Minotaur: Sunil Sharma

Minotaur (Sunil Sharma)

Afterword

“Any government that does not enjoy popular support cannot survive in today’s world. When people speak, the earth trembles and a deaf and disgraced leader has no place to hide then.”

That was the obituary of Constantine Caesar delivered by a somber Buntu, the newly-elected Harara chief, next day. Caesar was buried in a remote part of the island reserved for enemy graves and hardly visited by clan. Three years after the assassination of the usurper outsider, Buntu was running the island efficiently as the popularly-elected ruler of the tiny island. The Zulus were asked to pack up and go. The foreign engineers and doctors were no longer the hostages on the island. They were asked to leave or stay back as welcome guests of the island state, now rechristened as the Harara Island.

Most of the engineers and doctors stayed back voluntarily. They wanted to do their bit to the reconstruction of the island as a modern economy. The modernization introduced unwittingly by Caesar could not be halted any more. The last rain forest of isolation inevitably and finally was razed by bull-dozers of modernity and progress. The silver mines, coffee and other products were nationalized. Buntu, part native and part European, was instrumental in bringing more reforms. Hospitals, roads, schools and church followed quickly. Majority clung to native traditions. Minority got converted to Christianity. Harareers and English were official languages of the little nation. American presidential and justice system was followed. Solomon Islands recognized the Buntu government. U.S. A. , U.K. and Russia also recognized the popular government. In 2002, finally, Kofi Anan include the tiniest state in the family of U.N. police and small army were raise- the Hararas had finally shed their innocence and accepted the wicked ways of the outside world by raising the defense forces against perceived enemies. Mark Livingstone was declared the Father of the Nation. History textbooks got written and new leaders were anointed and old ones thrown away. Hararas, caught up in the logic of Marching History, had to emerge from their hoary isolation and join the world- to the great dismay of the American cultural anthropologists.

Jane Lorrain went back to Italy, big with Caesar’s child. She delivered a male child at Venice, her native town. Caesar, fearing his mortality, had deposited millions in seven Swiss banks. Buntu, on the advice of Americans, could freeze those accounts only after a year or so. Jane could not get enough money from those accounts. The diamonds and gold gifted by Caesar kept her floating. She bought a villa and retired from social life. The Livingstone clan lived and flourished happily in the Solomon Islands.

Constantine Caesar was dead. And buried and forgotten.

“I will be born as your son. I will rise from the dead. I will reclaim everything gain in New Land. My own people there invite me again to the throne there, as they had done with Charles II. Caesar never dies. He ran never die. He simply changes his form in every age. His spirit haunts this wretched world forever and enters a new body in every age”, Cesar’s last famous words to Jane just two days before Ides of March.

That, of course, is yet to be seen and proved correct. Only Time will tell how true is this romantic prognosis and this analogy, this selfish raiding of past for justifying a sordid present and a bloody ideology of naked ambition and hunger for untrammeled power by the Leader who got deposed from his own land and later on murdered in a foreign land by a radicalized aborigine for freedom of his tiny home land from invaders…. 

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Setu, May 2021