Skip to main content

Crime: Death without aadhar



Fiction

Mr Varma was about to rest in peace when something arrested his death.  A police officer stood beside his deathbed demanding his aadhar card. 

“You can’t die without the aadhar,” insisted the officer.  “How dare you disobey the rules of the country when we have such an efficient government?”

“I’m sorry,” Mr Varma wheezed. 

“Not having the aadhar is a crime.  You are under arrest.”

The constables moved Mr Varma into the police vehicle which was designed like an ambulance.  The vehicle was a new addition to the police force under the Prime Minister’s Kaanoon Kaaryaanvayan Yojna.

Even before the PMKKY vehicle reached the destination Mr Varma breathed his last.  He was a good citizen, however.  The residents of his Society will vouch for that if you care to ask them.  Like all good citizens, Mr Varma wanted to obey the government.  But he had no choice here. So he just wheezed and died.

“The bugger died,” a constable reported to the officer.

“How dare he?”  The officer fumed.  “How dare he disobey such a powerful and efficient government as ours which has designed clear rules for everything?  Put him under custody.”

The constables looked at each other.  They dared not utter a word.  In the new dispensation nobody questioned the higher authorities.  You just obeyed.  That’s efficiency.  This is a country with a difference.

Mr Varma’s body was shoved into a custody cell.

The constables who were sent to bring the relatives of Mr Varma came back with the information that he had no relatives except a daughter who was now in America with her husband.  She had arranged her father’s cremation with an event manager. 

“Then bring the event manager.  Let him produce the aadhar for his client.”

“The event manager terminated the contract as soon as he got to know that the client did not have the aadhar,” reported the constable.

The officer’s eyes widened.  “Such a patriot!  Who is that man?  Bring him here.  I will recommend him for Bharat Ratna.”

The event manager touched the feet of the constable and begged, “Leave me alone, sirs.  I have a family to look after.”

The constables did not understand the connection between the event manager’s family and Bharat Ratna.  They were only trained to run, shoot, beat up and – unofficially – accept bribes.  Since the official duties of running, shooting or beating up were not applicable here, they demanded what was left.  The event manager took out his purse and the constables grabbed it.  “Okay,” they said giving the empty wallet back.

“File the FIR,” ordered the officer when the constables returned.  “Crime: death without aadhar.”

One of the constables came rushing to say that the corpse had started growing in size.  The officer frowned.  But on the insistence of the constable, Officer went to the cell.  Mr Varma was no more a mere corpse.  He was a growing corpse.  In a country with a difference.

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniAugust 6, 2017 at 10:00 PM

    As was done in 1984, Aadhar has the power to" unperson" a person.

    ReplyDelete
  2. जितेन्द्र माथुरAugust 9, 2017 at 3:55 PM

    Very good satire Sir. Yes, this Aadhar issue is made to cross all sane limits. The system of checks and balances appears to have completely vanished rendering the government an unrestricted power to do anything according to its whims and fancies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 10, 2017 at 8:51 PM

      Glad you came here. I know that you are busy and when you come you go through all my posts. Thank you.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
18 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more

Octavian the Guru

Octavian was one of my students in college. Being a student of English literature, he had reasons to establish a personal rapport with me. It took me months to realise that the rapport was fake. He was playing a role for the sake of Rev Machiavelli . Octavian was about 20 years old and I was nearly double his age. Yet he could deceive me too easily. The plain truth is that anyone can deceive me as easily even today. I haven’t learnt certain basic lessons of life. Sheer inability. Some people are like that. Levin would say that my egomania and the concomitant hubris prevented my learning of the essential lessons of life. That would have been true in those days when Octavian took me for a farcical ride. By the time that ride was over, I had learnt at least one thing: that my ego was pulped. More than 20 years have passed after that and I haven’t still learnt to manage affairs in the world of people. That’s why I admit my sheer inability to learn some fundamental lessons of life. Th
8 comments
Read more