Cow and Chicken: A Kishore and Stephen Story (2,760 words)

Once upon a time, in a pious little town named Devil’s Court, there lived a family of evangelists named the Khojjas. They were fiercely religious, and impaled anyone who did not share their views. They would visit the town church every day to pray and repent for their sins, and would conceivably be forgiven, for they would always return healthy and invigorated for another day of impaling dissenters.

The child, Stephen Khojja, had learned his family’s ideals by heart at a very young age – by heart because, owing to his genes and an unfortunate injury to the head he had incurred as an infant, Stephen had not retained much in the way of a brain. There was only enough to enable him to perform the most basic involuntary actions, which included and was limited to reciting the Bible day in and day out like a broken record, and misinterpreting the already heavily misinterpreted passages as if it were a birthright.

Fortunately for Stephen’s parents, the Christian school Stephen went to had absolutely no academic standard at all. This precluded the otherwise inevitable event of Stephen's failing pre-preschool. Students were given specific titles and positions in class that stuck with them for life, and their schoolwork was assigned accordingly. Stephen was the Sinner, and his job was to repent – not because he had sinned, not because he wanted a favor of God – but purely for the sake of repenting, which was an exalted Christian virtue. The state of the sinner was man’s moral default, according to Christians, and everything else was merely a dissemblance.

At around the same time, in a neighboring town, a boy named Kishore Narniadung was growing up. Kishore was a very precocious kid, having potty trained himself at the age of ten, and learnt to read a few years after that. He was famous in his school for his diminutive build and ridiculously oversized glasses, which constantly slid down his nose. His front teeth looked as if they had been designed to open cans; and if this weren’t enough to disconcert anyone who knew him or saw him on a daily basis, Kishore was in possession of a very rare genetic gift called the Double Voice Box, which gave his speech those extra decibels that the microphone was invented to supply. His teachers always made him sit in a far corner of the classroom, but even from there, Kishore’s faintest whispers caused them to become temporarily deaf. Due to the amount of time the teachers wasted in recovering from this temporary deafness, Kishore only finished first grade at the age of twenty-five. It was at this point that his parents, who had been deaf ever since the newborn Kishore had let out his first cry, decided that Kishore should be sent to Devil’s Court for further schooling. When one has a dangerous weapon, it is always better to direct it at one’s enemies rather than at oneself. A deaf-mute Christian, after all, is only the second-best type of Christian.

Kishore set off for Devil’s Court on a Friday, which just so happened to be the thirteenth, whistling at ultrasonic pitches, and causing hoards of bats to ravage nearby towns in broad daylight. He was in a good mood. Traveling always excited him. He loved seeing new places, learning new things, and then laughing loudly and boasting about it to anyone who cared to listen.

When he entered Devil’s court, the first thing he saw was a hideous man of about his age clad in a diaper, and rolling around in the mud with pigs. The man was Stephen.

“Hello there!” said Kishore gaily, and the pigs died. Stephen, we must remember, did not possess the necessary faculties to react to such a harsh disturbance in the status quo. He looked up. His head seemed to take hours to move, his eyes half-lidded and uncomprehending and his lower lip quivering like a toad’s belly.

“Hello there!” Kishore said again.

“Sinner! Thou shalt not commit adultery with thy sister!”

Kishore was taken aback.

This gave Stephen enough time to add (involuntarily), “Thou shalt repent for sins thou hast not committed, for only he who hath sinned and repented for it shall be permitted through the Gates of Heaven, as shall those who have not sinned but have repented, those who have not sinned and have not repented, and those who have sinned but have not repented.”

Kishore was quick to see the flaw in this commandment.

“Then who goes to Hell?”

“No one, Son of Satan! No one! Everyone goes to Heaven in Christianity, everyone!”

“What about morality? What about a standard of judgement?”

“Speak not of judgement, coward! Only the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ may pass judgement. Everyone will go to Heaven!”

“Then there is no such thing as ‘sin’.”

“There is. You are a Sinner.”

“Then I will go to Hell.”

“No. You will go to Heaven, fool!”

This was too much for Kishore, so he went over to Stephen, and whispered gibberish into his ear. This would have killed any ordinary human, but we must remember that Stephen was no ordinary human. He was born of a virgin in a farmhouse in the middle of the night, just as a passing black hole sucked in the star that would have guided three particular wise men to the location. The three wise men fell off a cliff, and died. Shortly after that, Stephen’s mother dropped him, and he suffered a concussion. But that did not detract from his specialness. Later, Stephen’s father confessed to having known Stephen’s mother in her sleep, and the virgin birth confusion was cleared up.

Returning to the present:

“I’m no fool!” said Kishore indignantly. “I scored 90% in first grade.”

Stephen rose, and mud rolled off him and created unholy noises in the mud pit. He took a moment to repent, and then rounded on Kishore.

“In my school, I am the Sinner. I will go to Heaven, not you!”

Kishore laughed.

“You just said everyone goes to Heaven.”

“Not everyone. Only those who have sinned and those who haven’t.”

A passing eagle decided to claw Stephen in his unmentionables. When he realized twenty minutes later that his balls were missing, he began to cry. Imagine Senator Cicero crying after the Romans had decided to turn Rome into a democracy. Stephen’s cry was nothing like that. Anyone seeing him at this moment would have thought his tears fake – anyone except his parents. Mr. and Mrs. Khojja came running out of their house the moment they heard their precious son cry. They carried twelve-foot poles in their hands, and charged at Kishore with the intention of impaling him, evidently coming under the impression that it was he who was responsible for their son’s emasculation.

“Hello there!” said Kishore cordially, and the Khojjas died. Then he turned to Stephen. “I killed your parents. Won’t I go to Hell?”

“Not if you repent; not if you don’t repent,” said Stephen obstinately. “I wouldn’t change my opinion, even if you killed my mother.”

Mrs. Khojja stirred a bit, but Kishore promptly said, “How do you do!”

“So I’m not going to Hell, where am I going?”

“Heaven,” said Stephen. “Because everything is nothing and nothing is everything. There is no such thing as good or evil.”

Kishore was about to respond, but at that moment, a stout old woman in nun’s clothes walked out of the church, and called out to Stephen, balling her hands into fists and waving them in the air menacingly. “Stephen Khojja, you troublesome child! Come here, or I’ll hit you with my fits!”

“Mother Harriet,” said Stephen, scurrying to the old woman as quickly as his legs could carry him without the luxury of a central nervous system.

To Kishore, who was unfamiliar with the woman’s dialect, the words sounded somewhat like: “Aboo boo boo! Boo boo boo! Eee boo boo aaboo boo boo!” and he concluded that the woman must be from the Congo Basin.

Kishore, having decided that Stephen was not very bright, decided to ask Mother Harriet about her opinions on sins and morality.

“Mother Harriet, who goes to Heaven?” he asked.

“Aboo booooo BOOOOOOOO!” Mother Harriet said eloquently.

It took Kishore a moment to realize that she meant, “No one! Everyone goes to Hell.” He saw that this was in direct contradiction to what Stephen had told him.

“It’s just a different interpretation of the same concept,” Stephen said self-righteously. “You simpleton! You sinner! What do you know? All paths lead to God, but only Christians ever make it!”

Kishore frowned, and recited the Bhagavad Gita, complete with passionate facial expressions and a warlike dance. At the end, he looked around, expecting applause, but was greeted instead with a blank look by Stephen that told him that the entire performance had been wasted on him. He turned to Harriet, but realized that she was not there. For the reader’s information, the force of Kishore’s voice had propelled Harriet high into the clouds, where a powerful jet stream had carried her to a faraway island named Kalpa, where juvenile delinquents from all over the world were sent to be subjected to endless hours of physical training. Harriet, now disillusioned and wiser than before, found a lucrative career beating the life out of an old drum she had found lying around, and incidentally discovered the sadist in her.

“Very well,” said Kishore. “I don’t care for your ideas. I’ve had a long and tiring day, and I need to find someplace to rest. If you will excuse me.”

“The only place to rest is the church,” said Stephen, “for relaxation is holy, and all that is holy can be found in the church.”

Kishore rolled his eyes, and his super-thick glasses refracted a powerful ray of sunlight into them. In his temporary state of blindness, he had an epiphany.

“I see the light!” he exclaimed. “I see the light of Truth.”

Stephen smiled indulgently.

“So you have decided to come to your senses, and convert to Christianity. Thy sins shall be forgiven by he who forgives not only vices but virtues – for vice and virtue are but delusions of the lustful mind, and the enlightened know that all humans are exactly the same.”

Kishore thought awhile, and realized that Stephen spoke sooth.

“You speak sooth,” he said. “I now see that I was misled by my ten years of meaningless first-grade education. I should have been born in Devil’s Court!” He fell to his knees. “I want to be a Christian!”

Stephen placed an understanding hand on Kishore’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry. I will show you the path. It will take a while for a sinning Sinner like you to become a non-sinning Sinner like me, and even longer to become a non-sinning non-Sinner, but you will find that the rewards are worth it. You will have to take part in a certain ritual – a simple test that will determine whether or not you are ready for this difficult journey.”

“What test?”

“You will be crucified tomorrow morning. If you come back to life after three days, you will be deemed worthy of conversion.”

*

The next morning, Kishore was made to drag a wooden cross to a nearby hill named Mount Golgotha’s Fault, where he attempted to thrust it into the ground with a prodigious lack of strength. After several futile attempts at making the cross stand, Father Kumar, an austere drunken rapist, walked up and planted it himself.

Sipping from a bottle of rum and reciting verses from the Bible at the same time, Father Kumar began the crucifixion. As Kishore struggled against Father Kumar’s superior strength, and sobbed uncontrollably that his life may be spared, the nuns and priests began to show visible signs of arousal. The little orgy that had started on the side ended when the last nail was hammered through Kishore’s foot. Gray clouds suddenly filled the heretofore-clear sky, and lightning rent the air around the hill.

“In the name of Jesus Christ,” said Father Kumar, “Force is equaling to the mass multiplied by the velocity!”

Kishore, who had been hovering in the void between life and death, came back to his senses with a start.

“Acceleration!” he corrected loudly, the pain caused by the nails forgotten.

Father Kumar frowned so deeply that the nuns and priests around him ceased to be aroused.

“That’s not what it is saying in the Bible.”

Kishore shook his head defiantly.

“Newton’s Laws are absolute,” he declared. “Force is mass times acceleration.”

Father Kumar immediately conferred with his colleagues. A thin, pale woman with a perpetually hopeless expression on her face stepped forward.

“Name = Mother Sarita,” she said. “The Church has deemed you unfit for conversion. You still are, however, fit to be eaten. Cannibalism is a Christian virtue – for what is virtue but the absence of vice, and what is vice but a sin? And we all know that there is no such thing as a sin. System.out.println(“Kishore Narniadung will be cooked and eaten this afternoon.”);”

Kishore furrowed his eyebrows, and let out a howl of fury that made the hill and the entire valley shake; the thunder, clearly outdone, cowered away into nonexistence. Several priests and nuns immediately became atheists, for they had learnt when they were young that there was nothing louder than the thunder on the morning of a crucifixion; others recognized Kishore as the Nephew of God – Jesus’s distant cousin who had given voice to the Big Bang. Sadly, Christians were in the habit of eating Jesus’s cousins. The last one had provided sustenance to the whole crowd of Jews who had wandered aimlessly through the desert for generations.

Mother Sarita smacked her lips in a seductive way.

“Throws Modesty Exception,” she said, and then pounced on Kishore, ravaging him with her mouth in a most unholy way.

When Kishore brought this to Stephen’s notice, Stephen nodded slowly but uncomprehendingly, and said, “That which is unholy is not holy; and that which is holy goes to Heaven. Therefore, that which is unholy shall be praised by the Lord.”

As Kishore tried to make sense of this bizarre logic, he realized that the effects of the ray of sunlight had worn off.

“I don’t want to be a Christian,” he declared, and uttered one of his favorite words. It was one of the forbidden four-letter words. The others were “joop”, “doug”, “ergx”, and “Yhvh”.

Father Kumar winced.

“How dare you utter that word? Only prophets are allowed to utter it!”

Then realization dawned on Mother Sarita.

“If (Kishore == Prophet), break,” she said, and shut down. Everyone except Father Kumar and Stephen left to take Mother Sarita down the hill, and to the Recharging Chamber of the Church.

Kishore struggled against the nails.

“Get me out of here!” he demanded of Father Kumar.

“No.”

Kishore burped loudly at Father Kumar, and Father Kumar dissolved into thin air. Then he turned to Stephen, and repeated his demand.

Stephen was a sucker for direct orders, because it saved him the trouble of trying to try to try to try to try to try (ad infinitum) to think. He promptly removed the nails using his teeth.

“Thank you,” said Kishore, watching contentedly as his wounds healed by themselves. “This,” he said to a surprised Stephen (the expression on his face only approximated to surprise – in reality, it was the vacant look of one whose brain is absent), “is the power of yoga!”

Overexertion of Stephen’s tiny brain caused him to unlearn the art of breathing, and he died of asphyxiation.

Kishored laughed, but then stopped abruptly. He watched with growing horror as his wounds reappeared. “Oops,” he said, realizing that he had never learned yoga, and died.

Kishore and Stephen were buried side-by-side in the hill. Their epitaphs read, “Cow” and “Chicken”, since the residents of Devil’s Court could not be bothered with dwelling too long on them. And thus, two beings who died tragic deaths lay forgotten on top of a hill, which succumbed some years later to a violent landslide (which some Christian scholars termed “the wrath of God” as they hurriedly prepared the blueprints for a very large arc), decaying in the pages of history. A hopeful young Christian visited Kishore’s grave in the interim, and returned home an atheist when he saw no signs of the foretold resurrection.

*

At the island of Kalpa, Mother Harriet, whose new name was The Chariot, continued beating the drum monotonously. “Left, right, left… Left, right, left…”