Crime Today News
In the Iranian movie Children of Heaven, a young boy enters a running race to win the third prize, a pair of shoes. He aims to win the shoes for his little sister, who doesn’t have any footwear to wear to school. During practice runs, he consistently finishes ahead of everyone else. However, on race day, he intentionally does not run to come in first; instead, he desperately tries to finish in third place. He keeps looking back during the race and ultimately crosses the finish line, though he falls due to exhaustion. He asks the teacher who helps him up, “I finished third, didn’t I?” The teacher replies, “No, son, you finished first.” The boy cries upon hearing this, feeling like a loser despite being the winner. When he returns home, his little sister eagerly approaches him with hope, but the boy stands before her, his head drooping. The story ends with a reflection that some people, like the young boy, run all their miles for someone else.
I have ample material to fill a whole book, but I will attempt to introduce this person to you in just a few pages. I am talking about a very close friend of mine. To me, he is what today’s youngsters in Kerala refer to as “Chunk Bro”. I anticipate becoming emotional and shedding more tears than the ink flowing from my pen, so I have decided to keep it light.
This is a friend who has been with me for 15 long years – a real friend. Suppose I knock on his door at midnight with a bottle of poison in my hand and tell him that I have made up my mind to die. Instead of getting tense or worried, he would make some black tea for us and just talk to me. I am sure our conversation would open the door to a new life for me. But having said that, I am not taking the “how our friendship flourished and flowered” route that some memoirs take.
Let us take this story instead to a small tea stall at Desom Junction near the Cochin International Airport. Near the modest tea stall, we sit across each other at a sun-faded plastic table, nursing cups of black tea. It’s almost midnight and it has been two weeks since I resigned from my job. While leaving that desirable job with attractive pay and social status, I gave myself numerous reasons to support my decision. Over time, terms such as business targets, profit and loss analysis, customer mapping and sales reports had become detestable to me.
“So why on earth did you do an MBA?” Please don’t ask me that question!
Back then, a big slice of the human race seemed to be doing an MBA, so I simply followed suit. Opting for Commerce in Class 12 exams took me to BCom and, as a natural progression, BCom took me to an MBA; that is how it went. After that, I worked for four years, although I can’t say I enjoyed it very much. Now and then, I considered putting down my papers. By the way, “putting down one’s papers” is an informal English slang for resigning from one’s job. The phrase can be further shortened to simply “put paper”. So, for all these years, whenever I wanted to “put paper”, I was stopped by the emotional blackmail from my Appan and Amma.
But every time I contemplated resignation, I would ring this friend up.
“Da, I am done. I am going to put papers,” I would declare.
“Da, please don’t rush into any decisions. How about we try for one more month? Just try working with more involvement. You might get back on track… Who knows? Should you give up a job that pays you so well? Furthermore, any other job would likely have similar problems.” His answer was always along similar lines.
But then, when I called him up for the fifth time and announced that I would “put paper”, he reacted differently.
“Were you a paper boy or something in your past life, you idiot? Your life is becoming all about putting paper! Okay, enough. Go ahead and resign. We’ll handle the rest as it comes. No reason to stay is a good reason to go. Now, you don’t need to overthink or discuss this with anyone. We will figure it out on the go.”
Without wasting a second, I went straight to shoot an email to my boss, and I resigned! At first, it felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my chest. My parents were excited about spending the holidays with my brother in Australia, so telling them the news that I had resigned from my job was difficult.
For the first two nights, I was able to sleep peacefully. But then it began to get me. Sleepless nights then ensued, accompanied by some of God’s honest truths. Inside my head, one question raised its head, then another, followed by another and another… They wouldn’t cease. Have you accepted that you won’t receive monthly income in your account anymore? Do you understand that money will soon stop coming from the ATM when you swipe your card? Has it hit you that you’ll need to be more cautious when purchasing things online, like books, headphones, or anything else, really? At upcoming family events, you’ll have to admit that you are unemployed. Jobless!
You might ask yourself, What job can I take now? Will the new job provide the same security and status as my previous one?
With a heavy heart, I wondered why I hadn’t considered these concerns before sending in my resignation.
By the end of the next week, I was almost becoming an insomniac. That’s when I called him and asked if we could meet. And that’s how we arrived here: At a tea stall in Desom Junction, nursing cups of black tea. We sat there, determined to fix my future.
“Josappe, I’ve known you for many years now. You used to pray often, maintain a close relationship with God, repent even for minor mistakes and seek one confession after the other. However, as time went on, you began reading a lot and growing through your reading. This led to a change in your views. Ideas like work being the only form of prayer started to influence your perspective. Sins that you once confessed with teary eyes are now being overlooked as ‘natural’ and ‘human’, I don’t know how much of what I am saying you will agree with or accept, but we must retrieve that old version of you. I am not trying to say that all the troubles and tensions you are going through are happening because you pray less. But there are things beyond what we can ever fathom. There is someone, somewhere, designing roads and deciding directions for us. You should always nurture your relationship with Him. You need to recover a few traits you lost in your journey. At least for a short period of time, keep your logic aside and start visiting the church once again. Confess like you used to. Consciously, walk away from your present way of life for some time.”
Despite being known for providing practical solutions, his suggestions that day didn’t directly address the crisis I was facing. It was the first time he had suggested something that seemed so unrelated to the problem at hand. When it feels like even your shadow has abandoned you and you don’t know where to turn, when courage has long left your port, God sails towards you to salvage your situation. That day, God reached out to me through his words.
Excerpted with permission from Not All Angels Fly…You Could Be One, Joseph Annamkutty Jose, translated from the Malayalam by Hrishikesh Mundani, HarperCollins India
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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