What is wrong with science?

An imaginary dialogue taking place in the 16th century

Priest: So explain to me why moon revolves around earth and not just drift off into the space?
Scientist: I don't know.
Priest: Ha! But I know! God keeps it revolving. Why don't you scientists accept that there is a God?


An imaginary dialogue taking place in the 19th century

Priest: So explain to me why moon revolves around earth and not just drift off into the space?
Scientist: Because of Earth's gravity.
Priest: Oh, the gravity. So tell me, if larger objects keep pulling the smaller objects, things should keep collapsing. Why hasn't the universe collapsed into a single massive object?
Scientist: I don't know.
Priest: Ha! But I know! God keeps the things apart through the divine force. Why don't you scientists accept that there is a God?

An imaginary dialogue taking place in the 21st century

Priest: If larger objects have more gravity, pulling the smaller objects, things should keep collapsing. Why hasn't the universe collapsed into a single massive object?
Scientist: Because the universe is expanding and this expansion is accelerating due to the Big Bang.
Priest: How did the Big Bang happen?
Scientist: I don't know.
Priest: Ha! But I know! God made it happen. Why don't you scientists accept that there is a God?

What is wrong with science? Why doesn't it accept that there is a God? In the shortest possible answer: God is none of science's problems.

Science is the study of nature, using natural means, understanding natural phenomena and their natural causes. It does not and cannot resort to supra-natural if it fails to find a natural cause of a natural phenomenon. As implied by the three imaginary dialogues above, science has no problem, never had, saying "we don't know" when science cannot find an answer from the natural realm and as implied by those very dialogues, some people keep pushing science to replace God with "we don't know" which will never happen.

Existence or non-existence of God is not something science concerns itself with and yet the demand of science to accept the existence of a supreme creator never relents.  From Galileo to Darwin, scientists have come under criticism and sometimes persecution for just doing science. In none of his books did Charles Darwin say, "there is no creator of life" and yet he is criticized and ridiculed day in and day out by religious folks because his "science" differed from the creation stories of all major religions.

Of all the questions posed to science by people who want science submitted into accepting the idea of a divine creator, the most famous question is  "what was there before Big Bang". I have heard this question hundreds of times and hearing it always leaves me a little bit frustrated because I feel that whoever asks this question should first invest some time to understand the things because this is not a valid question. It has a word before in it which implies backward continuity of time through the Big Bang which is nothing more than a hypotheses. According to all we know, the time was also created as the result of Big Bang. This is just an example, a prime one actually, of getting into a quarrel with science without knowing how science works or what it's conclusions are so far. Most of such questions are based on human intuition which has been shown, time and again, by science to be completely unreliable. Our brains have been evolved to survive and recreate and not to intuitively understand the deep universal realities. If you want to test the reliability of human intuition, go read the theory of special relativity or quantum mechanics and just try to understand them based on nothing but your intuition.

While my basic assertion is that science is not in the business of accepting or denying the existence of a God, it's true that some practicing scientists are and have been very vocal about their atheism. The first names in this regard that come to my mind are Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins. Carl Sagan famously said. "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and Richard Dawkins, in an interview, said, "I am an atheist for all practical purposes. Meaning I don't claim that there is no God but I don't see evidence of existence of a God". The common thread in both those assertions is evidence. Science deals with measurable, empirical and falsifiable evidence. All these scientists are saying that there may very well be a God and everyone is free to believe in one, or two or a whole army of Gods but there is no measurable, empirical and falsifiable evidence of any. Once again, they art sticking to what's called the scientific method and that method insists on keeping natural in the study of nature.

And by the way, holy books foretelling scientific discoveries cannot be treated as evidence in scientific halls. People coming from all religions claim that their particular scripture foretells scientific discoveries but those claims are usually a matter of interpretations and those interpretations invariably follow the scientific discovery and not the other way round. There are many other problems with that approach, which requires a separate examination which I am not going to do here, due to which almost all leading scholars, very wisely,  have advised there followers of not going that route,

Thanks to science, the amount of things we know today about our universe outnumbers the things we don't know about it. There are only a handful of questions left unanswered. It's true that during the investigation of those unanswered questions, we might discover a whole new set of unanswered questions. Science will keep trying to find the answers and in the meantime it will keep pleading it's ignorance about those answers saying, "we don't know." If you feel the urge to say "Oh but I know and the answer is God", read the top of this article again.

Note: However unneeded this maybe, I must say that I am not trying to prove any religion wrong. All I am asking is to keep the faith and science in different realms.

The great Pashtun spirit

The history of Pashtuns is a history of constant struggle of a people for their rights. Post-partition, this struggle, in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (formerly NWFP) region of Pakistan was mostly spearheaded by leftist political elements. In fact, the leftist elements in KPK pre-date the creation of Pakistan People’s Party which later became the torch-bearer of the Left in Pakistani politics. Today, it seems hard to imagine that once this region was the bastion of non-violent liberal politics.

In past two decades, KPK has been a source of a stream of bad news, news of religious extremists taking over parts of it imposing inhumane conditions on the populace, news of hard-hitting reaction by the armed forces of Pakistan resulting in millions of people getting displaced in the conflict, news some of which I just don’t find the heart to mention here. Every bit of such news has been very hard for me to take since, hailing from Punjab, I always considered KPK my second home; a place that was, for many Punjabis like myself, a scenic refuge away from the mundane life.

Alas, today’s generation is probably deprived of the experience KPK had to offer prior to the onslaught of extremists (and nothing will make me happier to know that I am wrong and the things are still exactly the same). I have been to almost every part of Pakistan but I was surprised to find out the liberal attitudes in the KPK region. Despite all their overtly religious outlook, in my personal experience, there were no one in Pakistan more liberal than Pashtuns. I am proud to say that some of the people who initiated me on the path of liberalism by way of showing and teaching me the true values of liberalism were Pashtuns.

To some non-Pashtuns, especially my Punjabi fellows, this may come as a surprise because out there in Punjab the image of a Pashtun we had was of an extremely conservative religious person. Half of that image, according to my own experience, is true but not all of it. A vast majority of Pashtuns I have encountered in my life are practicing religious folks who hardly ever miss a prayer in a day. But what I also experienced was total lack of any desire to impose their religious values on strangers. I would love to share two of my many memories of the generosity of the Pashtun spirit.

On a journalistic assignment, I was once visiting the town of Takht Bhai in the company of an Ahmadi colleague. We were having lunch at a chappal kabab place. It was almost time for the noon prayer. We were sharing the table with an elderly Pashtun. I asked him if he could tell me where the nearest mosque was. He turned out to be the Imam of the local mosque and offered to escort us to the mosque after he finished his meal. When he did we got out of the restaurant and while I kept walking with the Imam, my Ahmadi friend stopped right outside the restaurant. I whispered to the Imam that my friend won’t be joining us because he was Ahmadi. That stopped the Imam short in his tracks. He turned around and shouted to my friend, “you worship the same Allah, right? So, come along!” Which he did with a wide grin on his face.

At another time, while I was a college student, a bunch of us were travelling through the valley of Swat in the middle of the month of Ramadan. None of us were fasting and it was the Zia era. There was no food available to be bought. Starving, we saw an apple orchard right by the road so we stopped the car and went into the orchard. There was not a soul around. We started pocketing the apples that had fallen off the trees when we saw a Pashtun, probably the owner of the orchard, rushing to us yelling in Pashto something which must have translated something like “thieves”. When he reached us, he asked the obvious question; what did we think we were doing? We told him we were hungry and there was no food available. When he hinted at the fact that this was the month of Ramadan and we were supposed to be fasting, I offered him the Shara’i excuse of travelers not being obligated to fast. He asked us to wait and came back with a paper bag. He started picking apples from the trees, bagging them while delivering a mini lecture to us on a mix of why you can’t just enter an orchard and pick fruit off the ground most of which is rotten anyway and travelers travelling in air-conditioned cars should not resort to quoting Shari’a exemptions on fasting. He handed the bag to us when it was full of apples. When we offered him money for the apples, he said, “oh now you want me take money for helping you commit a sin? Go on your way! You are a bunch of thieves but still my guests.” Those were the sweetest apples I have ever had, made sweeter by the kindness of a great man.

Such was the kind and generous Pashtun spirit that I kept encountering on my numerous trips to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. I hope that despite all the stabs taken at it by so many, that spirit is still alive and someday I will, once again, enjoy the great Pashtun hospitality.

Ghosts

A story by Rafi Aamer

John and Mary had been saving money for a long time to make the initial payment to buy their own house. By their calculation, they were still a few years away from having enough money to buy the house of their dreams; a small unit with two floors in a quiet neighborhood of San Jose. They could not believe when their real estate agent friend told them that because of the housing crash, they already had enough money to buy a house.Now. Not years from now, but now. In fact Estella had a house she could show to them. It was one of those abandoned properties that was now some bank’s liability and the bank had put the house on the market on a throwaway price. They went to see the house and fell in love with it on the first sight. Like all abandoned properties, it needed some fixing to do but it wasn’t that bad. They did not have to wait anymore.

Mary, being a stay home wife, started the fixing and decorating as they moved in and within a few days, they had made that house a perfect home for them to live and have kids and raise them.

But there was something that was not so right with the house.

There was a night when John was working the night shift when he received a call from Mary’s cell phone. It was very early the morning and John wondered why Mary was using the cell phone and not the home phone. When he answered the call, he heard a terrified Mary asking him to come home immediately. She wouldn't tell him what was wrong. She just kept crying and pleading John to come home. John drove home that was only a few miles away. When he got home, he saw Mary sitting on the steps outside the house in her nightgown shivering in a perfectly warm night. John ran to her and took Mary in her arms.

“What’s the matter honey? Are you alright?”

“I’m scared, “answered Mary, “I was sleeping and I was woken up by the sound from the other bedroom. The sound…”

“All houses make sounds honey,” John said cutting her off.

“No, no, not that kind of sound.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard…I heard a baby crying.” Mary said and broke into tears.

“You were sleeping. Maybe you dreamed about it and woke up.” John said consolingly while rubbing her back with his hand.

“No. It wasn’t a dream. It continued after I woke up. It continued for a long time. I could hear it so clearly. I was frozen with fear and couldn’t move. And then when the sound stopped, I grabbed my phone and ran out and called you.” She said, sobbing.

John helped Mary inside the house assuring her that it was just a hallucination.

But strange things kept happening. One night, John could swear that he too heard a baby crying but he dismissed it again as his mind playing tricks on him, something caused by Mary’s episode. Then there were other sounds, people talking to each other, whispering, and sometimes giggling. John kept reassuring Mary that they were just paranoid due to what happened when Mary hallucinated about hearing a child crying.

It only took John a few days to realize that he was wrong. That was the night of the party.

They, John and Mary, were not the ones who were having a party. They were sleeping in their bed. This time it was John who woke up, not because he heard any noises, but because he was thirsty.

John went downstairs to the kitchen to get water. The kitchen was part of the living area and it had a big window through which you could see the backyard. The window was covered with drapes and as John entered the kitchen, he saw flickering lights filtering in to the kitchen through the slits of the drapes. Curiously, John parted the drapes and what he saw sent a chill through his spine. There were people, backyard full of people, dressed for a party, drinking, laughing, dancing. The backyard was lit with different colors of lights. At the center of the crowd was a young man donning a black gown and he seemed like the center of attraction of the whole crowd. He had a big grin on his face. John kept looking at the scene thinking that he was just having a dream and he is going to wake up any moment now. He actually made a conscious effort, trying to make his mind wake him up, to no avail. He stood there for a long time mesmerized. The strangest thing was that there were a lot of people who looked like talking and laughing loudly but John couldn't hear a thing. The scene was completely silent. The first sound he heard didn't come from the party going on in the backyard. It came from behind him, the sound of a loud intake of breath, a big gasp. He turned around and saw Mary who was standing with wide eyes fixated on the scene in the backyard with her hands on her mouth. All blood had drained from her face. John hurriedly put the drapes back and hugged Mary who was shaking violently.

That night, they checked into a motel.

The first thing John did the next morning was to call Estella to find out who were the previous owners of their house.

“I don’t know. You bought this property from a bank since it was an abandoned property. I can check with the bank to find out. Why? Why do you want to know?”

“We want to know why they abandoned the house.” John replied.

Estella had the information in a couple of hours. Previous owners: David and Tiffany Rodriguez, current address: unknown.

John picked the phone book up and started calling every David Rodriguez. He had little hope to find the one he was looking for. The first five people he called told him that they had never lived at that address. It was the sixth one who said, “Why? Who wants to know?” John explained to him calmly that he wasn’t calling from any bank or any sort of similar organization. He was calling because they had bought David’s old house and they wanted to know a few things, some unusual things. After some hesitation, David agreed to meet them but refused to give John his address. Instead, he gave John the name of a coffee shop in a small town some 20 miles from San Jose and told him that he would meet them the next day at the coffee shop.

Next day, John and Mary drove to the small town David had told them about. It was a poorly maintained neighborhood with old buildings, some looking like they would fall down any moment, and streets in a bad need of repair. The coffee shop David had agreed to meet at was on the main street and the coffee shop itself looked like it existed in the early part of the previous century. When they entered the coffee shop, a young man behind the counter, who, for some reason, looked familiar to John, asked, “Are you here to see David?” When John said yes, the young man pointed to the corner table where a middle aged couple sat side by side. John and Mary walked to the table, shook hands with the couple and sat down on the opposite side of the table. The couple seemed to be in their late fifties and they were wearing cheap but clean clothes. After a few pleasantries, David asked John why he wanted to meet them.

“I wanted to know why you abandoned that house?” said John.

“Well, why do you think we abandoned it?”

“To be honest, I think you abandoned it because it is haunted and you couldn’t sell a haunted house. Maybe people in the area knew about that but we didn’t.”

“Haunted?” asked David with a curious look at his face, “No, it wasn’t haunted.”

“Then why did you leave it.” This time it was Mary’s turn to ask a question.

“I will tell you,” said David, “but first, I want to know why do you think it’s haunted?”

“We don’t think,” John said a bit aggressively, “we know it is haunted. We see and hear ghosts in the house.”

“Ghosts?” asked David and him and his wife looked at each other with puzzled looks on their faces.

“Yes, we keep hearing a baby cry in the smaller bedroom upstairs,” said Mary.

As soon as she said it, Tiffany's facial expression changed. She looked like she was about to start crying. She was looking in the distance. Then, with quivering lips and wet eyes, she lowered her head and said, almost whispered “Jenny coming home to have the baby.” Two droplets of tears fell from her eyes.

“And the night before the last, we saw some sort of a party going on with a young man in a black gown,” said John.

David, who was also looking in the distance, said, as he was in some sort of trance, “Ed’s college graduation party.”

They were all silent for a few moments that felt like hours. John, finally broke the silence, and said, 

“Who are Jenny and Ed?”

It was as if his question broke some sort of spell.

“Well, “said David, leaning forward and laying his arms on the table as if getting ready to tell a long story, “you know, Tiffany here, my wife, and I grew up in this very neighborhood. As you can see, it is a poor neighborhood mostly populated by Mexican immigrants. Our own folks came from Mexico. Tiffany and I married young, very young. But we decided not to have kids while we lived here. You see, we grew up in poverty and we didn't want the same for our kids. Neither of us is very highly educated but we decided to work hard, do as many jobs as we can in a day, work over weekends so we can get out of this town to some nicer place and then have kids so they can go to nice schools and don't have to live the life we did. And we did all that. We worked and worked and worked. It was tough, very tough, but the hope that one day we will get out of this town and have kids kept us going. After a few years, we had enough money to make the initial payment on a house, the house that belongs to you now. We had kids there, Jenny and Ed. We lived there for a long time but then the economy started going south. First Tiffany and then I lost our jobs. We could not find good jobs anymore. We tried to make ends meet by doing odd jobs but we couldn’t earn enough every month to pay the bank. So we started missing loan payments.”

Mary almost stopped David thinking something didn't make sense but she didn't because she couldn’t really understand what it was that didn't make sense.

“So, “David continued, “we decided to foreclose the house so we could at least get our loan written off and try to make a fresh start somehow. We went to the foreclosure court. We could not afford a good lawyer but the banks can. We tried our best but the judge ruled that we could not foreclose since we had the ability to earn. Ability. What a word! We were old now. We could not work anymore like we did when we were young. We are honest people and wanted to do the right the right way but the bank wanted us to work three jobs a day to pay them. We tried but could not do that. After that, we had no other choice but to abandon the house and come back to the obscurity of our hometown. The bank chased us but we had nothing of value left for them to take so they decided that we were not worth wasting time on. And, that’s the answer to your question.”

And it was at that moment that it hit Mary what didn't make sense. “Wait,” she said, “I don’t understand. You said you worked in this town for a long time and then you moved to the new house and had kids there. That should make you a lot older than you look to have two adult children, one becoming a mother and the other graduating from college. And you haven’t told us what happened to Jenny and Ed. How did they …?” Mary couldn't say the word.

“Die, you want to say?” asked David, “No. They did not die. The boy at the counter who talked to you as you entered is Ed and he could not go to college. He works here at this coffee shop. As for Jenny, Lord knows where she is. She got mixed up with the wrong sort of folks and fled town. I don't know where she is but I sure hope she is still alive. ”

“Then whose ghosts do we have in the house?” asked Mary, bewildered, to no one in particular.

David stood up to leave, as did his wife, and said, “Miss, you don’t have ghosts of people in your house. What you are seeing and hearing are ghosts of our dreams and hopes. If that house is haunted, it is only haunted by our dreams that didn't come true. The dreams that we could not pack into our suitcases when we left. We did not have another home to take them to. We had to leave them behind.”

David and Tiffany left the coffee shop, hand in hand, dragging their feet heavy with the weights of their lives tied to them

Dominos

Dominoes - A story by Rafi Aamer

In the middle of a forest surrounded by deserted and long destroyed villages many miles south of Hanoi, Vietnam, crickets and cicadas were chirping in a deafening chorus in the middle of a hot a moonless night. And suddenly all of them went silent. 

All of them…not a single chirp. An equally deafening silence following by deafening chorus. The insects must have sensed that something was about to happen. Insects have this sense of knowing the things-that-are-about-to-happen. And then the silence was pierced by a loud, painful, ear-drums shattering scream—a human scream. A scream that the snakes in the forest felt on their skins and writhed in anguish. Apes fell from the trees and started scurrying around to find a place where they could stop hearing the scream. It was the kind scream that goes on and on. And then it died. And after a brief silence, there followed a cacophony of hisses-barks-roars-tweets-squawks, all animals registering their protest for this alien auditory invasion. And they kept protesting till the dawn.
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Years ago, at the same spot of the same forest, Private James “Jimmy” Saunders of the 3rd brigade of the 4th Infantry Division of United States Army, was hiding in a ditch panting. He had arrived in Vietnam a week ago and on that particular day his company had faced the biggest ambush of Vietcong they had ever faced in that particular region. It was a surprise because their company commander had a truce with the local villagers promising them safety if they didn’t give protection to Vietcong. Seemingly, the Vietcong from other areas had been using the thickness of the forest to secretly gather and mobilize their troops. When the ambush happened, Jimmy’s company was taken completely off-guard. Jimmy saw many of his comrades just being cut in half by the salvo of incoming bullets. They took heavy casualties and started to run away in all directions. Jimmy had been running for 20 minutes straight. He didn’t know where the rest of his company was. He found this ditch and decided to hide and catch his breath.
He hadn’t completely regained his composure when he heard footsteps coming through the thick foliage of the forest. He squinted to see and wiped the sweat off his brow. Slowly a figure emerged. Jimmy crouched and straightened his rifle trying to hold his breath. The person was heading straight towards Jimmy’s hiding place. The person was wearing traditional loose Vietnamese unisex top and bottom of the same color. It had a bag slung over its shoulder. “Is it a stray Vietcong?” Jimmy thought. The person was still heading towards him. Then it reached into the bag and got something out. Jimmy could tell by the way the person’s hand was enveloping the object that the object was spherical…and then the person brought the object to its mouth…”Shit!” Jimmy’s mind yelled…”It’s a grenade and this Vietcong bastard is going to throw it at me”. Faster than the blink of the eye, Jimmy aimed and shot. The bullet hit the target and the person fell down. Jimmy rushed towards it, rifle still aimed at the fallen figure. When he arrived at his intended destination, he saw that “the Vietcong bastard” was a lean, about 16-year-old, girl holding her shot leg crying loudly. Her hat had come off and her bag was on the ground. About half a dozen apples had spilled from the bag.
“What the hell, what the hell, what the hell.” Jimmy started shouting in the air while stomping the ground walking in circles around the wounded girl.
“What the hell were you doing here?” he yelled in the girl’s face leaning down, saliva dripping from his lips. The girl tried to utter some Vietnamese words between her sobs. But Jimmy kept shouting at her face the same question. The girl got scared and started to crawl backward till her back hit a tree trunk. She grabbed the trunk and used it to stand up on her one good leg. Jimmy’s mind was still aflame with a mixture of fear, anger and frustration that he had been accumulating all day and which had now started to grow like a jungle-fire, setting Jimmy’s throat, ears, eyes on fire. The girl yelled at him in Vietnamese but the only word Jimmy could understand was “truce”. “Oh fucking beautiful!” Jimmy hit his helmet with the butt of his rifle. “Now I am going to get court-martialed for violating the truce” he shouted. His anger started to take over him completely. He started walking towards the girl. She wrapped her arms around the tree trunk behind her back and pressed her back against the tree as if trying to somehow get inside the tree-trunk to hide from Jimmy. “First your Vietcong brothers kill most of my friend, and then you show up, God knows why, in the middle of the forest biting an apple like taking the pin out of a grenade and now you are gonna tell your people that I shot you and the Captain’s gonna have my ass.” His rage had completely taken over his mind. He was mad angry now. “You know what! Not gonna happen!” Saying those words, Jimmy plunged his bayonet into the girl’s chest. It went through her chest and got lodged in the tree trunk. “That’s what you get for not minding your own fucking business in a goddamned war.” He yanked the bayonet back. Since it was lodged deeply into the tree trunk, it came off the rifle’s muzzle and fell down beside the dying girl’s body. There was slit where it had pierced the tree trunk, and the girl’s blood was dripping from the slit. It looked as the tree was bleeding.
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A week later, Jimmy was discharged from the unit because he had threatened to kill some of his fellow soldiers and was sent back home to Houston, Texas. The Army had termed him mentally unfit for the duty and his friends were perplexed at his sudden metamorphosis into a crazy maniac who would pick fights on the smallest of things. But the officers had seen many such episodes so they were not as perplexed.
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Once back home, Jimmy’s life was divided into brief episodes of jail time, mental asylums and even briefer episodes of employment. He could never keep a job because no provocation was small enough for him to not react violently. One April day, when he was driving on Highway 90 going home after losing yet another job, he spotted a hoarding on the side of the highway with a brown flower of some sort under which there were bold blue letters forming the words “Vietnam Airlines”. There was a picture of Vietnamese girl right next to the brown flower holding a bouquet. As Jimmy’s car got closer to the hoarding, Jimmy looked at the face of the girl and pushed the brake pedal with all his might. His car screeched to a halt in the middle of the highway. He couldn’t believe it. This was the picture of the girl—the girl he had killed decades ago in a Vietnamese forest. The cars passing around Jimmy’s car started honking and Jimmy had to drive away but he did give the picture another glance and he could see, right beside the bouquet she was holding, there was a wound on the girl’s chest.
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A few weeks later, when Jimmy had written the hoarding-girl incident off as an illusion, as his mind playing a trick on him, he discovered a plant that had sprouted out of nowhere in his backyard. He didn’t pay much attention to it but when he came back after three weeks—he had gone to Arizona to borrow money from his brother, most of which he lost in Las Vegas later—the plant had grown into a huge tree that had occupied almost all his backyard. He didn’t know the names of the trees but he recognized this one. It was the same tree. No, not the same type but the same tree because it had a slit in the middle of its trunk oozing blood.
Jimmy ran out of his house, panting and profusely sweating, got into his car and sped away from his house. He got onto the highway. And there they were, hoarding after hoarding, lined neatly alongside the highway, all advertising Vietnam Airlines with a girl wounded in the chest holding a bouquet. Jimmy drove hundreds of miles for many hours but the hoardings never stopped. When he ran out of gas, he ditched his car on the highway and ran into the shrubs like a maniac…into the trees with blood-dripping slits in their trunks. Jimmy crashed down sobbing and pounding the ground with his fists. He spent hours there into the dark night and then stood with some sort of determination in his eyes. “That’s it!” he said to no one present. “I know what to do. I have to go there and cut that goddamn tree down.”
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Jimmy was standing outside the ticketing office of Vietnam Airlines with a huge poster in the window displaying the same wounded girl. This was the first time Jimmy was looking at the girl’s picture this close and there was no doubting. It was the same girl. Same pale face, same narrow eyes, same thin lips, same short black hair parted neatly in the middle and falling straight down on her cheeks. For a moment, Jimmy thought of the stupidity of his plan. “OK. I can go there but what are the chances that I will be able to find that particular tree,” he thought. The poster girl’s lips parted. “You will”, she said.
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Jimmy rented a Jeep at the Hanoi airport. He bought a chainsaw, a map and some food items and drove south. Once he started getting close to his destination, the population started to thin out. There were small pockets of houses here and there but the closer he got, the fewer of them he could see. When he arrived at the edge of the forest, he hadn’t seen a single house or a human being for tens of miles.
Jimmy saw a trail entering the forest and he started to follow it. About a mile down, he saw that the trail was forking into slightly left and slightly right. He was thinking of which side to go when he saw a boy, about 5-year-old squatting on the ground playing with branches. His presence startled Jimmy but the boy did not seem surprised or scared. As he saw the headlights of the Jeep, he stood up and as the Jeep crawled closer to him, he raised his arm and pointed to the right side of the fork. Jimmy followed his direction. Once he passed the boy, he looked into the rear-view mirror. There was no sign of him.
As it grew darker, it started to become harder to follow the trail with any good speed. After one sharp turn, Jimmy had to slam the breaks because, there, standing right in the middle of the trail, was a girl, maybe a little older than the boy Jimmy had encountered previously. She was pointing to a clearing on the left. As Jimmy steered his vehicle into the clearing and the headlights hit the girl’s face, Jimmy could see that the entire side of her face had gone and he could see her exposed jaw-line.
On all the turns and forks, Jimmy kept getting directions from children of the ages ranging anywhere from 3 to 15-year-old. Some had blown skulls, some had bullet holes in their bodies and many had charred skin.
Around the midnight, Jimmy’s jeep drove into an unexpectedly clear area and in the middle of the area was the tree. It felt as if the other trees surrounding it had just walked away from it. As Jimmy’s Jeep’s headlights illuminated the tree, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The tree had changed its shape. Its trunk had become smooth like a child’s skin, close to the top where the trunk divided into branches, there were two perfectly symmetrical holes like eyes. And the branches? No, they were not like any other branches. They didn’t rise up like branches do. They were parted neatly in the middle and fell evenly on the sides of the tree like hair. Jimmy got a little closer and saw the things that were weighing them, the branches-hair, down. At the tip of every branch-hair was a glistening, sharp, bayonet. Jimmy got out of the Jeep and with the chainsaw in his hand, he moved tentatively towards the tree. Once he got a few feet from the tree, the branches-hair started to swish and wave and suddenly Jimmy saw all the bayonets aiming at him.
“This is a not a girl only armed with apples that you would be able to kill so easily.”
Who said that? The voice was unmistakably the dead girl’s but it seemed to be emanating from the tree.
“I told you, you would find us.”
“Who is ‘us’? Who are you?” Jimmy asked in a puzzled voice.
“You know who I am. I am the girl you killed right here, right at this place.”
“Listen, I know what I did was wrong. But it was war. War makes you insane.”
“Yes, it does.” The voice from the tree said. “It makes you insane so it can live and rage. People don’t have wars. Wars have them. War makes you insane because sane people cannot kill strangers without any reason.”
“There is a reason. There is always a reason. One has to defend his country.” Jimmy said shaking his head. He was getting a bit calmer now for some unknown reason.
“A country is an abstract idea. By country, you mean the proximity in which you were born, which is real, and you didn’t make a choice in that matter. You defend that using insanity but insanity is nothing in itself. It’s just the absence of sanity. Like darkness is the absence of light. When sanity is taken out, it leaves a hole behind it. Rudderless boats don’t get anywhere and holed existences cannot survive so our proximities--call them societies civilizations neighborhoods--have devised pieces that fill the hole left behind by the departure of sanity. Religious duty, patriotism, tribal pride, family honor, these pieces go by many names but their purpose is the same, to fill the hole of sanity so when there is no hole and there is nothing felt missing, insanity can be waged upon the others.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Everyone is a slave of their proximities and these proximities guide everyone’s lives. They tell you how to behave, who to marry, what to eat, what not to eat and what is “acceptable”, only they call it “normal” and what is not. And then they tell you that everything is relative and there are no absolutes. What is considered a bad thing within the proximity is declared good, even honorable, when done outside the proximity. If someone starts killing strangers within the proximity for now reason, he is imprisoned. If someone does that to the people of a competing proximity, he is given medals for his valor. You killed me one day but did you ever think about killing the boy paddling madly towards you on his bike in your town last week?”
“That kid wasn’t trying to kill me.”
“Neither was I. I was just coming here to meet my lover. We were going to kiss for the first time. But you killed me, only because you were not in your own proximity. You see, you killed me and went your way thinking that that was it. It wasn’t. When my lover came here and found me dead, he went back to the village with my dead body in his arms. He convinced the elders to break the truce and mobilized all the youth with the help of Vietcong. They mounted a spirited resistance in the following months after which your proximity sent planes with Napalms that burnt our proximity to the ground. You didn’t just kill me. You toppled the first domino.”
“The first domino?” Jimmy asked, confused.
“Yes. You know the game where they make a long row of little tiles standing on their sides close to each other in complex patterns and then you topple the first tile onto the next one which sets out a chain reaction of dominoes falling one after another. Only the pattern of dominoes is not complex but random in a war. It has its own insanity. It’s random so it’s not predictable. It doesn’t follow any particular direction. It goes forward, backward, upward, downward, sideways and all other dimensions we cannot fathom. By killing me, you started this insane sequence. All the kids that you saw on your way died because of you started this domino sequence. They are all small domino tiles that fell because of your single act.”
Jimmy was silent for some moments and then he asked the question: why was he guided to this place.
“Because war dominoes are insanely random and insanely long. They take their own time to complete the sequence. You were guided here so that the sequence is completed. There is one domino, the last one, still standing. And that last tile is you.”
Jimmy couldn’t find anything to say.
“But,” the voice said, “I will give you a choice, although you didn’t give me one. You have to fall sooner or later. It is your choice to go back and keep living miserably and then fall. Or come into my embrace and I will give you serenity and peace.”
Jimmy’s hands couldn’t hold up the chainsaw anymore. He dropped it to the ground. At that very moment the cicadas and crickets stopped chirping. There was silence--such silence that Jimmy’s footsteps could be heard from miles. He walked up to the tree, leaned against it with his back and wrapped his arms around the tree trunk behind him. Hundreds of bayonets rushed towards him.
------------------
A few days later, the rental company tracked their Jeep in the forest and saw Jimmy’s dead body sprawled on the ground with an old, rusted bayonet in his chest. 

Noha

نوحہ
اختر حسین جعفری
4 اپریل 1979

اب نہیں ہوتیں دعائیں مستجاب
اب کسی ابجد سے زندانِ ستم کھلتے نہیں
سبز سجادوں پہ بیٹھی بیبیوں نے
جس قدر حرفِ عبادت یاد تھے، پَو پھٹے تک اُنگلیوں پر گن لیے
اور دیکھا --- رحل کے نیچے لہو ہے
شیشئہ محفوظ کی مٹی ہے سُرخ
سطرِ مستحکم کے اندر بست و در باقی نہیں

یا الٰہی مرگِ یوسف کی خبر سچی نہ ہو
ایلچی کیسے بلادِ مصر سے
سوئے کنعاں آئے ہیں
اک جلوسِ بے تماشا گلیوں بازاروں میں ہے
تعزیہ بر دوش انبوہِ ہوا
روزنوں میں سر برہنہ مائیں جس سے مانگتی ہیں ھنّتوں کا اجر
خوابوں کی زکوٰۃ

سبز سجادوں پہ بیٹھی بیبیو
اب کسی ابجد سے زندانِ ستم کُھلتے نہیں
اب سمیٹو مشک و عنبر، ڈھانپ دو لوح و قلم
اشک پونچھو اور ردائیں نوکِ پا تک کھینچ لو
کَچی آنکھوں سے جنازے دیکھنا اچھا نہیں

The days after ....

After 9/11, a lot of my Pakistani friends were concerned about my wellbeing. Me being a Pakistani Muslim living in the New York area, they were worried that I may become the victim of the reported persecution of Pakistanis in USA. I need to set the record straight.

The days and weeks after 9/11 were surreal. Americans had never experienced anything like this before and they didn’t know how to react to this strange situation. On the day of 9/11, everyone I met was just shocked, dazed and confused. That state lasted for weeks during which a lot of things happened that were very un-American in character but the American spirit survived eventually and what I saw in those weeks had an extremely humbling effect on me. Following is the account of some of the things I witnessed.

The Bush administration surely went into the state of paranoia. FBI was given a free hand to round up any number of people they see fit and they did go on a man-hunt that was unprecedented in the history of the United States. But then, their hands were tied because they were operating at the fringes of law and any encroachment outside could have negative consequences. So, a lot of Pakistanis did get into trouble but those were the ones who were illegally residing in USA. (And by the way, people who reported them were mostly other Pakistanis trying to settle personal scores). Due to their illegal status, it was easy for FBI to round them up to show that they were doing something without getting into legal trouble. But even that didn’t get unprotested. There were reports of several Pakistani families migrating to Canada asking for political asylum. I was driving to the office listening to a radio station the day that report was published in the New York Times. I was listening to a talk show whose host was the renowned lawyer and human rights activist Ron Kuby. I will never forget his remarks that he made out of sheer frustration on the news report: “The last Pakistani family leaving New York, please take the statue of liberty with you because, apparently, we don’t give a crap about liberty anymore.”

Bad things did happen. I was at my office having lunch with my colleagues the week after 9/11 when we heard that someone had fired some shots at the mosque next town. I was subdued hearing that. One of my colleagues, Tara, noticed that and asked me if I was OK. I told her what exactly I was feeling; that this is not the USA I came to. Tara, a born and raised New Yorker, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Rafi, you are a good person and I am very happy that you decided to come to USA. This is not how we are. This will pass and I want you to give us some time before you make any decision.”

One day, I was smoking outside a restaurant in Brooklyn. It was a calm Friday afternoon. There was a group of young Americans hanging out at the corner of the block chatting and laughing. Another group of boys emerged from the mosque across the street and as they were passing the corner where the first group of teenagers I mentioned, they became silent and hanged their heads low avoiding any eye contact. One of the American boys saw that and shouted, “hey, pick your heads up. You didn’t do it.” That almost brought tears to my eyes.

Taking pictures of buildings and installations became an issue in the ensuing paranoia. Pakistanis were telling each other to be careful with their cameras. I read a report one day that a Pakistani student was taking pictures of Tappan Zee bridge and someone saw him doing that and called the police. Police arrested him but then taking pictures is not a crime so they had to come up with a charge to book him under. It turned out that he was delivering pizza for a local pizzeria. Working while on Student Visa was a violation and the police handed him over to FBI which started his deportation procedure.  The town he was arrested at is a small town on the borders of New Jersey and New York consisting mainly of retirees, people in their 70’s and 80’s. The news report mentioned that the citizens of that town, upon hearing the news of the arrest and deportation procedures, had formed a committee to provide legal support to the Pakistani student. I decided to meet this group of people.

I went to the local library where they regularly met. Their meeting was about to begin. I was greeted by John, an 83-year old retiree who used to be an attorney. John told me all they were doing to get the Pakistani student released so he could resume his studies. Everyone in town was pitching in money to fight the case. At the end of our meeting, I asked John what was motivating them to fight the cause. John said, “This is not the America I was born in and this sure isn’t the America I want to die in.”

And then one day, I came back from work to see a crowd gathered outside my Pakistani neighbor’s apartments. I came to know that about half an hour before my arrival, my neighbor’s kids were playing in the adjacent park and someone threw stones at them from behind a bush. Some people saw that and called the police. Within an hour, people of the town were out with candles in their hands and there was an impromptu candle light vigil outside my neighbor’s house. The vigil continued till the city’s mayor came there and assured people that he would make sure that a police patrol is available whenever kids were playing in that park. For weeks, I saw a police car guarding the park all day long.

One of the ways Pakistanis who come here illegally and then get a legal status is by marrying an American citizen. There are many legal requirements to be met and they are so complicated that it’s almost impossible to meet them all. Before 9/11, no one cared. But after 9/11, the government had to show that they are doing something so they decided to go after the people who were going through the process which is usually called “getting the papers”. One such Pakistani was picked up at his apartment in Queens and it was clear that he hadn’t filed his papers strictly in accordance with the law. The deportation process, that usually takes a couple of weeks, began while that person’s wife contacted a human rights group which promptly obtained the services of an immigration lawyer. But the time was of the essence. Immigration authorities expedited the deportation case while the defendant’s attorney was preparing to file the case. One morning, the defendant’s attorney came to know that the deportation proceedings had been completed and the person was being taken to the airport to be sent to Pakistan. The attorney rushed to the court and asked to see the judge immediately. The judge listened to her for 15 minutes while she explained how this deportation was unfair (note, not illegal, but unfair) since she hadn’t had enough time to file the case. The judge immediately issued a stay-order and called the airport authorities not to let the person to be boarded on the flight against his own will. He was brought back to the court and released after a week.

So, yes, bullets were fired at mosques, stones were thrown at children but the reaction from the civil society is what the real story is. People in America, in the weeks following 9/11, showed why and how they are special. As for me, who was unsure about staying in USA after shots were fired at a mosque, I was overwhelmed with the acts of kindness and humanity of the people of United States.

The Forgotten

The Forgotten - A Story by Rafi Aamer

I am the one the world forgot. I’m a silent-type and that didn't help the situation. People may have remembered me if I were a bit more talkative. But gods do not indulge in speaking needlessly. And I am talking about mere gods. What doesn't befit gods is certainly not suitable for the king of all gods. I am Zeus, Olumpios Astrapios Brontios, son of Koronus, grandson of Uranus and the destroyer of the Titans.

You might say, hey, talk about a silent type. There is lot of verbiage in just the introduction. Why couldn't I just say that I was Zeus and be done with it? You are right. But you must understand. Up on the heights of Mount Olympus where gods used to roam and praise me incessantly all the time, I now live alone and haven’t spoken to anyone for an eternity. So, bear with me and my verbosity.

Mythologists have muddled all the record and I need to set a lot of things straight.

Where did all the gods go? They died. What is it that you ask? How did the immortal gods die? That is the story I want to tell you. How they all died, one by one. All of them but one. And that one … well, that one will have to wait to be described.

But let me first express my disappointment with your current state of beliefs. I’m appalled at being forgotten. I’m appalled at being replaced with other deities but what appall me most are the kinds of deities you have replaced me with. You replaced the majestic silent-type with extremely chatty ones, who seem to be full of themselves. “Me Me Me” is all they seem to be muttering all the time. And what pride! Most of them claim to be running the world all alone. Managing the world alone! What flight of fancy! Look around yourself. Does this world look managed to you? There is no Poseidon reining in the seas and hence all these hurricanes and tsunamis. No Aether controlling the winds, No Gaia tendering the earth. And a small sampling of today’s music and poetry is enough to establish that Apollo is not around anymore. Everything is out of control and yet your new gods claim to be in complete control. Some gods and some control! Under Zeus’s charge, the world had order. People weren’t given the lists of do’s and don’ts. I didn’t hand out people a code by which they had to lead their lives. A true king of gods would care least what a peasant in a remote village drinks with a bunch of his friends. But your new gods have you on a tight leash. You are the only thing they truly control and they do it with scaring you of hellfire in the afterlife. I never needed those kinds of empty threats. One did whatever one wanted to do in one’s personal life under Zeus’s rule but if one did something against the designs of Zeus, there was no waiting for the judgment day. I didn’t use to roam around with a thunderbolt in my hand all the time for nothing. And what imagination, or lack of it, these new deities display! Man was created from clay? Create your own damn creation myths, I say, and don’t steal our stuff.

All right, I can sense the impatience. What happened? How mighty Zeus lost control of his world and why is he living alone in the ruins of Mt. Olympus. It all happened because of a four-letter word. But let us begin at the beginnings.

Dione, my beautiful wife was of the opinion that females extracted more joy from sexual intercourse but I had my doubts. So Dione and I did what in your parlance is called “making love” in the presence of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, and he told us afterwards that going by the two energies he had sensed in the room, it was I who had extracted more pleasure. I increased Tiresia’s life three times for proving me right. That was the day when we conceived Aphrodite, our stunningly beautiful and devilishly evil daughter.

Aphrodite grew up to be a beauty the likes of which were never seen before. There was always a crowd of young guys outside the palace begging for a glimpse of Aphrodite and another throng of angry fathers in my court complaining how their sons were bewitched by Aphrodite’s beauty and refused to do their chores, spending all their time outside the palace. As she grew, she became even more beautiful and I started getting complaints of people getting blinded by her beauty. At first, I ordered Aphrodite not to wear revealing dresses. She bitched and moaned about looking like a slave girl but I had not given her an option. The extra clothing didn’t work. This was not a beauty that could be concealed with mere fabric. You had to build stone walls around it to really hide it. And that’s what I did. I confined her to her quarters till she was old enough to be married off. Nobody but her mother was allowed to visit her because even the slave women had been getting smitten by her beauty. It was a tough decision. It meant almost solitary confinement for many, many years but I did it with public safety in mind. There were some riots in the city by the youngsters who were deprived of looking at Aphrodite but kings sometime need to take unpopular decisions. Aphrodite didn’t take it lightly either and, according to Dione, started to hate me for doing this. I didn’t worry much about that. I thought she would understand when she was older.

At the appointed age of divinity, she chose to be the goddess of beauty, lust and that four-letter word that destroyed Olympus--love. Her choice perplexed everyone. Beauty and lust, everyone understood. They go hand in hand. But what did love, a mental sickness had to do with beauty and lust?
Now, don’t wince, frown or judge me by that description of love. That is what love was in my time. A condition of mind, in which one person became obsessed, infatuated with another person, usually a stranger, for no discernible reason. If you asked the love-struck what caused him or her to become such a slave of another, he or she would not be able to give you a reason, or at least not a reason that could stand to reason. You people today don’t think of love as a mental sickness yet you often compare it to be spellbound because you cannot provide the rationale. Love is akin to magic; no reasons, just happens. Well, nothing “just happens”. You don’t consider love a mental sickness and yet you describe the phenomenon as “falling” in love; just like falling sick. So how this love, this mental sickness, became such an accepted and even welcome norm? It was the result of the evil plan that Aphrodite must have hatched in the days of her confinement. That is why she chose beauty, lust and love as her dominions. Don’t go by her pictures drawn by your painters where she is depicted as a gracious beauty brimming with innocence. She was no such thing. Her innocence is a misguided notion and due to the muddling of the history by the mythologists, you people have many such notions. Many of you consider Cupid as the god of love. Actually, he was the god of male lust. Some of you think that he is still flying around and shooting arrows. That is probably not the case (I wouldn't know for sure since Cupid served Jupiter and not me) but if he is still out there doing it, watch out! The guy is a bit of an idiot and when seen last, his eyesight was almost gone. He would shoot an arrow at a young male hunk and the arrow would end up hitting the old married guy with five kids sitting next to the hunk and that would completely devastate the poor man’s family. I had Eros as Cupid’s counterpart but I used him for strategic purposes and Eros, I can confirm, is dead along with the all the other gods, Olympians and the ones serving the Olympians.

Here is what Aphrodite did as the first phase of her plan. Since lust and love both were in her dominion, she masterfully mixed them up. Lust, before Aphrodite’s acts, was never considered a bad thing. It was a normal thing like hunger or fatigue. If you were not married, you could lust after anyone you wanted without any guilt. Virgins used to line up outside the wrestling houses of gods to lose their virginity and non-virgins visited the same wrestling houses to reaffirm their status. This spared the gods from chasing goddesses to have sex with and also gave them a good cardiac workout. You didn’t even have to know the name of the person you were having sex with. Aphrodite messed all that up. She took lust and love, her two dominions, and mixed and mingled them in such manner that lust without love or love without lust became incomplete, bad and unacceptable. And so they are to this day.

Now, I am not talking about the love for your parents, that’s genetic disposition. Neither am I talking about things like love for humanity. If someone loves the humanity, it means that he or she cares about humanity but not planning to go to bed with every human. I am talking about love between two individuals, the mental condition. Aphrodite’s mixing of love and lust is why you call the act of fulfilling lust, “making love”. You are not making anything in the process except possibly a baby. You see what I am getting at? Two friends enjoy each other’s company. What are they actually enjoying? They are enjoying talking to each other, or reading books together and discussing them or playing a good game of tennis. That means that they are enjoying using their friend’s body parts; brains, arms, elbows, legs. And yet enjoying a friend’s genitals is completely off the limit unless you have the mental condition, love. You still doubt that it’s a mental condition? Ask someone the reason of being in love with someone else and you will get vague answers. Some adventurous soul may offer something concrete like, “I love her because of those deep green eyes”. But ask the sick one if someone with deeper greener eyes walks by, would his current love be converted to the new person and you will get a “no” back as an answer although the logical answer should be yes. All this confusion is the result of Aphrodite’s stirring two dominions into one. You can’t screw who you don’t love and you can’t love who you can’t screw. It’s not polite to fall in love with someone just because the person is beautiful to look at or has a gorgeous body. No can do. If you do that, you are considered a shallow person. And why is that? Because those are purely lustful motives and not worthy of love. To counter such motives, butt-ugly people have coined phrases like “beauty is only skin deep”. If you are like me who appreciates the fine texture, smoothness, silkiness and just the right firmness of skin, you would know that some skins are deeper than the Dead Sea. That’s quite some depth. Another faulty notion that the ugly of the world have come up with is that the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you look at an ogre and like what you see, what you are beholding in your eye probably is not beauty but cataract. Oh what falsities have arisen from the evil one’s doings!

Certainly, there are exceptions like platonic love and hippies but that is because a lot of time has
passed since Aphrodite and the dominions of love and lust have lost some of their grip on each other. But when she mixed them up initially, the effect was complete and total. Within days, everyone in Olympus went loony. The lines of virgins outside the wrestling houses vanished because now the virgins were waiting for their respective one-true-love to be presented with the gift of their virginity. Friends who used to enjoy sex with each other stopped meeting. People used to hide the mental sickness before. Now they proclaimed their love for someone in public. Aphrodite kept only two people above the Effect, herself and I. Herself because she had the lust of a thousand goddesses and did not want to get pinned down due to the mental sickness called love, and me, so I could see the results of her odd mix-up, or at least that's what I thought at the time. I also thought at that time that this coupling of love and lust is the extent of Aphrodite’s mischief. Little did I know that this was just a mean to a devastating end.

I married Aphrodite off to Hephaestus, the god of smithing and one of the hardest working gods in Olympus. It might have angered Aphrodite to be given away in marriage to a humorless brute who was the only ugly god but I thought that he was the only one who could match the strength and resolve of Aphrodite. In the hindsight, Aphrodite’s anger was unjustified because, as it soon became apparent, she was not going to confine herself to one man anyway. Her bottomless lust coupled with that devious, scheming mind gave birth to one shenanigan after another. She had a protracted, secret affair with her half-brother Ares which was exposed when Hephaestus caught them in bed. She knew no limits. Once she fancied a perfect Titan for her that could only be borne of the union of Theias, the king of Smyrna, with his own daughter Myrrha. Aphrodite urged and convinced Myrrha for committing this incest while tricking the king to have sex with his daughter. When the king discovered how he was tricked, he became furious with his daughter, Aphrodite took Myrrha to the woods and turned her into a tree. After sometime, the tree opened up and Adonis, Aphrodite’s perfect Titan, emerged. She had an affair with him for few years and then got bored but Adonis had fallen in love with her and wouldn’t go away. That didn’t pose much of a problem for the conniving goddess. One day Apollo’s son, accidentally, or I think conveniently, saw Aphrodite naked by the stream which blinded him instantly. Furious Apollo killed Adonis in revenge.

I wish that all those people who describe Aphrodite today in such glamorous and doting terms should have lived in Olympus in the days and the times I’m talking about to see how wrathful Aphrodite was. Once there was a mortal named Psyche who grew up to be as beautiful as Aphrodite. People started comparing both the beauties. Aphrodite, jealous of Psyche, commissioned Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest man in the world. What happened was nothing short of funny. The golden arrow that Eros shot at Psyche bruised his thumb and drew a couple of drops of Ichors, god’s blood, before leaving the bow. As a result, Eros himself fell madly in love with Psyche. When Apollo heard the account, he laughed uncontrollably which made Eros mad and he made Apollo fall in love with a nymph named Daphne who didn’t like Apollo at all. Such were the events succeeding Aphrodite’s adventures in lust and wrath. Eros, in love with Psyche, requested me to grant Psyche the immortality and make her a goddess so he could marry her. (I once read in a story written by some human that making love with an immortal makes you immortal. Actually, it’s the other way round because, while immortality is a godly trait, mortality has a stronger essence, the essence which can scare even a god.) I granted immortality to Psyche and made her the goddess of soul, obviously to the disappointment and anger of Aphrodite. But then she was responsible for the whole sordid affair in the first place.
Aphrodite was not the only one you humans have misguided notions about. Prometheus is another one. I find humans’ infatuation with Prometheus quite mind-boggling. You have named more organizations after that thieving little bastard than me. That’s quite juvenile of you if I may say so. Humans paint him as a giant bundle of muscles with flowing beard. He was nothing of the sort. He was hardly 5 feet tall, the shortest Titan who would sneeze unstoppably in spring because of his pollen allergy. What the mythologists have failed to report is that Prometheus was Aphrodite’s bitch, always following her around, waiting for her orders to run small, insignificant errands. Due to an uprising in the mortal areas, I had taken the fire away from the mortals. It was Prometheus who, I am certain now because of subsequent events, on the orders of Aphrodite, stole the fire and gave it to the mortals. I punished him by chaining him for eternity with a vulture on his shoulder gnawing at his liver. But I am sure the bigger punishment to him was that he couldn’t be near Aphrodite anymore.

Now, I am a fair person. A king has to be. Despite all she had done, Aphrodite did use her irresistibility at times to get me out of some pickles. So when she came asking permission to build her own temple, I allowed although I was not very liberal allowing new temples. I also thought that having a temple, she might find out that being worshipped was better than getting laid. She named her new Temple Aphrodisiac and announced a grand feast as the inauguration of the Temple. All the gods and everyone who heard about the feast were invited.

On the night of the feast, I was in my chambers waiting for the bugle that would announce that everyone else had arrived at the feast and now the king’s arrival was awaited. Kings have to be the last to arrive. As I heard the bugle and was walking out of my palace, I saw a glow on the western horizon. There was fire raging in the middle regions of Mount Olympus, the slopes where the mortals lived. I cursed Prometheus and saw that the fire was raging towards the summit at a rapid pace. It was close to Apollo’s temple by then. I rushed towards the fire, gathered some clouds and started pouring the rain down on the outer perimeter of fire. Usually that did the trick but not on this fire. I observed the fire closely and realized why the fire had spread so rapidly. It was no ordinary fire. It wasn’t just burning the tress. It was leaping at them, embracing them like a hungry lover, kissing its branches leaves with its flames shaped like lips. It was like this fire had a passion, a strange crazed passion. Someone had stoked the fire within the fire. It took hours and hours of rain to extinguish the manic fire. When the fire was out, I saw that it had burnt the dungeon down where Prometheus was bound. Suits you just fine, I said to the ashes of the thief.

And what was happening at Aphrodisiac while I was putting the fire out?
This, which I later found out. When all gods gathered at the temple, they realized that almost every mortal had turned up at the temple. The divines didn’t like the fact that there were almost as many mortals as gods at the feast but knowing Aphrodite’s temper, they decided to wait for me to show up to take the issue up. All attendees were being served the drink of Aphrodisiac Temple, a special concoction made for the occasion by Aphrodite herself and which was being served by Temple’s nuns in large quantities. Its aroma and taste were like nothing else. One cup of it and you felt lighter than air, two cups and you couldn't stop smiling, three cups and you started feeling a strange and exciting stirring in your libido, four cups and your mind was the sole property of the whims of Aphrodite. Drunk, smiling, unable to control their senses while enjoying every sensation, the entire crowd started pairing up in a delicious dance orchestrated by Aphrodite with hypnotic music playing in the background in the great hall. Aphrodite not only choreographed the dance but also decided who danced with whom pointing partners towards each other with invisible mental fingers. They all danced in this trance induced by the potion. With every passing moment, the dancers’ passion increased. After a while, they started shedding their dresses one article at a time, cajoling, coaxing and stroking their partners’ bodies. It was quite some dance. Bodies rubbed against each other in passionate movements. Dancers’ hands roamed the bodies of their partners as if they had acquired their own will. Lips got locked and pairs of tongues dissolved into each other. They were aware of what they were doing and not aware of it at the same time. They were doing what Aphrodite was making them do but it never occurred to them. Another thing that didn't occur to any of them was the pattern of dance pairing. Not a single god was paired with a goddess and not a single mortal was dancing with a mortal. Divines with mortals. Mortals with divines. There in the middle of the hall was Apollo kissing the bare shoulders of a mortal woman. And there in the other corner was Hestia, my sister who had always cherished her virginity but she was now losing it to a peasant. And where was Hephaestus, husband of Aphrodite, who tried to restrain her with ropes to stop her adulterous ways, who tried to keep her for him alone? Hephaestus was hungrily nibbling at the puss-oozing nipples of the oldest and the ugliest and the sickest mortal woman in the world whose wrinkled body was covered with leaking boils. Though unaware of the consistent pattern of pairing in the hall, the gods at their individual level were aware of what they were doing: consorting with a mortal. They knew the consequences. It was a death dance. They knew they shouldn't have been doing it. But the potion had stirred their desires, the lust, but they couldn't stop because the boundaries of love and lust didn’t exist anymore. The lust had love and the love had lust. The effect was complete and total. To lust, they had to be in love. They were falling deeper and deeper in love with their mortal dancing partners. And it was love, the mental sickness, which kept them dancing the dance of death.

When I arrived at this orgy, there were hundreds of naked couples writhing on the floor of the Temple like worms; entangled bodies making it hard to make out whose limbs of the two one was looking it. The hall was echoing with their passionate moans. And up there on the high terrace stood Aphrodite with a triumphant smile.

“Welcome, Zeus, Olumpios Astrapios Brontios, the king of gods, although the end of your kingdom has begun. All your gods tonight lost their immortality with mortals. They will now begin to die, leaving you with no subjects to rule.” Her smile widened and her voice became more solemn. She spoke in the tone which you adopt when you are happy to deliver some bad news. “There will be a new race of humans as the result of this unholy union tonight…”

“I will destroy the offspring of these unions.” I cut her short while pointing to the worms still writhing on the floor.
“No you will not”, her smile undisturbed, “these gods have become mortals but they have not lost their dominions. And they are in love with the mortal they are lying down with right now. And they will love their offspring even more. You, who get scared of mortals uprising, will surely not risk an uprising by your gods. This new race of humans will survive and thrive. They will spread to all corners of the earth. They will eliminate all competing races. This new race will be ferocious and kind, capable of killing with impunity and curing with compassion. They will create new things like gods do but you will not be able to claim them as your new subjects because they will be mortal because of their mixed progeny. And they will forget you. The will forget that you actually existed. Great mighty Zeus will be replaced with the deities that this new race will create. These new deities, invisible and non-existent, will be held above you. They will consider Zeus a myth, a figment of some poet’s imagination. They will look at your statues and not know whose statues are they. And they will cherish love, the thing that has destroyed your kingdom. One by one, your gods will die and mortals will move out. I know that you will not climb down from the Mount Olympus to mix with this new race. Neither will you try to become a mortal. Because you are not just a god. You are the king and kings do not disgrace themselves. And then, when you will be alone for the rest of eternity, you will realize what life you subjected me to.” With that, she went out of the Temple and out of Olympus to never to come back.
She was right. Kings do not disgrace themselves. She has gone who knows where. All my gods are dead and here, on Mt. Olympus, I am living Aphrodite’s revenge.