesmerizing dance past midnight to the tunes of celestial music played by Gandharvans hailing from Indra’s Court. Lord Indra was the god of rain and thunderstorms. He wielded a lightning thunderbolt and rode on a white elephant.
When the apsaras arrived at night to perform their dance, paarijatham flowers bloomed and spread their irresistible fragrance into the night air. As legend goes, paarijatham flowers hail from Indra’s world and are named after Princess Paarijathaka. She fell in love with the sun god, but her romance was rebuffed, and she committed suicide. From her ashes were born the paarijatham trees that refused to bloom in the daylight to avoid seeing the sun. Instead, they bloomed at night, symbolizing the sadness of a failed romance.
Amballore House Page 19