Chapter Six:
The Mysterious Temple of a Blue God
Mag B was born into a poor fishing family in Kerala, India. His father Archak went fishing in the deep sea every morning and returned home late in the afternoon. His mother Tiru was a house wife, diligently looking after the entire household. She had a very sweet musical voice. She would often sing devotional songs in the local vernacular to please her chosen deity in solitude. But she almost always lived with the feeling of being well under a curse. A brahman--after feeling immensely insulted by her father--had cursed Tiru in her girlhood by swaying his index finger that everything would end up spoilt in her life at all times and that she would die following an evil experience.
The time I'm talking about was before Kutti's birth. Well, I should have mentioned earlier Kutti or Kutti Prabhu was the real name of our highly acclaimed magician Mag B. As I was saying, Tiru would very often lead a life of great fear and anxiety before Kutti's birth. Then there happened something supernatural to her.
One night, only a month prior to her maternity, she went to bed as usual. Suddenly, in the dead of night, she heard some mysterious sound coming from outside. At first, she didn't take it seriously--she thought it might have been some eccentric dog yelping in the nearby field, but when she clearly heard somebody calling her by name, she stood up from bed and opened the door only to let out a piercing shriek and fall on the ground unconscious. Her husband awoke at once and attended her with great care. But she took a whole day to regain partial consciousness and just managed to whimper in a trance, 'What will happen to my child? A ball of bright blue light entered my body through my mouth as I gaped at it. O Tirupati, save my babe.' After that, she couldn't speak any more in her life that lasted another month until Kutti's birth.
Following Tiru's sad demise, her husband Archak had to marry again in order to bring up his newborn son . Not even six months had passed since then that Archak's fishing boat capsized in the sea mysteriously. And there was nobody to rescue the drowing boatman. The shocking news left Kutti's stepmother dumbfounded for a month. Following this, she could of course speak like before but soon started feeling intense hatred towards Kutti, considering him to be exceptionally ill-starred. Inspite of it, she didn't neglect her duty as a mother. Embroidery had always been her hobby; now that became her livelihood.
When Kutti was 6-7 years old, his stepmother got him admitted to the local primary school. But within a few years after that, he 'commendably' earned a bad name from all sides by doing multifarious illicit jobs in the locality. On top, people began to say, 'Kutti is an evil clairvoyant--all his curses come true; he doesn't do good to anybody. He's devoid of good wishes for other people, actually.'
Complaint after complaint drove his stepmother crazy and led her to tactfully forsake him in a distant forlorn place one afternoon while he was asleep on medication--as pre-planned by her.
There was a tumbledown temple in that area. When Kutti woke up, it caught his attention straight. Evening was just round the corner. The summer sky was also threatening. Kutti the clever boy, realising what had happened to him in reality, started to consider whether he should go inside the temple for a mere shelter for the impending night. It was a large wooded plot of land with the ramshackle building in the middle. Nobody knew when and who had worshipped in the temple. Rumour had it that the whole desolate place was a cursed territory that had stood as an unsolved mystery from remote antiquity. 'Who knows what fate holds in store for me,' mumbled Kutti. Just at the moment, a miaow was heard from behind. Alarmed, as he turned around, he was taken aback to see something for the first time in life--there was a cute blue cat mischievously making a grimace of fun. Amused a bit, he asked, 'Where do you live, Pilli?' 'Miaow! I'm Nilli [literally, the blue one],' spoke the cat before hurriedly running into the temple. Astonished, Kutti said to himself, 'I've never seen a blue cat and never heard a cat speak like humans. Anyway, I will enter the building--come what may. What else can be done? In addition, I'm feeling more and more curious about the unknown contents of it. Why should I give up hope? They say fortune favours the brave.' So thinking, Kutti walked boldly towards the enigmatic interior.
As soon as he stepped on the veranda, it started raining cats and dogs, accompanied by the crashes of thunder and the flashes of lightning. The remaining sunlight of the day got dimmed by the heavy downpour. Kutti walked further into the temple. The door of the inner shrine was being vaguely seen to be shut; the prayer hall visible in front was fairly spacious with eight decorative pillars on its three sides from the marbled floor to the concrete roof. But most of them were dilapidated.
Kutti thought to himself, 'It's already so dark in here. How would I be able to spend the night?' In no time was there a massive thunderbolt illuminating and reverberating the whole palatial temple. And with that, there was an unbelievably dramatic change in all the scene. To his utter surprise, Kutti saw: scores of high-powered electric bulbs were switched on at the same time; scores of odd-looking pujaries clad in blue robes were performing rituals by ceremoniously chanting queer mantras in front of a luminous blue-marble statue of some unfamiliar god; and hundreds of devotees dressed in indigo were praying with their hands joined together all around the gorgeous prayer hall; and there were no signs of rain or anything outside. Completely overwhelmed, Kutti fell prostrate before the deity and closed his eyes to offer his regards. Oh crumbs! The moment he got up and opened his eyes, there was virtually nothing--it was all dark again, with the violent din of the raging thunderstorm from outside. Everything was as before. There was only a minute's brief interlude of sheer wizardry, which sent him trembling in fear and gave him unusual goosebumps that lasted for quite a while until he fell to the floor again--this time in a dead faint.
O dear readers! Can you possibly find any direct correlation between some distinct interesting things already mentioned in this coruscating life story? From the mystery surrounding Kutti's birth to the magic scene in the temple? Please think well and hard. They're not very difficult to detect.