Jesus is in the details - Short Story by Dr Koshy A.V.

Jesus is in the details.

 

He was sure he had put the PAN card* back where his wife, A, kept all the cards, in the small, groovy-looking, grey, Wildcraft bag but that morning when he searched for it as he needed it, he could not find it. He searched and searched and wondered what the hell had happened. It just could not be found. He searched his pockets, his wallet, his black backpack, and in the blue file in which he kept all his degree certificates, work experience certificates, and mark lists etc. Nowhere.

Hell. He could think of only one place it could be. The photostat shop where he had made copies. So, after work, he went there. The owner was called Prasannan.

"Sir, did you find a PAN card here that I had left behind?"

"No, sir, but we found this. See if it is yours"

Prasannan showed K an original work certificate of him having worked nearly ten years in a college in Kerala. He had forgotten that there, after photocopying it, and not known it.

He felt surprised. And left, still a bit bewildered; but also slightly mollified.

He had told A, earlier, about the PAN.

She said: "relax, you will find it, it will turn up."

But he had read too much of Kafka and that had made him paranoid and he knew these little things mattered a lot or you end up in the Castle and undergo the Trial. Where they metamorphose you into a Samsa insect which he had no wish to become. So he had kept on praying all the time about it through the day, worried.

Nothing to be done. He thanked the photostat owner and went home with the work experience certificate. Thankful for small mercies.

When he got home, he went and looked in the little Wildcraft bag again, after putting the certificate in his blue documents file. He was old-fashioned, no government digi locker for him. There it was, the PAN Card, staring him in the face as if it had a life of its own to dematerialize into thin air or materialize again if it wanted.

If he had not thought the PAN card was lost he would not have gone to the photostat shop and would not have found that he had actually lost something else, which he had thus, then, got back! Life is a mystery, the secret is in the details, and in small miracles is found manifest, God.

*for non-Indians to know, a PAN Card is a thing that is a must for Indians to file their taxes and perhaps the second most important document they must have after the 'aadhar' card, presently.

Dr. Koshy A.V. is presently working as an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Mount Carmel College, Autonomous, Bangalore, India. He has many books, degrees, diplomas, certificates, prizes, and awards to his credit and also, besides teaching, is an editor, anthology maker, poet, critic and writer of fiction. He runs an autism NPO with his wife, Anna Gabriel. Two of his co-authored books published in 2020 were Amazon best-sellers in India and USA, namely, Wine-kissed Poems with Jagari Mukherjee and Vodka by the Volga with Santosh Bakaya.