Somoshree Palit
“Who was Prometheus?”
“The titan who brought fire? The one who was tied to a rock, his liver was eaten by eagles-“
“Who was his son?”
“He had children?”
“Deucalion.”
“Oh.”
“Know what he did?”
“What?”
“He was like the Biblical Noah. He started the new age of mankind after the Flood. Made an ark. Same purpose.”
“Interesting.”
“Who was Pyrrha?”
“Spare me.”
“Deucalion’s wife.”
“So they built the Hellenic world as we know it.”
“Precisely. Now tell me, who remembers his name?”
The room was softly warm, half with the light of the fireplace, half with the moonlight.
“You do.”
“I don’t matter in the greater equation of things.” Nova smiled easily, twirling a pen between her fingers. She used to say her professor in college taught her that.
“Your words mattered a lot today.”
“The words of Mark Antony. Not mine.”
“You did him well.”
The theatre had throbbed with the passion in Nova’s voice – “But Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honourable man.”
In the firelight, she arched her brow, a curious glance in her eyes. “What was wrong in Caesar’s ambition?”
“That he wasn’t ambitious?”
“What if he was?”
“Antony’s speech would be redundant.”
“But what if he was ambitious?” Nova repeated. “What is so wrong about that?”
I shifted in my place. “You see, ambition brings about downfall. People who were ambitious, throughout history, all of them had a downfall.”
The night was calm, pristine even. The church choir rehearsed delightfully for Christmas, faraway. Bits of snow absorbed pieces of music, kissing the churchyard gravestones like the anima of phantom lovers.
“Ghenghis Khan. Alexander. Napoleon. Hitler. You name them. They died-“
“People die all the time.”
“Not like they did.”
“Exactly.” Nova smiled, her wandering eyes fixed finally on the bust of David. “People die. Just not like they did.”
She crouched forward. “They were their own martyrs and gods. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“To be your own martyr and god?”
“Imagine being beholden to no divinity but oneself.”
“That – is what I call ambition. It’s a trapdoor. What can you do, becomes what will you do, becomes good Lord, what have you done.”
I quite liked this young researcher. If you would have seen her, you would know. She was not of a tall stature. She used to say she has been this height since twelve. Gross exaggeration. But her eyes, her eyes were otherworldly. One could not look straight into her eyes. They looked like pools of ink that could devour anything. Anything.
“There was someone that I knew.” Nova gazed fixedly on the figure of David, turning her face towards her left, so that she almost resembled the statuette. “Someone I used to be quite fond of.”
I bent forward in my chair to listen to her. She was one of them, the ones to whom you would listen to. Ardently.
“Aren’t you fond of them now?”
“What can I say? He messed up pretty badly.” Nova traced the cover of the Book of Ethics, smiling sadly. “It was a summer night,” and then she began.
“You wouldn’t call him a scientist, and yet he was one of the most ardent worshippers of science to have ever traced the planet. We were in highschool, and I was quite fond of figurines. I still am.”
“I smell a highschool summer love.”
“Far from it. To love is to become human. He wanted to become God.”
“God is love, I presume.”
Nova shook her head in frustration. “Presumptions. Presumptions. All presumptions. When do we get rid of this!” she sighed. “But I digress. It so happened that one day, we had an assignment to complete. Your aim in life. Basic highschool homework.”
“He wrote the impossible, I presume?” I teased.
“Quit presuming.” Nova gave a half-smile. “That word disgusts me.”
“That’s a harsh word.”
“Anyway”, she continued, “He said he would create life, the same way I create art. He said, when he grew up, and had a laboratory of his own, he would set up a chamber, a small new world of his.
‘I visited him a couple of years ago, before I landed up here, seas across my home. He had already built his chamber by then. Dim-lit, white scrapped wallpapers hanging loosely on the walls. Rust and moss covered bits and patches of the floor. There was a smell in that room – how shall I say? The kind of smell that comes off the ground after the first showers of May. That kind. He followed me within this chamber, nervous, almost shy. Or… should I say anxious? He had never quite been the one to be shy.”
“Like you?”
Nova looked startled. Then her gaze broke into a smirk. “There aren’t many like me.”
“I know.”
“You should be glad. There was a large puddle in that room. Or chamber, whatever you may like to call it. A large puddle of clear blue water. I felt like I wanted to jump into that, like a child at play. I almost did, and then I dared not.
Scattered all across the place were tiny humans, you see, the kind we saw in Gulliver’s Travels. You don’t believe me, do you? Yes, yes I didn’t believe myself. My own eyes. No no don’t start. I’ll explain.
He said, ‘Remember what I told you? Remember? I remember, you liked figurines.” He was so very happy, like a child who had just built his doll house. ‘I can talk to them all. Individually.’ He called out a name. A human sprawling on the floor looked up, shivered, wept in bewilderment, and then… froze. Froze, as if all life had been drawn out of it. Froze, and fell. I wondered if that’s what happens to people who claim to see Gods. They don’t live for long.
‘Aren’t they pretty?’ He giggled, clapping his hands.
‘How… How did you…?’
‘You mean, how did I make them?’ He tilted his head a little to the side, ‘Ask me how I did it.’
‘I am.’
‘You see, there are several accounts of creation all over the world. In the Rig Veda, “Purusha”, an emanation of the figure of God, is sacrificed by them to create human beings. The Purusha is the divine radiance of God and can at least in some sense be understood as the individuation of consciousness, the personal aspect of God. There… there was a hymn, where did it go now…” He tapped his forehead thrice, as if expecting a being to rise out of it.
“Can’t find it now. Forget that. So, three-quarters of Purusha remained “high-rise”, and only “one-quarter was reborn here.” Manu, the son of the first being, performed a very difficult penance, Tapas, they call it, and created ten great sages, after which he created seven more Manus, the ancestors of mankind in each age. He cloned himself, or so he says. The Chinese have much in common with the Hindu Purusha in the story of Pangu, the first human being.
Both the Mayans and the ancient Babylonians taught that the gods created humans to honor them. “I will create a barbarian. ‘Man’ will be his name,” Marduk exclaimed in Enuma Elish. “May he be entrusted with the service of the gods, may the gods be at peace! Let’s surrender the lower gods. Only one – Do you follow me? Yes? Yes. Only one perishes in order for humanity to be formed.
The Bible believes that man was created by God from clay, and in his own image on the sixth day of creation, as recorded in Genesis. The Muslims likewise believe that Allah created the first man in Paradise, Adam. His children are the ancestors of mankind. Persian Zoroastrianism also clings to the creation story of Adam and Eve, where Eve – Please listen to me. Please, I am trying. Please. Yes. In the Shinto doctrine, the Japanese were descended from Izanagi and Izanami and were commanded to “create, stabilize and give birth to this floating land”. The most important of the gods was the sun god Amaterasu, whose child was Jimmu, the first of men, the first emperor.’
I had lost track long ago. He poured his knowledge, vial for vial, and I lost track of space and time. There might have been days, years even, as he went on explaining.
‘Who is God?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Who is God?’ He repeated.
‘I do not believe in him.’
‘But who is he?’
‘More like, what is it?’
‘Any manner you’d like to put it.’
‘Something, something that created everything else. A phenomenon. A thing. That thing is god.’
‘A thing that bore the universe? Isn’t something that created everything likely to be called a god?’
‘God or not, I believe in a source of creation. I believe in a source of energy. Call it god. Call it magic. Call it occult. Call it imagination. Call it fantasy. Call it an explosion. Call it an accident. Call it anything. It’s but a phenomena. Only a thing.’
He paused, lowered his voice. ‘I call it Light.’
‘Care to elaborate?’
‘An emanation of god, the radiance of a god. A sacrifice of a god, dissolving in radiance. Born of a god, a god of radiance. We are related to that one entity. God. And what is God? What is God, Nova?’
He looked at the tiny human forms scuttling across the floor, and laughed. He laughed until tears formed at the corner of his eyes. ‘And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.’
‘You…created men… from light?’
‘You create too, Nova. You create art. You create poetry. Isn’t your muse a spark of light in your brain?’
‘That’s different.’
‘How so?’ He pleaded. ‘How so? Everything we create, everything we make, everything we see, and everything we don’t, it’s light. The most ancient form of energy. First came Light, then came man, then came fire. A singularity, which produced pieces of itself as men, as gods, and then became a clone of itself, and-‘
‘And produced both light and heat.’
‘There!’ There was a relieved smile on his face. He wiped his brow and said again, ‘There.’
With this, he trampled indifferently on a few of his own miniatures, as tiny bits of light escaped from each of them.
‘Such fragile little things.’ He giggled.
‘Can they see it?’
‘What?’
‘That thing. The light.’
‘Oh that. No they can’t. Can we see souls when they escape our dead ones?’
*****
The fire grew softer with every passing minute. Nova still gazed fixedly on the bust of David, her gaze indiscernible. We had fallen quiet, and not said a word since she had finished talking. I broke the silence.
“What was the point?”
“What was the point of what?”
“Of this fable?”
“You think it’s a fable?” Nova turned to look at me, the fireplace shimmering on her black eyes.
“Is it not?”
“I leave it upto your discretion.” A corner of her mouth curled upwards.
“What happened to him?”
“What could have happened to him anyway? He was ambitious. And all ambition marks a downfall.”
“To be honest, considering your whole story is a hypothesis, a justification of your case, I would say, if he had a downfall, he deserved that.”
“Why so?”
“Humans or not, he trampled on the men he created. He laughed while they died. He showed you what dying meant for him. Clapping his hands, like you said. He had no mercy. He deserved a downfall.”
Nova rested backwards on her armchair. “Would you say the same thing of your God?”
The embers fell listlessly beneath the fireplace. There was a deafening silence all around. Faraway, a church choir rehearsed their carols.
“I thought you were an atheist.”
“I am not an atheist because I do not believe in God. I am an atheist because I do not believe that God is good.”
“And yet you know all about religion.”
“Could I help it? I had committed myself to ancient things at a young age.”
“Then why do you not believe in God?”
“How am I to function if I do not believe in myself?”
I smirked. “So you think you are god?”
“I don’t think.”
“Like, in general?”
“Laurels to that burn, but yes that too.” Nova laughed. “I wish I did think before I acted though. I wish I did.”
“Why would you be god?”
“I thought I told you all I knew of that thing.”
“Please?”
Nova considered me for a moment. “If I were willing to destroy evil, and was able, I wouldn’t think twice. And I would definitely not nuke the lizards for featherless apes. I don’t even like apes. It’s not like I adore lizards either. But they are tolerable.”
“So you’d be the Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnibenevolent – the ideal way?”
“I don’t know about the other two, but I’ll go with Omniscience for now.”
“For now?”
“Can’t swear on potential. Definitely not promising on benevolence.”
“You can vow on Religion atleast?”
“Religion either forces you to believe you are a villain, or you are God. If it makes you believe anything in between, you have every right to judge its deficiencies.”
“You’d make an incomplete god.”
“We all are incomplete gods.”
“I smell ambition.”
“I reek of it.” She stood up, walking towards the window. “Tell me why alchemy is a forbidden science. Tell me why something as harmless, and as beautiful and useful as turning iron to gold is something dreaded, forbidden, deadly? Tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“Gods have golden blood. Liquid gold furls and unfurls in their bodies. We have liquid iron scarring our insides. Burning us up until our moments of death.”
Nova picked up the art of Michaelangelo in her palms. “We have dreaded gods. We have craved the knowledge of the gods. We have taken the knowledge of the gods. If we knew how to turn iron to gold, we would become gods.”
I stared at her feet. There was something very overwhelming about her. In several cultures, people touch the feet of the ones they respect. I stared at her toes. It was time.
“And you would still make an incomplete god.” I regretted.
“And a mortal one. When I die, all omniscient narrators would die with me. There would only be unreliable ones thereafter.”
She laughed.
*****
I left the funeral right after. They knew how much I adored this promising researcher, and had asked me to tell them about her. Things only I had known. Things she had trusted only me, me alone, and no one else with. She knew things the world was not yet ready to hear. She had done things the world could not stand to bear.
It was painless. She succumbed in her sleep. An injected airshot on a vein between the toes. They say Air embolism could be fatal. It was. It looked like a disease of the heart.
They suspected nothing.
*****
Epilogue
If you are reading this, it is already too late. As you can see, the details of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I advise you not to pay any heed to that.
They are coming. I have shut the doors of that wretched chamber. They are coming, and all I can do is hide.
You see, it did not pay well to become a god. I am not an atheist because I do not believe in God. I am an atheist because I do not believe in the goodness of God. I have been there. I know.
To indeed be a god… I beg of you, do not, for the love of god, turn the page. Do not turn the page. It is a curse. A curse. To indeed be a god. To indeed –
*****