All Is Sorrow, Nothing Else

For a moment, I was struck speechless by his perception. For three years I had suffered nightmarishly over the accident which occurred to my son in which he lost a vital half of his foot. Many long and painful attempts to obtain an appropriate and functional prosthetic haven’t been successful. Except while inside his house, he can’t allow his foot to remain unguarded without wearing bulky shoes. Which meant certain things got excluded automatically—going to a traditional temple or visiting a holy person. Most South Indian households have an unwritten code that the guest leave his or her footwear at the front door. Even indoors, he needs to be extra careful so that the part put together by plastic surgery doesn’t get hurt. All these are not simple adjustments. Of course, on top of it all, reduced mobility in the prime of life.

But one thing hadn’t sunk into my consciousness. I had not taken into account that the tall, well-built young man pulled by the centripetal force of a speeding express train on the night of September 6 into the tiny space between the train and station platform, with 20 carriages rushing past him at 50 km per hour, was spared his life. The rapid suction from the platform towards the train took place at the fraction of a moment when a metre-long gap between one carriage and another was flashing by. It was at that 10th of a second that he had fallen below. Not an easily imaginable miracle.

So much of my grief was taken away by that single observation of my daughter-in-law’s uncle. The physical and mental trauma cannot be erased, but when one realises that things could have been calamitous, the pain is less.

But we all have a variety of things to be unhappy about. Recently, I participated in a course on spiritual self-improvement. On various occasions during the sessions, the preceptor kept asking the participants if they were happy. Most of the participants said they were. But I couldn’t answer either way. I felt then, as I do now, that a person cannot admit truthfully that he or she is happy in absolute terms.

There is a school of philosophy which says that the natural state of a human being is happiness and that we all allow it to be encrusted with a number of things, including memory. But we are happy or unhappy only in relation to something. The loudest expression of happiness occurs in people in politics where they hold their hands aloft locking them with those of the very people they publicly berated. It is almost as if in a folk dance. The bonhomie of discovery of new allies and enemies these days does last full five years as no one in power does anything to unseat himself or herself.

Power and authority seem to give these men and women happiness. Of course, it is time-bound. Once you taste power and authority, they can become the source of unspeakable misery when you are bereft of them.

Simple people are happy with small things. Like getting a seat in a city bus. (Some say it is not a simple thing.) These people are happy with trivial things offered as gifts with purchases. The combination of the purchase and the gift can be perplexing. Like when a combination lock was given as a gift with a shaving cream. It will mean another number to recall and misery at a crucial time when the person would have preferred the loss of luggage to an unopenable lock when stern-faced uniformed men want to verify if the luggage contains any object usable as a weapon.

The people who attended the spiritual course could not be said to be deprived circumstantially. Economic well-being is no guarantee of happiness. Some deep, lingering unhappiness had made them seek spiritual help. At the end of the programme, the preceptor again asked if they were happy. They did appear happy. It is my earnest prayer that they remain so. I have only experienced happiness as a fleeting phenomenon. To me that seems to be the real nature of happiness—the impermanence. A tiny moment of happiness does not always lead to another moment of happiness. It is out of profound—almost ultimate—wisdom that a most extraordinary man declared 2,500 years ago that all is sorrow.

(An influential figure in post-independent Tamil literature, the author has written over 200 short stories, 15 novellas and eight novels, including the highly-acclaimed The Eighteenth Parallel.)