A very unlikely tale

The holiness of eggs--for once they broke it was all over--suddenly became a suspect

Once upon a time, a man named Hakim, a seasoned traveller and a wise man, after having survived a shipwreck in Pacific Ocean, found himself washed ashore on the sands of an island, not known to the outside world. Before jumping off his sinking vessel Hakim had stuffed his waterproof sack with whatever he could lay his hands on that could be consumed as food: packets of dried fruits, vegetables, eggs, water bottles, a few slices of raw meat. Holding on to a driftwood he had floated for days in the open ocean, his body ravaged by the elements. It was night, and the stars were out when his feet touched the land.

Exhausted from his ordeal he just lay there on the cool sands and slept.

As the day broke, he awoke to find himself surrounded by men with painted faces. They wore hides, adorned their bodies with bones and stones, shouting and waving their poison-tipped spears in the air.

Hakim was made to walk in front of the crowd, his hands clasped over his head, his copper skin a weathered leather. He was taken inside a cave that was huge from inside, damp, and smelled of stale air. As he walked down the passage, removed from daylight, lit by the flames of the torches, he saw eggs everywhere. Eggs of all kinds, shapes, colors, and sizes. They were placed in the niches carved in the rock; some hung in the air from threads overhead, swinging when touched by the tips of the spears as their retinue passed below. Hakim found it peculiar that all the eggs had been painted with an inscription in black ink, the script heavily marked with oblique lines, dashes, and commas, the diacritic marks. Each egg had its own unique inscription.

The passage opened into a spacious room, where the chief sat on a raised platform, a well lit place like a stage; he was thin, pale, and emaciated. The chief’s family and the members of the ruling elite sat on the ground level in front of the throne in semicircles, in semi-darkness.

“Hello everyone!” Hakim waved.

"Do you believe in eggs," the chief roared, narrowed his eyes, as he got up from his seat, his hands on his hips.

"Yes, I do. I’d like to eat them all the time; they are so nutritious," Hakim said excitedly.

"Blasphemy!" the chief thundered. “Take him away and kill him.”

"But I do like eggs," Hakim said, looking around confused. Like the chief the rest of the crowd, too, was, emaciated: their bellies protruding, their legs atrophied, ribs showing through the skins, buttocks without fat, temples wasted, and cheeks hollowed out. Kwashiorkor Disease, he thought. Severe protein malnutrition!

"If you like eggs then how dare you’d eat them?" the chief screamed, foaming, and after a moment of pause added, "Don't you know eggs are holy?"

It was then Hakim realized that the tribe had been adoring eggs, admiring them without eating them, not realizing how severely malnourished they had become.

"Don't you see how perfect and smooth they are!? How they maintain their roundness throughout their curve--a sign of consistency and patience," the chief's wife spoke with a lisp, her front teeth missing. She sat on the ground next to the throne, at the level of her husband’s feet. “They are the most perfect thing ever created by Almighty.”

Hakim wanted to tell them that they had to break those damn eggs and eat them, so that they could start feeling healthy; he wanted to tell them how ridiculous it was that they had to suffer for no good reason. But being a wise man he remained quiet. He closed his eyes and zoomed out of the cave for a few seconds deep into his mind, wishing for a miracle for these people.

"Take him away and hang him, unless he utters:  Eggs are not to eat but to keep,” the chief declared.

“The first of the Divine Writs. Once you utter it three times, you will become an egghead like us--part of the brotherhood who inhabit this land from one end to the other.” The chief rolled the egg, the size of a watermelon, placed in his lap, as he spoke, as if showing off the inscription painted on this monster of an egg. The natives, who had stood due to this exciting conversation, fell on their knees upon seeing the written words, touching their foreheads on the ground. When they rose back up Hakim saw that every forehead had a dark callus in the center, close to the hairline.

"I have something to show you, before you kill me,” Hakim announced, as he patted his sack. “I can assure you that you’d love to see what I have here in this pouch of mine.” He remembered that he’d got left with a large whole onion and a sealed packet of dehydrated, chopped onions in his sack. He was pretty sure that these people had never seen an onion before. He took the onion out, raised it slowly over his head. "This is a very holy object in the country where I came from." He swayed his arm in the air, making sure that everyone saw the onion.

The chief got up, stepped forward, looked at this flaky, rust colored object with curiosity. "Not only that you’ve committed another blasphemy, but now you’ve really hurt our feelings. How can you ever prove this rotten assertion of yours about this ugly thing?" he thundered disdainfully, his finger pointing towards the onion. "I would have chopped the head off of anyone for saying this, but since you are a newcomer, I’m going to give you a chance--plus our religion teaches us to be kind to one another.” He then turns around, laughed aloud, and addressed his tribe, his finger still pointing toward the onion. “Look at this shameful little thing. The awkwardness at its best. The miracle of perfect smoothness over an entire roundness has not even touched this hideous monster--Just look at all these cracks and spots--this thing reeks of evil.”

The cave was filled with gasps, the air suddenly becoming tense.

"Give me a knife and I will show you something you’ve never seen before." Hakim said. “For the whole miracle to unfold I’ll need a pan, a little oil, and a stove.”

Hakim was given a knife and other things he asked for. He felt the gazes of everyone on him, piercing tips of spears. Like a chef on a TV food channel he became animated. With much fanfare, he poured some oil into the pan, placed it on the flame. He then peeled the outer flaky layer of the onion, carefully and slowly, so as not to unruffle  the deeper layers. He then peeled the next layer off with his fingers, held both the onion and the peeled layer high over his head for everyone to see.

Except for the hissing of the stove the cave went silent as a grave. It took a few moments for some in the crowd to realize that the remaining onion was identical to the one before the peel, as if untouched. They had not seen anything like that before. The cave was filled with an uneasy murmur.

Putting the onion on the side, Hakim chopped the peeled layer into pieces, threw the cut bits into the pan. With a loud crackle smoke rose off the sizzling oil filling the cave with a strange aroma. The chief recoiled back in fear. Some in the crowd let out muffled screams. Lips moved, tongue intoning prayers to ward off the evil spirits.

Except for Hakim no one noticed that the youngest son of the chief, a teenager, had stepped forward in all this commotion to take a closer look at the pan and its contents. Keeping his hands folded across his chest, he was bent forward, looking wide eyed at the golden brown pieces being simmered.

Hakim took the pan off the stove, flicked a golden brown fried bit off the pan with the tip of the knife, and put it in his mouth. "Put it in your mouth," he said. “And chew it slowly--watch me as I do--- Slow and easy! It’s going to taste different, but savor it, for this thing is packed with a secret power very few know about.”

The youngest son tasted it first, his face breaking into a smile. He stepped back to let his father come forward. The chief tried it, and liked the taste so much that he ignored the stinging in his eyes. Next he picked the onion up, began peeling its layer off to see if this all had not been a trick. After chopping the peel, he had just taken off, into bits himself, he threw them in the pan, let them simmer to complete the process he’d just witnessed. After having satisfied himself thoroughly, he handed the onion to his wife, half his size and age, who had been covetously staring at this wonderful object, an object which could maintain its shape, its look, its consistency, no matter how many times you broke into its superficial layer--That was quite unlike eggs. The holiness of eggs--for once they broke it was all over--suddenly became a suspect.

Peeling another layer off, she touched it all over her face, kissed it, rubbed it on her eyes, before she handed it to her elder son, the future chief. The elder son got another peel off, nodding his head in amazement. He then handed the remaining onion to the assistant of his father, the vice chief.

As the ever shrinking onion was going from hand to hand, the stinging feeling in everyone's eyes kept getting worse, and soon tears rolled down their cheeks as if from a fountain. Sobs filled the air. Panic started to settle in.

"Give me back this satanic thing," the chief roared, rubbing his eyes. He could hardly open his eyes.

But the onion was gone. The last peel was taken off by the minister for Religious Affairs.

"Black magic! He’s not only a blasphemer, he’s a sorcerer too. There’s no place for sorcery in our religion." The religious minister shouted into a gong, magnifying his voice several folds. "He is a trickster. He deserves to die."

At that point, knowing the game was up, Hakim looked at the chief and uttered: "There are no eggs but the Egg which is in your lap." He didn’t realize he had recited the first Divine Writ wrong.

"Kill him right away, for he has altered our fundamental truth,” the minister for Religious Affair roared. “This alone is punishable by death."

“Hang him.” The chief declared.

Hakim was hanged in the public square. His last memory: a pair of eyes of the youngest son of the chief staring at him fixedly coupled with an enigmatic smile on his face. Hakim instantly knew the miracle, he had wished for, had happened. He died in peace.

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The tribe continued to suffer from severe malnutrition until a short time after the chief’s death; and then the tribe’s people started gaining weight mysteriously. Within a few decades they were so healthy that they forgot how miserably they used to live only a generation ago, and how short their lifespan had really been.

The youngest son, who refused kingship when his elder brother died of irreversible malnutrition, was immortalized in their chronicles as the one who discovered the secret of making Omelet.

No one knew how he’d done it, until he, too, died of the old age, leaving his memoirs. In them he wrote: “When the man died on the gallows and people left the place, I plunged my hand in the dead man’s sack still on his body, and there at the bottom, I found a packet filled with dried bits of something I’d never seen before. I came home and put a few of these bits in water to see what would happen. Nothing happened right away. I let them soak in water overnight and went to bed. The next day the bits had transformed into juicy, succulent pieces of onion. Had I not seen the fresh onion the man had shown us, had me and everyone tasted it on that fateful day, I would have never known that that packet essentially contained onions too, only in the dehydrated form. It didn’t take me long to discover their secret power, as alluded by the man. At the bottom of the same packet I found a few tiny, black round things--the seeds. I would never forget the look in the man’s eyes when his soul was about to leave his body. In that one look he had communicated to me the secret of Omelet making.”

(This material is copyrighted to the author of this story).