Caratha

On the chosen Feast Day of Caratha, the Witch sent out her invitations for the party, and waited calmly to see who would come.

They came in their numbers, from all over Caratha. College students, businessmen, secretaries, retired teachers, boy scouts, even the odd policeman or soldier. They came without even knowing why they came, for the Witch provided nothing at the party to eat or drink, not even water, unless one chose to purchase mints or toffees from vending machines. But such was the power of the Witch of Caratha that they came anyway.

For the occasion, the Witch took on herself the form of a plump and comely young woman, dressed in black better to set off her porcelain-fair skin and red lips. She seated herself at her desk by the side of the path along which her guests would have to come to attend her party. This path, running behind the Big House, ran along the top of a high retaining wall, with a steep drop down to the concrete yard where the party was; and the Witch sat there, and watched them come, and charged admission. It was only a nominal amount, and they paid without thought; but it a chance for her to check them out and assess their suitability for the Test.

The one she was seeking, the one she awaited, would come. Such was the knowledge of the Witch of Caratha. She would have to find him, or her. That was all.

She saw him early, long before he saw her, even as he was getting out of his car. At first there was nothing special about him; he was just another man, not young, not old. But the Witch knew the Signs, and knew that he had in him the precious nameless Something she wanted. 

It was time to begin the Test.

She stopped him by sticking a golden rod out in his path, so far that it projected beyond the edge of the wall. “Admission fee, please.”

He looked surprised, and fumbled for his wallet. “How much?” Close to, he looked exhausted, with shadows chasing each other in his eyes. That was good. Very good.

She quoted exactly four times the usual price. As he was taking out the money, she caused her desk to creep closer and closer to the edge of the wall, to see whether he would step back away. But, as she had hoped, he didn’t. Even though his feet must have been halfway over the edge of the wall, he compensated by leaning far over the desk. Extremely good.

The moustachioed man behind him – who had a girl in tow and had got out of the same car – tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey,” he said, not knowing why he said it, unaware that this too was the doing of the Witch of Caratha – “can you pay for me? I have no money.”

“Nor I,” said the girl.

The man the Witch was interested in looked over his shoulder at them, as though he had never seen them before, and that too was the doing of the Witch. With the same puzzled look on his face, he turned back to the Witch. “How much?”

She told him the actual rate, knowing he would notice the difference, waiting for him to protest. He didn’t, and slid the money across the desk to her. The smile she gave him wasn’t even feigned.

Causing the desk to slide back away from the path, she stood, taking his arm.

“I’ll walk down with you,” she said.

The yard was crowded, though most of the people there stood idly talking to each other, without even a shadow of purpose. The Witch guided him, with subtle pressure of her hand on his arm, in the direction of the vending machines, and watched him buy a roll of mints. And, precisely as she had anticipated, he dropped the top one trying to get it out, and handed her the next.

“I have to go back to the desk,” she pouted.

“No, go on, that’s for you.” He scooped up the dropped mint and popped it into a trash can. 

Yes, he was almost certainly the one. She hadn’t chosen him. He had chosen himself.

Now, all she had to do was wait for him to leave. If he wanted to, he could. The way was open, and dribs and drabs of the crowd were already making their way towards the exit gate, being no longer needed. If he didn’t leave, though...

If he didn’t leave, he was the One indeed.

                                               *********************

The man came out of the bathroom, towelling himself dry. He had no idea precisely when he had decided to take a bath. He had wandered among the people standing around and talking, watching them come and go, and idly wondering if he should leave too. But in the end he hadn’t. He had no idea why he hadn’t left; it had merely not seemed necessary.

Now, the yard before him was deserted, and with alarm he saw that the daylight had almost faded completely away. Above the retaining wall opposite, the big house with its projecting balconies was completely dark, and suddenly seemed full of some unknown menace. 

Already knowing it was too late, still half-wet, he dropped the towel and hunted for his clothes.

Silently, like a shroud, the night closed in. 


Copyright B Purkayastha 2011

The Memory Morgue

In the shelves of the memory morgue, the bodies lie; frozen in the shape they were last when put away, kept in there to be pulled out and examined someday, perhaps, in years to come. In the darkness and the cold of the shelves, they are preserved as the mind would have them, safe in the knowledge that they were there to be accessed when needed.

Once in a while the mind walks down those silent corridors, under the harsh white lights, down into the basement of the years. Once in a while the hand reaches out and grasps the handle of a shelf, and pulls it out, to examine the memory, watch its frozen face for signs of life, and plants a kiss on its lips before pushing it back into the darkness...until next time.

Those are the good memories.

And there is the other basement – the one with the dim yellow lights, where the cold is so severe that the air seems to freeze. The mind doesn’t want to come in here. But it knows the place exists. And, sometimes, driven by who knows what impulse, it takes a deep breath, walks down the darkened flights of stairs, and comes into this place.

Here are the shelves that are never touched, where the damaged memories lie. Here are the broken shells that were once bright and new, here the memories too painful to relive. Here are the dead children of hopes, the crippled remnants of dreams, the skeletons of love that has fallen to dust. Here we have the essence of pain.

The hand rises here, hesitantly, to touch the outside of a drawer, and try to feel if the pain is as sharp as ever, or if it has dulled. Mostly, the mind recoils, and leaves as quickly as possible, afraid to take the chance. Sometimes, rarely, the hand pulls the drawer open, and views the contents, hoping they will have fallen to dust with the passage of the years.

Sometimes, the contents open their eyes and look back.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2011

Food For Thought

The ship came down from space.

It came down riding on a spire of flame, white hot metal surrounded by a sheath of matter turned to plasma from the heat of its passage.

In its cells lived some tens of men and women, big and small, ethnographers and sociologists, scientists and spacemen, and not a few of the animals man takes, usually unwittingly, with him wherever he goes: from roundworms and head lice to mice and mosquitoes. In a few years those animals would have created a massive ecological disaster, but the time was not yet.

The mother ship stayed up above in orbit, and hundreds of other men and women lived in its chambers and monitored their instruments and passed on messages to the home planet left parsecs behind. Those men and women would never see the world they had left again; by the time they got back, those they had known and loved had been dust for so long even their names would have been forgotten.               

The expedition had been built on one premise; that of all the worlds yet surveyed by the Global Supercomputer, this was the planet that had the conditions creating the greatest chances of harbouring intelligent life. Oh, there were the radio sources from beyond the galaxy, but the race would be extinct before it ever reached one of those vast intelligences the size of stars, and the Global Supercomputer only licked at the data contained in them before passing it on to the appropriate scientific committees. But in this galaxy, within the reach of the volume of space the race could reach, this one had the highest chances of intelligent life.

And that is why, at an aptly astronomical cost, the expedition had been fitted out and sent to this planet revolving around a minor star no one had ever bothered to name before…

The captain of the expedition sat in his cabin in the mother ship and wished with all his heart that he could have gone on the trip down to the planet; but he had given up his place as per orders. He couldn’t even name the planet after himself. It had already been named before the expedition had ever left, in honour of some long dead explorer the captain had never heard of before.

And so the expedition came down to Gagarin.

They had expected to find villages and communes, because the Global Supercomputer had told them they would find intelligence. Maybe they would even encounter resistance, so a few old-fashioned guns – some shotguns and some good old bolt action hunting rifles – were carried on down with them. A few volleys should scare any bow wielding tribesmen into negotiations. They hadn’t seen any villages from orbit, but when they landed they were prepared for – anything.   

And when they landed, what did they find? Well…

A world of grass it was. It was a world of tall, waving, aromatic grass with, here and there, giant stony pillars with mushroom tops. A few tiny rodent-like creatures scrambled among the grass stems and the matted roots, while huge herds of much larger pseudo-bovines munched at the leaves. There were warm shallow seas, green and scummy with algal growth and whose floors were paved with large bivalve molluscs with soft shells that looked like giant clams. And that was all.

No villages, no communes, no primitive steam engines. There wasn’t even a single naked savage.

But since all that money had already been spent…

The captain of the expedition may have missed out on having the planet named after himself, but he knew a good business opportunity when he saw one. And that grassland planet, for all that it had no mineral wealth, was all opportunity…

So, with the guidance of Captain van der Decken, Commerce came to Gagarin.

What sort of commercial success can one make of a planet with no minerals, which does not lie on or near any of the interstellar transport routes?

The answer was, as it so often is, tourism.

In a relatively short time great hotels towered over the grasslands and looked out over the warm shallow oceans. Tourists who could pay – the billionaires and trillionaires of the galaxy – came in their thousands to laze on the beaches and go for safaris on the lovely grasslands, to shoot the vast herds of almost-cows and to feast on the clams.

Those clams were really, it turned out, delicious.

They were so delicious that they had achieved a cult status in the galaxy, and soon enough great cordon bleu chefs who had worked in the best eateries of a dozen worlds came to cook them too… stewed clams, steamed clams, clams cut alive from their soft shells and eaten still quivering with a dash of chef’s secret sauce, and a dozen other preparations. The pseudo-bison were almost inedible for the gastronaut, but the clams more than compensated.  

And so the tourists came, sat in their deckchairs and sipped their light grass wine with live pseudo-beetle larvae wriggling out their lives at the bottom of their glasses, and ate their clams and soaked up all that lovely sun and speculated about the tall stony mushroom pillars, of whose nature nothing had ever been discovered.

It was found that the clams had a low reproductive rate and could not be commercially farmed, so their numbers began dropping drastically. But by then the tourist economy was so dependent on the clams that it was suggested that once the clams were all gone they would simply import more from the mother planet and sell them as the genuine article.

And so the years passed…

Zhang Dehuai was not all that much of a scientist. In many ways, he was thought of as a crank.

He held, one admits, views that might be thought of as odd. One of those views said that the Global Supercomputer couldn’t possibly be mistaken, manifestly ignoring the hundreds of instances when it had been demonstrably wrong – and therefore when the Supercomputer had said there was intelligence on Gagarin, there must be intelligence on Gagarin. And he had invented a machine which, he said, could track down that intelligence…

Also, it helped that Zhang Dehuai was a bit of a gourmand. He had always wanted to try the fabled clams of Gagarin with beetle larva grass wine. He had never thought he would be able to do either, though, until a misguided committee at the University decided to give him a grant (the financial year was drawing to an end and the money was lying unspent and would revert back to the general fund unless disbursed).

And so it was that Zhang Dehuai came down to Gagarin.

Zhang landed by shuttle at Van der Decken Spaceport one lovely summer day. He was taken by Hovercraft to his luxury hotel (all hotels on Gagarin were luxury; no one but those who could afford luxury hotel accommodation could afford the trip in the first place) and, after freshening up, he carefully unpacked and assembled his apparatus. After that he politely turned down the offer of a place on the next bison hunting trip, ordered a packed lunch of clam and beetle wine, and headed for the nearest mushroom pillar, which he could see clearly on the horizon.

Zhang had a theory, you see: he was convinced that the pillars, whatever they were, were the centre of intelligence. Either they contained the intelligence in some form, or they, themselves, were alive and intelligent. With his apparatus, he was determined to prove it. If he was successful, the next day he would return with independent witnesses and prove it again…

Zhang set up his instrument at the foot of the pillar. It rose high above him, mysterious and beautiful in its stony majesty, slim and straight till it expanded into a great hood that seemed to shut out half the sky. Zhang looked up at it with a great deal of hope but not too much emotion, and got down to work.

The instrument worked only at short ranges. It had, among other things, a detector that was linked to a strength meter and a direction indicator. Zhang calibrated it to ignore his own brain waves and pointed the detector towards the mushroom pillar.

Nothing happened.

He pushed it as close as he could to the pillar and switched it on again. Still nothing.

Zhang would not have got where he was if he was the sort to be easily disheartened. He decided that perhaps the intelligence was dormant; sleeping, maybe, and would wake. Very well, he would wait. He sat back and realised, suddenly, that he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything since the ship and there was, in his backpack, the beetle wine and clams he had so long craved.

He took a sip of the wine. It was light, he decided, with the taste of the oil of the grass, leavened by wind and sun, and the dying beetle larva, still struggling weakly, had flavoured it nicely with its own unique tang. He sipped a little more of it, and took out and ate the first clam. It was alive, the best way of eating it, or so they said; he had no trouble separating it from its soft shell, and dipped it in the secret sauce and ate it quickly in a few bites. The edge gone from his hunger, he reached into his pack and removed the second clam. He was going toenjoy this one…

He had just applied his shelling knife to the clam when he happened to look at the instrument. The detector was live, the needle quivering eagerly, and the direction indicator was pointing right at him…

Zhang put the knife down slowly and looked at the clam in his hand. “You,” he said.

Little red and blue lights flickered up and down the face of the console of his apparatus. “Yes,” said the speaker.

“So you are intelligent.”

“Yes, we all are. Those of us who are left.”

“And why did you never let us know you’re intelligent before this? Why didn’t you let me know before I ate your friend?”

“Uh, well, that wasn’t my friend, that was our President you just ate,” said the clam, and the detector’s needles shrugged apologetically.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2008

Excavation

An immense red sun came up over the horizon. It was so huge that by the time the lower edge of its disc cleared the low line of the distant hills, the top was well on the way to the zenith. It was red, but not bright; the colour was more the sullen red of glowing coal. The light it shed was very poor.

The camp lay at the bottom of a ridge, sheltered by it from the winds. The constructions were all bright white in colour, multiple walled and heavily protected from the environment and from radiation. All around it the earth lay bare and burnt free of all vegetation, and even the topsoil was largely gone, exposing the rocks everywhere, jagged and sharp or worn down smooth by the constant wind.

The Chief Archaeologist stood at the viewing bubble of his office and looked out at the sun. The door behind him opened; without turning, he knew who it was, because of the unmistakable odour. “Any change?” he asked.

His deputy made a noise signifying the negative. “The Captain sent the message again just now,” he said. “Plans unchanged. We are being evacuated tonight.”

“That’s ridiculous.” The Chief Archaeologist gestured angrily at the site of the excavations, clearly visible from his viewing bubble. “We can’t possibly leave now. Do you realise what an enormous find we have here? And that’s merely the top layer of the city that we’ve reached so far. Who knows what else we might find with a little more digging? We must have more time!”

“I’ll tell him,” said the Deputy Archaeologist, “but it will make no difference, I fear. He’s not scientifically oriented. He will merely say that orders are orders and that more excavations must wait for future expeditions.”

“Future expeditions.” The Chief Archaeologist had difficulty controlling his anger. “What future expeditions? Look at that red giant of a sun. By the time the next expedition turns up, a million years from now, this planet will be a vaporised ball of gas floating in its photosphere. We must find out as much as we can this time, because there will neverbe another chance.”

“I’ll tell him that too,” said the Deputy Archaeologist, and exited.

The Chief Archaeologist sighed. He felt old and tired suddenly. The whole effort seemed too much for him. But this was the find of a lifetime; he couldn’t leave when all that knowledge of the civilisation of this planet was within his grasp.

He moved closer to the window to get a better look at the robot excavators at work on the dig. Working with infinite care, they had already exposed another layer of dwellings and the streets between them. The excavators were difficult to see because of the shadows the sun threw. In a few minutes he would, he decided, put on a thermal outfit and go out to see the work in progress at first hand. He should be there now; the stupid business with the Captain up in the mother ship in orbit had delayed him.

Behind him the door opened again. “He gives us three days,” said his deputy. “No more.”

The Chief Archaeologist heaved his heavy carapace round enough to be able to look at his deputy. His basic colour was sand-yellow, but the red light through the bubble made him look reddish. The carapace was rough and pitted, the shine of youth long since rubbed off, evidence of his age and experience. He moved his multiple serrated manipulators.

“That’s better than nothing,” he said. “But far from enough. Three days gives us some sort of time, but not enough. Not enough to discover anything really significant about these creatures.”

“They built a city,” said the Deputy. “More than one city, but this is the only one we can investigate in the time we have left.”

“I think they did a lot more than that,” said the Chief Archaeologist. “I think they built a civilisation that lasted on this planet a long, long time. I think they were the dominant creatures during all the history of this planet.

“Just consider what we found,” he said. “We‘ve found buildings hundreds of floors tall; seen the unmistakable remnants of granaries, housing blocks, nurseries, streets and aquifers. There’s clear evidence that more layers of this city lie underneath, and we haven’t yet found any of it, and yet we are ordered away from here.”  He clacked his pedipalps. “It just makes me angry thinking what else we’re missing.” 

“They must have been alive not long ago,” said the Deputy. “The last of them were still around maybe a few thousand years ago, for all they were so much smaller than us. We found grain dating back that long.” His antennae switched back and forth. “We just missed them.”

“But we didn’t find any corpses,” said the Chief Archaeologist. “They must have buried them before abandoning this city. I suggest you set a detail to seek burial grounds. It might tell us something about them. We have only three days, and we must make the best use of these days we can. We know nothing about them really, and yet they were the greatest intelligences on this planet from what we’ve found.

”I wonder what they were like,” he mused. “What was their art, their music? What heights of science and technology did they reach? What did they know of the cosmos, of the universe beyond their tiny system? Did they take the first steps to space, and just how far did they go? Did they pull themselves down by constant war, or did they find a way of living together and co-operating? We could find some answers, of course, but that would require years of excavations, and that’s just what they are not giving us.

“I wonder if we’ll ever really know anything about them at all.”

The Deputy’s communicator buzzed and he listened briefly. “We do know something more about them,” he said. “One of our assistant archaeologists just deciphered a  kind of plaque we found. It had their name. I don't know that it helps us much, but still…”

“Oh?” said the Chief Archaeologist, with some interest. “What were they called?”

“Termites.”  

Copyright B Purkayastha 2008

A conversation with God

                                        
The boy climbed the crest of the iron-hard ridge and looked back towards the town.

He stood there looking for a long time at the distant lights, and he whistled, shrill in the early evening, and his God came to him.

“I see they’ve thrown you out,” his God said.

“Yes,” said the boy bitterly, “they have. And where were You?”

“I?” God thought for a while. “I must have been sleeping,” He said at last. “Sorry about that. In any case, it wouldn’t have made any difference.”

“It wouldn’t?” The boy was astonished. “Why not?”

“I couldn’t have done anything to help you.”

“But, look here – You’re my God. You’re supposed to look out for me.”

“How d’you expect Me to look out for you against all the other Gods looking out for their people? How many people were in the mob that threw you out?”

“A thousand or more,” said the boy reluctantly.

“There you are then,” said God, sounding smug and defensive at the same time. “How do you expect Me to do anything against a thousand other Gods?”

“But they’re all part of Yourself, aren’t they?”

“Just a second.” God darted off, investigated a dead sparrow, and came back scribbling in a Golden Book. He put the Book away and said kindly, “Look, boy, I’ve warned you enough times about stealing, haven’t I? How long did you expect to be able to get away with it?”

“But You haven’t exactly made it possible for me to earn a living, have You? It’s either beg or steal, that’s all I can do. And because I’m young, nobody will give me alms.”

“We all must work according to our skills,” said God sententiously.

“Ah. And who gave me those skills? You, isn’t it?”

God looked uncomfortable. “In any case, the other thousand parts of Me had right on their side. Even if you’d had right on your side, how am I supposed to go against a thousand other parts of Myself? You just think of it.”

“But,” the boy spluttered, “look here. I wasn’t even guilty of the theft for which I was thrown out! I promise You, I was just walking along the street, and some fat woman had her chain snatched, and everyone started running, and then they caught me and beat me. And then they threw me out.” The boy paused, and added gloomily, “they didn’t find the chain either.”

“Naturally not, since you didn’t steal it.” God scratched the base of his tail with a hooked claw. “Anyway, it’s done, and you’re out here. No point crying over spilt milk, that’s what I always say. What do you want Me to do now?”  

“What do I want You to do? Get me back into the city, of course. That’s the only place I know.”

“And then you’ll steal and they’ll throw you out again.” God hooked a large moth out of the air and began to eat it meditatively, sitting on His hind legs. “And we’ll be back here, inside of a week.”

“No, You also have to give me some skills to earn a living some other way.” The boy grabbed God’s floppy ear and began to twist. God winced and dropped what was left of the moth.

“You’re hurting Me!”

“Good.” The boy twisted some more. “I’ll keep hurting till You give me what I want.”

“Look,” God begged. “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t teach you new skills overnight.”

“Why not? You can do anything, can’t You?”

“Ouch! If I could teach Myself new skills, do you think I’d be sitting here getting my ear half torn off? Let go! OK, you win. Just let go!”

“Just as long as You remember,” said the boy, releasing God, “that You’re my God and You can’t get away from me, so if I’m not satisfied I’ll tear off Your ear next time.”

“All right, all right.” God rubbed His ear tenderly. “I can’t teach you new skills, but I’ll do My best to make you a better thief. Will that do?”

“If that’s all You can do.” The boy regarded God with disfavour. “You aren’t much of a God, are You?”

“You should speak to Me with respect,” said God. “I think I made you.”

“Respect doesn’t just come, it has to be earned,” the boy said. “You’ve done precious little to earn mine.”

“I will, I will. Just get back to the town and see.”

“How do I get back to the town? They threw me out.”

“Tomorrow is the Festival of St Coelho. Anyone with the Saint’s first name – your name is Paulo, isn’t it? – anyway, as I was saying, anyone with the Saint’s first name is eligible to crave pardon. Go to the Elders and do it, and I shall intercede with Myself to ensure you’re pardoned.”

“All right,” said the boy, sitting down and facing the lights of the city. “I’ll do that. Thanks.” God sat down beside him. For a while neither spoke.

“Isn’t it a lousy job, being a personal God?”

“Look at it this way. Would you want to be a personal God, or to be someone who’s represented on earth by priests and popes and pastors and mullahs who drag one’s name through the mud? If I had to endure a day of that any longer, I’d have turned atheist Myself.”

“And what does it feel like to have your ear twisted to make You grant a favour?”

“Not great,” God confessed. “Almost enough to make Me turn agnostic, it was.”

“Well,” said the boy, “it felt just fine to me.” 

Copyright B Purkayastha 2008

Father and Son

“Good morning, son. How are you today?”

“Jai Shri Ram, dad. You should never say ‘good morning’, don’t you know? It’s a Western greeting, a threat to our culture.”

“What? Who told you that?”

“Everyone knows that, dad. Didn’t someone say it on TV only yesterday? All Hindus should greet each other with Jai Shri Ram.”

“Someone said that, did they? All right, we’ll talk about it later. Have you done your homework?”

“No. I won’t do my homework.”

“Why ever not?”

“All of it is false. I was supposed to study in science that the aeroplane was invented by the Wright brothers and the radio by some Marconi but everyone knows that the aeroplane and radio, like everything else, were invented by the ancient Hindus.”

“They were, were they?”

“Yes, and that’s not all. My history homework says that the Taj Mahal was built by a Mughal oppressor but everyone knows it was really a Hindu temple called the Tejo Mahalaya. Some great scientist said this.”

“My god. You’re making my head spin.”

“So of course you see that I can’t do the homework.”

“I think I should talk to your teacher. What does she think about it?”

“Who cares what she thinks about it? She should stay home and learn to make chapattis for her husband. All women should stay home and learn to make chapattis for their husbands.”

“I wonder what your mother would say if she heard you say this.”

“She had better not say anything. Or the Sri Ram Sene will discipline her.”

“The Sri Ram Sene? But that’s a Hindu group from South India.”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’ve just formed the local branch of the Sri Ram Sene.”

“Oh, have you then? My head is going round and round. I’m feeling dizzy!”

“Wait, dad, you sit down and rest. I’ll get you something fizzy to drink.”

“That’s thoughtful of you, son.”

“Here you are, dad.”

“Pffffffffffffffffft!!!!”

“Don’t you like it?”

“What on earth was that? It tastes like cow urine!”

“It is cow urine. I went out today and got it from the cow that hangs around the garbage bin down the street.”

“Are you mad? Have you gone completely insane?”

“No, not at all. It’s a patriotic Hindu drink, much better than foreign drinks like Coke which are against Indian culture. The RSS said so. And speaking of the RSS...”

“What?”

“How dare you have only one child? The RSS says each Hindu family must have seven children, or otherwise the Muslims will outbreed us and destroy Hinduism. Why did you stop after only me?”

“Don’t you think one of you is enough?”

“How will we fight the Muslims and the Christians and the pseudo-seculars if every one of us thought that way then? How will we fight the terrorists?”

“Don’t you think that there are more important things to do in life than fighting Muslims and Christians?”

“Now that you mention it, there is. This evening my friends and I will go out and beat up girls.”

“Why?”

“They go out wearing lipstick and alone or with men who they are not married to, especially Muslim men. It is pub culture. It’s against Indian culture. We’re only defending Indian culture.”

“Son, tell me, seriously, what do you want to do with your life?”

“Yes, I wanted to tell you that I have decided to join the army.”

“Join the army? I had hoped that you would want to study for an MBA. Why do you want to join the army?”

“So that I can be a colonel and help arm and train Hindu groups and spread Hindu propaganda.”

BOOM!

“What was that?”

“Oh, that must have been the bomb I was making in the shed. It must have gone off somehow.”

“You were making a bomb in the shed? You are mad! Now the police will come.”

“Don’t worry, dad. Calm down. Nothing will happen.”

“How do you mean nothing will happen? They will arrest us all for being terrorists.”

 “Everyone knows Hindus can never be terrorists.”

Copyright B Purkayastha 2009

Close Encounter of the Fifteenth Kind

“You,” said the Flth of the Xsth from the Fifth Dimension, “are sick.”

Dila Ram shrugged. “You’re a fine one to talk,” he said. “Back home, anyone looking like you would be in intensive care.”

“Speak when you’re spoken to,” said the Flth. It glared at Dila Ram from its bloodshot eyes and rubbed its white face with the feverish glow over the high cheekbones. “You’re sick. How can you deny it?”

“I’m not denying it,” said Dila Ram. He looked around the grey chamber. The walls were smooth and furry and warm and soft, the floor clear and transparent. Down far below he could see the stars. “I’m not denying it, but I’d like to know what on earth you mean by it.”

“Earth?” the Flth pounced triumphantly. “You aren’t on Earth.”

“Don’t I know it.” Dila Ram looked down at the stars. “But just where are we?”

“That’s not important.” The Flth sniffed loudly. “You’re really sick.”

“Just, please, tell me in what way I’m sick,” said Dila Ram, “and I’ll be forever grateful to you.”

“Well...” The Flth looked over Dila Ram. “You wear clothes!” it exclaimed triumphantly.

“So?” Dila Ram looked at the Flth’s scarecrow-thin body. “You’re wearing...clothes.” He pointed doubtfully at the Flth’s breechclout.

“Not like you. And you...you eat...that.” Spittle flying from its lips, the Flth pointed a trembling forefinger at the apple in Dila Ram’s hand.

“What?” Dila Ram looked at the apple, and took a bite out of it. “Why not? Try it – it’s good.” 

The Flth shrieked and backed away from the proffered fruit, shuddering with horror. Dila Ram wondered if it was about to have a heart attack. He shrugged and ate the rest of the apple. By the time he was through, the Flth had apparently recovered.

“So,” said Dila Ram, “why have you brought me here?”

“To, uh –“ the Flth’s bloodshot eyes blinked. “To study you,” it said finally.

“Study me? What for?”

“What for? Why does anyone...er...study anything?” The Flth picked nervously at the furry wall. A piece came off in its fingernails. “Look what you made me do!” it exclaimed.

“Serves you right for putting me in such a room,” said Dila Ram. “It looks like the walls are made of the skin of a decaying caterpillar.”

“That’s very interesting,” said the Flth. “How did you know that? Who’s been telling you things?”

“You mean...?” Dila Ram moved away from the nearest wall, and looked up quickly at the ceiling. It was pink and fluffy, and strings of it hung down towards him. One of the strings brushed his face. It smelt good. He licked it. It tasted even better than it smelled. He began to eat it.

“Watch what you’re doing!” The Flth jumped up and down in its agitation. At every jump, the floor trembled. “You’re eating the ship!”

“Well, you oughtn’t to make the ceiling out of candyfloss.” Dila Ram swallowed the piece he had been eating. “I won’t eat the rest if you’ll just put me back.”

“But we can’t do that!” wailed the Flth. “We’ll study you, and then we  want to find a female to breed with you!”

“But if you do that,” said Dila Ram logically, “the children will begin eating your candyfloss ceiling, and before you know it...”

“No,” said the Flth. “We’ll make a room for them, a special room, with walls they can’t eat, walls made of, uh...”

“Yeah?”

“Chocolate, that’s it! Walls made of chocolate! Nothing can eat chocolate.”

“Flth,” said Dila Ram, “my dear friend, I have some bad news for you...”


Two days later Dila Ram was back in his usual haunts, where he remains to this day. And when anyone asks where he had been, whether it is true that he had once been abducted by an alien UFO, he smiles and offers that person an apple. 

Copyright B Purkayastha 2009

Invention

"It was the best thing I ever did,” said Musca. He walked quickly with short steps, as usual, to the window and turned round. “You see the garbage dump there? Well, you can’t see it from this distance, but it’s literally buzzing with flies. Billions of them! It’s a fly paradise.”

“And so?” The journalist, Nebulo, looked puzzled. “Flies are everywhere, and they’re still there around the dump as well. You said the thing you made was the best thng you ever did, but, well…”

“Yes. It was the best thing I ever did.” Musca almost swelled with pride. “You know how flies spread disease? Well, they’re menaces, flies are. Worse than bloody mosquitoes; at least mosquitoes are clean.” He went to his desk and opened a drawer. “What is this?”

Nebulo studied the proffered object with some surprise. “It’s flypaper, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course it is.” Musca nodded. “Flypaper, you know, is so much better than those aerosol sprays to kill flies. You don’t damage the ozone layer and you don’t spray poison on uncovered food, and besides you can leave the windows open.

“But flypaper has one great disadvantage. Flies don’t really get attracted t

o it. They more or less wander to the paper by themselves and get stuck if they do. I needed something more, something that would cause flies to actively seek out the paper and get stuck in it.

“I thought of scents. The first idea was of the stink of rotting garbage. That would probably work, but it would put off anyone with a sense of smell. Then I thought of sugar solution, but I only wanted to murder flies; not bees or wasps.

“Then one fine day the idea came to me: sex.”

Nebulo raised his eyebrows. “Sex?”

“Fly sex, you understand.” Musca grinned without humour. “I took fly pheromones. Male and female sex pheromones, and set out to synthesise the essence of them. It took months. Yes, months before I could make the pheromones cheaply and easily enough. But at last it was done.

“What did I do? I bought the stickiest flypaper going and drenched it – absolutely bloody saturated it – with the mix of pheromones. Then I took that sheet of paper and let it near that succulent garbage dump and sat back to watch.

“In one hour, that one square metre sheet of fly paper caught one hundred and ninety thousand, six hundred and eighteen flies. I counted. There was not a square millimetre of the sheet that wasn’t covered with flies, and the garbage dump was fly free. I could see them swarming after me, eager to commit suicide on my fly paper, buzzing after me as I packed up the paper and got ready to go home.”

Musca raised a hand and waved it irritably at a fly. The fly came back and sat on his hair. He seemed not to notice. “Yes, they came swarming after me to screw the paper, and I thought I had it made. The only flies who would survive it would be the ones without libido, and I wasn’t interested in them anyway. If they didn’t want to screw, they wouldn’t reproduce, and that would be the end of it.

“You’ll understand how happy I was. I repeated the experiment several times, and each time I was astonished at the results. I was about to apply for a patent. I think I could have made the country fly-free. Alas!”

Musca wiped away a manly tear. “That night I was visited. I don’t really know how to explain it better. I woke to find Him next to my bed. He shook his pedipalps and unfurled His proboscis, and cleaned His compound eyes with His forelegs. Then he took my precious fly paper and …uh…”

Musca made a slightly painful motion, as though it hurt him to sit. “Never mind that. Anyway, He took the fly paper and – a moment after that He was gone.

“And the next morning I stopped the research, of course.”

“Of course,” agreed Nebulo. “And this Him you refer to, it would be…?”

“Beelzebub,” said Musca, whispering and nervously watching the fly, which was now sitting on his hand. “Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies.”
 
  

Copyright B Purkayastha 2009

Sex Story

“...the females of this species,” continued the Explorer, “have a sexual opening between their nether extremities, what they call ‘legs’. The males, on the other hand, have a proboscis situated in the same position. When they wish to have sexual relations, the male inserts this proboscis into the female’s sexual opening and releases –“

The armour-plated skin of the Overlord’s face shifted in disgust. “Is this really necessary?” he asked.

“This method,” the Explorer went on remorselessly, “though common to almost all of the planet’s higher animal life, has reached its nadir, as we would say, in this dominant species. It’s transcended the original purpose of reproduction and become an end in itself.” He shuddered formally in order to convey his revulsion at what he was about to say. “They indulge in it...for pleasure.”

“That’s disgusting!” The Overlord’s First Mate, swollen with child, shuddered in her turn, not as a formality but because she was genuinely distressed at the thought. “Aren’t they ashamed of it?”

“No,” said the Explorer apologetically. “But some of them don’t even tell their young juveniles about it – they make up stories about avians with long keratinous facial proboscises leaving the juveniles, or even more fantastic tales; but among the adults they’ve made an entire industry out of it. Several industries, as it happens, catering to a multitude of their utterly depraved tastes. For instance, some of these females make a living by allowing males to insert their proboscises into their sexual openings in return for units of the prevailing medium of exchange. Sometimes this activity is recorded on audiovisual media for the entertainment of others of the species.”

“Horrible!” exclaimed the First Mate.

Fascinated despite himself, the Overlord leaned forward over his opulent table. “How do these creatures reproduce anyway?” he asked. “What is the mechanism?”

“I scarcely presume to tell of it,” the Explorer replied, with an apologetic flip of his upper tail in the direction of the First Mate. “But once the male inserts his proboscis into the female’s sexual opening, he deposits his sex cells inside, and these may fuse with the female’s cells to produce the offspring. The female nourishes the offspring to term by means of a shared blood supply, and when the offspring have reached term, she expels it or them – there is usually only one – through the sexual opening.”

“That’s all she does?” asked the First Mate incredulously. “She just pushes it out when she’s done?” She shuddered, her skin plates clattering with the force of her emotion. “How can the maternal instinct be so lacking?” she asked the world, plaintively.

“She does secrete a white fluid from milk glands on her upper body,” the Explorer said, “and this nourishes her offspring for a while. And then she does provide a limited amount of care. But nothing to the sacrifices our ladies make, of course.”

“I should think not!” snapped the First Mate. “Oh, how sweet is the pain I await when my litter begins gnawing me alive from the inside! What rapturous agony as they eat me to a hollow shell and break out at last, leaving of me nothing but an empty husk, yet active and independent as I can make them! What can these horrible creatures of yours know in comparison to that bliss?”

“I take it,” the Overlord said, “that these creatures do not produce offspring each time they indulge their perverted sexual tastes?”

“No,” the Explorer said. “They use various barriers and chemicals to prevent that happening, of course. Sometimes they even remove developing offspring from the female’s body before term, in order to spare her the joys of motherhood. You can scarcely expect better of such creatures.”

Moaning, the First Mate covered her ear apertures and swayed from side to side, displaying her absolute refusal to listen any further.

“I’ve heard enough.” The Overlord arose and took up his ceremonial Greatsword from the rack behind his head. He clanged an alarm, and a menial poked its genderless head through the window. “Ask my Despots to meet me at once and send word to prepare the war fleet for launching to orbit,” he told it. The menial disappeared.

“You’re about to attack that planet?” asked the Explorer disinterestedly. “What for? It’s only a worthless ball of mud and water. I really only told you the conditions there to entertain you.”

“Such a centre of immorality and evil cannot be allowed to contaminate the galaxy,” said the Overlord. He clapped the explorer on the shoulder. “It’s a Crusade, really, but if you want to be ethical about it then think of it this way: these creatures of yours must be suffering endlessly, with their twisted sexual mores and their lack of all maternal instincts.

“Yes,” he said, happily, “we’ll be doing them a favour by wiping them off the face of the universe!”

Copyright B Purkayastha 2009

Agent 006: Licence To Shill

“My name’s Bomb, James Bomb.” 

Agent 006 leaned forward and looked deeply into the eyes of the lovely woman opposite him. “I’ll have a beer, shaken, not stirred,” he said out of the corner of his handsome mouth to the barman. The barman shook the beer and opened the bottle. The foam shot out and fell all over the lovely woman’s arm. Without looking, Agent 006 took a revolver from a shoulder holster and shot the barman dead.

“That’s for messing up a lovely lady,” he muttered out of the corner of his handsome mouth. “Now, my dear, where should we go, to your place or mine? No, it’s got to be your place. I forgot the dead blonde in my bed...” he thought for a moment. “Sorry, I forgot N’s orders. I have to go and wipe out the Evil World Conquest Organisation before dinner.” 

“Shall I see you again, James?” asked the lovely woman, her eyes wet with frustrated lust.

“Who knows, my dear, who knows...” Agent 006 smiled at her from his rugged, handsome face, and went out to his ultra-modern, gadget-fitted, super-car, leaving her to pay the bill and answer police queries about the dead barman. He swung his toned, athletic body behind the wheel and drove off for the tall white building that housed the corporate headquarters of the Evil World Conquest Organisation.

“Damn,” he thought to himself, as he used his cigarette lighter, the one with the hidden radio capable of communicating with the Secret Moon base, to light a slim cigarette, “I really must remember to renew my product endorsement contracts. I should be getting money from this tobacco company for using its stuff.”

The Bad Guys made an attempt to intercept him on the way, attacking his car with one of their own. But Agent 006’s keen eyes missed nothing. As he pressed a button, a deadly hail of titanium needles flew from the back of his car and impaled ten innocent bystanders and a traffic policeman on a motorcycle. Except for crashing through a wheelbarrow of fruit, the Bad Guys weren’t affected. Agent 006 then pressed another button and his car grew wings and flew through the air, setting off alarms about a possible terrorist attack. Several kilometres away, a trigger-happy fighter pilot on anti-terror patrol promptly fired a missile and shot down an airliner, earning a commendation for alertness and a cool head under pressure.

Meanwhile, Agent 006 arrived at the white building with the logo of the Evil World Conquest Organisation, which, as a cover of course, manufactured condoms, above the door. The armed guards at the entrance looked at 006 but before they could raise their hands to ask him to stop, he had pressed another button and his car released a cloud of gas so fetid that the guards fled, for shelter, into a public toilet. Agent 006 jumped out of the car and strode into the building, looking as handsome as he could for the benefit of the security cameras. He saw a beautiful woman walking along the lobby and gravitated to her at once.

“You’re the personal secretary of the Chairman of the Evil World Conquest Organisation, aren’t you?” he asked her, with his most charming smile. “Let’s save time and go to bed at once, and after that you can show me the Chairman’s personal Evil Time Machine which he uses to capture and imprison top weapons scientists and forces them to create warped and twisted condoms for his nefarious ends.”

“Let’s go then,” said the secretary, completely won over, and led him into a plush bedroom with flowers on the bedside table. She began taking off her clothes, and, as Agent 006 turned his back for a moment to loosen his tie, she took a gun from her suspenders and shoved it into the small of his back. “Hands up,” she said.

After she had tied Agent 006 to a secret nuclear device that looked exactly like a drinks refrigerator in the corner, so tightly that even he couldn’t move, she went to the internal phone to call the bosses of the Evil World Conquest Organisation and inform them of the capture.

“Wait a moment!” called Agent 006, confused and worried. “How did you ever resist my charms? No woman can ever resist me. It’s a natural law!”

“Oh,” she grinned, clicking on the timer for the nuclear device. “That’s simple. Your law just never made allowances for a lesbian, that’s all.” 

Copyright B Purkayastha 2009

Hangover

“Give me a Blood Mary,” said the warlock, burying his face in his hands.

“Careful,” I warned, reaching out just in time to stop his conical hat toppling off onto the bar. “You ought to have left it at the door,” I told him, pointing. “There is a hat-check girl, after all.”

“Who ever heard of a warlock without a hat?” he grumbled. “Who ever heard of a bald warlock at that?” He lifted his hat long enough to show me an expanse of mottled scalp partly covered with a few wispy strands of hair. “Who’s ever going to take a warlock seriously if he can’t even grow himself a head of hair!”

“Well,” I asked, reasonably enough I thought, as I reached up for a glass, “why don’t you?”

“You think it’s that easy? Besides, what use is hair? Takes up time to comb and shampoo and keep trimmed, doesn’t it?” He glared at me. “Where’s my Blood Mary?”

I measured out the vodka. “What blood do you want?” I asked. “The usual?”

“Yes, of course.” He watched me mix in the hippogriff blood, using a wing bone of a wyvern as a swizzle stick, snatched it out of my hand and downed it in one deep gulp. “Give me another,” he said.

“Tough day at work?” I asked, automatically. In my job, you understand, I have to do a lot of listening. For some reason a lot of otherwise intelligent people seem to think a bartender is a part time psychiatrist or confessor or something. So I have to at least pretend to be interested. Over the years I’ve learned to look interested even as I daydreamed about my girlfriend or planned my shopping. But sometimes I listened, because there might be something worth listening to. Besides, my girlfriend had decided a bartender wasn’t her dream man after all and left me. “Something went wrong, did it?”

“Did it ever,” he said morosely. He sipped at the second Blood Mary. “These things taste terrible,” he said.

“Then why do you drink them?” I shrugged. Over on the other side of the room, two vampires were passionately locking lips, their fangs ripping the hell out of each other’s mouths. Dark red blood was trickling down their pale skins. Well, so long as they were harming nobody else, what they did to each other was their lookout.

“Because I want to.” That was a good answer, I supposed. The vampires realised they were drawing everyone’s attention, and stopped mauling each other. The female began to daintily mop her partner’s blood away with a napkin. A tall ogre came ambling over and demanded a keg of ale. I muscled it over the counter, took his gold and watched him suck down the entire keg in one long draught.

“You were saying?” I asked, turning back to the warlock. He had been mumbling something. “Something about a demon, wasn’t it?”

“The next time I try to raise one,” he said, “you might as well take my hat and cloak of stars away and give me a strait-jacket.” He tossed off the last of the second Blood Mary. “I’ll have another,” he informed me, “and go easy on the blood.”

“It must have been bad,” I said, “if you need three Blood Marys.”

“Three?” he screeched, loud enough so even the shambling mummy in the corner turned to look. “Three hundred wouldn’t be enough, you hear me? Or three thousand!”

“All right,” I said soothingly. “Calm down a bit and tell me more.”


I don’t think (said the warlock, sipping at his third Blood Mary) you ever wondered about Summoning a demon? No, of course you haven’t. Only the greatest warlocks ever give any thought to the matter, and only the greatest of the greatest – someone like me, for instance – would even begin to plan out a Summoning. It isn’t easy.

First, of course, you have to decide which demon to Summon. It’s a very, very difficult exercise even to bring over a little imp, so if you’re going to go to all that trouble you might as well bring over a demon who’s worth the effort – someone who can do something for you. Get me?

So I consulted all my books of spells, my grimoires and of course the great Atlas of Hell, which is, of course, bound in human skin and written in human blood. And – step by step – I narrowed down my search until I chose which Demon to summon. It was no small demon, no imp from one of the lesser circles. I had decided on a Demon worth my while indeed; a demon of demons, so to speak. Yes, I, the greatest warlock of all, decided to bring over the greatest demon I could.

It was Beelzebub. You know what he’s like? Or maybe you don’t. It doesn’t matter. He’s the second greatest of them all in Hell, that’s all you need to remember. Beelzebub, the Demon King.

I tell you I had a hard time getting together the things I needed to get him over. A full year I spent just in getting the nail parings of a dragon, and three months more to get a phoenix’ ashes. I almost gave up when it came to the grated unicorn horn, and were it not for a young female friend of mine – well, I digress. Finally, I had it all together, and I prepared everything for the Summoning.

You remember the storm last night? I was there in my tower, feeling the storm make it sway, so strong the wind was, and the rain – I believe even the nightwalkers stayed in their caverns. But I didn’t mind the storm. It provided – you know – the setting.

I won’t bore you with the rituals. They wouldn’t mean a thing to you anyway, my drink-slinging friend. Just let me say that precisely at midnight, when I poured three measured drops of the essence of vile canker into the indestructible crucible of molten gold – I’ll tell you about that crucible some day, how I got it and how I tried to break it – anyway, by that time I had already been at work for five hours without a break. And then I uttered the words of the Summoning.

“Beelzebub,” I called at last, “King of Demons, come out!”

I had not known precisely what to expect, so I stood well back from the pentagram on the floor where he was supposed to make his entrance. I waited to see him appear, with his three great horns and seven eyes, and his bat wings and needle teeth. I waited in vain.

What instead happened was a hole opened in the air and something came through, snuffling. Imagine an old, old snake, its head as thin as a spike, and its scales ragged and dull. Now give that snake wet, leathery-looking wings, folded along its back, and a tail ending in a blunt triangle, and you’ll have a fair idea of what it looked like. Standing on two stunted legs, the thing wasn’t even up to my waist.

“Beelzebub,” I said in astonishment, “is that you?”

“Beelzebub’s on holiday,” the thing said in a whining voice. “I never get a holiday, but he does. All I do is wait on him through eternity while he goes off gallivanting among the seas of Europa – and what do you want?”

“Who are you?” I asked, still amazed.

“Beelzebub’s secretary. At least that’s what he calls me, but I’m more like his personal servant. Now what do you want? Why did you bring me here?”

I tell you that my senses were in such a whirl that I could scarcely remember why I had wanted to summon a demon in the first place. All I could do was blab something about enhancing my powers. I think I demanded the powers of Hell to be added to mine. And at that the creature laughed aloud.

“Powers indeed. If I had powers to give, would I have wasted my eternity as Beelzebub’s factotum?” It flapped its wings slightly, and my Magic Dust was blown right out of its packets all over the floor. A hundred years of Magic Dust just thrown away! “Maybe you want the keys to Satan’s executive washroom too?” Still laughing, it shimmered and vanished. And after it went, I found it had stolen all my gryphon feathers as well. Why? Who knows?

And that’s how it ended, a lifetime’s effort to summon a demon.  I tell you, I’d rather be in a strait jacket than go through that again.


The warlock put down his fourth Blood Mary and, sighing, turned to go. I was watching the werewolf at the far end of the bar, who had reached an advanced stage of intoxication and was liable to begin something if I wasn’t careful, so the warlock had almost made the door when I realised something.

“Hey,” I called, “you haven’t paid me for that.”

He looked over his shoulder at me with his reddened watery eyes. “Money,” he said bitterly, and sent a gold coin floating through the air. “That’s all you lot think about. And here I am with my life’s work shattered.”

And with a sigh of utter drunken melancholy, he tottered into the night.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2010