MISSIONS YOU [CHAPTER 1]

A/S: I pause the Bureau of Life series to answer a burning call that you should pay attention to.

There was a certainty in Maja’s consciousness that he was going at a skin-splitting speed of 135km/h… on his feet and in a field of waist-high grasses - 15 notches faster than your average cheetah. Maja could hear the ASIM-crested chopper drum and chop a few hundred meters behind him. He could feel the blood bursting through his carotid, yet an unknown peace welcomed his racing heart.

Scanty elephant grass blades tore at his faded camos as his rocketing feet took him beyond the fields into the bamboo forest. Sprigs snapped at his bruised face even as the rat-a-tat of a machine gun he couldn’t recognize echoed the thumps in his head.

***

Maja Kasero arrived at the Pathalaia bus station thirteen hours ago with Mensah Afram, his assistant, expecting to be picked up by Bibek. Bibek was a believer from Mechi, who had been transferred by the Bank he worked with to a branch in Pathalaia. Bibek had informed Maja that Pathalaia needed the gospel more than air itself and he had invited Maja to come start a fellowship there.

Maja and Mensah had just arrived from Pakari, a commercial hub in the Biratnagar province of Nepal. They had spent four months building an underground fellowship of believers at Pakari; the eighteenth fellowship that they had founded in the country with 1.4% Christian citizenry. The Mechi fellowship was one of those eighteen.

Maja and Mensah were met by a bristly young man who identified himself as Bishal. He claimed to be Bibek’s driver and assured them that Bibek was in a meeting with the regional heads of his bank. Maja, being who he was, tried to reach Bibek and got his voicemail twice. Maja was very careful about his actions in Nepal because being a missionary in this country was a delicate specie of difficulty. And being on the Anti-Asian Missions (ASIM) group’s wanted-list was a whole new class of adversity that only Paul the Apostle would understand.

Maja scoured his spirit to discern Bishal’s persona but only found peace there, so he and Mensah joined Bishal in confidence that they were in safe hands. Twenty minutes later, they dozed off in a black sedan with Kathmandu license plates, weaving through the usual Pathalaia evening traffic.

And thirty-five minutes later, Maja stirred to the grunts of a rowdy bunch. He opened his eyes to see that they were in an open space crawling with coarse-looking militants in black camos, flaunting every imaginable form of armament.

There was no cerebral doubt in Maja that this was an ASIM camp even though his heart hoped against hope that his brain was wrong.  His first reaction was to fret, but fellowship with the spirit in his twenty-four years of mission work had taught him that no situation deserved angst. Two things were involved; either God showed up and he continued his mission or he died and went to heaven – in which case he gained more.

So he looked around. He was still in the car, Mensah was still snoring beside him but Bishal was not in the driver’s seat. Strange. Not Bishal’s disappearance but why Elion’s Spirit didn’t warn Maja that Bishal was not who he claimed to be – that rarely happened. If Maja wasn’t warned, then there had to be a reason why Elion’s Spirit had allowed them get to wherever this was. He stretched to wake Mensah but thought against it. He needed to formulate a plan before rousing the young man to this.

“Run,” Elion’s Spirit said out of nowhere.

Maja paused, looked around the space and saw that it was helmed in by shacks made solely of corrugated roofing sheets. Where was he going to run to? How fast could he go to escape these restless militants? Where was he? Questions numbering the molecules of water flooded his thoughts but he caught himself before anxiety found a footing.

Another lesson picked up in the mission field was this, whatever Elion’s Spirit said to do was doable if logic was minimized and instructions followed. So he turned to wake Mensah--

“Do not wake him,” Elion’s Spirit said again and that made Maja wonder who was really speaking.

“You can’t ask me to run and leave Mensah here,” Maja quizzed, struggling not to imagine the anguish that awaited Mensah in the hands of these brutes.

“I just did,” Elion’s Spirit replied.

Maja checked the door locks, saw that the car was open and refused further negotiations with logic. He opened the door and shot out with speed he didn’t know his limbs possessed. To his amazement, there was no exit out of the open space. So how did the sedan get in here? Then he gleaned the thumps of an approaching chopper, looked back and saw the cables rigged to the sedan and knew exactly how.

An uproar broke up behind him as the militants cheered. This was sport for them because they knew there was no way out of here. A door adjacent to Maja’s right opened and a burly Arab stepped out with bare torso; he resembled a statue of bricks. He glared at Maja, who was still running in circles.

“Run towards him,” Elion’s Spirit said and Maja obeyed.

When Maja was five feet away from the door, the statue of bricks swung an arm with the heft of a mallet at Maja. Maja didn’t stop, didn’t dodge, didn’t swerve, he just kept running. The blow missed and his speed threw the Arab off balance.

Maja leaped over the falling hunk in stride and entered the door which opened into a lounge that was in stark contrast to the carnage outside; polished wood and glass fittings. His feet carried him too fast to absorb this splendour enclosed in squalor. He can’t remember how many doors he ran through or how many militants he saw in what seemed to be an endless maze of elegant rooms but he eventually arrived at a window without bars.

“Jump through it,” Elion’s Spirit muttered again. And Maja thought twice before obeying. The window was lined with glass louvers. He had only witnessed such madness in the action movies he watched as a kid.

“Can it get more blockbuster than this?” Elion’s Spirit added with a chuckle and Maja smiled. Elion’s Spirit found the oddest moments to poke harmless humour. The humour numbed Maja’s anxiety and he ran head-on into the window and fell… for what seemed like fifteen seconds.

When he landed, his whole body received tiny and enormous jolts of pain in many parts. There were so many hurting spots that the pain signals seemed confused. Glass shards rained on him as he attempted a Jackie Chan quick-get-up but the earth he lay on denied him the privilege to experiment. He slipped and rolled downhill.

Teak twigs slapped his face, trunks played ping pong with his torso, and the wet forest floor painted him the colour of the sub-tropical evergreen forest. Then he lost consciousness.

To be continued...

Image Credit: Jean-Léon Gérôme - The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer, Courtesy wikipedia.com