Soul-Retriever

Let me tell you that working as a soul-retriever for the God of Death is not very fulfilling. The pay isn’t good and you have to stay at work 24X7 with no leaves. Moreover, it is a thankless job – you can’t expect a god to thank you, even if he is your immediate senior, and no human would ever thank you for snatching away his soul and bringing him to his not-so-heavenly abode. You might find the last part of my previous statement a little dubious given that I work in the Suicides Department. After all, these people have given up their souls voluntarily, so they should be happy when I arrive to fetch them – you would think, but let me tell you that it is not so. In fact, they are the people who rue being brought here the most. This is due to the standard procedure set by my predecessors in this department. I shall tell you an incident when I was just a trainee here for your better understanding.
First let me tell you that the soul that resides inside you is not “complete” in the exact sense of the term. It wasn’t complete even when you were born and has been broken into many fragments since. A fragment of your soul breaks apart when you find someone you love and who love you back and it goes to reside with that person’s soul. It is this fragment that makes that other person think of you and have goodwill towards you. So, since your parents loved you even before you were born, a fragment of your soul resides with them from before your birth. In fact, it has been residing in them since you were assigned a soul. I will talk about the details of soul-assigning some other time – let me concentrate on this part first. So, in short, the no. of fragments of your soul depends on how many lives you have affected in a positive way or how many people love you and the size of that fragment depends upon how much they love you.
When a person dies, we have to collect all the pieces of his soul before we can bring him back. Now, the standard procedure for our department is that we make the soul look for his fragments himself as a punishment for committing suicide (and increasing our workload).
It so happened that I was assigned the task of bringing back the soul of a young twenty-something guy. He had committed suicide by jumping off a tall building because he had been fired from his job for something which he didn’t consider to be his fault. The soul was sitting near the dead body when I reached. He was pretty happy to see me come. He said, “Now I can finally rest in peace.” and extended his hands towards me as if I was going to handcuff him.
“Not so soon son, we still have work to do.” I told him. Then I explained to him the standard procedure to be followed. He was unfazed at this. I took out my pack of cigarettes, handed him the device that we use to guide us to the fragments of any particular soul and told him to get on with his job while I sat and smoked. (I did not know then that I should go along with him – an oversight that almost cost me my training stipend.)
A full 24 hours and two packets of fags later, when he did not arrive I began to get worried. I got afraid because losing a soul on the way invites divine wrath, something I didn’t want to face. So I decided to look for him for a day before I contacted my guide.
To make a long story short (because this is not the important part) I found him weeping quietly in the attic of his parents’ home after a prolonged search. He got afraid when he saw me and started begging, saying, “I know I can’t run away from you. Please allow me to stay here as long as possible, I don’t want to go. I shouldn’t have committed suicide in the first place. Can you please give me life once again? I promise I won’t do anything of this sort again.” and so on. I had to shake him for a long time to get him out of his hysterics. Then I asked him what had happened that transformed him from a soul happy to leave to one that would like to bear the torments of earthly life once again. This is what he told me.
“The first place I went to was my girlfriend’s. She was asleep in her room. Entering that room reminded me of all the happy moments that we had spent there. She was sleeping with a book curled in her hand. I noticed that even while sleeping she doesn’t take out the necklace I had given her as a gift long ago. I also noticed, for the first time, that she has a picture of us tucked under her pillow. Using your device, I could see that she loves me a lot – much more than I had imagined. That was the first time I wondered whether I had made a mistake.”
“After that I went to my friends’ places. Although I found a few people who had only professed their friendship at my face, my friends on a whole liked me a lot. I also noticed that my school and college friends loved me more than my colleagues and this amazed me a lot, given that I had not tried a lot to keep in touch with them. It broke my heart to say goodbye to all of my friends one-by-one. I realized for the first time how much I had been loved and now I was sure that I had made a mistake by committing suicide. Still I would have gone with you if you had come there but you didn’t.”
“I arrived last at this place – partly because it is far from where I lived or rather, died, and partly because I had begun to realize how hard it would be for me to bid my parents farewell. When I arrived, my parents were still awake and they were talking about me. Mom was saying, “But what will he do now?” to which Dad replied, “Don’t you worry. Our son is very intelligent; he will find a better job pretty soon. “
Mom: “But what will he do in the meantime? How will he sustain himself? He is used to spending twenty-thirty thousand every month; he doesn’t have any savings worth mentioning.”
Dad: “Does he know that I get twenty thousand as my salary?”
Mom:”I don’t think so.”
Dad:”OK. Then we shall send him fifteen every month. I think he can manage with that much for the time being. If he asks how much I get, tell him that I get thirty so that he won’t feel guilty about it. We can live pretty comfortably with the remaining but he must stay there and look for a job. If he comes back to this small town, he will never find a job suitable to his qualifications and his talent will be wasted. I don’t want this to happen. We should do whatever it takes to keep him there.”
And with this Dad laid the matter to rest and my parents went to sleep. Mom looked as if a burden had been lifted from her head. None of them said one single word about how they would manage with a meager five thousand a month even when both of them know that half of it would have be spent for Mom’s medicines. It was at that moment that I realized how good it really is to be alive; to be loved and cared for by so many people who are ready to do anything for you; to have someone who will think of you no matter what happens or how low you stand on the social ladder; to breathe in the knowledge that, although it may not seem so, someone is thinking of you at this very moment; to have people ready to sacrifice their comforts for your own. Now I don’t want to die. I wish I had never taken this step. Can you please give me life back? I swear I won’t do anything so foolish again. Please….”
With this he broke into the most pitiable crying I had ever seen. Now, I can’t say I was not moved by his story but there was nothing to be done. I had to handcuff him and carry him all the way to my office while he kept on screaming and trying to persuade me to let him free all the time.
Can you guess why I told you this story? Obviously to help me decrease my workload. What else could the motive have been?