Over A Cup of Coffee

“If triangles invented a God, they would make him three-sided.”

-Montesque

There was a sudden surge of pure white light and suddenly, everything went black. A crisp, clear whisper resonated, “Time to wake up.”  44 year-old Parth Sahay woke up with a start, sweating profusely. He reached out instinctively towards his left hand side to switch off his alarm clock, as was his ritual every morning. But as he tried to feel the time-piece with his hand, he was taken aback by its absence. As his vision gradually slid into focus after a few eye-rubs, he noticed that it was not morning as yet. Another fact that stuck him as abnormal was that his room was perfectly neat and tidied up. In fact even his bedside stool, which usually lay occupied with thick novels and bundles of loose paper, was exceptionally clean and empty.  As he jumped off his bed, hundreds of questions inflated inside him. What exactly had made him wake up in the dead of the night? What made him feel so tense? Had he experienced a nightmare? All he could remember was a violent blast of white light after which he found himself awake. And then there was always the uncanny cleanliness about his room which he had never bothered to maintain. A part of himself told him that he was still in some kind of a dream, and he should go back to his bed and forget it. But something inside him urged him to stay awake. After about a two-second thought, he decided in the favor of the latter. What harm would there be in having a glass of water before dozing off again?  He stood up, wore his slippers and left the room. As he crossed the drawing room to reach for the refrigerator, he froze with fear. There, on his dining-table, sat a middle-aged man, smiling at him in a know-all sort of manner. For a second, Parth was petrified with shock and bewilderment. Then, as he came back to his senses, he realised that he had seen the man somewhere, but could not recognize who he was. This thought calmed him down a bit. “I was beginning to get anxious about you. Have a seat,” said the man as he motioned towards the chair. His face still bore that slight smile. He was holding a cup of coffee in his hand, and another cup was kept on the table, beside a kettle full of coffee. He wore a formal white-shirt layered with a black coat.   “Wh-who are you?” stammered Parth, “and what are you doing here?” “Well…let’s say, my name is Yash Thapar. But that’s not the point. Firstly, would you like some coffee?” asked the man. Perplexed at being asked such a trivial question when he deserved some substantial answers, he merely gave a grunt that was more of a ‘no’ than a ‘yes’. Thapar ignored him and poured the contents of the kettle into the cup, and offered it to Parth to drink. He took it with trembling hands, and sipped at the coffee, which immediately relieved and calmed him down.  “So, what makes you come here in the middle of the night? A nice little chat?” he asked with a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “That’s what it is, I want to talk to you,” said the man. “Go on…” Parth said. “Well, for starters, you are dead,” declared the man in a cold voice.  Parth laughed at the absurdity of the statement, but when he saw that the man did not return the favor, he stopped it. “What do you mean by that, old man?” he asked in growing panic. “I mean just what I said: you are dead!” The man said simply. “Wou-would you care to elaborate that statement?” Parth asked him in a low voice, this time being even more anxious.  “Well, it means that you have ceased to exist, if that’s what you want to hear!” He smirked as he said so. Parth kept staring at the man in disbelief, as if waiting for an explanation. Then, almost telepathically, the man said, “Listen to me. I am not going to waste my breath persuading you to believe that you are dead. I can just make you understand. What is the last thing you remember before waking up here?” “That’s what I’m trying to--” Parth stopped midway through his answer, because he had a sudden realization of what he had been dreaming about. Strings of visions rushed before his eyes, curtaining him temporarily of sight.  He saw himself sitting leisurely in the back-seat of his Audi A6, giving orders to his driver. The car rushed past the glittering night-lights at 140 kilometers an hour. At a traffic crossing, he urged his driver to drive past the crossing before the lights turned red. The driver obliged, and pushed the accelerator to its full extent. Out of the blue, a car came from his side of the road at an equally high speed. It came straight towards his car, its head-lights emitting blinding white light. The car came within inches of his car, with him gaping at it helplessly. There was a sudden surge of pure white light and suddenly, everything went black. He came out of the vision as abruptly as he had entered it. The look on his face was of horror and utmost disbelief. He could not come to terms of his own death. What kind of gamble was that? “Now you understand,” the man said, bursting his bubble of thought. “Or do you?” For a few moments, Parth could only gasp and pant. After that period, he shouted, “This is nonsense! You are a madman!” The man, as always, kept on smiling. “You can believe what you want to believe, I can only show you the way…” he said as he sipped his coffee. “To hell with you and your goddamn theory! And eve—even if you are right in all this by any chance, where do you fit in?” “Now we’re getting somewhere…What I’m going to tell you now might be another shocker for you, but I am God.” This was too much for him and this time Parth gave a full-fledged laugh. It wasn’t the effect that “God” might have expected, but still he kept a straight face, patiently waiting for the outburst to subside. After the laugh had died out completely, the man said, “Again, I won’t waste my time to make you realize what’s true. I’m here to do my job, and I don’t have all day. Let’s get down to business.” He reached into his coat’s inner pocket and took out two folded sheets of paper, stapled carelessly to each other. He handed the parchment to Parth, who accepted it with trembling hands. He opened it along the creases and started reading it. The text, in a highly stylized font, read: “I address you, human, as the controller of your destiny, your environs, your thoughts and your emotions. It is hereby informed to you that you are officially dead (as of 12th June 2009). Attached to this paper is a list of all the deeds you have ever committed in your life after attaining the age of eighteen years, a sort of bio-data of yourself. On behalf of these deeds, you would be adjudged by me, on the basis of which you would be segregated into either Heaven, or Hell. Signed: God” Parth read and re-read it many times before he looked up. Looking at the scarred old man set his mind ticking. What sort of crazy scheme was this? This man, calling himself God, comes to him announcing that he is dead! The thing seemed ridiculous, but something told him it was not all false. For the second time that night, the old man interrupted his train of thought by snatching the paper out of his grasp. “I suppose you have read it by now,” he said, “and that should have been enough to convince you that you are dead. Now let’s save both of us time, and start your allotment process.” “What allotment?” asked Parth, in an unusually calm voice. “Your allotment into either heaven or hell.” He explained. This time, Parth did not retaliate, since he was surely convinced that he was in a nightmare. He repeated that thought again and again in his mind, but somehow he could not feel at ease. The man turned to the attached sheet and started reading it in a transformed official voice, “Name: Parth Sahay. Occupation: Author. Age (at time of death): 44 years. List of deeds from the age of adulthood is as follows: 1.    Bullying junior: Negative 2.    Cheating in exam: Negative 3.    Studying intently: Positive 4.    Slapping sibling…” And so he went on and on, never for once looking up at Parth. Parth just kept on listening raptly to him, and as he did so, long-forgotten memories came back to him, which formed a huge lump in his throat. He revisited his college days, and then gradually the time he spent with his parents, which finally made way for his married life. Memories that had been, till now, lying neglected at a far corner of his brain, confronted him as if they had happened only yesterday. Thapar shrewdly went through all of the list continuously and without pause, never for once realizing its importance for Parth.  When finally, after about 45 minutes, Thapar stopped reading the text, Parth saw himself crying his heart out. He finally realized that there was so much more he could have done in his lifetime except worrying about his job or earning money. He had taken the small things in life too much for granted, and he had realized this fact after his life had ended. “Calm down son, I know how you feel,” Thapar said in a soothing voice, handing him his coffee.  He instinctively gulped the coffee and felt warmth spread all over his body. This sudden relief bough him back once again to his usual self, and he jerked-off his tears and felt much better. “What now?” he asked in a rejuvenated voice, “Where do I belong? Heaven or hell?” Somehow, he had passed over the fact that he was dead, and was quite much at peace with himself.  “Well, you’ve got 11034 negatives, and, let me see…about 11030 positives.” He announced with an air of finality in his voice. He waited for any response from Parth, which he did not get. Then, after two minutes of vacuum between the both of them, he spoke, “Well, under normal circumstances I would have given you hell, but since you have been widely acclaimed to be one of the greatest thinkers of our age, and have contributed to society in every way possible, I might have to make an exception…” He again went into deep thought. “Very well then, congrats!” he said suddenly, emerging from his trance. “You are the few of those who belong to heaven!” He held out his fist for a formal shake-hand. All this while, Parth had had his face dug deep inside his hands. He was thinking and forming up his own theory to all the happenings of that night. He suddenly looked up, and his previously sullen look was replaced by feverish excitement, which almost made him look insane. “You, my friend, are not God, You just can’t be!” he declared sonorously.  “Come on now, don’t start again…”said the man irritably. “You see, this time I am neither joking, nor am I acting on impulse, and I am even not expressing any irony, I am very clear and rational this time. And I don’t think you’re god, that’s impossible…”he declared confidently. The man opened his mouth in protest, but stopped before speaking anything. For the first time that night, he had a look of dreaded astonishment on his face. For a few seconds he just gazed at Parth with an expression of utmost disbelief on his face, which made his facial scars even more prominent. It was half a minute later that he spoke, stammering as he did. “We-well, how did you know?”  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. However, you do owe me a hell lot of answers. So, who are you, if not God?” He asked. The man still looked at him with horror. He looked as if he was handpicking the right words for his answer. “Well, I don’t know how,” he said slowly, “but you have just found out what you weren’t supposed to. In fact, no living being, let alone human being, has ever questioned me the way you have. You have attained the level of realization not meant for human beings to attain. You know--” The rest of his words were drowned away because of Parth’s interruption. “Cut out the sensationalist jargon,” he snapped, “and answer my question.” “Ok.” He said as he shifted around uncomfortably in his chair, “what do you think happens to a particular individual when he dies?” “I don’t know. I have never given it any thought,” he replied. “Oh, really? Just pretend that you didn’t meet me here tonight. What would your thoughts about afterlife be?” asked the man. “I’d probably believe the Hell and Heaven theory. The theory that states that a person can either go to heaven or hell.” He replied. “Yes. Because your perception was so, that’s why it happened to you. It’s one’s opinion that matters. The mind makes real, what it thinks is real. It cannot do so in reality because the so-called ‘Laws of physics’ bind the actions of real life. However, when it escapes the world after death, it puts to practicality those ideas, about which it had been dreaming all throughout its life.” He looked as if he had a sudden gush of excitement. “The place where you are sitting is not bound by any laws. It’s the perfect playground for a fertile mind, a mind such as yours! Because in this place, there are no limits! The mind sees what it chooses to see! You get me?” Parth was listening to all this with the interest of an overly fascinated science student. “Yes, to some extent.” He responded thoughtfully. Thapar, unable to contain his enthusiasm, went on speaking. “It’s all a mind-trick. When you confidently refused to believe that I was god, your mind made it sure that I really wasn’t! And now I am somebody else!” he half-shouted with feverish excitement. “What place, according to you, are you at, presently? Your home? Hell, no! This is an image of your home as created by your brain. Doesn’t anything strike you as extraordinary here? Isn’t it a cut more clean that you ever kept it? It is because it’s not the house you lived in, but one which you aspired to live in. You always wanted to maintain this type of cleanliness in your house, but you couldn’t, owing to your busy schedule. Now there’s only one question that remains to be answered: where do I fit into all this?” He asked as he nipped his coffee. Parth was only listening, not replying. He was bombarded with so many different speculations at a time, that it was not possible for him to take part in a meaningful interaction. Thapar didn’t wait for him and answered his own question, “I am your alter-ego. Every man, whatever his opinion about afterlife maybe, from the time of consciousness, is divided into two parts: one, what he thinks, and two, what he does. All the life, his thoughts about certain things are different from what actions he takes against or for the things. These two divisions are in anonymity with each other until the man dies. After his death, these two parts are treated as two different individuals, because they are completely asymmetrical to each other. Both may or may not have different perspectives about death, so they may or may not be judged by similar means. So far, so good. In your case, throughout your life, you believed in the heaven-hell theory, but when I confronted you, you suddenly had some kind of brainwave, and almost entirely convinced your mind that I am not God. So the mind had nothing else to show you, because you had no alternate theory that explained death, so it reverted to what really happens after death. It presented your own alter- ego to you, in my form. We are part of the same person. You are his actions, and I am his thoughts. It seems his actions were much better than his thought, that’s why my face is full of scars and wrinkles, and you look normal. If the person we constitute to had done exactly how he felt, then we both would have been one single person. I have been made to meet you because you have obtained knowledge of the ultimate realization: death for a man, is as the man thinks it is. So, to make both of us come to terms with our death, we meet.” He gave a deep sigh and stopped, looking deeply satisfied. He drank away what was left of the coffee, and slumped back comfortably on the back-rest. A strange kind of completeness had taken over Parth too. It seemed as if his life was, in the truest sense of the word, absolute. He too drank the coffee to the last drop, and ultimate peace took over him. He wanted nothing else than to sink away into oblivion, just like that. His mind readily obliged, and played the last move of its existence. The next second, he was plunged into nothingness, just like that. THE END
Over A Cup of Coffee by Bharat Misra is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 India License.