Ammaiyar (um-my-or) Paatti always thought she was one of a kind. The people of her town, Dharmapuram, thought so too. But, they also thought she was the most ‘unkind’. To them, she was the very summary of meanness and wickedness. If you expect them to be proved false at the end of this story, you are wrong. She was all that and more! And, she never changed. Perhaps, she would have – but she died a just day too young. At 112 years.
Her sparsely attended funeral did not spark the usual debate on whether the departed soul would go to Heaven or Hell. The wise men and women of the town knew what she deserved and where she would go. And that place definitely was not Heaven.
Ammaiyar Paatti’s idea of Hell, during all her discerning 100 odd years, was that of a huge burning kiln or a cauldron full of boiling oil. She was prepared for that. “That could not be worse than the Dharmapuram summer!” she used to tell herself whenever she heard someone curse her. So, in a way, she wasn’t prepared for Hell.
It turned out to be a monstrous and unfathomable pit. Imagine a blend of the smell of a hundred tons of rotten flesh, a bombarded chemical lab and the nastiest stench you have ever come across. Then, multiply it a thousand times with a stink hundred times stronger. That’s how smelly the pit was. If you wonder why, you’ll feel good to know that the Hell-pit itself was only representative of the ego-pits it contained. “And how many of them were there?” Impossible as it maybe, at first sight, Ammaiyar Paatti thought there were more than the number of those who could ever have died.
Then, during her timeless stay in the pit, she came to know a lot about her fellow pit-mates. Among them, a former leader of a Superpower who bombed a third-world nation to win his elections, a Home Minister who gave the go ahead to burn a train full of fanatics to mobilize his party’s vote bank and a Hispanic war-criminal. They all hated the smelly pit like they hated honesty and integrity. Like most of them, she too was ready to give anything to get out of it – but, sadly, there was nothing to give. For once, there was nothing for them to take either! (That is, apart from the stink and the filth.)
And, suddenly it happened. I can’t say if it was day or night, for it is tough to differentiate them in the hell-pit. Two white formless forms from Heaven flew down the pit with an announcement; an announcement that ensured that every throat in the pit had a lump and every eye, some light.
This was the reason: The messengers from Heaven would select some of them by random, and ask them about any good deeds that they may have done during their living years. “Those who can come up with a single good thing that Heaven could verify in its register,” the messengers said, “would be taken to Heaven!” But they didn’t say it was more of a measure to make heavenly existence (or non-existence) more interesting, than one to reduce the crowd in Hell. After all, isn’t the place supposed to be crowded?
What followed was the worst ever stampede. Though none of the pit-mates could die again, they all felt the pain of the last moments of their lifetimes. In the mad rush, somehow Ammaiyar Paatti managed to get the attention of the messengers. But, a few others put up a better show and came before her.
The first of them was a politician. His claim that he had once donated a lot of money to a starving family was found to be a bribe to a government official, and he was promptly sent back. Then came the famous Godman who insisted that he had sent many a good soul to Heaven. This ended a bit farcically, as many of his disciples who were in Hell booed him down. After countless tall claims by the pit-mates and their unfeeling rejections by the messengers came Ammaiyar Paati’s turn.
Now, she was thankful to those who managed to beat her in the race to be heard. For, she had enough time to think and remember her only good deed. “Once, a long time ago, I gave a hungry beggar a rotten banana,” she said proudly and for everybody to hear. Yes, she had really done so – though more out of irritation than out of pity.
After crosschecking with the register, the first messenger said, “We shall go by what you have done. You shall go by what you have done”. And, by a swish of what seemed like his hand, he made a banana appear. “Hold tight and you won’t fall! Just remember that we won’t come down again”, he said, and offered her the banana. Although its smell was subdued by hell’s own fragrance, the blackish brown of one half of its skin guaranteed its age. Undoubtedly, it was rotten. It must’ve been the same banana that the unfortunate witness of Ammaiyar Paatti’s generosity got. Without any reluctance the old woman grabbed the decaying fabrication of nature and got ready to fly out of the smelling pit.
Slowly her legs lifted off the surface on which she had been standing since the day she died, and she started planning her plans for the heavenly abode-to-be. By the time she started thinking about getting back her youth, the former US president had grasped one of her legs and the ambitious Indian politician, another. Journalists, professional killers, rapists and auto-rickshaw drivers followed suit and within a minute they formed a chain of ascending fiends with billions of hands linked to as many legs. Tell them there is no hope in the Hell, they’d laugh!
When they had almost reached the entrance of the endless ravine, the second of the formless messengers looked down. With an apparent smile he said, “Thanks to Ammaiyar Paatti, Heaven is gonna be entertained for years”. Suddenly awakened from her dreams by the mention of her name, Ammaiyaar Paatti too looked down to check out the reason for the utterance.
To say that she was shocked would be an understatement beyond comparison. “Is not the banana mine? Whom do these baboons think they are cheating”, she thought and yanked her legs. Alas! That one last mean act on her part effectively negated the legacy of the rotten banana! The jerk of her legs broke the rotten banana into two perfect halves, with the blackish brown rotten side in her possession, and kicked off the greatest fall of humankind – dead or alive. Like a bunch of grapes they fell back into the hateful pit to rot and smell.
In Heaven, we all had a live telecast of the whole event and even today its repeats get the highest TRP!
