The Disciple’s Boy

33

                                    The Disciple’s Boy

         

Bhagat Ram alias Bhagte’s only son, the only brother of his sisters, had grown to be weirdly-weak lad; especially to the eyes that’d seen this perfectly normal child-sprout three years ago he seemed strangely withered. Spiritlessly he seemed agedly trundling down the slope instead of ascending the boyish graph with profundity, prowess and passion of childhood. Since that encounter with the exorcist in the chaupal, his fear-psychosis laden little body had taken a deadly moron course. Childhood’s chirp bypassed him nonchalantly thus depriving him of that mirthing elation which makes the period of transition from childhood to boyhood so hip-hopping, robust and angelic.

Spring had gone from his once provocatively naughty steps. A big irony, indeed! His father served the priest like a drudge who servilely cringed whenever his master felt any need.

The servile who blossomed so many flowers in the temple precincts, had almost lunatically neglected his own little flower of his small courtyard. More the boy deflowered and the more he acquired a graveyard’s graveness, the more firmly his father’s guru’s holy credentials stamped their wordings on the poor man’s spotlessly clean faith. After all there was now not a single complaint from the little, serious fellow’s siblings, mother and neighbours. Apart from this satisfying superficial observation the father’s complete devotion to the temple and its priest was suffice to make him ignorant of all other not so mundane issues involved in the matters with his boy. Caught in this mire of blind faith, the sound of abnormal morbidity ensnaring his child never reached his parental ears.

He was aware of the intensity of repugnance in the exorcist’s eyes for his boy. From the pulpits of blind faith it too appeared a holy man’s mild retort to a not-so-holy body which once had been possessed by an evil soul. So in order to avoid any embarrassing scene he’d always kept the boy away from the temple. Since more than a fortnight the mowed down flower wasn’t keeping well. He was bedridden, as they said it, with fever. Few injections and pills by some makeshift doctor---the quack---in the village as well as a visit or two to the city failed to see the boy on his legs. The servant-disciple was at last forced to unfold the matter of his withering flower before his final hope. Hearing this the blackmagical-physicist had weirdly chimed as if he was totally acquainted with the boy’s fate:

“Phew! Didn’t I tell you that a particle of the evil soul is still inside his body? Now she has ensnared him completely. Do whatever you want and go to any doctor, they can’t find the cause of his illness!”

So, for the last few days the cocksure exorcist––helplessly hypnotized by some long and cynical history of unfulfilled revenge––was prescribing holy ash from his yajna site. But the disease was eating the boy just like a big flock of sheep nibbling down a little patch of grass; while his father, drowsy in his reasonless devotion, never raised a question about the unrealistic, paranormal explorations of the guru. He was forced to quell even the littlest traces of fatherly suspicion by the superstitiously sweeping statement of another example in the family itself. His sister-in-law had given birth to a girl only a weak ago. The delivery was premature. But this seven-month-pregnancy had repulsed the chaotic spirit’s effort---as they thought it---to invalidate a soul’s effort to take a human birth. By the cold and hard logic of it, the earlier miscarriages were just a mode and medium of fructifying the timeliness of this event at the time it occurred––not before, not after. But very rarely the God explicitly takes credit for some good happening to someone of His creation. Rather the reward is worldly bestowed upon someone on the earth through His implicit ways. So here was this godhead reaping the golden harvest for His beneficence.

Under such circumstances the priest had become the epitome of benign God to the family. All of them were fully convinced that the priest’ll surely dispel the bad luck hovering over the boy. Aah, the fleckless devotion, even the plaintive sighs of a son on deathbed didn’t reach his father’s ears!

Finally when it dawned upon the disciple’s senses that the holy ash from the priest’s fireplace was no longer effective in darting the plaintive whiff of death trying to blow out the little lamp of life glowing strugglingly in his house, he made weeping, sweeping requests to the beholder of his faith to pay a visit to his humble house and save his son’s life.

To this the priest spluttered indifferently, “You didn’t pay heed to my advice earlier. These things need to be rooted out before they take full control over the victim’s body.”

It carved a horrific niche in the smooth surface of the poor villager’s devotional heart. Like a whimpering, mewling child he started a fresh burst of frantic implorations. This self-forgetting slavishness of the poor man closed all escaping doors as well as periphrastic windows for the priest to avoid the issue.

“Ok! Since you’ve served me so well,” he muttered casting a hideous glance at the slavish servant, “I’ll try to get the thing out. But, it’ll only be a try. Don’t be....”

The priest thus set out for a joust with the evil spirit. His eccentric mood found itself swerving at the perilous periphery of retributive orbits. The boy had after all publicly thrown sacrilege at his holy apron, at a time when this village was even yet to start feeling his religious presence, forcing him to childishly flabbergast the protestor.

Jerkily traveling in his old jeep he reached there with his favourite followers. As he threw a look of perversion into the pertinaciously dull eyes of the boy, wryly chuckling death stared back at him from the deepest mire. The boy’s almost inanimate body convulsed with a retortive, defiant jerk. His deflowered lips opened with a mocking whimper. Neck twisted with speaking effort. Alas, that wasn’t to be! Howling winds of vicious sandstorms blew off the little flicker. The last breath was out not to be taken in––end of a soul’s sullen sojourn here on earth.

The religioner was taken aback by the impact of finer vibrations of the soul leaving its body as if before leaving it’d heaved a comic sigh into his hairy face: the soul, after full realisation of the truth, smiling at the farcical scenario wherein the intrigues were trying to materialise the spiritual truth for narrow earthly motives. The corpse’s dead open eyes stared at him with an impeccable sermonising look to dispel the flimsy veil over the veteran religioner’s eyes, which’d ensnared this godhead to furtively look for the religion’s results scattered in society.

Before throwing all his fatherly emotions in the form of a loud cry, Bhagte beseechingly, with full force, cringed before his saviour. His unbuckling faith finally moved sideways to allow him to see the reality with wide open eyes. Deepest of moroseness enmasked his simple face as a prelude to the tough task of mourning; then started the heart-wrenching tribulation at its highest pitch in the poor temple servant’s humble home.

The Sadhu knew standing there won’t serve any purpose. He saw disbelief, disappointment, exasperating pain and even disapproval in their mourning eyes. Instead of feeling their grief, his ego sensed a bruise by their silent, salty revolt.

“Accursed be death’s timing! Nobody would’ve been able to save him anyway. But he chose to die in my presence as if to settle scores with me!” his inner voice baulked.

The boy’s dead body appeared lying winsomely. Its glazed eyes seemed to say the little rival had chosen to die in his foe’s presence in order to disprove all which the exorcist symbolised. The little human had died vengefully with a vehement convulsion. His head now loosened with pride as if the mortal remains of that defeated small body had at last won the battle. The priest couldn’t anymore bear this testimony to his failure lying in the form of this dead body. To rub salt at his burn-injuries, the bony girl’s crying penetrated his hairy ears from an adjacent little room.

“Now they’ll fall back upon all the credit these trumpeting cheerleaders so heartfully showered upon me after her birth!” his soul went plummeting into the pits of despair.

He muttered some inaudible obscenities and to avoid any further predicament signaled his lumpishly roving vagabonds to leave the house. As they say tragic coincidences do occur, one occurred here as well. While they were fleeing away from the frustratingly restrictive situation, their floundering path happened to cross over a little flower bed. Just as they stepped out of the house into the street, Phulva along with a few other girls chanced to pass that house. Curious eyes of the girls were peeping into the door out of which the weeping cries were emanating so piteously. Her mesmerising gypsy resplendence was glowing like the pole-star among the group. The golden statuette was celestially shining among the mere mortal ones made of just clay.

Her foe during the previous caravan halt in the village came hurtling out of the door. His retinue had a bawdy look in their eyes. Their rampaging glares greedily scanned the group of those poor homeless girls; their ears meanwhile stole the sweetest voice among the gypsy mouths chorusing the sale of their trifling provisions. The burly chief stared hideously at her. The soft flower almost wrinkled under the impact of this pervasively torrid gust of storm. In fraction of a second his mind abnormally intrigued with the spooks of past. The exorcist’s hawk eyes recognised that primal fear in the eyes of prey. A vengeful instinct led by that primordial hate recognised this elegant flower blossomed out of that opening bud of three years ago.

Very vividly she too had recognised him. The moonet tried to hide behind the other girls in order to stop the moonlight from reaching his abnormally boiling soul. She but failed to hide her almost celestial charm. Her limitlessly shining feminal aura slammed against his hateful face. His whole religious structure dangerously creaked under the unascetic impact of this feminal fusillade. He felt infinitely defeated.

“Such an irreligiously perfect blossoming of the flower from that bud which you feigned to trample!” angrily his imprisoned soul beat its fists against the lofty walls of religiondom.

“Here she is!” he cried mayhem, while the fearless fools looked spellbound: the devil’s muteness waiting with cold callousness for anything capable of connivance in the matter.

“Here is the evil spirit which possessed the boy a few years ago!” repugnance came out of his crannied mendicant self so volcanically that all of its stony walls shook with the propensity of being blown away to cinders.

This unnerving pang of hate was mammoth multiplication of the previous peak of any of his fits of malice––as if the abnormal quotient of hate had aggravated itself in proportion to the infinitely long and luscious number of her beauty starting its first digit from that little lassie bud.

It created stormy waves of intimidation among the girls. They shivered and snuggled behind the mystical glean of her bold and brave beauty, leaving her face to face with the Sadhu.

“She’s taken his life! Didn’t I tell you?” he cried to obliterate the fleck from his robe of supernaturalhood. “He fell ill when she was here last time and died now when she is back again!” he raised his crutch at her with the exorcist’s intention to mercilessly circumvent and torture her soul there itself to settle aeonically old scores from the side of ever escaping asceticism perennially pitted against the ever chasing bewitching femininity.

His noisy aspersion was falling on deaf ears as far as the preposterous brains of his accomplices were concerned. Their lumpish nervous systems were totally benumbed by the invincible aura of her beauty. They just stood there like they were under the spell of a powerful sedative substance. The polemical verbal pogrom of their benedictor wasn’t enough to dispel the translucent veil of oblivion from their eyes. Their carnalic eyes, at the erotic peak of lewdness, ogled at the beauty in dismay. Apart from this the bursting volcano’s stringent hyperboles just got drowned in the infinite well of cries coming from the house.

At first the flower had shrinked with fear due to that paranormally sudden verbal onslaught and the tortuous reflection of a wrong past. But she was too beautiful to appear fearful for a long time. Her lilac like face bravely withstood the furious fury of that gusty wind. Valiant feminineness boldly doffed off the cowardish surprise and fear from her chiseled features. And there she stood: the saviour of gypsy pride; so bold and so beautiful!

“Your God may break your second leg too!” shrill vehemence of her feministic anger cut across the cascading jargon of his pretersensual chauvinism.

Her retort was followed by a heroic gesture by her face which made her look so bold in the filthy air of dirty environment. The girls then sneaked into a sinewy bylane and disappeared in the narrow streets. The priest---spuriously serious--- stood there flabbergasted. The foolish-heads meanwhile forgot themselves in the subtle seduction of that coveted gypsy prize. The lumpish horde was almost day-dreaming about her mesmerising beauty. The very same however was the storm centre in the religioner’s ragefully trembling soul. When he was leaving with his escort party every pore of his existence was hissing with limitless humiliation.

His ascetism had evolved in parallel with his hate for the female beauty. To him the beauty in a woman---or a girl for that matter---symbolised all the power of temptation which could throw a religioner from his chosen path. ‘To be attracted by a beautiful female is a sin’ had been his chorus song, which his mundane self roughly interpreted as: ‘To be beautiful is a sin.’  

The mourning inferno, meanwhile, let loose its full fury inside Bhagte’s house. His blind faith had a fatal shove as death whiffed out the tiny flicker of his house. Swirling frenzy of the deepest sorrow banged its mourning head to rescind the fabric of his faith, crying what purpose it served for a common, suavely rustic and illiterate fellow like him, if not materialise in the form of a rebuff to the impending calamity. Why God didn’t hitch away the evil destiny eyeing this most ardent of a follower? Oh, is God sleeping when the truest of a follower like him is surrounded by the unruly hordes of bad luck fatally scampering to lynch him according to the illogically, unreasonably and unjustifiably augured law of predetermination (or be it an accidental chaos of the time)? Why God doesn’t take the trouble to wipe out these tragic lines etched out predeterminedly (or accidentally) on the innocent devotee’s imperiled existential self?

When such tragedies occur even God seems to be acting arbitrarily. Trying to find an answer by looking purportedly into the gloom caused by the death of that small flicker in his house, Bhagat Ram wept bitterly. His Himalayan faith was shaking and trembling under the impact of scathing tremours. Big boulders were coming rumbling down from lofty heights where his simple conscience believed Him to exist. Shindily reverberating jitter between faith and no-faith dragged him into the deepest of morass where atheism, having put out all lights of faith, romped around in festering mud and slush. His senses condemned it as an out-an-out farce. They went on a rampage trying to look for the justifiable reasons for the nonpaying faith of such big proportions. Shaken by the utterly ruthless happening they struck against his brain’s network looking for futile, preposterous answers.

Aah, the flawless faith becoming a dogma! Slave like obedience to His name now plummeting into the well of bigotry! Why God why... the courageous support of thy name was now (at this time when he needed it most) so furtively elapsing from beneath the feet of this simple human being? The ‘why?’ against his faith cried with its nemesis almost continuously. In this traditionally patriarchal society their progeny from his lineage had been fatally shaken. So even though the dead boy’s sisters wept by his body, it appeared as if he’d died siblingless.

Oh, the cursive dictates of fate banefully writing one more tragedy! Like a paranoid being he kept on replicating his mourning queries and pleadings against the invincible judgment, whilst his own faithful lawyer had wryly cast aspersion on him. The failed litigator, thus, hopelessly kept on espousing his lost case. The court proceedings, however, had been churlishly called off without showing any leniency on account of his faithful service rendered to His ‘supposed envisage’ on earth.