Hindu belief has it that the 10th and last avatar of the deity Vishnu will be Kalki. Kalki, who rides a white horse and bears a flaming sword. All you have to do is run a Google search for Kalki (specify it’s not Kalki Koechlin you’re looking for, otherwise you might get hopelessly sidetracked), and you’ll realise just how obsessed Indians are with Kalki. There are people wanting to know if Kalki will be a woman, whether Kalki will kill everyone, whether Kalki has already been born, and so on.
Well, no more questions need be asked. Kalki has not only been born, he’s alive and well, and clamouring for his gratuity. He’s better known as Rameshchandra Fefar, a former employee of the Water Resources Department in Gujarat. Fefar claims to be Kalki, and takes credit for India having made a profit of `20 lakh crore over the past 20 years, because there were no droughts in this period.
Not quite accurate (since India has had a lot of drought since 2000), but Fefar might not know, since he went to office only 16 days in 2018. This lack of attendance, by the way, drew the department’s ire, along with a show cause notice. When the department also withheld his pay and his gratuity, Fefar, like Superman, unmasked himself and revealed himself as Kalki. He has threatened that if his gratuity isn’t paid up, he’s going to bring drought to India.
This raises so many questions, in my mind. Why is Fefar-Kalki threatening drought? We already have drought, along with delayed monsoons, heat waves, and cyclones (our weather does nothing by halves). Why not threaten something really awful, like the shutting down of WhatsApp?
Then, if Fefar really is Kalki, how come he’s not claiming responsibility for Covid? The way Covid is wrecking everything in sight, from the national economy to our healthcare system, anybody who could say he was responsible for unleashing Covid would be certainly feared—possibly enough for the government to cough up that gratuity.
Also, why is he so grouchy about the gratuity? Shouldn’t Kalki be above such pettiness?
Besides, the bureaucracy is notoriously hard to battle on such matters; we could be in the middle of Satyug by the time Fefar’s case came up for consideration. Fefar would do far better to focus on winning over the public. Indians adore godmen; this is Fefar’s chance to make a killing as one. There have been other Kalki claimants, why not another? And anyway, the time is ripe for a Kalki to emerge: what with all that’s been happening recently, the uber-religious will be falling over themselves trying to save their souls before THE END.
Madhulika Liddle
Twitter: @authormadhulika
Novelist and short story writer