Authors: Jose Thekkumthala
One day he suddenly died, giving enormous relief to Mariamma for not having to put up with the burden that God had sent her way. Though sad in some ways, she was relieved and freed.
“You spent your lifetime sitting and lying down, you stupid son of a bitch,” Mariamma told his dead body, with a final kiss, controlling her tears at the same time.
Then she buried him standing up, with a toddy glass in his hand.
“This is your only chance to stand up since you were born; stand up for what you believe; stand up for toddy,” Mariamma told him as she tossed the final handful of mud into the grave.
She thought of getting those memorable words into a written epitaph as a lasting memorial to the alcoholic, but thought better of it and shelved the plan.
Poulose died without any epitaph, without sad hymns, without eulogy, and without anybody weeping. His drinking buddies were
there to bid a final good-bye to send him off along a short road to hell. “Even hell is heaven if I have a glass of toddy,” Poulose used to tell his drinking buddies.
Mariamma buried Poulose only from the waist down. The first heavy rain of the monsoon gave a much-needed bath to Poulose and filled his glass with water, giving the impression that Poulose was holding full glass of toddy. His hair was waving in the monstrous monsoon wind, and he appeared ready to toast any passersby. His drinking buddies from the neighboring pub happened to walk by and were astonished to see their friend in his old form, ready for another drink.
“A friend is not a friend unless he can get drunk with you,” Poulose used to tell his drinking buddies.
A huge circle of his drinking buddies soon started gathering around him nightly, and they toasted to his health, whatever that meant, with the toddy glasses they carried, by clinking them to the one he was holding. “Blessed are those who get drunk even after their deaths and glory be to them in the toddy shops across Kerala,” his buddies intoned reverentially as the Midnight Express passed by them. They built an invisible shrine around him to worship him and worship his idea of ceaseless drinking.
It usually does not happen, but it happened one particular night: the Midnight Express stopped by the paddy field where Poulose was buried!
He was being toasted by his drinking buddies at that time. Eli got out of the bus while Vareed decided to stay inside, seeing everything outside but unseen by the outside world.
Once outside the bus, Eli made herself invisible.
It was a spectacularly windy night. The untamed wind picked up momentum and was shaking the banyan trees wildly. Eli had gotten out of the bus cautiously. As soon as she got out, the wind gathered witheringly fierce force and howled like a hundred jackals. The animal kingdom could see Eli even though she was invisible to the human eye. The sacrificial animals in the nearby temple trembled in fear as they saw Eli heading to the paddy field. The goats bleated
uncontrollably, and the roosters went on a rampage of “cock, cock-a-doodle-doo,” as if morning had broken out. Coyotes in the distance yelped savagely, helplessly. The dogs in the street barked and ran away, tails tucked between legs; the cats meowed angrily. The owls on the banyan tree hooted with their heads turning in myriad directions like they could not make up their minds on where to look. A flock of crows cawed loudly and assembled on the plantain trees. All these bizarre animal acts occurred simultaneously as soon Eli got out of the Midnight Express. Eli was well known to the animals in the area; she was the terror of the pauper’s graveyard; she was the terror of Amballore.
There was thunder and lightning from the growling skies. White clouds resembling huge umbrellas gathered under the midnight sky over paddy field to protect the inmates of the pauper’s graveyard from Eli. The nightingale, the bird of the night, perched on the tall coconut palm tree, stopped singing. Mother Nature waited in anguished anticipation. It was a befitting welcome to Eli.
Unseen to the drunks assembled around Poulose and unseen to the humanity following the Midnight Express, Eli approached the site where Poulose was buried. Poulose was in his usual form, extending his right arm and holding a rainwater-filled toddy glass that Mariamma had lovingly entrusted with him. His hair was scuffled erratically by the restless wind. He looked like a ghost.
Eli, she of superhuman strength, pulled Poulose out from the grave with little effort. To the spectators, it was as if Poulose came straight out of the grave all by himself. He was standing erect facing his admirers, with mud covering his lower torso. Eli, fighting the rigor mortis, extended both of his arms sideways. With both arms thus extended, Poulose resembled either a large bird ready to take off to the skies or Jesus Christ about to resurrect to heaven. Even though drunk as a skunk, as the expression goes, the gathered alcoholics were conscious enough to see this unexpected transformation of Poulose, who was moving of his own, despite branded legally dead.
Jesus Christ. At least, that is how Poulose appeared to the assembled friends around him. He appeared poised to launch
himself upward toward heaven, resurrecting after a short burial period in the paddy field. They thought Poulose was the new messiah just resurrecting from the dead to preach salvation through binge drinking. Some of them knelt in front of him and started praying feverishly:
Our Poulose in heaven,
Your kingdom come,
On earth as in the toddy shops.
Give us today our daily drink;
Forgive us our sins
As we forgive those who give us no toddy.
To Vareed in the bus, who could see everything, Eli looked like a ventriloquist holding her puppet, Poulose. She was, in fact, getting ready to use her puppet act on Poulose.
Once upon a time, when she was alive, she used to work as a ventriloquist during church and temple festivals and amid the crowds attending Trichur Pooram. People used to marvel at her amazing ability to imitate anyone’s voice, whether it was a child, adult man, adult woman, animal—whoever and whatever. She was so talented that she made a living out of her ventriloquism.
Clever as she was in imitating any kind of voice, masculine or feminine, it was an easy task for her to speak in Poulose’s masculine and drunken voice. Eli did her best imitation of Poulose’s drunken voice.
To the sinners kneeling in front of Poulose, Eli spoke in Poulose’s voice: “I, Poulose, who art the resurrected messiah of the alcoholics in Kerala, solemnly bless you sinners kneeling in front of me, because the heavens belong to you. Distant is not the day when you will join me in heaven to celebrate and have a hearty drink of toddy. I hereby pronounce you as the lucky ones chosen to meet me in the toddy club in heaven. Salvation is yours.”
Poulose was moving his lips (not much of lips; the flesh had mostly disappeared, making him practically a skeleton) and clacking
together his teeth, with help from the famous ventriloquist. As they listened to the unbelievable voice of Poulose addressing them personally, the devotees’ ardent prayers took on a higher note and became passionate and emotional. Poulose was talking to them just like Christ talked to the disciples who came to see him after his resurrection. They chanted in praise of Poulose.
Yet some others took to their heels in fear as they saw Poulose transformed and ready to resurrect, horror-struck as they were to witness a dead man moving, talking, and readying himself to fly to the skies. Eli, for good measure, pulled down the escapees’ mundus to enhance the drama. The mundus promptly departed the bodies, and they were all in shorts—except those who did not have shorts, who ran in their birthday suits. The eloping drunks were horrified by the spooky episode.
Then they saw an even more unbelievable sight: Poulose started chasing them! He was floating and coming for them, positioned right behind them. He shouted at them, “Ye of little faith who do not believe in me, let you rot in hell. Lucky are the ones who believe in me, the resurrected Poulose. Don’t be doubting Thomases.”
“This place is haunted,” they screamed loudly as they deserted the graveyard.
Some of them thought that it was the last race of their lives, an Olympic race away from their loved ones and into the arms of death. They all got drenched by the rain that decided to pour down when Poulose resurrected. They ran for their dear lives, some of them crying out for their mommies.
The ghastly scenes of the night concluded when Poulose walked into the Midnight Express. As he approached the vehicle, its doors opened as if it was expecting him. The doors closed behind him, and the bus continued its trek toward Amballore House.
***
The abduction of Poulose was one of the many that Vareed and Eli would engineer in their career as the aliens’ ambassadors. Even though they usually kidnapped exceptionally talented scientists,
they occasionally stole corpses from pauper’s graveyard and abducted ordinary folks like Poulose. This was meant to provide specimens to the researchers at Amballore House.
This was not the first time that the elderly couple swiped the corpses from the paddy field. Nor would this be the last time. Their goal was to create a bank of human organs, to use them as models to make artificial organs through 3D printing technology.
Some abductees underwent selective transplantation of organs by having a natural organ swapped for an artificial one. They would then be kept under observation to judge the viability of the replaced organ.
Amballore House had already assembled enough scientists to run the program. Vareed told them, “We are working on a gateway to the future, a gateway leading to a life devoid of body breakdown and disease. We are working on newer and newer frontiers of the genetic engineering. And yes, we are working towards attaining immortality outside Amballore House. “
Some of the scientists were not so sure about this enthusiasm of Vareed to create a world of sheer happiness. They were concerned that the happy world would leave nothing to hope for in the afterlife.
Vareed would reply that the imminent problems of the world took precedence to the visions of an afterlife. He said, “We create our own heaven and hell right here in our own life, in our world. We create heaven by eradicating diseases. The elixir of immortality is within our reach. This is more important than worrying about an afterlife.
“Seeking happiness in the post-mortem world is misplaced hope, just a mirage. We are, on the other hand, seeking an oasis in this desert of life, an oasis that will sustain us in this life, an oasis that appears in the form of a disease-free world. This is it folks! What you see in this world is what we get; this world is a reward in itself.” Vareed pontificated to the researchers.
The artificial organs, per Vareed, would be intelligent; in other words, each organ would be equipped with its own microchip that
controlled its functions. A number of artificial organs with their own subbrains were prelude to the human body that Vareed visualized, a body that would have distributed brainpower throughout it, instead of all the neural activity being concentrated in a single brain. The brain residing in the head would be like a central processing unit, coordinating the functions of all the mini brains in the body.
The main brain would function as a backup for the distributed mini brains.
8
THE WORLD OF YESTERDAYS
Vareed often talked to the scientists that he occasionally assembled to update him on the ongoing research projects.
He told his scientific community, “It is fascinating to imagine a world totally different from what we know of, a world whose laws are written differently from those of ours. This fascination arises from our explorative nature and our belief that greener pastures are always on the other side. Human nature makes us explore things, because fascinating things might be lying hidden from us.
“The variety of nature prompts us to imagine that something different from us is out there, either lurking nearby or existing far away. This belief is also a testament to our undying attempts to dream of better things, and to dream up different things, because of boredom with things that we already know. Familiarity breeds contempt.”
His fascination for the supernatural came out of his desire to know more about life and God, to know more about the universe that was around us, and to know more about the universe that most probably lay hidden from us. The facts of life called out with bold questions that needed to be asked, but onus was on us to answer them. According to him, the world we knew brought people to their knees, because they were unable to solve its riddles. The universally observed human failure to fully comprehend nature’s mysteries dismayed him.
Vareed saw the world carry on in the conventional past-present-future mode, which was the world outside of Amballore House. This was the world where happiness did not stay long, where misery and old age came knocking, and where humans saw life’s magic disappearing as life progressed from infancy to youth to old age.
Vareed told the researchers, “The allure of life disappears like a scene in the rearview mirror of a speeding bullet train. Life is nothing but a moving train whose mirror shows unattainable
beauty, since whatever we see is fast receding from us, the scenes getting farther and farther from us as the train travels, as time progresses.
“Here in Amballore House, the aliens have built a world so that present is preserved. The present events are no more drifting into yesterdays unlike in the conventional world.” Vareed coined the terms “world of todays” (the stationary-time world) to describe the world inside Amballore House.
The “world of tomorrows” (ordinary-time universe) was outside of Amballore House where one encountered death eventually. “You do not get out of this world alive,” as the saying went.
Vareed suggested Amballore House as a solution to the problems of the world.
His dream project was “world of yesterdays” (the reversed-time universe) where events happened in the reverse order of the conventional world. This world was in sharp contrast to, and its laws were diametrically opposite to the world we were born into. It was a tantalizing, yet hypothetical world where tomorrows appeared more appealing than in the conventional world. In this world, one would be born in a grave and would end up in a cradle.