The Master of Hell, dreaded by the Gods, sends his man to fetch a soul. The Messenger of Death is well built, tall, dark and exactly looks like the one he should be. He is as old as the one living since eternity and as young as the one who is still to live till the final triumph of good over evil. He comes to a crowded square. It seems he has to wait and follow some strangers drawn by an accident to the Trauma Centre till the certification by RML doctors.
He does not wait for the autopsy report as he was trained to be indifferent to the cause of death. But he is busy with the formalities unknown to the living. His chores do not prevent him from examining the dead or its demeanour, which he often does, perhaps in search of some story in each dead face. He finds that the visage suggests just another insignificant man in his early sixties, who appears to be in seventies. This is a body which is on its sixth month’s extension after retirement, which is always considered as a reward for its 38 years of service in the government organisation. It is medium height, medium built, fair and so on, which has nothing to do with its death or perhaps with the entire span of being alive. It is more average than any statistical method could have median-ed.
The dead have innumerable replicas in the living world- so numerous they are and in so plentiful ways they die that even the hell registry does not have specific entries for the ways of death. They certainly have broad categories like “death in war”, “famine”, “diseases”, “old age” and a recent addition, “road accidents”. (After much controversy and debate, the deaths caused by “road rage” were included in the “road accident” category). The radicals in the hell bureaucracy had to fight hard for the inclusion of the “road accident” grouping. Their arguments were initially resisted by the old guard on the ground that accident deaths are very arbitrary in space and time. Taking the current example, one truck entered the city during peak office hours (needless to say, after duly bribing the traffic authorities), reached a particular space of earth where an underage driver was testing his new car. It hit another car while avoiding colliding with a pole. The truck driver was caught unaware and hit our man in the pavement, who was not supposed to be in that space at that time as per his years of daily routine. The day before and mostly he used to be in office at this time.
The hell supervisors argued how can such a death be traced to a cause and given a separate entry in such an important registry. However, the Master of Hell, as the Chief Executive, was open to new ideas and adaptive to the changing nature of the profession and the world of man. But he openly refused to entertain the demand for a new column for the road rage victims. Maybe he had tacit approval from the Board for both the decisions or possibly the Board never bothered.
There are minutes of the meetings held in the past to decide each of these entries. These minutes form part of the Hell Manuals. For example, long philosophical debates took place when an entry for “death in war” was created. The concept of martyrdom, nationhood, ideologies, right and wrong were discussed and most importantly the main controversy was whether to have this entry in the hell registry or it is simply a jurisdictional overreach, which should have been sent properly for entry into the heaven registry. Ultimately the majority decision tilted towards recognising the horrific nature of violence and death in war, and the entry was duly columned in hell.
The truck driver fled the scene as is the case mostly. The underage driver also managed to sneak out. The enumerable replicas of the dead, who were still undead, were stuck in the traffic, staring at their steering while articulating their excuses in their respective offices as a road accident is no longer an authentic excuse for being late. They had another important task today, to unknow something that flashed their sight from the corner. Something so ghastly that is once seen could be ‘unseened’ with some amount of effort, but not without an undying scar on our power of seeing.
The messenger of death sees a dent in the soul perhaps caused by the apathy of some hundred passersby minding their own business. Or by the arbitrariness of its death. Or by the meaning and purpose of life it learnt in those motivational sessions in office.
He always carried souls with some minor dents, shades and stigmas. He is more curious this time as the dent was more severe than usual. A simple radiography may tell him the structural maturity of the dent in the soul. So he visits the nearest lab of the Radiology department. He finds the age of the dent much older than the time of death, which makes his examination more prying. He then starts putting the living souls around him before the machine and surprisingly finds most of them with similar markers. A soul being an immaterial entity was supposed to be untouched by worldly pressures or grinding of time.
The hell bureaucracy has entries for each living person’s birth, death, deeds, and everything one may think of with hyperlinks and auto-entries. Since the birth of mankind, the bureaucracy has followed these practices in the most impeccable way. The Messenger of Death was bringing the souls to hell for hundreds of centuries and never bothered to check and calculate whose time has come but simply followed the algorithm and calculated fate and destiny as per each one’s deeds. But now fate seems to have stopped reckoning and destiny losing its precision. The randomness and unpredictability of road accidents cannot be explained without a new power, a hitherto unknown God, who seems to have invaded the fates of humans. In the bureaucratic hierarchy of heaven and hell there is no such post that this new God is occupying and yet it is running the show. Where to fit him? Is the Board aware of it? But most importantly is it within my Grade Pay to inform the Board through the Master of Hell? What if my organisation blames me for everything that slipped from their hand? After all, I have been responsible for fetching these souls. For the last century or so, since automobile dependence has shaped cities, mankind has created this new God, Arbitrary, who is manipulating the registry and still managed to remain hidden in plain sight. Most importantly, how to convince the humans that no help is coming? What type of religion do we need to tell humans to let go of one’s hold on the securities of childhood and drop into a strange unknown world ruled by forces unconcerned with man?
The messenger, being an intermediary between God and man murmurs within himself, “Perhaps the God is not yet dead, but humans have already made it irrelevant.”
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