1
The darkness was heavy with some ominous message. It was not foretold and none seem to understand what was coming. The prophetess of the tribe, Miana, was brooding over the calamitous black outside sitting beside the small, casual window of the only room of her house. The tribe was waiting out there; waiting silently to see what would come. The stillness of the wind, the silence of all the usually clamoring beasts and birds of the nearby forest made it deeply sinister. The prophetess muttered some unintelligible words to herself. It was a chant to the get rid of misfortunes; it was a chant to the ancient God of Nourishment. But he did not seem to respond to it. The gloom hovered neatly from every visible corner of sky and earth. But why should it have happened? Was it because the ritual for the New God of Misfortunes, the once most important god of the tribe was not performed with utmost care and exactness last time? Was it because they suddenly questioned the godliness of this New God? This was the question that was knocking everyone who was standing under the open sky with their dark eyes filled with intense frustration and terror.

Suddenly they heard the baleful silence breaking with a distant sound of mechanical treading of thousands feet….

2
The New God of Misfortune appeared when Miana was seventeen. Before that things were certainly different. From the moment of the blooming of her consciousness, she discovered herself in a world blessed with honest sunshine and heavenly starry nights. Many a night she passed hearing the ceaseless raindrops caressing the thick foliage of the tropical forest. Many a dawn she did her prayer to the ancient, benevolent God of regeneration and prosperity bathing in the unhampered flow of pure gold from the great Sun God. It was a time holding all the primitive, raw bliss of earth. Miana dived deep into the wonders whispering around her. The dark nights brought about thousands of mysteries and the shinny yellow of the mornings unfolded them before the dilated eyes of Miana who was never tired of seeing the working of the nature around her throbbing and breathing, changing like the tune of an unfamiliar song. Often she used to go deeper into the forest….

It seems deeper like an ocean level a bit further from the shore…the sounds…oh! No. It’s silence that is so beautiful here. No, there is a sound…sound…aha, silence…no, sound…ooo I got you boy, it’s you. Come on; take a ride on my hand. I will take you to my village…

She started for her village taking the noisy grasshopper on her hand. The soft earth was smelling her steps with curiosity as they were not that much well-known with human feet. The fallen, dying leaves were soothed by the touch of her soft toes that were the harbinger of freshness to them.

She slowing discerned a world full of opposites. She saw rain and sun, water and fire, day and night, summer and winter, storm and stillness, life and death. The small world of Miana, limited to a small tribal habitation and a friendly forest gradually revealed all the core mysteries of universe to her. She saw how opposites were peacefully evolved and took their turns as if they were inevitable parts of the same system. In the lonely afternoons she contemplated over these interplays of opposition and its significance…the opposites of nature always contributed to make a unified whole and there both parts were simultaneously important…


3
But there were many other opposites that Miana did not know about because they were not the opposites of an unnatural origin…

4
Miana’s people lived on a bald land beside a vast high land forest. It was tangled by a forceful river but the place they settled on was higher from the river’s level so they were safe from flood. Miana did not know from when her ancestors had started to live on this land. They all were grey in complexion with dark eyes and sturdy physical structure. They made small straw huts for shelter. It was a blessed land. The gods were content. There had been a few intertribal wars in the last many years. Something hard and shinny was found from under the earth and was not of that use to them. This place was adorned with not only gold but also many other natural treasures….so on and so forth. It was a kind of typical paradise on earth hidden beneath the bushes.

They had many good gods with the powers to preserve, support and nourish. To speak the truth, they never saw them to appear in reality. The only God they experienced was a new god, unfamiliar to their primitive religion. It was the New God of Misfortune.

One day, two strangers entered into Miana’s village. It was the early of spring and everything was giggling, dancing and mating. In the midst of this festival of life, two intruders fall into the place handing bizarre apparatus that produced fire and could kill a man instantly. The outsiders were different even in bodily features- they were pink in complexion with golden hair and brown eyes. They spoke in a complex, outlandish language to each other. They were Different.

Miana was seventeen then; a girl almost on the verge of her womanness. She was already taken as the prophetess of the tribe because she could foretell natural occurrences. She could comprehend the language of nature and they thought she had a secret understanding with the natural gods. Logic says that a prophetess of nature would not be able to predict an unnatural event that is the appearance of the pink, foreign representative of an alien god. She could not prefigure the approaching of a new negative god that would shackle the entire tribe’s freedom and peace. So, she was always greeted with silent, indignant stares when encountered by any village folk after it happened.

The incident was too abrupt. Not a single sign could be read from nature. It was so obscure and mysterious even for a prophetess who could reckon the looming of an eclipse or a storm so accurately. The nature did not react a bit when they stepped in with their fire producing machines…it was all a dark, deep, impenetrable mystery. Anyways.

Miana’s people did not know that they wanted and why they ascended (this was what they believed) to them with death and destruction. When they came up to this humble residence with power and pink, the grey people were ready to accept them as gods, new yet undefined gods for whom soon paeans would be composed and rituals would be invented.

5
The pink foreigners told that they were not the actual god (they were extremely content when they found to be considered as gods; they were relishing it). They were mere representatives. The God, who was almost as powerful as the God Himself (may sound paradoxical to you but Miana’s people did not question it) lived in a very distant place, a real heaven made of all the precious things gathered from all over the earth. The God was so mighty that he could take away millions of lives by a single move of his forefinger.

Actually, it was a goddess…


Many other pink representatives were coming everyday. They loved the tropical fruit, fleshy grey women, magnificent tributes and blind fear. They arrived with new codes, laws, rules, rituals and scriptures where things like these were written- “We are a mighty God’s representatives, almost semi gods; you are human beings. We are pink and beautiful; you are grey and ugly. We are neat and tidy; you are messy and unkempt. We know; you don’t know…” They had to offer these to them. And they had to take those from them. Miana’s panic-stricken villagers accepted everything as they must have obeyed the New God; God must not ever be defied. They wondered – “Even his representatives had the power of life and death; how immensely mighty the New God of Misfortune himself would be!” They bowed, chanted, showered gold, gems and ivory upon them and did everything they could to show their reverence to appease their unpredictable wrath.

6
But everything turned worse when one day Miana saw one of the representatives of the almighty New God of Misfortune to bleed from a scratch of a thorn of a wild bushy plant…