(2 Months ago)

K thinks I dislike all religions. That isn’t true. I’m actually quite fond of some of them.

See, religions are nothing but an evolutionary trick to ensure the survival of the species. Without it, humans would have wiped each other out a long time ago. They were always too short-sighted, too violent and too given to acting out of emotion.

Someone once said, “You could never convince a monkey  to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas in monkey heaven.” That’s a pretty astute observation. Religion kept the lunatics in check. Over time, these religions became more and more complicated. Today, it’s a vestigial organ, like your appendix – useful for nothing except the occasional painful inflammation.

Gods just want to be worshipped. They don’t want to be co-opted into your wars, or constantly needled for favours, or blamed for your screwups.

If you happen to be one of the “smart Gods”. you leverage your influence to increase the size of your worshipper base. Peaceful methods don’t give quick results, so yes, bloodshed is preferred. It’s why you cultivate a few rabid idiots in every religion.

If you are even smarter, you diversify. Spread your followers all over the globe so they don’t get wiped out by a war or a plague, leaving behind nothing more than a bad memory. That’s the reason so many of you were moved out of the Steppes in the first place – though don’t blame us for the “Aryan superiority BS” – that’s all a human invention.

But the genius Gods? They don’t bother with logistics. They invent religions, each one a Venus flytrap for human devotion. One venerates virgins, another dangles them in the afterlife. One blesses booze, another bans it. One bans religious icons and pictures of God, the other conveniently drops the Middle Eastern roots and pictures them like a white hippie with lustrous golden hair.

On the surface, they’re oil and water, sparking wars as followers slaughter each other over whose fairy tale is the truest. Yet every prayer – screamed by zealots, whispered by sinners, sobbed by the dying – funnels back to one entity. That’s not just your usual run-of-the-mill clever; that’s fiendish, diabolical poetry in motion.

Which brings me to the angel I was here to meet, standing on a bridge, preaching peace while his bosses schemed. Gods and their games – the tune never changes, only the puppets dangling at the end of the string.

— The Private Journals of Akran

The Atal Setu bridge was one of a kind. It had been built to so much hope and fanfare right before the recent elections and started showing signs of decay right after the results. In many ways, it was an accurate representation of the past decade of government rule – flashy inauguration, structural defects and a concerning tendency to crumble under pressure.

Micah stood in the middle of the bridge, arms held politely behind his back. He was dressed, like always, in a trench coat. Over the centuries, every time we met, he had always maintained the same look. Dark-haired, clean-shaven, impeccably dressed, lithe physique. He nodded amicably as I stepped closer.

“The peace of the lord be with you always, Akran.”

“And also with you,” I said automatically. I had known him a long time. We had an easy, familiar relationship of mutual trust and respect – like Sisyphus and his lesser-known twin, each pushing our own boulder up separate hills, nodding to each other in passing as the rocks rolled back down.

“You are looking a little sleep deprived,” he said, polite concern on his face.

I was actually finally getting some decent sleep. But it felt like it was never enough. I had a couple of thousand years of sleepless nights to shake off.

None of this, of course, was going to be of interest to Micah. He would listen and make sympathetic noises at all the right places. If I needed that, I would just get myself a dog.

“Aren’t you a little far from home?”

He smiled. “Isn’t the whole world our home?”

From any other archangel, a statement like this would get me bristling. Not because of the truth of his words, but because they made such statements with smug condescension, as if to imply that it was but the natural order of things. Micah never did that; he always had this bemused, tempered way of speaking that somehow didn’t rile me up.

Besides, he wasn’t wrong. The cult of the one God used to generate much amusement each time it materialised, for all other religions at the time were polytheistic. It failed many times, over and over, before it finally took root in a beleaguered tribe of slaves in Egypt when a tired and hungry man encountered a burning bush in the desert.

It began to catch on again when, a few centuries later, another man fasting for forty days in the desert encountered the devil and refused to be tempted. That tiny sect became the default religion of the Roman Empire and spread across half the civilised world.

And it expanded again when a merchant fleeing across the desert between Mecca and Medina encountered an angel who spoke to him in God’s own language. He became the founder of a third monotheistic religion that spread its roots across much of Asia and Africa.

Three gigantic, civilisation-defining religions that turned polytheism on its head.

Nobody was laughing anymore.

Surely, there was nothing common about them besides monotheism, geographical proximity, burning deserts and each of its founders being close to starvation at the time, was there?

Well, maybe there was one more detail that might be relevant. It’s so insignificant, really, that I hesitate to even mention it.

This thousand-square-mile area that served as the birthplace of these three religions is populated with a bunch of plants unique to arid climates. Like the acacia tree and the Peganum harmala shrub. What’s special about those plants, you ask? For one thing, and this may be a coincidence, both these plants contain psychoactive compounds that, when ingested, can cause hallucinations. Like say … a burning bush?

A devil that tempts you?

An angel that suggests that you are special?

What are the odds? Really?

All of this ran through my mind as I listened to him.

I smiled to show Micah that I had not taken offence.

Excerpted with permission from Shadows Revealed: Book 2 of Celestial Chronicles, Rohan Monteiro, IF/Westland.

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