Amballore House (27 page)

It remained a mystery how the aliens managed to persuade Vareed and Eli to go with them. What Judas Toddy Club patrons observed was that the foursome talked among themselves mostly in hushed tones and therefore remained inaudible to anyone outside of their immediate circle. Therefore, no one had a clue of what they discussed.

The toddy club patrons narrated their story to Amballore
Times
reporters who came in hordes after the abduction story got out. Everyone, including Judas and his wife, insisted that the possible body snatchers were not extraterrestrials. They looked like normal Malayalees, according to the witnesses, who were prepared to testify to that fact in a court of law, if needed.

Even though the abductors looked like ordinary malayalees, they were nevertheless called aliens because of the mystery surrounding them. The patrons were mystified by their uncanny ability to persuade the septuagenarian couple to go with them after abandoning their beloved children.

Everyone agreed that the couple was in their midseventies; some remembered that the old lady had ponytails, an unusual fashion at that advanced age. The so-called aliens did not resemble anything that conventional wisdom dictated. They did not have small bodies and large heads with protruding eyes. They did not walk around murmuring “ET phone home.” They did not have antennae attached to their heads, giving them appearance of enlarged deathwatch beetles. They did not speak in monotones or in binary language. They did not have green tears like in science fiction movies.

As in all abduction stories, speculation abounded. All of a sudden, a whole plethora of abnormal stories started surfacing like mushrooms, out of toddy shop patrons. Some of them who previously had no out-of-the-ordinary story to tell of the appearance of the estate owners suddenly started remembering new things about them, such as them having tiny antennae attached to their foreheads. Some said they had horns on their heads and sported tails like devils. Just figments of your imaginations, the pessimists among them said.

They did not know that the aliens were able to convince Vareed that they were in fact his parents, not merely by their appearance but more importantly by citing some events from their personal past known only to the four of them. They did not know that the aliens promised them an adventurous life filled with challenges, if they went with them. They did not know that the aliens promised them an everlasting life with no cares of old age. They did not know that they offered to take them to the intriguing Amballore House and beyond to the mysteries of outer space. Enticing Vareed and Eli to accompany them to Amballore House turned out to be an easy task.

Judas recalled that the couple placed a large order of toddy, which they carried out with them in a huge tumbler. If the septuagenarians were in fact extraterrestrials as some people believed, the large supply of toddy was speculated to be meant to be carried to outer space and ceremoniously consumed while they were sitting in their comfortable satellite and zipping past an ocean of stars and planets.

What got everyone’s curiosity heightened was the fact that the couple traveled in the mysterious Midnight Express to get to the toddy shop. This vehicle was rumored to be owned by extraterrestrials. Everyone remembered that after the couple finished their drinks, they offered a ride to Vareed and Eli in their extraterrestrial bus, and the offer was accepted.

The Midnight Express usually took off from the Amballore bus depot located by the side of National Highway 47. It would suddenly and unexpectedly appear there on some midnights. It then traveled along Hell’s Highway, which connected the bus depot to Amballore House, and terminated its journey by flying over the
perimeter walls of the mansion and mysteriously disappearing, leaving no trace of where it vanished. Yes, the Midnight Express could fly!

The Midnight Express that day made its legendary trek to Amballore House from Judas Toddy Club, flew over the mansion’s perimeter wall, and disappeared from the scene. The press reporters were at the site, having been tipped by alert toddy drinkers. However, they did not have anything spectacular to report, except to say that the bus disappeared into thin air as it floated over the perimeter wall and dived into the estate grounds. Just the usual story, they said, and nothing more.

***

Various theories were tossed around to fill the informational vacuum surrounding the aliens. Conjecture surfaced. The fact that the aliens resembled typical Malayalees gave rise to heated debates in Judas Toddy Club. Some speculated that the entire Kerala civilization was transplanted from outer space. Another theory was maybe the ETs were bewitched by the supernatural beauty of Kerala and decided to settle down there.

Even though counterarguments were raised to point out that the Malayalam language was not a binary language - aliens were rumored to speak in a binary language - and that it had deep links to an ensemble of Dravidian languages and to Sanskrit and therefore the Kerala civilization could not have originated in outer space, a predominant section of Judas Toddy Club customers believed that the Kerala civilization was transplanted from outer space. They usually proposed this theory after heavy toddy consumption.

Wild scientific theories surfaced to support some keen observations toddy club patrons made. The aliens resembled Vareed’s parents. But then they did not look a day older than Vareed. How was this possible? Were they under some secret Ayurvedic treatment that gave them the fountain of youth in their advanced age?

The investigation bureau came across old stories that Vareed’s parents had disappeared in their seventies in very similar circumstances. Unbelievable as it may sound, Vareed’s parents
were abducted from the very same toddy shop, owned at that time by Judas’s father of the name Judas Sr. This story came to light when the investigators interviewed some of the oldest citizens of Amballore, who were alive when the previous abduction took place. These senior citizens were privy to historical Amballore highlights and could give eyewitness accounts of them. They claimed that Vareed’s parents were abducted by their parents at the very same toddy shop.

Some patrons discounted their story, branding it through a codename “Alzheimer’s Story,” implying it was unreliable, coming from the dementia-affected brains of the old citizens. They argued that being kidnapped was not a hereditary disease that could run in the family, unlike a genetic disorder that could be transmitted from generation to generation.

Wild cheers erupted when this opinion was put forward, and almost all the patrons drank to the authenticity of the counterargument. Common sense dictated that an intergenerational abduction cycle run by an alien civilization was highly unlikely, as unlikely as a science fiction fantasy—or at the very least, like a rabbit with three ears.

In spite of the legitimacy of this counterargument, the school of thought that put forward the intergenerational abduction theory had a lot going for it, and it prevailed. They backed up their story with exotic astrophysics.

Thrown into the argument were Einstein’s general theory of relativity - and its relation to gravitation - and the existence of black holes that generate humongous gravitational fields where time was slowed down. It was known to the extraterrestrials that Amballore House was located at the mouth of a narrow wormhole that connected it to a very distant black hole located far away - millions and millions of light-years away - in a different galaxy.

A wormhole is also called an Einstein-Rosen bridge, having its origin in the theory of relativity. This tunnel connects two points in space-time, enabling time travel. The far mouth of the wormhole was located on the alien’s planet and was under an intense
gravitational field due to its proximity to a black hole, making it reside in a time-slowed world. The near mouth of the wormhole in Amballore House retained the slowed time, just as the far mouth.

This meant that time was flowing very slowly at Amballore House, in the same fashion as at the other end of the wormhole. Vareed’s parents were abducted by their predecessors and lodged in Amballore House, or were sent to the far mouth through the wormhole. Either way, they could spend an eternity - in earth’s frame of reference - in a matter of a few days of the time-slowed universe’s frame of reference. This meant that Vareed’s parents barely aged after they were abducted. They reappeared to fetch their son and his wife, looking exactly like how they looked when they disappeared. They were of the same age as Vareed, instead of appearing forty years older.

They had taken a dip in the fountain of youth!

Amballore House’s slowed-time offered eternal youth to its residents. They grew older only if they stepped out of its gate and started mingling with the general public in the town and beyond.

The toddy patrons speculated that in time, Vareed and his wife would fetch their own son and his wife to an intergalactic world, provided there was no breakage in the link, such as a natural death of the first-born before his time came up for induction to alien’s rank! This process would repeat ad infinitum, affecting countless future generations. Vareed’s family tree was known as the Amballore dynasty.

Mystery remained on how an ordinary Malayalee that one often rubbed shoulders with in Kerala’s crowded buses or met as a comrade in a dark, dingy, and smelly toddy shop or had a pleasure of meeting by accident while rescuing him from a gigantic pothole omnipresent in Kerala’s roads when his car got stranded there— how such an ordinary Malayalee such as an Amballore dynasty member could become an extraterrestrial. They were not necessarily extraordinary individuals who could perform miraculous feats such as walking on water. They were merely ordinary human beings and this demanded an answer for how they
could possibly fly a bus, how they were elevated to the chosen tribe status to do ambassadorship to the extraterrestrials.

Why was the Amballore dynasty chosen to be the advocates of aliens? Were the dynasty members some kind of traitors to mankind, working for extraterrestrials and letting them in on the secrets of the human society?

Or was the Amballore dynasty a secretive tribe that came from outer space and masqueraded as normal Malayalees?

No one, including patrons of the Judas Toddy Club and the spies of Amballore Investigation Bureau, had answers to these questions.

***

The fascinating theory of the origin of the Kerala civilization and the historical timeline of the Amballore dynasty elders’ abductions came from anthropologists from Amballore University.

The very first Malayalee that sprouted out of the newly minted Kerala gave rise to a dynasty of firstborn sons. Vareed fell in this distinguished dynasty. He was the eldest son of the eldest son of the eldest son of - well, you get the drift - the very first Malayalee who walked on the land between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea.

Aliens picked two members of the Amballore dynasty, a husband and wife in their seventies. This was followed by a similar choice from the same dynasty after a generation, say, thirty to forty years. This scheme repeated.

The original alien that made contact for the very first time with the forefathers of Vareed and his parents was the real extraterrestrial, a bona fide alien, the kind who walked around murmuring “ET phone home,” the kind who had all the strange features that science fiction movies depicted. He had protruding antennae from enlarged heads. The abduction of the very first generation was the hardest, because of the alien appearance of the outer space creatures and the effort they had to put in to coax earthlings to accompany them. However, once they trained the first generation in all the tasks that they were engaged in on earth, the first generation became as good as the
aliens. It then became a no-brainer to use the first generation to coax and abduct the second generation through intergenerational arm-twisting. The abductees transformed into abductors, and this process repeated for subsequent generations. The second and subsequent kidnappings were accomplished willingly between two generations and therefore went smoothly.

The blood relations go a long way in implementing incomprehensible things.

Vareed and Eli were just one couple in a long succession of septuagenarian couples, all falling under the same reputed family tree of the modern civilized society that formed thousands of years after Parasuraman created Kerala. The cardinal rule in picking the generation was to assign torchbearer status to the eldest son of the family to represent one generation. The period assigned to Vareed and Eli was from 1958 through 1988. Vareed and Eli would abdicate their throne to their eldest son and his wife, Thoma and Ann, in 1988. The story of the dynasty would go on.

Under the normal circumstances, that is. However, Thoma and Ann died natural deaths in the year 1988, the year they were supposed to be abducted! This created a problem, because the normal flow of the dynasty would be disrupted. However, Thoma’s younger brother Inasu and his wife, Trissa would be chosen to carry the torch of the Amballore dynasty.

The abducted septuagenarians, unbelievably, were chosen to abduct superior brains to Amballore House, those excelling in research and scholarship and whose contributions to unraveling the mysteries of universe were exemplary. Aliens knew that they would cause little to no ripple in society if they were to abduct senior citizens as contrasted to abducting young couples, because the disappearance of youth would create widespread chaos and disruption in family life of typical human society. The elders were retired people and hence were of no consequence if they disappeared to become the ambassadors of aliens.

Even though the Amballore dynasty was the chosen tribe, it did not in itself hold the aliens’ interest in terms of brain power, research
skills and technical prowess that they were targeting. The dynasty was merely a brokerage firm that abducted exceptionally talented individuals from across Kerala and brought them to Amballore House.

***

The very first abduction of the elders of the Amballore dynasty by extraterrestrials took place some five thousand years ago, way back when the Indus Valley Civilization flourished and close to when the Mayan calendar started. To get some more historic perspective, it was some thirteen thousand years before this that Homo sapiens were making rounds in the New World, the Americas.