In serious conversations and not so serious conversations, people used and re-used the expression “life is a journey” and converted it into a sort of a cliché. The expression being a cliché is not at all a reason for us to overlook its importance. For all human beings, life is nothing but a journey from the moment we enter this world from a mother’s womb crying, to the moment we get back to the bosom of mother earth making others cry. And we all are moving swiftly, without any time to rest or to look back. But I must confess that because of the accident that happened to me recently, I got some valuable time off from my all other mundane pre-occupations.
Accidents are inarguably terrible incidents; particularly so if they result in demise of human beings or if they result in the permanent amputation of their limbs. But fortunately, the accident that I met up with was rather mild and it made me only temporarily incapacitated – making my right hand to stay inside, what is called an “arm-bag”, for a month or so. And that invariably meant I had to have quite a boring life, without working on computers, bike riding, car driving, park trotting or dull sleeping. (For sleeping was a very difficult task as it always resulted in a change in the “optimum” position my hand should be kept for lesser pain) So all in all it was a peculiar living, different from the sort of life that I had been living till then.
The news of I meeting up with an accident spread like wildfire and there had been an array of phone calls from different parts of the world. And some people, being unsatisfied by the news that they heard through phone, turned up personally to meet me. There had been concerned inquiries from sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, friends and relatives, neighbours and acquaintances. I almost got bored on explaining to people how I met up with the accident. Yet some others, who came to know about the incident lately, complained for not letting them know about it as soon as it happened, as if it was something of a newsworthy item which I decided not to advertise because of my perceived disregard for publicity of my temporary handicap.
It was some sort of a peculiar living that I lived for about a month or so. I was rendered so much incapacitated that the only logical thing to be done, left to me, was thinking, or as some would call it, day dreaming, though I would prefer to call it the former. It was the time that I got to reflect upon the life that I have lived, to take stock of the various experiences that I had, the various relationships that I had kept and I’ve been keeping and the various ways in which I had responded to people, situations and challenges that came my way. The first thing that came to mind was of course the audacity of the dog, which jumped into my way and brought me down with my bike, which resulted in my temporary handicap. So I was cogitating how differently I would have behaved if I had had the occasion to see the dog sitting across the road, knitting sinister designs of jumping on to my way and creating mayhem.
For one month my right hand was so much incapacitated that even moving it an inch was becoming a very huge and painful task. Eating food with the right hand was almost impossible that my mother took that task herself and I apparently got back to a situation similar to my childhood days, where feeding me food was almost always a task that my mother undertook solely. It made me once again realize that any food, however insipid it may be, would taste as piquant as piquant would be, if given by a mother with her divine hands. Yet some of us, when we grow up and become capable of standing on our own feet, jettison our mothers and abandon them to the mercy of fate and nature, under some fit of outrageous recklessness.
Reading was also rendered difficult by my incapacitated right hand, which was finding its rest in an annoying arm-bag, but yet I found some courage do that with my left hand. So there was some sort of a reading spree from Hemingway to Yeats and from Dickens to Wordsworth. Thus once again I got my hand on Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which like all other of his books, had the touch of his amazing narrative. I have discovered, yet again that one can’t finish off reading even one page of his book without referring the dictionary at least twice. Dickens will make you really wonder about the strength of your vocabulary, every single time you venture into reading his works.
The story of my “injured” days will not be complete if I fail to write about a lady who has, quite literally, helped me get back to normalcy. She was the lady who did physiotherapy for me and helped me with those exercises that have helped me to regain the strength of my right hand. Isn’t it a true statement, if I take my chance to say that a pretty lady is a positive thing only for a romantic beholder, but if that same lady is talented in her profession, it would be beneficial for the whole society? She was one of those most amazing people in whom beauty and professional expertise found their near-perfect combination. She is someone who would have been living about two and a half decades of her life in this world. The chain on her neck, with a cross in it, has shown clearly that she is an ardent believer of Lord Jesus. She had her curly hair nicely tied behind using a band and hair-slides going all across her hair in a zigzag manner to maintain the exact form in which she wanted them to stay. She always placed her small, black bindi exactly in between two of her eyebrows in such a meticulous way that it was difficult not to doubt whether she always used some measurement devices to find the exact middle position in between those eyebrows to place her bindi. The bracelet on her hand and the skin of her hand indulged themselves in a sort of competition in a bid to outshine each other. When the incandescent light bulbs were switched on, her shadow that they made on the floor was picturesque. When her eyes were filled up with tears, probably as a result of a rebuke by some doctor, she looked more beautiful than ever before, which made me think that even though a weeping girl is a shame for the person who made her weep and for those people who behold that and one should invariably do everything to prevent that, it brings on a bizarre enhancement to a lady’s beauty as was evident from what I saw in her. If Keats would have seen her, he would have yelled, yet again that, “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever”; if Dickens would have got an occasion to see her, for explaining her, he would have used exactly the same expression, “tenderly beautiful”, that he had used to explain Lucie Manette; on beholding her, Yeats would have been very happy to find someone with “little snow white feet,” exactly like his own sweet heart. This genteel lady had the grace, elegance, nobility, integrity and all the other virtues that one normally associates with a traditional Indian woman, the Bharathiya Nari. For my two months of “injured” life, she was perhaps my best friend, whom I have seen the most, to whom I have spoken the most. In those months I have started to have such a bond with her that it seems quite difficult to put that easily into oblivion. She was such a beautiful, talented, yet a simple lady, that she would have bowled over many a young, bachelor heart, and I was no exception. (This same liberty to get bowled over by the beauty of a pretty lady is perhaps the greatest bliss of bachelorhood.) When I venture outside my home, I feel like I am seeing her and meeting up with her everywhere I go - on the streets, at the park, at restaurants, on shopping malls and among mobs – standing with her kind countenance and with that comforting smile on her face that had blown away pains and agonies of patients and had sunk their anguishes and apprehensions into a sea of comfort. As now I am back to my normal life, with my right hand working the same way it was working before the accident, I thankfully recognise and understand that she perhaps had the greatest part in it and would use this article as a praise and an accolade to her and wish her that her professional excellence may continue to be a boon to many more patients that come her way.
Now, as I reach the peroration of my discourse, I must note that one month of bed rest after the accident, has made me more logical, coherent and rational; while in the past, I had been, at times, an insolent, impertinent and officious bloke, who poked his nose into others’ affairs, unsolicited, thinking that I am doing a big service to them. That one month also marked my evolution as a commentator of current affairs as I got my first “death threatening” mail (if it is by any sense a sign that my articles are becoming effective and are reaching far off places) from an anonymous, silly chap with an email id priyaprem90@gmail.com, from somewhere in the Middle East, expatiating upon the severe consequences that I may face if I continue with my “tirade” on his party leaders, he being furious on one of my “controversial” articles about the leaders of a particular political party. (So that apparently means, if you people find me mowed down by some unknown vehicle or stabbed by some mysterious gang, then you certainly have an email id to inform the Police to start off the investigation) I am extremely happy to publish this blogpost of mine, after two long months of painful obscurity and I undertake to write as often as before, provided I am not harmed or killed by our anonymous, yet courageous friend, priyaprem90@gmail.com, who has vowed to do so.
