One man - determined to save...
G Raghuveera Rao is a man of principles and honour. A man of integrity and valour. A man now desperate enough to make a deal with the Devil himself, if that is what it takes to save his son.
One favour - destroy to s...
Dawn was a strange time, straddling night and day, as though time was unsure whether to let go of the darkness or embrace the light. It was a philosophical thought if one wanted to be charitable, maybe he was being stupid. Nature and space had no such compulsions or emotions, the sun rotated in its place and Earth rotated and revolved around the sun. It was mere physics, not metaphysics; and he had no use for either of them.
He stepped out of the car and leaned against the side, looking towards the temple. Situated on the outskirts of Hyderabad, on a small hillock, it was an old one and its carved central spire stood tall against the dim sky. In the growing light, he could make out the silhouettes of his family; his wife and parents. Who were currently engaged in yet another mind-boggling, logic-defying act, hoping to appease the Gods or at least one of the thirty-three million of them in the Hindu pantheon. This time, the ritual consisted of washing each step of the temple stairs with water and then anointing it with turmeric and vermilion. A little over a hundred stairs.
They hoped for a miracle. He thought it was an exercise in futility.
He saw his mother, who at sixty-eight, still had strength but was now bent with grief. And then there was his wife, forty-two years old who had aged by over ten years in the past few months. He watched his father, seventy years old, struggling with the bucket of water he carried. Despite that, he held himself tall and straight, one could retire from the army, but the military left its mark on its soldiers.
His sigh misted in the cold morning, he had lost track of the places they had visited and the rituals that had been performed. He believed in God, though it was more an expression of expected behaviour, rather than explicit faith. And he rarely took part in those worship rituals, stating that such senseless acts would not beseech the divinities to grant their wishes. A conviction that hardened with each passing day. He always argued that God, whom they believed to be an omnipresent, omnipotent being, did not exist. Now he questioned if his refusal to display his faith had invited God's wrath. But then if God was omniscient too, he would know about each creature's faith and disbeliefs, so why was he blind to his wife's devotions? Maybe he was dispassionate and did not care about his creations and creatures, why else would evil and misery be abounding in the world?
But this was not the time for those arguments either, he thought as he strode towards the temple, he would help them if only because he was not going to allow his father to trudge up and down those stairs carrying buckets of water. He might not believe in the appease-the-Gods-rituals, but he would help his family.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Three hours later, they were done; wet, hungry and exhausted. All that they could do was hope it would be enough, that somehow, some God would consider washing temple stairs as adequate reparation and grant their wish. He held his wife as she struggled to walk the short distance to the car, while behind him his parents helped each other. 'It was not fair,' he wanted to scream, 'there was no reason why they had to suffer this way.'
