Sentilong Ozukum
The old man limped across the aisle as if in slow motion, his body tilting impossibly to his left every time he planted his left foot on the cemented floor. As usual eyebrows were raised, necks turned. Upon reaching the third pew of the church, he rested his right palm on the edge of the wooden pew and gently pushed himself into the bench with great athletic skill. The old woman seated next to him shifted in her seat muttering something under her breath. You couldn’t blame her. If you had been sitting in the church, you’d have thought that he had stepped into the wrong place for he resembled a homeless bum more than a devotee of God. His shirt was patched in three different places and most of the buttons too had fallen off exposing his hairy chest. His trousers cut from thick cotton cloth had never seen the blade of a hot iron and were wrinkled at wicked angles. And if you’d look down, you’d notice that the straps of the right foot of his sandals had broken loose and were tied with the help of an elastic rope. There was dirt underneath his thin fingernails and his heels were cracked in more than a couple of places like lines running along a map. He was certainly out of place. He had been for the past many years.
He cracked his knuckles gently, cleared his throat and looked around. For a moment he wondered if his weary eyes were playing a cruel trick upon his mind. The church was unusually packed. People often didn’t turn up for the Wednesday evening services. Some evenings it would be only him, the full time workers and some women folks. He remembered those days in the past when people were eager to worship the Lord and the sanctuary would be full every evening. Those days were gone and he wasn’t sure he would live long enough to witness another revival in the land. Nowadays, people seemed to get busier each day and they just didn’t have the time to visit the church during the weekdays. But for him, he didn’t miss any of the services. Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday-he was there. If somebody had kept a record of the attendance of the church members, his name would have been on the top of the list year after year. The harsh summer rains didn’t stop him. Neither did the occasional pain in his chest which once in a while kept him away from his daily work at the printing press. Church was to him what calcium was to his bones.
He bowed down his head in a solemn prayer and when it was done, he lifted his head towards the pulpit to see if there was any reason for the sudden increase in the attendance. A balding old man dressed in a blue shirt and a sharp tie was seated at the pulpit instead of the pastor. He knew that man. He was the travelling missionary who often visited the church with his message of God’s everlasting love. The old man took out his Bible from his gunny bag and placed it gently on his lap though he never opened it. Not at least inside the church. Like most of the folks of his time, he was illiterate. People often mocked him for carrying a Bible when he couldn’t even spell his name. But that didn’t bother him much. People had their own rights to express their opinions about him and he too had the same rights to ignore them. It also didn’t bother him that he was illiterate since he knew most of the verses in his mind though sometimes he wished he could read a line or two. However, in the privacy of his den, he often flipped through the pages of the holy book, his eyes poring over the countless letters that appeared like a marching army of ants to his untrained eyes. On the first day of every month he kept aside a sum of one hundred and fifty rupees in a small envelope for his tithe. That was the day he received his meagre wage of one thousand and five hundred rupees from the printing press where he worked. Though the sum was small, it was enough to support his life. His expenditure was minimal. The small mud house where he lived cost him only rupees four hundred per month and together with his food, he never spent more than a thousand rupees a month. He even had a bank account to his name where he occasionally deposited a certain sum.
Nobody knew with certainty about his past. Some people said that he used to be in the military decades ago until they dismissed him because he went a little crazy in his head and tried to kill his commanding officer. But there were other people who refused to believe that he was a defence personal. “How can a man of his physical stature ever be recruited in the army?” they asked. Instead they said that he used to be a truck driver earning a decent living until one stormy day, the wheels started to possess a mind of their own. It was just another ordinary day in his driving calendar – another bend in the road, another right steer. But the wheels continued rolling straight ahead. He steered to the right again but the wheels never altered their path. He slammed on the brakes but it was too late. The giant vehicle roared off the road into a trench some fifty metres below killing both the labourers who were travelling at the back of the truck. He escaped death with a head injury which robbed him of his sanity. Children in the town, however, were told a different story. It is difficult to tell or to even trace the source of the story but every kid in the town was convinced that the old man lost his sanity because he tried to memorise the whole of Webster’s dictionary when he was in college. No matter how the stories ran, they all had the same plot at the end. Children ran away on seeing him in the street. Mothers silenced the cries of children by making them believe that the mad man would come if they didn’t stop crying. People considered it a bad omen to cross paths with him early in the morning. He had no social life. He paid the rent and other house bills on time. He was the most diligent worker at the printing press where he was assigned to carry, cut or organise bundles of papers. His neighbours didn’t have a complaint against him. He had no grievances against anyone. He had no record of crimes. You could as well say that he was the ideal citizen of the state.
More people filled in and the service got underway. A prayer, some announcements, and a congregational hymn. Then after a brief introduction, the missionary opened his Bible and started expounding the word of God. Everybody lurked forward. His main theme for the evening- Tuning in to hear God’s voice.
“God speaks to us every day but we have become too deaf to hear his voice,” he shouted over the microphone and everybody nodded in agreement.
“We have been blinded by our wealth, crippled by our pride and paralysed by our sinful desires.”
“God in his everlasting power can use anything anytime to get our attention…If only we could shut off our senses to the world and tune in to listen to the voice of the divine.”
Citing Biblical passages he went on to explain how God spoke through a donkey to the prophet Balaam while in the case of Moses it was a burning bush which caught his attention. An encounter with a whale made Jonah to turn his direction while it took some scribbling on a wall to rob Nebuchadnezzar of his sleep. Surely God did work in His own mysterious ways.
People nodded in agreement every time he made a point. Some scribbled notes, other underlined Biblical passages. The old man, on the other hand, sat motionless enthralled by the atmosphere inside the church. At that moment, it was like the good old days. He wondered if this could be the beginning of another revival. People were thirsty. He began to pray for a miracle.
At the end of the sermon, the preacher summoned everyone to stand on their feet with their eyes closed and join him in a few minutes of solemn meditation.
This, he intoned, was an exercise of shutting off the senses from the world to hear the voice of God. The whole congregation stood up, eyes closed, heads bowed.
“I can feel the presence of God’s spirit,” the seasoned preacher declared over the microphone. “Tonight, God will speak to each one of us. Tonight, we will hear the voice of God. Let’s shut off our senses to the filth of this world and tune in to the voice of God.”
There was an eerie silence all around.
Then, out of the blue, a thunderous voice filled the church.
“I’m the Lord, your God and I’ve something important to say to you tonight.”
Confused and shocked, the whole congregation stood frozen for a few seconds. Nobody had any idea what was happening.
“I’m not happy with the way money is handled in this church,” the voice continued. “I’m not happy with your offerings and your outward appearances. My house has been turned into a den of wickedness and deceit.”
The voice didn’t sound heavenly.
It was the missionary who first opened his eyes to see what kind of a trick was being played upon him. The pastor too opened his eyes followed by the deacons and then the whole congregation. Nobody believed what they saw. People gasped. There was a commotion.
The mad man in ragged clothes was standing on the bench, his eyes closed, his hands lifted in the air.
“Repent before it is too late,” he continued his divine chanting.
The pastor, completely humiliated at this point, stormed out of the pulpit and gripped the old man by his collar throwing him onto the floor. The deacons leaped from their respective seats and stood encircling the fallen man. People held their breath. There was confusion everywhere.
The old man stood up peacefully and opened his eyes as if he was being awakened from a beautiful dream.
“This is the voice of the God you worship,” he continued his mission. “How long will you hide from your sins. How long?”
He never completed the sentence. Unable to bear such blasphemy, somebody from the congregation leaped forward and kicked the self-appointed prophet in his groin. The old mad gasped for air and then collapsed on the floor. Some women started to scream. There was utter pandemonium inside the church. Surrounded by the pastor and the deacons, the old man was lifted off the ground and carried out of the church, amidst shouts of anger and condemnation.
