I needed to earn a bit extra so I taught literature and linguistics as a part-timer in a Government college. The shitty thing about this educational business as with other businesses is that you can’t afford to be a chooser. It is take it or leave it thing. They gave me classes on the morning shift in the months of December and January. So be it! The drudgery would ask of me to kick off the feathery blanket with the image of a dragon spewing fire on it, drag myself out of bed, turn the faucet on and splash liquid ice on face, sit on commode with the bottom making noises more than moving bowels, slip into a woolen jumper and a trekker’s jacket I picked up from Thamel, bury head in earflap Sherpa hat, all in tearing hurry, and then take a two hundred meters brisk walk to catch a bus blind as a bat fighting the jungle of fog.

The bus is for the commuters like a coop is for a chicken. In rush hour the transport take people for the commodity. Fume or rant, this is the way it is! You can’t help.

You reach the college to find the classroom empty and cold while the ‘poets and professors of tomorrow’ sitting in the warmth and coziness of cafeteria sipping tea from cup in the smoke-filled room fighting about a girl or cinema.

So, these were the colors – the blinding fog, the morning commute, the human coop, farting more than shitting, layers of clothes on, cold classroom and students fighting about a girl or a cinema – which lay in memory for me to bring out and to paint the portrait of my colorful life, then.

There was the other side of it. The corner of the planet earth I lived in had this religious creatures galore and so had the temples and monasteries. I’d cross path with hundreds of these god-fearing creatures like phantoms emerging from fog and melting into it. Some had their teeth clattering, others had their lips rapidly pronouncing names of gods out of genuine prayer or to fight the cold. The sight of them would run a thought through my head.  Are their gods as wicked as my college authorities? They put me out in the freezing morning blanketed in fog for fistful of money to scrape by and their gods put them out to commute to temples and monasteries where He seldom if ever manifest Himself. And I’d wonder if it is money or God that is mightier.

What else make them rise so early when the Sun is hours from rising to brave the chills and fog when they have every opportunity for kicking around the blanket! And then I find myself victim of necessity and they victim of faith. Either of us are victims, anyway, doesn’t matter in what way! It comes all over me that God sitting in head is mightier than God sitting in temples. They call it belief. God is all about belief! What I see around is delusive, not real! God is real! I have no eyes for God! These eyes won’t do! I need a vision!

Well, if so, then maybe this thing of flesh and blood is as much real as the gods of stone living in the temples! I can put God into stone! Why can’t I put god into this living thing of flesh and blood! It is all about believing! Why do I believe in one thing and not believe in the other thing! Why am I so discriminatory in my belief systems! I may have been duped into believing that I am not God. Why can’t I live by the belief that I am real and I am God! If this thing called “belief” has power to evoke faith in you so much so that you take the stone idols for God, why can’t the same “belief” evoke faith in me to take myself for God?

With these thoughts swarming through my head as I was emerging and melting into fog on my way to college, this weird fellow or a Sadhu in painted face swathed in coarse, prickly blanket walking on bare feet emerged from fog and walked up to me. I quickened my pace to avoid the self-styled agent of God, but he had set his mind on me.

And he ran off at the mouth. Here is what he said. “Your face is shining like a diamond in the dark sky. The God is keeping a vigil at you. You are getting your light from Him. God has commanded you to swim across the river of sin, help others cross it and then go to Him unblemished. Your task is to redeem people from sin and set their feet on right path. Happiness will kiss your feet and joy crown your head. Keep your head empty, for God may need a place in it.”

Alright, alright, I can’t put God in my head now as I have other things occupying it, I said trying to disengage myself from him.

“I want you to grant me a wish, he said, looking piercingly into my eyes. I shot a look back at him. “I’m as much God’s servant in the earth as you. We pursue one and same mission. We walk two different paths but our destiny is strung together.”

“Yeah, I got it, I said trying to move away from him.

“Give me your jacket. The body of flesh and blood that I am in needs it more than the body you are in. You can find a better one”, he said.

“I can see you shivering with cold. If I take it off and let you put it on your body, I’ll go shivering. One of us (God’s servants) has to go shivering and braving the chill and fog. We can’t both have it since there is only one piece. Maybe you are the servant of God whose wish I am denying. Maybe I have to go to hell for the sinful act of not granting a wish of a God’s servant.  I’d gladly go to hell than to go shivering in heaven. You know why? I am God and I am in heaven. I am duped into believing that I am not. This “belief” is a shitty thing that rules mind breeding conflicting ideas – Reality and Delusion. I am no more under delusion.

And I moved away leaving him gaping at me.