Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel by BS Murthy (read full novel txt) 📖

none, only to return saying that her parents weren’t convinced about that. And it was no Mont Blanc either, for it was a cheap Chinese ‘Hero’, whatever, is there a kid now, who experiences the joys of refilling a fountain pen. It’s another story that when my father-in-law presented me a Mont Blanc, Rathi buggered it fiddling with its complex refilling mechanism. Well I went with that girl to her house to clear my name, and asserting my innocence, I goaded them to search for it in their own place. Oh, how fervently I prayed to Lord Chandramouli to help me locate it, and lo I found it, of all the places, beneath a jar of pickles? Maybe for that childhood devotion during the karthik to Him, notwithstanding the sacrilege as you put it that God had saved me from the ignominy through that miracle of miracles. How ecstatically I ran to the temple for thanksgiving.’

“Instead of running to the God had you been right up your street, maybe you would have ended up being a godman.”

“Why given the credulity of man, one can’t rule out the possibility,” he said. “But when I prayed for god’s help then, I was blissfully unaware that Brahmeswara of our village and the Chandramouliswara of that town were different deities at all. But when I realized that it’s the faith that makes man blind, I began to distance myself from the religion itself; why when one begins to believe that his religion is the best of all, I see the worst of ignorance in man.’

“Some time in future, when science would have scanned the entire universe only to find that there is no abode of the God, much less heaven and hell, maybe then, man might turn his back on his religion.”

“I doubt still, for man might believe that God keeps himself away from the intruding man,” he said wryly before getting back to his recap, “The obduracy in a child could be the perseverance in its nascence or who knows pigheadedness in the making. Once, a relative, who was a school teacher, came to our place, and as is the wont of those in the teaching line, he tried to gauge my depth in depth. How his verdict that besides native intelligence I was blessed with innate logical abilities gladdened my grandfather I still recall; well I was not even school going then. It was another thing that the distractions of youth ruined my potential to excel at studies, and by the time I had that low-grade engineering degree on hand, my grandfather was no more. But the pain my poor scores caused my father hurts me still; oh how his tone conveyed his agony as he said, ‘so with these marks you expect a job’. After all, he had endured so much hardship to make me an engineer as by then my grandfather had turned our lands into promissory notes without any noteworthy promise to note. But later, when my brother passed out with distinction, I felt lighter, and thanked him for reengineering our father’s dreams. But still, as his words haunt me, I could never forgive myself for having let him down so badly. How I used to feel that if only I could go back in time and come out with flying colors! It could be this subconscious guilt that was behind that dream that too in my early fifties in which I was at the B.I.T all again. As if to prove that dreams don’t reflect the realities of life, how confused I looked in my Alma Mater in that familiar dream setting. Maybe, it was this psyche of failure that subconsciously fuelled my later-day urge for success.”

“Luckily for you, your guilt didn’t bog you down.”       

“All the same, the glow of youth failed to illuminate the perilous path of my adult life,” he said ruefully. “You know, my life began in the dimness of the kerosene lamp by which I lived the first ten years of it till my father’s love for me gave him the vision of my education in a town. I can say with hindsight that it was the kerosene lamp that illuminated my path to adulthood, whose fluorescent bulb had cast a shadow on the way to my manhood when I began lusting for wealth to my hurt. Well that was after the quirk of fate had placed the wheel of fortune in my hands as till then I craved for love to the neglect of my studies and at the cost of my career. While the ennobling love of my youth seemed a hackneyed expression not backed by money, all my mid-life wealth was of no avail for its fulfillment as by then lusting for sex, I lost the capacity to love. Maybe the singular focus on one aspect of life makes man lose sight of the other possibilities of it to his detriment.”

“It’s the human frailties that make a saga of life and but for them your story would have been a mere statistic of success.”

“Why you make me think all again,” he said and closed his eyes as if to shut out any present influences from interfering with his contemplation.

 

Chapter 8

Villainy of Innocence

 

“Wonder how social mores affect the course of life,” he had resumed his discourse at length “Won’t the American way of life that lets the teens to be on their own serve as an example? While the economy is structured for their economic independence, the society is not shaped to cope up with their youthful distractions that hamper their academic progress. That’s why the U.S has been perennially short of professionals and so looks eastwards to make up for the shortfall; but what if Parkinson’s theory about the alternate ascendancy of the East and the West comes true? What charms the sheen-less new world could hold then to the youth of the old world for their immigration? Maybe then as a Confucius and an Aryabhata gave way to a Socrates and a Plato in times of yore, the Newtons and the Edisons of our times might give way to some Mengs and Mathurs in the eras to come. But for that to happen, maybe it’s an idea that we have a five year teenage study break for the adolescents to grapple with their youth before they could pursue their studies without distraction, and I can tell you, then the toppers would not be the bookworms. But on the flip side, the U.S practice frees parents from the burden of their children’s upbringing allowing them in time to wine and dine; but the Asian penchant for supporting their progeny to the hilt puts paid to the recreational activities of the parents. A via media like requiring the children to work part-time to part-finance their higher studies may be an ideal model for the world at large but man either remains slavish to his habitual ways or disowns them altogether; seldom has he updated them in tune with the changing times.” 

“Why didn’t the hippies of the last sixties give a jolt the cultures of the time?”

“Cultures my foot,” he scowled. “At their core all cultures are cultureless and our age-old one bear witness to it. If someone were to breathe his last at home, it’s deemed inauspicious to live in there, at least for a year; and what was the norm to avert such a thing from ever happening? The dying was laid by the roadside for him to seek his salvation unmindful of the humiliation, and if the sick were to show signs of recovery, they were taken in only to be dragged out at the slightest hint of a relapse. What can be worse for any to be abandoned by the very family by which he or she might have sworn all life; but the dying were unmindful of the ill-treatment for they were conditioned by the culture into believing it was better that way for their loved ones. Well, it’s the altered lifestyle that forced us to abandon that abominable practice but still wasn’t Goebbels justified in saying that he would reach for the gun whenever he heard the word culture.”

“Whatever, all tend to swear by their respective cultures.”     

“The notion that culture was shaped by the wisdom of yore is rooted in the cerebral puniness of the day,” he said. “It’s this self diminution of the men of our clan that proved to be a double jeopardy for the widows for so long; were a woman to lose her man, won’t she be needing succor from her kith and kin; but our custom used to quarantine her for full three days, and what’s worse, subjected her to many a humiliating ritual thereafter. Well, as I was away when my grandfathers died, I was not aware of what my grandmothers had endured, and so I had no idea of what was in the offing for my mother when my father died; and being unprepared, I failed to prevent all those travails forced upon her in the name of our tradition. Oh, how I wish I had put my foot down on all that humiliating crap, and why this gloating over cultures that are connotations of insensitivities.”

“That they’ve stopped tonsuring widows; won’t it show the change in attitudes?” 

“That is owing to the vanity of the children, more so sons, than out of any concern for the woman,” he said. “Which son would like to flaunt his tonsured mother to his embarrassment; well only when it hurts men collectively that they turn against the self-embarrassing customs. But why anyone should bother about, say, the farce of a sakunam as it is inimical to only a few, who are supposed to bring bad omens. There was a guy in our village considered a bad sakunam by one and all, and setting out on an errand, all used to pray that the fellow shouldn’t cross their paths. If only they happened to come across him, its mission abandoned for the day that is not before venting their ire on the hapless chap with abuses galore. Where in all this was the thought of the hurt to his self-worth; the problem with the half-wits is that they validate from small samples; well, any writing on the absurdities in cultures would make a couple of volumes or more for each of them, and yet all lament about our cultural decline. Is there any custom that is even remotely rational in its conception; it’s the small minds that lay great store on these for they can’t think out of the box into which their upbringing pushes them.” 

“But then counter-cultures fared no better and more over won’t a culture-less society bring in anarchy?”

“It’s a case of switching over from one defective gear to another,” he said. “Why life is bound to be imperfect in any conceivable social arrangement but the peril lies in abandoning what is natural to the upbringing. It’s sad to see urban parents putting the fear of a cat or a mouse into their kids’ impressionable heads in our land named after Bharat, who as toddler, touted to have tamed lions in their dens. But in our days there was no escaping from scorpions, so children were taught how to handle them; and caught by us unawares, even as they tried to escape, we used to shout kodi, kodi and wonder why they stayed put at that. Well, the rest was child’s play with a chappal found nearby; but then, whoever escaped a scorpion sting or two in any village, one fell straight on my thigh from the high ceiling when I was fast asleep, and what a hell it was with my fingers swollen like cucumbers. But how many of them I had battered to death later I lost count, and there is no way I can comprehend if it was out of vengeance. Whatever, it’s also a common knowledge to the village kids that leeches were better dealt with