Paradise Lost, in favour of grilled chicken

The day mother boarded an aero plane, she made an important discovery: heaven was not a nice place to be. “How boring would heaven be if that’s the place in the clouds. All white and smoky and still. We would have nothing to do but wear white and go on praising the god, who too would be in white. No colour, no voice. I don’t want to be there,” she told me. Conversion was no way out. Every religion had its paradise built in the sky.

***

Choosing between heaven and hell, the application form would certainly contain a column asking for his/her food preference. Heaven would be a vegan’s paradise. Milk and honey, grapes and pomegranates, and of course, apples that could cause man to lose paradise again. Hell stands in contrast, with grills and barbecues and a few ovens. Despite its Prometheusian origin, fire seems to belong to hell. At least, you could cook your food.

***

The father continued solemnly with his head lowered. “When you talk to the man upstairs,” he said, “I want you to tell Him something for me. Tell Him it ain’t right for people to die when they’re young. I mean it. Tell Him if they got to die at all, they got to die when they’re old. I want you to tell Him that. I don’t think He knows it ain’t right, because He’s supposed to be good and it’s been going on for a long, long time. Okay?”

“And don’t let anybody up there push you around,” the brother advised. “You’ll be just good as anybody else in heaven, even though you are Italian.”

“Dress warm,” said the mother, who seemed to know.

Joseph Heller
Catch 22

When Eve read Manu Smriti

The characters in this description are fictitious. They could have lived anywhere in Renaissance Italy or Inquisition Spain or contemporary Kerala. Resemblance to any person, living or dead or cloistered, is unintentional.

The short priest’s face looked familiar. He belted out commands to the 180 men and women seeking his certificate which would prove them worthy of Christian marriage. “Don’t use your mobile phones for the next three days; don’t read newspapers; don’t talk in the dining hall; don’t talk too much to your partner…” he warned the forcibly assembled flock. Suddenly, it occurred to me. He resembled Napoleon Bonaparte. The general was addressing his prisoners of war.

Marriage Preparation Course, credited to a certain Fr Thomas Thoppil in Kerala at least, is the Catholic Church’s way of getting even with those who bunk Mass. After all, religion comes handy only at birth, wedding and death, when the clergy vengefully enforces their bureaucratic regime on the evading laity. I knew I had no choice but to yawn through the lectures if I had to rise to my family’s expectations. Even my fiancée had vetoed my suggestion of a secular wedding.

So I decided to approach the course journalistically. Instead of admitting that I was wasting three days at the mercy of Fr Bonaparte and Sr Indira Gandhi, I convinced myself that I would resurrect on the third day with a socio-politico-economic analysis of the classes and of course, the certificate. I was more of a Confucian than a Christian when I entered the pastoral centre, which would be my detention centre for the next three days.

From the onset, I realized I was being a bit too prejudiced about the course. I had forgotten the value of marriage. To me it was a socially sanctioned, legally binding pact between a man and a woman to love each other and live together. It was something else too. It was the fifth sacrament, “a visible sign of the invisible grace of god”. No wonder the clergy drew swords when the state government made registration of weddings compulsory to abide by a Supreme Court order. Praise the Lord (thrice)!

Point noted. But the sanctity of marriage had historical roots. A pleasant priest listed out biblical fairy tales to drive home the point. Adam was a good man and Eve was a tempted/tempting wife, who ultimately packed their bags out of the paradise. Abraham was a powerful patriarch and Sara was his nagging wife who got his lover and lovechild exiled to desert. Isaac was a blind father and Rebecca was his cunning wife, who robbed their firstborn of his rights to pay her younger son.

Oh god! These women! I already have second thoughts. I felt endless gratitude towards the mother superior, who tried to keep us men safe from women for three days at least. She proved a worthy commander to Fr Bonaparte when she gave strict gender-specific orders. Men and women were assigned separate stairs, lest the eves teased and tempted the adams. Only after men were led to safety after lunch/dinner, women were allowed in.

So women happily and hungrily waited for their turn at the dining table. The Church was more ‘Indianised’ than its RSS-BJP detractors in this aspect at least. It even quotes from Manu Smriti to remind wannabe brides that they must be a combo of efficient minister and energetic mistress. But confusion remained. Why would the priest ask me on the wedding day to ensure that my wife ate even if I starved? Maybe as a token of acknowledgement to the fair sex, who made up 90 plus percent of the saints of the otherwise male-dominated Catholic Church.

The Pope grants equal status to Sr Alphonsa, a sick nun who rarely left the confines of her convent at Bharananganam, and Mother Teresa, who roamed the streets of Kolkata nursing lepers. If the Mother epitomizes true Christian spirit, the other saint, like St Therese of Lisieux, represents all the paranoia of the institutional Church which can’t come to terms with human body. It eulogises the self-mortification of the blessed women. If Therese persuaded the superiors to admit her in a nunnery before she was 15, Alphonsa disfigured herself to ward off repeated marriage proposals.

For a religion which has been trying to instill a sense of guilt on every child, nothing can be a better virtue than negating the needs of the body. The Church, which extends the good-evil dichotomy to the soul-body debate, goes in endless circles praising Christian virtues, namely suffering, compromising and praying. Can’t blame the Church. It merely echoes the laity’s wishes. When classified ad writers seek/notify “fair, wheatish and god-fearing” girls, the Church exhorts submission to husbands as the supreme goal for any Christian woman, if she doesn’t decide, by any chance, to be the bride of God.

The third evening, Fr Bonaparte appeared again, with a bunch of certificates. The general now tried to sound friendly, having won the three-day battle to save souls. I refused the truce and completed writing the feedback form: “The food was fine and timely. Sleep was perfect. Even my mother wouldn’t have cared me so much. But you should be more adept in enforcing discipline. Why don’t you try jammers to prevent the kids (half of them 30 plus) from using mobiles in the bathrooms. It would come handy like the Alsatian watchdog of the convent.”

But the rest of the congregation was unconcerned. Mothers had come to take home their cleansed sons and daughters. They bowed before Bonaparte for moulding their daughters and daughters-in-law into model Christian wives. Together, these women keep the 2000-year-old faith alive. In return, the Church blames them for all the follies of mankind. Even after the Pope endorsed Charles Darwin, it refers to the true guardians of the multinational faith corporate as the proverbial rib yanked off the first man. It’s a thankless world, indeed.

Three wishes

“Ask for three wishes. It will be granted,” Manju chechi told me as we herded her little sons across the beach to Madre de Deos Church. During my two two-year stints in Thiruvananthapuram, I had never visited the famed pilgrim centre on the outskirts of the city. I regret it now. Vettukad church, as it is known locally, is a picnic spot too. Overlooking the Arabian Sea, the small church seems blessed.

The children are excited by the vastness of the church premises and the presence of sea. When they are tired of chasing each other, they sit on the foyer, narrating improvised stories. One (or all) of Manju chechi’s wishes will be for them. She too is new to this church and every first time in a church, you will be granted three wishes. That’s what we have been told when we were little children.

I have been so fascinated by the opportunity for easy gratification, without effort and without penance, that I drew up three wishes every time I went to a strange church. Almost all sets of wishes concerned the family’s health, my education and some childhood fantasies, which included some miraculous interventions to win over my first crush, a chubby girl who attended catechism with me.

I devised plans to face her, but never executed any of it. In due course I forgot about that wish and found another sweetheart. Most of the other wishes were granted. I never topped the class, but passed out in “flying colours” each year. Ultimately, the three-wishes scheme was forgotten as I bunked masses and classes without guilt and without excitement. But wishes remained, nevertheless.

An accidental visit to the church caught me off guard. I could not pinpoint three wishes. There are no exams to pass, no diseases to cure and no hearts to win. I have almost learned cycling and swimming after praying for it for years. Postal stamps of Papua New Guinea and Dominican Republic no longer needed providence to come by. Even my younger brother has abandoned the stamp albums.

Since an opportunity to realize three wishes could not be wasted, I widened my search as a politically conscious, socially responsible being. Then I realized the fallacy. Religion can only help the personal. In public affairs, faith doesn’t move mountains. What would god think if he got the following wish list: 1) Please make George Bush repent so he dismantles his nuke pile; 2) Please give some wisdom to Bin Laden so he doesn’t mistake ordinary men for nations and annihilate them; 3) Please tell Paul Wolfowitz not to make the Miserables more miserable.

We can’t pray to god to make all men (and women) good. If he could, he would have made them so despite the serpent and the apple. I wish I wasn’t told that war and violence, poverty and famine, greed and selfishness can’t be wished away. Then I would have lots of wishes to feed this make-believe system.