Severest Suffering

 Like the play I described in the blog yesterday, the following incident, too, took place in the CIEFL.  Well, I was the Mess Secretary. There was a huge influx of the floating population of short term course students that December.

My attempt was to give a truly wholesome, varied and yet not horribly expensive fare to one and all. Believe me,  being a mess secretary when  some two  hundred  strong student population, all adults in a varied age group of twenty three to fifty-five, eats there thrice a day, is quite bothersome. 

People may eat the simplest, tasteless food at home. Their expectations shoot sky high when they are in the institute mess, for example. At times, so obsessed can they be over some minor item that you wonder if they have come to  study or to hog. Soul curry and food for thought are laughable concepts in such contexts. 

There are all sorts of stakeholders, moreover; the mess workers, their regional affiliations, their hidden associations with regular students and the teaching staff, the institutional canteen owner, the service providers, the hostel office staff‌, and the warden. All sorts of politics is eternally brewing, cooking up in such a situation.

Yet I could manage to make the show run rather well. Most of the participants were very happy indeed. The evening tea used to be at five and it would go on for half an hour. As the mess  secretary, one should keep on checking the process at all sorts of times. So I came to the mess hall at 5.30ish that evening.

The mess was getting lonelier as people mostly used to crowd in at 5ish. There was a lovely tree nearby. I had a nice cuppa sitting under it, watching the ants run their eternal errands. I had a brief talk with the mess workers regarding the dinner, and I thought I would get back to my room/studies.

Suddenly there was this man in his mid fifties who said he would like to talk to me. Well, I had always kept an aloof profile, especially because I used to be truly busy with research work and language learning simultaneously. 

I hence wondered what this total stranger, he was from the short term courses, would have to say to me. Some mess bother, I thought. Suddenly he asked me if I am from Pune and if Bider is a railway junction on the way. Yes, I said, but the train would be there at about two a.m. One never really gets to see it hence, though it is at this junction that the train truly diverts.

He said suddenly , my son got off there while travelling to Mumbai. It seems his son was hyper intelligent, committed, a good boy. For getting water, he got off the train and the train started, it seems. In the hurry to get on to the train, he was crushed under, between the platform and the wheels.

Well, I had never expected any such incident to unfold. I was young, too. Nor had I experienced any such huge tragedy in my life. For a minute, I was so severely shocked I did not know what to say. 

But then I made that hapless father sit down, talked to him of all sorts of consolation possible. Basically I made him realise that I shared his sad shock . At the end of our talk for some fifteen minutes, he said, "I do not know why I felt like talking to you. I thought you alone would understand."

My 'wedding guest moment' as in Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner' thus turned in to one of my hugest compliments by a total stranger. I would never ever meet that person again. The only thing I know of him was that he was from a very small village on the Kerala-Tamilnadu-Karnataka border. I do not know any of these languages either.

Yet it makes me feel a tremendous sense of soul satisfaction that I could heal in a minor way a suffering father's oozing wound, and that a total stranger felt I could be a humane, sensitive person. Thanks be to my upbringing and my love for literature, I believe.

A child dying is the worst possible trauma, I think. Especially unfathomed would be the father's unspoken grief that he cannot even give a voice to, given the societal gender roles. If there has been any minor misunderstanding with the child just before the incident, difficult to imagine would be the eternal self torment, the constant march of grief accompanied with self recrimination. Impossible even to imagine.

Remembered all of this because my cousin wrote to me about his son's death anniversary . One could sense the raw grief behind the philosophical explanations of  religious texts. I have shared this kind of intense suffering when a colleague lost her ten year old son. Such was the deep pain that later, when I was explaining the mp Wordsworth poem on the same theme, my students felt I was near tears.

Well, life very very very rarely gives a second chance. Most people are unfortunate thus. Better to live every moment most sensitively!

Pratima@you never know how strong you are unless there is no alternative to being strong, I suppose!