The Soul of Truth

by Shaji Madathil

  Thank you so much for the generous donation, Appu! It will certainly help in renovating the library to a high standard. I am also collecting books for the library. When I went to your home, Oppol gave me the whole collection your Achen and you had built up. You can be proud those books will help the youngsters in our village now. The next time you come here, you will be impressed by the new look of our library of that, I am sure!

  One more thing. I have found a princess for your heart. You can start weaving dreams about her because I feel certain that you two are meant for each other. When you have her with you on this journey, you will forget your grief and loss. You should. At least to a certain extent.

  Oppol will write to you soon, with all the details.

  Hoping to see you soon.

  Yours,

  Manu master.

  I didn’t know what I felt. Betrayed? Excited? Intrigued?

  Soon, I got Oppol’s letter with the details about Radhika. I read the letter and shoved it into a drawer. I didn’t reply to the letters.

  Time waits for no one. The city was changing right in front of my eyes. It became bigger, taller, wider and more beautiful by the day.

  I got promoted to the position of materials supervisor.

  Our PRO passed away. He was replaced by his son.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Ruby. On sleepless nights, she invaded my senses. She might belong to another man now, but for me, she will always be the spring that dreams are made of.

  The beach was a favourite haunt for Haneef and me. We spent many evenings there. We even had a favourite bench on which we rested and counted the waves.

  The rolling waves. Rushing in such a hurry to hug the shore. The intense passion of the embrace. The fulfilment. The quiet return.

  The everlasting love story.

  The sea has its own secrets. The shore has its own too. But that does not stand between their love. Repeatedly, they bid adieu only to come together again.

  The sea is a mirror of our emotions. When we are happy, we see the waves playing with the shore. When angry, we see the lashing waves and the sulking shore. In sadness, we see the unending tears the shore sheds into the sea to be washed away into its depths.

  The human mind is a bigger whirlpool than any seen in the sea.

  Haneef was quiet beside me. I could feel his tension. He had received bad news from home. His baby was born with a birth defect in the valve of the heart. He would need surgery to correct it. Haneef was shattered when the news came. He knew that he would get the surgery done even if it cost him all his savings. He had already taken leave to go home to his son. But he had no idea how he would find that huge sum of money so quickly.

  Why is God so cruel? What is his reason for being so? The good and the poor are haunted with misfortunes, whereas the bad and the rich have such easy lives! There are no reasonable answers to all these.

  The world doesn’t care. It marches on.

  I had promised Haneef that I would help him to the best of my capacity, and he was slightly relieved by my offer but he was still agonisingly stressed.

  When I handed over the signed cheque, he was surprised at the amount. His eyes overflowed with tears of gratitude, and he held both my hands, not able to say a word. It was a big amount, as much as I could spare. But I didn’t feel it was a burden. Rather, I felt lighthearted after handing it to Haneef. There was such a joy in giving. And that happiness doubled when Haneef called to let us know that the baby’s surgery was successful.

  I soon came to be known as the person to go to if anybody needed help. I was only happy to do what I could. A king without a throne.

  Will my book of life have all those accounts too? Or are those pages all torn off and discarded?

  Maybe, every baby is born with a set of questions from the Creator. One hundred questions to be answered through the course of his life. Full marks for right answers. Negative marks for the wrong ones. At the Last Judgement, the soul will be judged according to the tally on that questionnaire. And that determines his rebirth.

  Most just scrape through. Some might even have negative marks. Only the rare ones get all of these correct. Such human beings must be the truly great ones—the prophets!

  How well have I done? delete. I will know soon.

  “Do you know how old you are now, Uthaman? You are still holding on to the fallen feathers of the one that has flown away. She won’t come back. You can never return those tear-stained feathers either.” Haneef kept egging me on about my lonely existence whenever he got a chance. Gradually his words found their mark. I found myself wondering about the ‘princess’ mentioned by Manu master.

  I read the letter sent by Oppol again. Radhika! That name started coming up unbidden in my days and dreams.

  I finally wrote back to Oppol and Manu master and went home for the second time. To get married to Radhika, my wife in this life. Though I had agreed to the marriage only to please my family and Manu master, I soon realised that Radhika was the late spring that came smiling into my life. Time, the great magician, finally started healing my scars after all.

  The fragile wings of the thinning dark take flight from the hillocks. The day comes in heavy with the treads of humans along the village paths.

  The Thirty-Ninth Night

  The clouds disperse after cremating the day. The sky looks bereaved. The cold has already conquered this December night. The church bells clang in the distance. Christmas stars wink from the houses at their distant cousins in the sky. The songs of the nightingales fill the night.

  The whole yard has been cleaned up—in readiness for my final rites in two days’ time. The waste has been burnt in one corner. The dying embers still send pale smoke into the sky. In that burning silence, my grave sleeps peacefully. The everlasting sleep.

  No struggles in there.

  No pain.

  No thoughts.

  No longings.

  Just sleep.

  I have not decomposed into a skeleton yet. I am just a few bits of rotting flesh, desperately clinging to the bones and a pitiful wreath of shed hair and nails and teeth. The evidence of a life of thirty-nine years. How long will even those last?

  Loss! Or is it?

  What if the world doesn’t consider this a loss?

  Shadows ripple. The spirits come forward.

  They have personalities too. Cruel, helpless, sympathetic, weak, strong… A small hierarchical army of spirits.

  The ancestors stay alert on the roof. I can vaguely recognise some of them. They have been my anchor, holding me close when my thoughts flew high like a kite set free from its anchoring string. Will the evil spirits punish me for my disobedience? For my longings? There is nothing I can do about them now. I will have to accept whatever punishment they deem fit.

  The prayers of my ancestors seem to be working. The evil spirits again disappear into the shadows.

  I am surrounded by the green glow. The guardian of the souls spoke. “Your time is nigh. You have only two more days on this earth. Get ready. You will have to face more tests. Your journey won’t be easy. You will again live through your birth and death. But you will ultimately attain the truth. Each life is a lesson. Never-ending lessons. You keep learning. Till the end of humanity. Each bereavement is a trial. A test of the strength of human relations. Each rebirth is determined by the karma of the previous births. Life and spirit are interwoven, fulfilling each other. The soul is the journey, the body is the chariot, the brain is the charioteer, the mind is the rein, the senses are the horses and the desires are the paths. If the senses stray from the path, and the chariot fails to reach its destination, the soul will never be able to complete its journey. It is doomed to wander forever. Death is a truth. You have to accept it.”

  I felt the eternal silence of the nights and the bottomless depths of the oceans in those wise words. They faded into the distance to the accompaniment of hoof beats.

  I relaxed; the wave of relief not dissimilar to that felt after getting through a
tough interview!

  But I have questions of my own. Questions with no answers! Time will reveal those questions to you in the form of confessions. And you will be forced to find the answers yourselves.

  I used to ponder over questions without answers. Day and night, they used to haunt me. Am I now close to finding those answers?

  I don’t know. What I do have now are my memories.

  I didn’t feel like returning to the Gulf after my marriage. Within a few days, Radhika had become such an integral part of me that I couldn’t think of being apart from her.

  Radhika! The queen of my heart.

  How quickly she ruled over my heart, stealing me entirely for herself.

  Women are God’s most amazing creations. They are difficult to understand, but once we gain their trust, they never abandon you. And nothing is sweeter than a woman’s love.

  We had so few days together. We had so many unspoken desires we never had a chance to share with each other.

  These memories are a reminder. That each has its own time and place. That time waits for no one. That man desires one thing, but God may grant him another.

  I even wanted to extend my leave. But it was Radhika who advised me against it. She was right. The more I stayed with her, the more difficult it would have been for both of us to part. And part, we had to. My marriage had only increased my responsibilities towards my family.

  We couldn’t sleep the day before my departure. How could we?

  Radhika pretended to be brave, but I could see the anguish in her heart. She tried hard to hide the tears in her eyes.

  I noticed how Sumathy had grown. She was my next big responsibility. I had to get her married to a good boy from a good family. We couldn’t afford any more gossip!

  Deepu! He would always be my responsibility. Who else would take care of my little brother when he couldn’t do so himself? And he was my responsibility in more ways than one. I could never get rid of the guilt of my role in destroying his life.

  The capriciousness of youth. One small mistake, a lifetime of misery.

  It happened during the Onam holidays when Deepu was in eighth standard.

  Being the oldest, I was the leader among the children hunting for flowers, and Deepu was my faithful sidekick. Both of us tried hard to impress the younger kids, especially the girls. Swimming across the river, bicycle tricks, climbing the tallest trees, diving into the temple pond…

  Those days were rich with folklore about hauntings in the village, and particularly the temple pond. Everybody believed that seductive witches haunted the pond at night to take baths and lure any gullible men who happened to be bewitched by their unearthly beauty.

  One particular story was based on an old incident that actually took place in the village. A poor, low-caste youth fell in love with the daughter of the rich, high-caste Raghavan Pillai. The boy was a manual labourer who worked for Raghavan Pillai. The young couple fell deeply in love, and knowing that they would never be allowed to marry by their families, they eloped in the dark of the night. Raghavan Pillai moved heaven and earth to recover his daughter, and finally, the police caught up with the couple. They returned the girl to her father but thrashed the young boy so savagely that he was as good as dead.

  The girl was locked up in her room, but she managed to escape one day. Nobody knew how she got out of the locked room. A massive search was again launched. And then, someone saw the body of her lover hanging on a tree next to the temple pond. And soon, her body was discovered from the pond. Nobody was sure whether they committed suicide together, or if the girl somehow knew about the suicide of her lover and managed to get out of the locked room and took her own life, to be with him, forever.

  Raghavan Pillai was not moved even by the death of his daughter. He greased enough palms to hush up the case. One week after the their deaths the boy’s hut was burnt to the ground. Raghavan Pillai was suspected to be behind that atrocity as well. But no one was ever arrested.

  Whatever the truth, since then, there had been stories of splashing sounds and laughter from the temple pond after dark. Some villagers even testified to seeing the boy on the tree where he was found hanging. The stories got more credibility when Raghavan Pillai died horribly in a freak car accident. Gradually, people avoided using the temple pond. Except for some brave regulars, who didn’t care for ghosts and, of course, us!

  It was a favourite haunt of ours on the hot holiday afternoons. There was a tall boundary wall around the pond, partially separating it into two parts, one side for the men and the other for women. Running along the wall and diving into the pond was our favourite pastime.

  That day too, we got to the pond after collecting flowers. I was the first one to dive in. The others followed. I was splashing around happily when a terrible scream from above made me look around. For a moment, I thought I was in a nightmare. Deepu lay spread-eagled on the rocks by the side of the pond! I swam as fast as I could to him. He seemed unconscious, not moving at all! There was blood, warm blood seeping out of his body. I cradled him on my lap, holding him seemed to be the only thing I could think of. By then, the screams of the other children had brought some people running, and they helped to get him quickly to the hospital in town.

  Those were terrible days for our family. The wait outside the ICU, the verdict of the doctors, the anxiety ripping us apart—I had never prayed so hard in my life. Amma was like a living corpse, refusing to eat or drink and calling out incessantly to all the Gods she knew.

  After four days, Deepu regained consciousness. He asked for me when he opened his eyes.

  We got him back, but it was never the same. He had broken his spine and lost all movements and sensations below his neck. But, at that moment, we were not too worried about his disability. That came only later. Then, we were simply overjoyed that our Deepu was still with us.

  No one could believe what had happened to Deepu. How could the most energetic boy in the village suddenly get to this pitiable condition. He was so used to diving from the wall into the pond. And, it was probably his familiarity and overconfidence that led to the tragedy. His friends behind him on the wall said that he was looking back and laughing at a joke they shared, while he took the jump and clearly misjudged the landing.

  But I could never forgive myself.

  It was my fault. I was the elder one. I should have supervised the younger ones when they dived. I should have warned him to aim for the middle of the pond when jumping from the wall. I should have warned him about the danger of the treacherous rocks by the side of the pond. I should have, but I didn’t. It was all my fault, and I spent days agonising over this.

  Deepu’s accident put an end to the village children ever again diving from the wall into the pond.

  His accident also put an end to the Deepu we knew. Our mischievous Deepu; the light faded from his eyes , and from our home. He was the life of our home, and the family never recovered from that accident. From that loss. A loss that at times we felt was even greater than death itself.

  Then, there was Oppol. A life full of losses. Achen, Amma, her husband. She struggled with those irreparable losses, but her generosity was such that she found enough love to nurture her two young daughters and all of us, her younger siblings, through all of life’s difficulties. Who could be this patient against the odds of life? Her husband, Balettan, had loved each one of us so much, and we had returned that love in equal amounts. Who was to know that he was loving us for a lifetime in that short time he was allowed? After the Kargil War, we got a garlanded coffin covered in the tricolour, with his name engraved on it. It was such a cruel fate for Oppol and the rest of us.

  After my marriage, I was motivated to work even harder at my job. The Gulf was the land of hard-working people. I marvelled at how hard the Malayalis worked in this foreign country. Their tears mingled with their sweat. Everybody was disciplined. There were no complaints about the limited holidays. It was simple: enjoy the Friday, the one off-day, and work hard the other days.


  And, of course, there was the much-anticipated vacations to home. But there was also the depression of returning from home after the vacation.

  Like migrating birds. Caged birds. Within four walls.

  We celebrated our native festivals, like Onam, in Bahrain with added enthusiasm to make up for our enforced estrangement.

  Man’s fate is decided by God. I have no doubt about that. Even the most educated and qualified person might not be successful in life unless he has God’s blessings. God has to guide you to the right place at the right time. He opens the doors for us.

  But, sometimes, the ways of the world make us doubt about the existence of God. How can we not when we see the atrocities around us? Do truth, justice, humanity and virtue mean anything at all? These virtues seem to be associated with losers, while we see cheats, liars, thieves and killers prospering. Human beings revel in selfishness and deceit. The lawyer who can lie most convincingly is considered the best. Witnesses have no problem lying after swearing on the holy books. Thugs believe they can bribe even God with money and gold.

  Where is the world headed to?

  How long can man exist like this?

  “Might is right!” Who said this first? Whoever it was, he had uttered the one truth that stands the test of time.

  My sincerity and hard work were appreciated. I was promoted to the new, bigger branch of the office in Hoora. Hoora was a city with a thriving nightlife. Hotels, restaurants and nightclubs were in plenty. It would be right to say that it came alive after nine at night, and the celebrations lasted till about two in the morning. The easy access to liquor and women destroyed the lives of many an Indian in Bahrain.

  I worked everyday from seven in the morning to four in the evening. We had people from all parts of the world working in our organisation, but we had no problems communicating or understanding each other.