CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE UNBELIEVABLE KIND
A.V. DHANUSHKODI
Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
HAMLET, Act I, Scene V
EPISODE THREE---SIXTY-ONE
I have never believed in occult “sciences”, for the simple reason they are not verifiable objectively. Such “sciences” breed a horde of conmen, charlatans, faith healers, godmen and the like. However, it is also true that there have been and are good godmen and faith-healers, but their credibility has depended more on the faith their devotees have had in them than on their own spiritual powers, with which they claim to cure the sufferings of their devotees. Here, I am reminded of the Great Wizard of Oz, who gives the Scarecrow “brains”, the tin woodman a “heart”, and the cowardly lion “courage”. It simply appears to be a matter of mind over matter.
The episode I am about to relate contains both the comic and the tragic perceptions of life: again, it appears to be a matter of perception based on belief. Truly, it ought to be the other way around. In fact, in a way, it was so in olden times when matrices of beliefs were built on perceptions which were, more often, partial because of ignorance. Those matrices then, over centuries, took firm roots in our collective unconscious and metamorphosed into invincible “virtual reality”; now, mostly we tend to interpret facts to suit our such beliefs, so that, paradoxically, the same fact seems to contain diametrically opposite “truths”, which are nothing but perceptions based on beliefs. Logically then, a single occurrence could contain any number of “truths”, all absolutely valid. If we persist in pushing the analysis deeper, we would flounder in the foggy regions of perception, truth, belief, matter, mind, and so on, where physics and metaphysics are inextricably enmeshed in each other. Let me not venture where even angels fear to tread.
Coming to hard facts, I had a friend who was an inveterate believer in the occult sciences such as astrology, magic, mysticism, clairvoyance and whatnot. Any amount of reasoning would fail to penetrate his firewall of belief. He firmly believed that the destiny of every living being, even the non-human, was cast at the time it was born, by the planetary positions at that time. I would often point out that new planets and even new universes were being discovered every other day by astronomers, the kindred souls of his astrologers, with the help of extremely high-tech telescopes and computers, and where would they come into the picture in his computations? To which he would counter that all those were already discovered by our wise ancestors and taken into consideration while casting horoscopes, because they used much, much more of their grey-matter than we do now. He would then point out that, instead of going inward to discover the almost unlimited supernatural powers of the brain, we went outward inventing electronic gadgets---which were nothing but pale fragmented surrogates of our brain---and depended on them, a ludicrous position to be in, configured by our own stupidity. Even to me, a confirmed rationalist, his arguments would seem to contain some degree of truth and, therefore, I would withdraw for the time being, in order to find more invincible mental missiles to attack his arguments the next time. Our arguments and counter-arguments were at times fiery, at times cool, but they would go on and on for days, months, and years, without an end in view.
Finally, one day, I told him that I would concede defeat, if he would take me to an astrologer, whose predictions would be infallible. With glee, he readily agreed and fixed an appointment with one, who would put an end to all my bletherings, as he put it. I was not at all offended. On the contrary, I was happy that that would finish him off for good.
* * *
Winding my way through many narrow streets and lanes on my scooter, under the expert guidance of my friend on the pillion, we stopped in front of a dilapidated small house, threatening to crumble down any minute. I expected a mansion for an astrologer capable of predicting the future unfailingly, not a rundown hovel.
As if reading my thought, my friend said, “He doesn’t charge anything for his readings. He does it for the love of it and only for those known well to him.”
“His income?” I enquired.
“He is a retired employee of the railways. Gets a pension, enough to meet his modest needs.”
“His family?” I probed further.
“Lives alone; a bachelor.”
“Obviously he must have inherited the house from his father?”
“Yes. His father made a lot of money. Finally, he was arrested for corruption and convicted. He died behind bars.”
“So his son’s way of living is a rebound reaction?”
“Yes.”
“But he is living in his father’s tainted house?” I taunted him,
“Precisely the reason he lets the house fall apart.” He chuckled.
I understood.
We got down from the scooter and approached the house, ducking and weaving our way through overhanging branches, jasmine creepers, and thorny rose bushes. The rainy season had coaxed the jasmines and the roses to bloom and blush.
The front door was open and nobody was in sight. My friend called out, once, twice, and, on the third call, we could hear, somewhere at the back of the house, faint sounds of shuffling feet. We waited. After a couple of minutes, we saw a pale, lean, shadowy figure of a man emerge out of the smoky interior of the house, wiping his hands on the back of his dhoti.
He came close to us and asked, “Who is it?” peering at us closely. The man was short-sighted.
“Uncle, it’s me, Chandru,” responded my friend, in an easy and familiar tone.
“Oh, Chandru! Come in, come in. I wasn’t expecting you. You said you’d come tomorrow?” There was a touch of reproach in his tone.
“No uncle, today”.
I thought the old man himself was beginning to fall apart. He shook his head disapprovingly. Then he looked at me, with a question in his eyes.
“My friend, Dhanush,” gave out my friend.
“Not a film actor?” asked the old man with a serious expression. I knew he was joking, but I wondered why he thought of the acting profession and not any other. There was no film actor called Dhanush at the time. We both laughed. The old man’s lips curled slightly into a faint smile of satisfaction.
“No uncle, he is a stage actor.”
“Was,” I corrected.
“ ‘Life is but a brief candle, a poor actor who struts and frets with his candle on the stage for a minute, and then is seen no more. It is a story told by an imbecile, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’ who said that?” asked the venerable old man of me, in a challenging tone.
I knew he was quoting Macbeth in Act V, Scene VI, but I did not have the heart to say it, because it was such a horribly mangled version of Shakespeare, that I replied, after a moment’s thought whether I should correct him or plead ignorance, “I am extremely sorry Sir, I don’t seem to have read it, but it sounds faintly familiar. I might have said it sometime or the other,” and laughed loudly to dissolve the embarrassment of the situation.
Chandru was fully aware of the reason for my plea of ignorance, because he knew the lines by heart, listening to them from me a thousand times if not more, because I was fond of quoting the famous passage, having played Macbeth on the stage a hundred times or more. He too laughed, not loudly though, for the simple reason that he wanted, out of courtesy, to humour the old man.
The old man brushed aside my quip with a derisive look and said, shaking his head, “I knew you wouldn’t know. Who reads Shakespeare these days? I did Macbeth when the Railways Recreation Club staged it during its annual celebrations. But that’s an old story; who wants to hear it now? Not even I.” He looked at us both, expecting us to laugh. We both laughed loudly this time, just to humour his sense of humour.
The dear old man was much pleased. He turned around and gestured us to follow him.
The room, which one normally refers to as the reception room, couldn’t have been more unfit to receive anybody, including the owner of the house. How the old man could make anything out of anything there was a mystery to me. The two open cupboards in the room were overflowing with books of all sizes, colours, thicknesses, and age. Many more books and things which defied description were strewn on the floor helter-skelter, along with loose sheets of paper scribbled over with characters resembling ancient hieroglyphics to advanced mathematical symbols. Suddenly I discovered a pitch black blob in the farthest corner of the room, which I recognized within seconds as a cat, from a pair of piercing eyes looking intently at me. In an instant I realized that the room was a complete and perfect picture of the Study of Faust to a fault, the fault being the black cat in the place of a black poodle; I even half expected the cat to metamorphose into Mephisto. I recalled the tough time I had in arranging the props to configure the study of Faust, when I directed Urfaust, the first version of Faust, for the Goethe Institute years ago; had I known the old man then, he would have done it in a flash with his little finger.
Sinking into a rickety old easy-chair, one doesn’t find in any home these days, he made a sweeping gesture for us to be seated, only that there were no other seats to be found anywhere in the room, except the one he had occupied already. Chandru, without a moment’s hesitation, cleared enough space on the floor in front of the old man and sat down cross-legged and gestured to me with a nod that I did the same. I did, but not without some anxiety, knowing that my right knee would soon begin to protest if I maintained that posture for long.
“What is it you want to know?” asked the old man of Chandru, bluntly and suddenly. The bluntness and the suddenness of the question took Chandru unawares that he opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out of it, except some unintelligible sounds. He closed his mouth a second later and scratched the back of his head and looked at me for help. He held the old man in such awe that he could not bring up a subject which questioned the very foundation of that awe. Therefore, the undesirable task of undermining that foundation fell upon my shoulders.
“Sir, I am extremely sorry to say that it is for my sake that we have come here to explore the possibility of probing into the infallibility of….” I started.
“Come to the point!” lashed out the old man in impatience and annoyance.
Chandru was trying hard to suppress a smile. I thought I deserved the slap and decided to be as blunt as the old man.
“Sir, I’m an atheist and a rationalist; in short, I don’t believe in astrology and similar systems of thought and practice. Chandru brought me to you to prove me wrong. He asserts that your predictions have been infallible. I have come to put your power of prediction to test, if you would consent to subjecting yourself to……”
“Enough!” he looked at me for a very long time without a word. I couldn’t fathom his thoughts. From the corner of my eye, I could see Chandru beginning to fidget in discomfort. Suddenly, I could see the glint of consent in the old man’s eyes. In a flash, I picked the answer to his predictable question.
“What is it you want me to predict?” he shot as I expected.
“The precise time, date, and year of my departure”, I shot back as I had decided. His reaction was unexpected.
He guffawed uncontrollably. I was a little puzzled; Chandru was visibly embarrassed.
The old man quickly calmed down and looked at me with a patronising smile and asked, “How will you check my prediction? As a ghost? But you don’t believe in ghosts, right?”
I felt extremely ashamed, as a rationalist, to be cornered in a trice. I looked down and fell silent, at a loss for words.
Chandru came to my help, “Uncle, predict mine”.
I was taken aback. I began to protest, but Chandru calmed me down.
Meanwhile, the old man was deep in thought, with closed eyes and head bent down. There was a long period of absolute silence when, suddenly, we heard the ominous purring of the cat in the corner. That shook the old man out of his trance and he looked at Chandru.
“Do you have your horoscope?”
“No uncle, there was no reason for me to bring it with me. But you must be having a copy which I gave you sometime ago.”
“Yes, yes, I should think so,” he looked around him at the papers, some bundled, some loosely lying. After a bit of prodding he picked up a bundle, untied and thumbed through it, and picked out an old, faded, yellowing sheet of paper, with the scribbling on it scarcely visible. As he peered at it closely, he nodded with some satisfaction and said, “Yes, I have it.”
He put the rest of the bundle down on the floor and looked at Chandru’s horoscope for a few minutes with complete concentration. Then, he took a notebook lying on the floor and fumbled for something to write, when I offered him my ball-pen. He took it and began to draw and write on the blank sheets: figures, diagrams, numbers, letters, and all imaginable shapes one could think of. Looking at the sheets of his notebook, suddenly I saw a close resemblance to the “Lost Notebooks of Da Vinci.” Through the motionless time, my mind recalled having read that one could, with a fair measure of certainty, predict the birth of a person but not his death. The cat purred.
As if on cue, the old man said, still looking at Chandru’s horoscope, more to himself than to us, “You know, one could, with a fair measure of certainty, predict the birth of a person, but not his death”. I was surprised that he was reading my mind verbatim. He continued, “Perhaps only God could do that. I am not God. But I can figure it out to some extent. I am not talking figuratively”, he seemed to be amused at his ill-timed pun, “I’m talking literally about the figures,” he added.
With some discomfort I looked at Chandru, but he appeared to be enjoying the old man’s play with words. We waited.
“Sixty-one!” he said suddenly and looked up at Chandru. It was too pithy a prediction to contain clarity. We waited for the next word.
“You will leave when you reach sixty-one. But remember, I am not God!”
The old man dropped the notebook, the horoscope, and the ball-pen on the floor, leaned back fully in his easy-chair and closed his eyes.
There was an uneasy dead silence for a few minutes. Nobody stirred. Then, the cat purred.
“Please leave. I’m very, very tired.”
We got up without making the slightest noise. I realized that my right knee had not bothered me a bit throughout the session. As we started moving towards the door, my sight fell on my ball-pen, a very expensive platinum-coated ball-pen my sister had sent me from the U.S. on my last birthday, but I decided to leave it there as a gift to the old man for his efforts.
“Please take your ball-pen with you. Don’t you ever gift a gift.” The old man’s eyes were still closed. Meekly I picked up my ball-pen and followed Chandru through the front door.
* * *
Years passed as I met Chandru many times to chat and discuss light and serious matters as usual, but never once did we bring up the subject of astrology and other such occult “sciences”; in particular, our visit to the old man. Chandru and I seemed to have made a tacit pact to wait for Chandru to reach sixty-one; a morbid pact no doubt.
One day, as I was leaving my office after a day’s hard work, my phone rang. For a while I was undecided whether I should answer the call, for it could be from my boss asking me to attend to some very important work which had come up suddenly. I might not be able to refuse his request and could be tied down to my desk for another hour or so. I looked intensely at the instrument, willing the ringing to stop. It wouldn’t; it was insistent. Finally, I decided to answer it and bluntly refuse, if it was my boss asking me to work on for some more time. But, to my great relief, I heard Chandru’s voice.
“Hi, Chandru, I’m happy it’s you! What’s the matter?”
“Will you come to my house, now, straight from office?” he sounded rather distraught.
“Chandru, I’ve had an awfully busy day. I am tired. I want to go home, take a shower, and hit the sack,” then I added, sensing something was very seriously wrong, “unless it’s very, very important and urgent.”
“It is”, he said, in a voice which sounded somewhat unsteady.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you when you come”. His voice sounded very sure that he was not demanding unfairly.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes”, I assured him and put down the receiver.
I was there in less than fifteen minutes; my recently acquired Fiat had never failed me yet.
He was waiting at the gate, dressed to go out. When I stopped, he opened the front door and hopped onto the seat next to mine.
“Let’s go!” he commanded, looking straight ahead, avoiding my eyes.
“Where to?” I asked, annoyed at all the mystery. I thought he was over-reacting to whatever it was.
“To the old man’s house,” was his terse answer.
I was a little amused that he had picked up my epithet. From him, however, it didn’t sound irreverent.
“What’s the matter? You sound as if the old man had kicked the bucket,” I said in a light vein with a smile.
Chandru turned, looked at me, holding my eyes steadily, and I suddenly realized that I had guessed correctly---although in a cavalier manner for the occasion--- when he said, “He has”.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt sorry, vaguely sorry for the old man; and sorry for Chandru. But, at the bottom of that benign sentiment was anger: anger that the clever old man had found a way of cheating me out of my well-earned dark pleasure of confronting him with his failed prediction when Chandru was 61.
After what seemed a long time, I calmed down. As the engine was still running, I shifted the gear from neutral to one, when I heard Chandru say, “He was 61”.
The engine coughed once and stopped.
***
Time passed quickly when many changes took place in my life: I was transferred twice, to godforsaken places; my son and daughter were married and had settled down abroad; some of my uncles and aunts passed away and so on. Through all those years, the memory of our encounter with the old man had gradually faded and slipped out of my mind altogether. Finally, when I retired from service, I came back to Madras for good.
I expected Chandru at the station, as I had sent him a letter. He didn’t turn up, and I had to engage a taxi, to transport me and my wife with our luggage to our ancestral house, which I had left locked the past few years for the purpose of my occupation when I retired.
The first two days I relaxed completely, postponing even unpacking of the luggage we had brought with us. I was mentally and physically so tired that I postponed even calling Chandru. I should confess that I was also somewhat cross with him for not receiving me at the station and not calling me even after two days.
Finally, on the third day, I decided to call on him unannounced. My old scooter was still in my garage; my car was yet to be delivered by the trucking company I had engaged for that purpose. I pushed my scooter to the petrol bunk situated pat opposite my house and filled the scooter’s tank full. To my surprise, after a few attempts, it started.
As I knocked on Chandru’s door, I was rehearsing how I should pull him up. I had to knock repeatedly for some time before I could hear the bolt being moved. When the door was opened, not by Chandru but by the houseowner, I was somewhat surprised. He did not recognize me first but, when he did, he greeted me soberly.
“How are you Sir?” I enquired out of courtesy and added, “Isn’t Chandru in?”
“Well…,” he avoided my eyes, “You see, he shifted to another house two days ago.”
“Shifted? Why?”
“You see, he needed a bigger house.”
“A bigger house?” I couldn’t understand why, because Chandru was a widower and his only son lived in the U.S. with his wife and two children. Chandru didn’t need a bigger house.
“You see, Chandru’s son and his family are returning to settle down here.”
“I see”, I said, “May I have his address?”
“Yes,” he said, but said nothing more.
I was losing my patience. “May I have his address, Sir?” I repeated with some asperity now.
“Oh, by the way, here is your letter to Chandru”, he handed me the letter. The man did not have the courtesy to pass my letter to Chandru.
“I received it just yesterday,” he added.
I took the letter and waited for the address.
He scribbled something on a small sheet of paper and gave it to me, saying, “You see, the house is at the other end of this street, on the opposite side.”
“Thank you,” I said curtly and walked out.
I started the scooter and drove to the other end of the street. I slowed down, when I saw a small gathering in front of a house. They were standing in small groups and talking in hushed voices. I checked the house number with the slip of paper. It was 61.
A memory, which had slipped deep into my subconscious, was trying hard to break through to my conscious mind.
A.V. Dhanushkodi, September 2009
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