Biju John – Author Page

A yellow walkie-talkie began to howl hysterically from one of the docking ports of the International Space Station. A young astronaut, dressed in casual trousers and shirt, now wading through the corridors, suddenly stopped. Her eyes turned to the direction of the burst of static filling the air and at her colleague who was getting into her space suit, fifty feet away at another docking port. She saw the other woman reaching for the walkie-talkie and talking a bit madly. Having swung around, the woman in her casuals ran to another direction through the slow corridors.

A fragile figure, she was not above thirty, but due to the fear and anxiety in her eyes and from the tattered blue polo shirt and trousers she wore, the woman looked older. By the colour of her skin, she was mostly American, by the angle of her nose she was partly French, and by the texture of her skin and eyes, she looked Asian. More notably, by the heat of the fire in her eyes, she looked betrayed, bereft of her dear ones and scared of a mortal enemy – the silent assassin.

Having waded a pretty long distance through the abdomen of the space-station, now some two hundred fifty miles above London, she entered one of the sleep stations on her right. Not prepared to accept the truth she was going to encounter, she stood at the open door, her eyes tightly shut.

But it was something that she had to face anyway.

A heavy cloud of evening fog was drifting downstream from the unseen peak of a mountain. As the white fog filled the recess of a cluster of pine trees that rose from the foot of the mountain, this man, as unrecognisable as the earth that the fog had taken control of, covered from head to ankles in a yellow raincoat, was climbing a vertical cliff, all by himself, a heavy bag hanging from his shoulder. He paused at a height and studied the movements of a blistered space-capsule that had been brought ashore a greenish reservoir a hundred feet from him, a dozen officers investigating the surroundings and another dozen mounting the heavy capsule onto a truck, silently watched by three or four hundred village folks who had stood on the ledges that jutted out from the walls of a gorge. 

A gorge with vertical cliffs that guarded the reservoir. 

The man, his feet now buried in a bed of mist-laden grass and a face that suffered terrible burns, kept ascending the cliff, jumping from rock to rock. Huge rain drops spattered on his plastic raincoat which he had pulled tighter around his body. He was entirely inside the yellowness illuminated by the silent lightning above the misty mountain, its peaks not visible. 

As the fog thinned away for a few seconds and the lightning brightened up the misty world, the scorched capsule came into view in the man’s backdrop, floating and gurgling above the water. Except for the distant roar of a waterfall and the chirping and squeaking of the dampened valley, the world was quite quiet, as if it was a day after the Last Judgement – all the good and evil taken.

All his attention riveted to the reservoir and the movement of the capsule, he studied the crowd that had been silently watching the procedures from the rocky ledge vertically above the reservoir. Moving like a ghost, jumping from rock to rock, he edged to the direction of the ledge where the crowd had stood in silence.

Now, already walking to the crowded ledge, he crossed a terrible police cordon with a ‘Not Beyond This Line’ warning until he got lost in the crowd and found a position from where he could watch the capsule, presently being lifted and heaved onto the truck. 

The man elbowed through the crowd, carefully listening to the men and women, discussing the events before and after the splashing down. All that they had heard was that the thing that fell into the reservoir belonged to America and that the men and women around it for the last two weeks were all Americans.

Now, upon his shivering legs inside the church, the priest was apparently angry at the sight of the empty glass-cases of the saints, the deserted cross overhead and the toppled furniture and charred little back room behind the altar – the sacristy.

Shouting a curse familiar only in Coorgs, the priest challenged the saints to appear before him and wink once again. He sent the beam of his torchlight up at the deserted cross above the altar.

“Shame on you, sons of a harlot!” The priest shouted at the cross, his eyes searching around. “Curses upon you for all that you have done to me and to the people, you imposters! Your villainy had made them believe your winking. They burned candles for you and brought your food at midnight. You fooled them and feasted upon the food they brought out of their miserable poverty. You spread new superstitions. You told them stories of a forged Divine Feminine to foil the Son of God. May curses follow you all the way to the door of Hell.” 

The priest paused here. He bent down upon his knees and breathed hard. “I know,” he shouted louder, not looking up. “I know you are there, listening to me, chirping to each other’s ears, sniggering from your holes in the balcony.”

He then paused again and listened.

“Eesho,” he shouted. Although the lean man tried to pacify the priest, he spoke between coughs. “You are the worst of the three of you! You are worse than Maadan. You played an ugly drama to prove that you are Christ but the Heavens declined you. I curse you, all the three of you, wretched mortals. I curse you – Geev and Paul, sons of a…”

He paused for a while to breathe.

“Come down,” the priest looked up, walking to the wooden stairwell, going a few steps up. “I have come to plead to the three of you. Come down, now.”

He waited for a while. His companion had, by this time, walked up to the top-most step and stopped there, afraid of going further. Coming back to the priest who was only halfway to the balcony, the lean man whispered something into his ears.

“No,” the priest was heard shouting. “They are nowhere but here!”

The lean man went up again but hesitated to advance.

“Listen,” the priest shouted, his voice now breaking. “I have come to tell you this. The court has decided to lift the ban on the temple. Soon the same will be lifted from the church too. A new priest will be appointed, the church will be renovated, the devotees will come back. We will have our prayers. We will have our processions. We will have new statues and new glass cases.”

The priest paused.

“Do you hear, Paul and Geev?” the assistant asked this time.

“I have come to tell you,” the priest interrupted. “I have come to tell the three of you that Middle Coorg will have all its glory back but we will not wish to have the three of you stay here anymore. No feminism. No equality. No changes. No Dames. No Bards. I don’t care what the people of Upper Coorg teach and those in Lower Coorg suffer. Is that clear?”

For long, every student and teacher was clueless about something that kept English language inaccessible to them due to a high level of ambiguity but John came up with his Number Method. In simple words, Number Method assigns a number to some of the determiners, adjectives, adverbs and even verbs. As per Number Method, No, never, don’t have a zero number (0/10) while little and few have 0.1 to 0.9 numbers out of 10. Scaling them up, numbers rise to 10/10 with “always” and “everyday” while some words achieve a 11/10 range with words such as “overwhelming, exceedingly,” etc.

Biju John introduced the Crush Card to impart English Education in a very unique and simple way using colors. Here, students do not learn the age-old grammar rules with definitions.

Biju John is now at the helm of taking Kerala to the next level with a unique online program called English Crush.  Already working with 300+ schools and teaching over 900 students, the program aims to get everyone born in Kerala after 2010 on board for a short ride. With over 1000 English Medium schools around, English Crush intends to bridge the gap between Kerala’s English Rich and English Poor to empower the state to produce a fully literate state.