[This is just a ‘gaf gaaf’. Some mindless, pointless, random ‘gaf gaaf’ that is not supposed to serve any rational purpose. The only good thing about this piece is … well it is short.]
AN EVENING WITH GOD
I was home alone. Paula Zahn was on vacation. Kiran Chetry was substituting. The field reporter (the name skips my mind), brandishing the lowest form of exploitative journalism, was brazenly chronicling the Lindsey Lohan Misdemeanors.
My wife, who clears up the coffee table every morning, had put the Dish remote control in her favorite place: on top of the television. Since it was already after 8 PM, my pledged allegiance to ‘Man Convention’ charter forbade me from getting up from the sofa. I had no alternative but to watch, since the sofa faced TV.
Dulled by the sticky sameness of CNN, whilst my eyes feigned to bear the less-than-pseudo-news network, my mind was minding my own collective stresses. My negativity churned my stomach. I felt barely one solution away from 10 new worries.
I feel least alone when I am by myself. My worries gang me up when they find me unaccompanied. My wife was not around to distract me: “Baap re, did you see Sitaula’s new house in Binita’s email? It’s humongous.”
I have not seen Sitaula’s new house yet, but I assume ‘humongous’ is bigger than ‘huge’. It has three more consonants, and an extra 500 dollars worth of ‘Wheel of Fortune’ vowels.
Dead-ended in a blue funk cul-de-sac, as I futilely struggled a Houdini escape from my self-inflicted melancholic thoughts, I heard the doorbell ring. When I opened the door, a self-assured man authoritatively walked inside.
“May I help you?” Intrigued by his intrusion, I wondered aloud—as if his answer would mean a favor.
“I am god,” he whispered casually. His soft, lush voice felt like a wave with a jingle of verse singing me an admission lullaby. In his careless whisper, the intruder sounded a lot like George Michael, minus that annoying chorus of Andrew Ridgeley.
There was no sun-cross halo or a third eye, no blue throat or a crescent moon, no long earlobes or four arms, and no conch shell or a lotus flower—the man who claimed he was god, glazed no tokens of a mythic incarnation. He looked nothing like Ganesh, Buddha, or Morgan Freeman. The only similarity with Jesus was his beard—and with Moses, well, he stank exactly like a man who had walked for 40 years in the desert.
“But, Jesus is not god. He is my son.” The trespasser corrected me.
Oh my, oh my, he had read my thoughts faster than Intel’s Core 2 Quad processor. I believed him instantly. He spared me the time I would have wasted harboring suspicion. He was god indeed.
I turned the TV off and begged him to sit on my couch. He chose the loveseat. “The name makes it more comfortable than a sofa,” he said, folding his legs. I haven’t seen Sitaula’s loveseat yet, but I wished I had Sitaula’s loveseat—I bet his would be more comfortable for god.
My mind started spinning with a pang of guilt when I realized I was not prepared for god’s visit. Because, first of all, I swear to god I am an atheist. Second, I was not ready with the list of what I wanted from god.
One long stare and I was certain that god looked nothing like what I would have imagined him to be if I believed in god. He was five feet seven inches tall, filthy-looking man who had yanked his creased oak khaki pants up to his belly button. A Dockers’ palm-green shirt was tucked in his pants the same way I cram zucchinis inside my potato bag in a Korean grocery store. A sweat patch under his armpit gave the panoramic feel of a full moon surrounded by dusk cloud.
God looked exactly like how we feel at Tribhuvan Airport when our mother tell us, “Arko patak ali chaadai aaija hai.”
“To what do I owe your presence, my lord?” My duteous salutation to god amused me. I was not aware I had that in me.
“Those bastard priests turn the AC off when they leave the temple. It got so hot in the temple I decided to take a walk.” God replied.
But he is god, I thought, he should be able to change the weather to suit him.
“With this global warning, I have no control anymore,” god conceded, “I had it all planned, but that fatso, I don’t know how he lost Florida.” He had read my thoughts anew.
“Lord, if you don’t mind me asking … why did you choose my house?”
“I saw you were lonely and stressed out. I thought I’d give you a company. I wanted to surprise you; I know you don’t believe in me.”
“No lord, it’s not that black and white. I’m a little cynical about everything.”
When he heard my defense, god smiled, “Who do you think made you cynical? You are a product. I manufactured you.”
“Just a product?”
God nodded, before he reached to his pocket and pulled a piece of chip in which my product name, serial and model numbers were engraved. My entire identity, the three categories combined, was only 11 digits long.
“This is what you guys call DNA,” god smirked, “Not that complex, is it? Every person is an 11-digit product. It will be another 167 years before someone figures this out.”
Then, to prove his point, he showed me a piece of paper with a sample question from the 12th grade final exam from the future high school class of 2179 AD. The following was written in the paper:
Final Exam—12th Grade
June 24, 2179
Barack Obama High School, Jackson, Mississippi
Course: Genetic Biology
Question # 1: Clone the person seated next to you and make him sing: “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away.”
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As evening grew late, god opened up to me, gripping my senses without letting me resolve my recurring stimuli. He knew everything. He knew of every future advent, every invention, births, deaths, and all the future dates.
I heard some good future news: Prachanda will eventually die. I also heard some bad future news: Republic of Nepal will one day have a 15-Rupee postal stamp with a picture of Prachanda. Then I heard some sad future news: That 15-Rupee postal stamp will be the only stamp available to Nepali citizens. So, every time a citizen will need to send a letter or a parcel, he or she would have to use the tongue to moisten Prachanda.
As I got to know him better, I learned god is quite down-to-earth. I also learned, in heaven, ‘down-to-earth’ is considered a derogatory phrase (that implies ‘as bad as humans’). They use ‘up-to-heaven’ instead. So … As I got to know him better, I learned god is quite up-to-heaven.
What's more, he was a million times funnier than his religion groupies, who preach abstinence and hate. When I gave him a compliment on his sense of humor, he shot back, “If I did not have a sense of humor, why would I make Badminton the most popular sport in Indonesia?”
And other times he was plain modest. He answered my query about heaven with, “Oh, it’s nothing like Vegas, dude.”
We talked politics, economics, wines, movies, music, Internet, and Nepal, among many other topics. I learned god earnestly worries about Nepal. So much so, he was interested to hear my take on the intellectuals of Nepal on Nepal.
“I don’t read them anymore,” I confessed, “These intellectuals always talk about the solutions; I don’t even understand the problems.”
“You don’t think CK Lal knows the solutions?” I had infuriated god. It seems god, like all godly Nepali people, is quite fond of Nepali Times.
I kept silent. How dare I? I don’t know Nepali politics enough even to argue with god, let alone a Nepali Times intellect.
So I deliberately changed the topic to Intelligent Design. What a gaffe that turned out to be. Our conversation turned outright ugly when I mentioned Darwin. God totally lost it when he heard the word ‘evolution’. In what looked like mimicking of Tom Cruise, he started hopping on my loveseat, doing a contemporary adaptation of ‘Tandav Nritya’ with modern rage.
“Here’s my survival of the fittest,” god grabbed his private parts and screamed like an angry hip-hop artist, struggling to rhyme a tail-stanza to ‘The real slim shady’.
I gave him a couple of seconds to calm himself down. Once again, I needed to switch the topic. I am not a well-informed person; I was running out of topics.
The only issue I could think quickly was gay marriage. God turned somewhat serious when we talked about male homosexuality. “When I designed that orifice, it never crossed my mind that it would be used for other purposes,” he reflected, “But if some have found a loophole to their happiness, who am I to judge?”
Even if he looked old fashioned, on the gay issue, god sure sounded more liberal than Ted Kennedy. He admitted that it was a design bug, but showed no curiosity in fixing it. God, as it turns out, is not as moral as social republicans.
God was honest. He seemed a little annoyed with religious leaders who rendered their own genus of Dharma and Karma. There is a quotation of Confucius on my wall that reads: “Forget injuries, never forget kindness.”
When god read that quote, he gnashed his teeth. “Listen to that Chink … ‘forget injuries’, he says. How irresponsible is that?”
“Why is that irresponsible, lord?” I asked.
“That quote delayed the invention of Tetanus vaccine by hundreds of years.” God shook his head.
When I tried to steer the conversation towards the spirit world and afterlife, god did not look that interested. “That’s my cubicle job that I do everyday,” he said, “Let’s talk about something that I don’t have to write on my status report.”
“Lord, can you critique my writing?” I had found an opening. I was dying to ask him that question since he set foot in my house.
God asked me to scoot over so that he could read this piece on my laptop. He read the entire piece in god’s speed, which took him about 12 seconds. When he finished, he looked disappointed. He said, “Don’t quit your day job.”
“That bad?” I almost cried.
God was brutally honest. “I have read pamphlets on diarrhea that are more interesting than this.”
“How can I improve, lord?”
“I never visited your house. We never talked. This meeting never took place. You know I don’t even exist,” he explained, “This piece is a work of fiction. When you write a fiction like this, you have to have a protagonist and at least one antagonist. Personally, I prefer a female antagonist; they are interesting. Where is your female antagonist?”
“But lord, this is not a story. This is just a ‘gaf gaaf’. Some mindless, pointless, random ‘gaf gaaf’ that is not supposed to serve any rational purpose.”
I felt a soft tap on my shoulder. “It’s inexcusable that you are nodding off at my house warming,” Sitaula complained. I have never understood why Sitaula does not do something about that sweat patch under his armpit.
Kiran Chetry looked humongous on Sitaula’s humongous television set that occupied only a tiny portion of his humongous basement.
When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me that god lives in a big house. She did not tell me that house could give me a minor anxiety attack.
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**YAWN**
