Amballore House (31 page)

His Christmas wish list included this world.

***

It was a well-known fact that Vareed was able to recall the dead from the grave, and often rescued people from the grips of death. They then would be transferred into Amballore House’s stationary-time world, where they could lead an eternal life.

Resurrecting people was like going back in time, similar to “world of yesterdays,” that he dreamed about. He came close to realizing his dream by performing this miracle.

***

No one could see the traffic accident because it was night. There were no street lamps. There was faint illumination from the crescent moon, not enough to brighten up.

It happened on Hell’s Highway. The so-called highway was anything but a highway. It was a misnomer, probably coined by someone with a dubious sense of humor. It was probably designed by a drunken civil engineer while he was distracted by his nagging wife and crying baby. The nightmarish road looked like it was built as an afterthought in an area crowded by both residential and commercial properties that were built intermixed, with no proper planning.

There was a treacherous ninety-degree turn in the so-called highway. The sudden turn was accompanied by a sharp descent in the road. It was as if the distracted engineer forgot to patch up the low-level and high-level segments in a coherent way to help accident-free driving. The fact that the road was quite narrow at this juncture of the highway did not help either.

Kumar was traveling at a normal speed on his motorbike. Unseen to the motorist, a farm truck was heading in his direction at a high speed. As fate would have it, their meeting ground happened to be at the mortal ninety-degree turn in the road.

It only lasted a flickering second. While the bike was in the middle of negotiating the turn downgrade, the farm truck coming at lightning speed crashed right into it, killing Kumar instantaneously. The big, long truck struggled to negotiate the ninety-degree turn and managed to some degree, but it overshot and made the fatal impact with the bike. It braked at the last moment, but not before the impact. The momentum kept it going after the braking.

An unrestrained farm tool, presumably heavy and sharp (it was later found to be a tractor blade), flew towards Kumar and severed his head just before the collision. Kumar’s head flew into the pauper’s graveyard by the side of Hell’s Highway. Immediately after, the truck made impact with the bike and sent it heavenward.

The bike flew up in the air because it was coming downhill, and the fierce impact of the truck sent it up the hill backward and into the air. A headless Kumar was still perched on the bike and appeared to be riding his bike backward in the air against a clear crescent moon. The bike went up high and then descended and landed in the
pauper’s graveyard.

The truck did not stay around to see what happened. The driver panicked, and the vehicle sped away faster than it had approached the accident scene.

When the police came to the scene next morning, they saw the unbelievable: Kumar, with his head cut off, was still perched on the bike that was standing in the thick bushes of the graveyard. His severed head was lying there on the ground, staring at him! The tractor blade that butchered him was also at the scene, lying near the staring head, declaring to the world that it was the culprit and shouting to the police that they could arrest it for all it cared.

Kumar appeared poised to take off again on his bike.

The genetic engineering class at Amballore University was full. Nobody wanted to skip the class since it was totally entertaining and educational at the same time. The university was famous for the most advanced courses in cutting-edge technologies. It attracted talented students from across Kerala. The university boasted of some of the brightest students.

Kumar had been one of those bright students. He had won a National Merit Scholarship. With a fat check coming his way every month, he had not needed to worry about money to pay his way through university. He had earned a name for himself early in his life, while he was a school student. University principals stood in line to get such students enrolled at their institutions. He had held a science talent scholarship throughout his high school years. His main field of study had been genetic engineering. He had felt that genetic engineering was the solution to all the miseries of the world, being powerful to engineer genes smart enough to withstand diseases. He had believed that the existing medicine was nothing but an afterthought, coming to rescue people who fell sick. The medicine of tomorrow, thanks to genetic engineering, would be capable of preventing disease by designing smart genes that steered clear of diseases.

Kumar’s death was such a tragic event that the entire university could not come to terms with it. Here was a trophy student, a
talented young scientist, the pride of Amballore University, with a promising career that could change the landscape of genetic engineering and human lives. Here was a highly likely prominent scientist of tomorrow, forging ahead with ambitious ideas that could spearhead new innovations in genetics. His demise was a loss not only to his parents and Amballore University but also to the entire scientific community. It was not only his parents and siblings who grieved. The entire university grieved and declared the institution would observe a day of mourning. The news of the tragic and premature death spread like wildfire across Amballore.

The funeral pyre was arranged in nearby temple, and the body was taken in a casket carried by high officials of Amballore University. Then the unbelievable happened. The casket was toppled in a stampede as a result of the huge crowd of students attending the funeral. In the accompanying pandemonium, it was reported that the body was lost, as miracle would have it. To have a dead body snatched in a broad daylight amid thousands of spectators was unbelievable, and even more unbelievable was that nobody could figure out who snatched the body.

As reported in the Amballore Times under the headline “UFO Abducts Promising Student’s Body,” there were several spectators who witnessed a strange vehicle resembling a UFO that landed amid the grieving crowd of the funeral procession. Two old people, one man and one woman, got out of the UFO, forged right ahead into the stampede, managed to topple the casket, and got away with the dead body. All these happened with such utmost efficiency and lightning speed that not one single spectator was able to see everything that happened. The press reporter had to piece together accounts of various witnesses to come up with a plausible story. The UFO simply disappeared from the scene after the body was snatched.

Kumar’s body could not be cremated. However, the officials decided to cremate the casket left behind by the extraterrestrials, the closest they could do to pay homage to the genius scientist-to-be.

Later on during the night, a peculiar-looking bus stopped at Amballore Junction and hurried down the notorious Hell’s
Highway to Amballore House, in full view of a crescent moon and stars. That bus reached Amballore House’s perimeter wall and did not stop. The bus simply floated over the brick wall and disappeared from the scene.

The Midnight Express later reached Amballore House. Vareed alighted from the bus, carrying the body of Kumar. Following him in close proximity was the bus driver, Eli, his wife.

Kumar came to life through Vareed’s magical power. The crowd at Amballore House, including scientists, professors, researchers, and robots, were invited to the company of Vareed and Eli. They were offered a chance to see how Kumar would come back to life through Vareed’s mystical power.

Vareed’s resurrection process revealed that he was filtering normal events through a reversed-time frame. To the audience, it appeared as if they were watching events in a time-reversed universe, if there was such a universe. To put it differently, the crowd felt that they were seeing a movie run backward.

A number of things happened simultaneously at breakneck speed at the accident scene, and the audience struggled to grasp the flow of events that took place in a very short span of time. The following was a series of riveting scenes that greeted the audience when Vareed resurrected Kumar:

The scene in front of Vareed and Eli at Amballore House changed into a paddy field, like in a 4-D IMAX movie. The headless body of Kumar was perched on a motorbike with his head lying across from him and staring at him.

Suddenly the bike started flying upward and forward in the air. After ascending to some height, the bike started descending in a forward direction. The bike prepared to land on the road.

Just before the bike landed on the road, Kumar’s head in the paddy field stopped watching Kumar and lifted up and flew upward and headed toward the headless body.

A moment after this, the tractor blade lifted itself from the nearby paddy field and started flying upward toward the bike, aimed at
Kumar’s neck.

The tractor blade and the head seemed to be coordinating their fast motion with an aim of joining the headless body simultaneously.

Kumar’s headless body landed first. Suddenly a farm truck was seen receding from him.

Immediately after, Kumar’s body, his head, and the tractor blade met above his neck. Kumar’s body sucked in all the spilled blood like a vampire. Blood drops were seen lifting themselves from the roadside and paddy field and joining the body. It was as if Kumar’s body was a Count Dracula sucking up the spilled blood.

As soon as the threesome’s rendezvous took place, the tractor blade was seen moving away from a live Kumar (who was moving backward now on his bike) toward the farm truck that was still receding. The blade landed in the truck. The truck receded faster.

Kumar was alive and started moving backward.

Suddenly, Kumar was in their midst, alive and well. The dead body that Vareed carried to Amballore House vanished, replaced by a young, vibrant, and healthy Kumar

The spectators who were watching the riveting scenes stood up and greeted the young man uproariously. Some robots in the crowd gave him high fives. He was given a hero’s welcome.

The young scientist would now undergo a period of training in Amballore House’s training center. He would be groomed by a team of scientists, robots, and professors. He was effectively inducted into the supernatural underworld to conduct everlasting research.

He was alive and well, and he would be alive and well for an eternity inside the walls of Amballore House.

9
THE CARDIOLOGIST

In addition to assembling great minds of science and technology, Vareed and Eli paid attention to bringing great researchers of medicine to Amballore House. One area they were interested and to which they lent their passion was artificial human organs. Even though these were available in the market, their availability was very limited, and their quality was questionable. These facts were like a sore thumb causing concern in the medical community. “A lot more people would be alive today if only there were a fair supply of high-quality artificial organs,” Vareed told Eli.

They did not sit idle with their dream but jumped right into it with their characteristic vigor and enthusiasm. They abducted medical professionals to Amballore House. A prominent story revolved around the abduction of a famous cardiologist working in Amballore Medical College.

***

After a busy day of performing cardiac surgery and teaching medical students at the famous college, Professor Sharif was heading out home. “See you all tomorrow,” he told his colleagues as he headed out to his car at the end of the day, little knowing what was waiting for him outside.

As he reached his parking area, which housed his red Corvette that he recently imported from the United States, he was puzzled to see an old couple in his car, the woman in the driver’s seat and the man in the backseat. As soon as the professor reached the car, the passenger door opened automatically, as if the car were expecting him. “Get in the car, prof,” Eli told the famous cardiologist. The old man sitting in the backseat, Eli’s husband, Vareed, nodded his head in agreement.

The smart professor had an eerie feeling. He approached the parking lot’s public phone booth and phoned the college security department, declining the invitation extended by the strange couple. He reported on the unusual intruders in the car and made sure that
he told the security officer that he had the key to the car and therefore there was no risk of them driving away.

“How old you think they are, prof?” the officer inquired.

“They look like they are in their midseventies,” the professor answered.

“So, you are saying two septuagenarians intruded into your car and are holding your car hostage?” the officer asked the professor.

Professor Sharif answered in the affirmative. He could hear laughter over the phone, followed by a comment that it was unbelievable and that they were coming to check it out.

The professor waited for the security to arrive. He was almost sure that he could wrestle the car away from the old couple but was not sure if they were armed, and hence he decided to wait for help to arrive. He moved away from the car and waited at the far end of the parking structure, unseen to the couple and yet making sure the car was visible to him.

Vareed and Eli decided to make themselves invisible as they were waiting for the security personnel to arrive. They had expected this much to happen and were not surprised that the professor called the security department, as they gathered from his frantic phone call and his willingness to wait out for whoever was coming to retrieve his car. Eli closed the passenger door.

At last the security officers arrived. Professor Sharif joined them at the car but was surprised to see it unoccupied. The security personnel could not see anybody in the car either. They questioned the sanity of the professor and accused him of bluffing and pulling their legs. They smelled a practical joke the aging professor was playing on them, however unlikely such a scenario could be. The helpless professor was as surprised as anybody at the disappearance of the intruders.

“Where are the old couple?” they asked him.