The First Story

So in the beginning there was nothing. Narada (who lived right at the edge of the nothingness) was bored of looking out onto the …well nothingness. There wasn’t anything else he could look at you know. He had been banished to the edge of the void because like all other fourteen-year-old boys, he had taken his dad’s vimana out for a spin on the Milky Way (not the chocolate by the way) and had gotten caught for speeding. So he had been banished (temporarily of course). And he was bored.

“Just gotta getta aaout, just gotta getta raight aout of heeare”. He had a very funny accent-a cross between an aatchi and some uptight English kaaran- a precursor, some say, to Freddie Mercury. If you don’t know who that is, ask your dad. And if your dad was one of those not influenced by the hippie movement, then …well find someone who was. Actually you could ask your mom too but then she might not want to admit that she was one of the pot smoking, free thinking, …you know what they were like back then.

So he decided to do some exploring. He went out and explored and then gave up after some time as he soon found out that you couldn’t really explore nothingness. So he clomped back to his house, sat at the window and stared…and stared…and stared.

And jumped up, rushed out of the house and scooped up the shining ball from the edge of the void. It was round-as all balls should be. It sparkled and shimmered and pulsed with all kinds of colours. It was also warm to the touch, which was really surprising, as you know how cold the void can be. That did not occur to Narada because he, like many other children of his age, had not been paying any attention to his physics classes at all.

He looked closely and saw that the ball was made of hundreds of iridescent streams of colours that seemed to flow into each other and not stop flowing. They mixed and moved like the chutney in a mixie except the ball did not make any noise.

He was puzzled and intrigued by it. He turned it this way and that and this way again but no, he still couldn’t figure it out. Then he saw something even strange. In the midst of all that colour he saw something black. A little, black pointy tip kind of thing, you know the kind that just begs to be pulled and poked and twisted. So he did exactly that and then…there was light.

Narada was flung several light years away and thankfully landed on what was to become the Oort cloud-you know, the nebulous thingamajig from where the comets come…right you don’t know. Well, it suffices to say that he landed in a softer part of the galaxy. He was still recovering from that outpouring of incandescence when he was rapidly hauled up by his ear. I am sure you must all know what a painful experience it is to have your ear pulled, even in fun and this was not fun.

He saw or rather squinted at a tall, handsome man with a pair of very fancy shades wrapped around his head. No this is not Cyclops…wait won’t you! This tall man with the shades had a furious look on his face, to put it mildly. “What have you gone and done this time, you young rascal?”, he thundered. Narada looked really terrified now. “By my formidable father’s beard, I have had it,.” he thought to himself. He put on a look of injured innocence and started to shake his head when a voice like the chiming of a thousand temple lamps boomed out across the now rapidly filling void. “Look Oh beings! Look! Our hour of reckoning draws near. We must retire or die.” With this rather gloomy pronouncement, the world as we know it began to take shape. There did you see that? That was the first volcano and that BHOOm was the first sea coming into being. By the way all the water spilled out of the lota Shiva was carrying, as he was so surprised at the turn of events that he dropped the vessel with a clang. It later went on to become the Big Dipper.

Everything was in fast-forward or so it seemed to the beings that stood silent spectators to this once in a lifetime act of creation. They saw small little things crawl out of the sand live and die in a few precious microseconds. They saw planets die and form again in the rapidly increasing expanse of the galaxy that filled the void. They saw many, many things but the strangest of all was the emergence of a creature that looked like a miniaturised version of the great beings that stood watching this process. Naturally they were most shocked at this development.

You see what had happened was that Vishnu’s youngest child had lost his ball. Now that ball was very special because that sphere contained the essence of all life. So you see, that is why it was so necessary to have the contents of that ball constantly being churned up so that in the end you would have a perfect mix, rather like the perfect dosai batter, to make the perfect world. Vishnu’s youngest child was supposed to grow up to become the guardian of this perfect world but as things turned out; the ball was unravelled at the wrong time. So the world that was created wasn’t perfect- not by a long shot.

Vishnu realised what had happened and so banished Narada (again) to the edge of the universe. Except this time, he made sure that Narada could not get out of his house at all.

Meanwhile the gods watched in astonishment and surprise as the world evolved into a planet unlike anything they had ever conceived before. More than one admired the sheer diversity of life and intelligence on the planet and even went so far as to say, “This has got to be the greatest miracle of all”. Truer words were never spoken. You guessed it…this world was what we call Earth today. The gods really didn’t have a name for it then so they just called it Srishti, which means creation in some old, obscure language. Little did they realise what the creation of this new planet actually meant for them.

They watched as these strange creatures did stranger things to the planet they called home. One of the species suddenly took two random sticks, rubbed them together and made ahhhh! They made fire…that’s right, Fire. The gods looked around in wariness now wondering which one of them could have given the formula for this most sacred of elements to these uncouth animals. Then something even more terrifying happened. They suddenly started speaking…intelligible sounds that even the gods could understand. Worse, they were speaking in that obscure language the gods themselves used. Then things fell apart. These creatures became civilized and started doing all the things the gods used to do. From predicting the weather, to writing about the existence of other life forms, even creating new materials from the resources they had on the planet…and all without external aid. This really angered the gods. One of the braver gods volunteered to go down to the planet disguised as one of the creatures and find out exactly how they managed to gather so much information in so little time. Before he could do that they heard a startling pronouncement from this new planet.

“God id dead”, said a small, tinny voice. There was absolute silence for a heartbeat. Then the entire universe seemed to convulse with laughter at the absurd statement. Everyone knows that the universe would not exist if the gods had not thought it up in the first place.

Wait a minute! What was happening? The gods were fading away as if …no it was not possible. There was no way they could be fading away just because of one silly, presumptuous statement made by some anonymous creature. But it was true. The gods were fading away, slowly and then faster and faster until there was nothing left of them at all. They just vanished as if they had never existed at all.

The universe thought it was just some prank that they had decided to pull. But it waited and waited until it realised that they weren’t coming back ever. No gods at all, would the universe dissolve into chaos? The answer to that seemed pretty obvious when a pert little star commented, “I don’t see why we have to worry so much. We have managed not to dissolve into chaos for quite sometime now. Who says we can’t do without the gods? And oh yeah…in case you have forgotten, Narada is still alive somewhere on the edges of the known universe. He would qualify as a god, wouldn’t he?”

The universe nodded its sage head in agreement and managed to get Narada out of the house he was not supposed to leave. Narada was nonplussed and very confused. He had no idea about what had happened during his confinement. When he found out that all the gods had vanished because of that one statement he took a trip down to the new planet.

He found that not one of the inhabitants of that planet had any clue as to how they got there in the first place. What was even worse was that, all they had were some nonsensical scientific theories about the beginning of time and absolutely no stories. He couldn’t believe it. They had no stories anywhere at all, no way of telling their children what their heritage was all about.

He had to do something about it. He owed it to his parents and the memory of the other gods. So he sat down and started writing the story of how the world was created by accident and not because some particulate matter had collided with some other random material floating about in the void causing a Big Bang. See that is exactly why he had to write a story to explain the creation of the world. He wrote, and wrote, and wrote and after many, many solar months, he finished it. He put it down on a comet just so that he could stretch his arms when the comet suddenly whizzed away and his story went flying all over the universe.

It whizzed away so fast that he had no time to catch it. By some strange coincidence (for which the universe is known), the story finally fluttered down to this planet now known as Earth. It fluttered gently onto a pile of books in a small dusty little bookshop, in the middle of a little village with an unpronounceable name. A little boy came wandering in. It was his birthday and he had some money to spend so he wandered all over the bookstore trying to find a book that he liked. A thick pile of papers on top of the used notebooks pile caught his attention. For some reason he felt compelled to buy the book, though it did not look like any book he had seen before. The storekeeper himself was puzzled as to the origin of the book but then why should he bother with it as long as he gets the money. So the little boy took his new book and sat down to read it. He opened it to the first page and saw, “In the beginning, there was nothing. I mean absolutely nothing. I can’t tell you it was dark or bright or empty or full because….there was nothing. Ever tried to describe nothingness? I thought not.”

So that is how the first story came into being.