Sukh Ram’s Nightmare

Sukh Ram, involving ‘comfort’ and ‘Lord Ram’ in his name, is not feeling as comfortable as he should given his otherwise fine-going life. He has been bitten by the bug of insecurity; a psychologically exaggerated thing possibly. But every person’s haunts are as real as anyone else. One just cannot put these into the dustbin without reflecting over them. 

Sukh Ram wants to stay happy, feel safe and operate freely in a far better world than the present one. Of the many scaring bits of facts that stop this world from being a better one, the wrong interpretations of Islam just stab him like a poor kafir, slaying his peace, robbing him of his right to believe that we have indeed made some progress in the 21^st century. He just cannot sit comfortably in the confines of his living room and watch the horrible scenes of massacres perpetrated by the blinded souls of extremist Islamists. Massacres of innocent students, beastly cut-downs on women’s already almost nonexistent freedom, live slayings of media men like they are just chicken, pumping poison in soft childhood to make them killing machines in future: the images are killing. It’s just not possible to believe that he is safe in this world, wherever on earth he is and whatever religion he is following. 

More to keep himself safe, and a bit less to help the humanity, he wants a better world by helping his Muslim brothers to redefine themselves in the ways parallel to the world involving blending of cultures and openness to beliefs and lifestyles. More than anything, it will save non-Muslims like him from the hair-raising problems at many levels in the future.

With his scared guts and his pants almost wet with cowardliness, he wishes these secular theorists to be gagged for some time and allow some real practical talk and do some reality check. He is praying for those who can find ways to gradually melt paranoid apprehension in the Muslim minds regarding anything non-Muslim, be it dress, places of worship, mode of prayer, food, relationships and what not!

He can even give a significant portion of his earnings to anybody who can ensure that the next generation of Muslims is more tolerant of those beyond the Muslim walls having their own distinct ways of life. He will embrace anybody who can tell the educated next generation of Muslims that touching a Hindu temple’s walls from outside does not mean they have lost their Muslimhood. As a Hindu he feels very lenient in what he accommodates regarding the multiple realities linked to inter-religious strains. He hardly has any qualms about entering and even offering prayers in darghas and mosques. But he has a doubt whether his best effort to take a single Muslim into the shrine of his faith will meet some success. Guys, again he cribs with a wounded judgement that Muslims from childhood are conditioned to take any such bravado into others’ shrines as blasphemous. With burning heart and sad spirit he recalls an ultra-modern, educated Muslim colleague of his in the corporate who used to openly throw Tuesday prashada into the dustbin. Well it was just a simple ritual by God-abiding Hindu employees to collect money on Tuesday and distribute prashada on the floor. ‘If the educated lot behaves that way, imagine the situation in crammed slum-type Muslim neighbourhoods!’ the ‘Ram’ portion of his name gets jittery.

The ‘Sukh’ portion of his name wants Islam has to be fundamentally redefined to inculcate mercy at its core philosophy like other world religions. A lady colleague of Sukh Ram still gets palpitations when she recalls an incident from her childhood in an African country. Her father had taken her to visit his Muslim friend’s house. All went well till she saw the host’s small kid catching a mouse and scooping out its eyes with playful relish. The proud father just looked droolingly. Highly educated and unbelievably soft, she still gets disturbed and says, ‘The fundamental philosophy is to kill the softer side in the young ones to make them less tolerant, less humane, aggressive and merciless so as to annihilate the kafirs and non-believers.’ Sukh Ram’s 7-year-old son softly mollycoddles a baby doll and serves her eatables hoping that she will grow to be his wife sometime in future. Sukh Ram shudders; takes his eyes away from his son. He has seen the documentaries portraying the consequences of this fundamental Islamic approach in war-torn and strife-lorn Islamic states where kid jehadis commit heinous crimes against humanity with the ease of performing something holy.

He wants to look far into a prosperous future, but how can he do that if he has millions around him who are looking back and crying all sorts of distractions. ‘They get antagonistic to me. My crime: I look ahead while they look back. By sticking to the rigid medieval line, my Muslims brothers think that they are surrounded by enemies like me and they have to stay and act like a pack of wolves to ward off the danger,’ he feels a painful stab in his heart. It’s evening time and the melodious azaan call blares from a minaret in ‘that’ section of the city. It draws him apprehensively to the crammed, unhygienic, slumish Muslim neighbourhood where the age-old lifestyles had been forced to stay alive in semi dark behind closed walls overlooking narrow streets. He wants them to open up; to come into the multi-religious playground and enjoy the fun the current age has to offer. He does not want this as a pious being. He does it as a scared person; scared because the volcanic eruptions from the suppressed neighbourhoods might erupt to cover his poor head with soot and ash. He counts the names of those well-to-do Muslims who can afford to shift to better social environment but still prefer to stay in narrow confines. In fact there had been a reverse trend. Upper class Muslim families had shifted to congested predominantly Muslim colonies from the earlier secular kafir-infested locations having better facilities. He becomes more insecure because it does not augur well for a cosmopolitan society. It does not augur well for him either.

He wants to have happy, safe, smiling Muslim families in his neighbourhood. He wants them to be normal people around him just like any other religioner. Following the azaan call, he spreads his palms to beg some favour. ‘The governments world over please contrive, devise direct and indirect, covert and overt ways and means to break this fear psychosis in Muslim minds to draw them out of the wolfish packs behind closed walls and redistribute and relocate them as prosperous neighbours of tolerant culture involving people of different religions,’ he finds himself praying to the governments world over instead of 320 million Hindu Gods and Goddesses and the sole supreme entity, the Almighty.

Now he pins all his hopes on the Governments and their institutions to bring about subtle fundamental changes in the ways Islamists lead their lives so that at least the next generation of Muslims would not look stealthily, apprehensively over the Islamic walls and peer at the world outside including him as an alien entity. If this is not done, he gets goosebumps at this realisation, the world inside Muslim neighbourhoods and outside will become so different that it will have sky and earth differentials. ‘Such differentials never allow stability,’ he bangs his rolled up newspaper on a flea that is distracting him and now resting on the table. He misses the aim, ‘How I wish there were many modern maulvis who keep the Koran and computer together!’