I get up from sleep and pull the drapes. It’s cloudy. Suddenly I feel I am unable to read my mind. Just as the overcast sky, my mind is clouded with thoughts. These clouds have thickened my thought process. I love clouds, but not always. I am suddenly reminded of another such cloudy day.
It was a sleepy monsoon day. The sky was painted black with dark nimbostratus clouds of weird shapes. The darkness well casted it shadow on the earth and made this world devoid of light. Everything appeared to be in unison with the clouds. They spread gloom. It was a black day, literally and figuratively. And I can feel it happening to me right away.
I am standing in the balcony of the hospital room where my grandmother is being treated. She has suffered a haemorrhage. She wanted to see me, her grandchild. Oh! How much do I adore her. At one moment I was her pet, at another she was my teacher and I her pupil, and still at another moment she was my mother, my homework buddy, my secret confidante. And there I see her lying motionless on a hospital cot. She had crafted my childhood. Just like a potter carefully gives shape to his pots and pans, she had chosen and guarded the shape, colour, pattern of my childhood. I still remember the bright plastic alphabets she had bought for me to recognize. She would sit patiently for hours and teach me the alphabet. She would hold my hand and help me write. She was my mentor. And I remember she would read those bed time stories to me. And later she would ask me to read or at least try to read. She was a marvellous teacher.
She used to tell me that “reading” is something that will help you sail through the toughest of times. Lemony Snicket said “Well-read people are less likely to be evil”. I don’t know if his quote satisfies a Hindu mythological character Ravan who was the source of erudition at that time and yet he had to play a villain’s part. And yeah what about the terrorist “Osama Bin Laden”, he was a Civil Engineer. Or for that matter many of us who cheat or swindle others, do they all never read or read less? Sherman Alexie describes in his essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and me” how he loved to read. His entire childhood, adolescence, youth was spent in reading which made him a great writer. I am sure he must have been a less evil man. But nothing can be more evil than seeing a beloved one die.
And here she lay, incapacitated on that cot. It was so unlike her. She had struggled and fought all her life. Just like “Sherman Alexie”, she had fought the world just to be able to go to school. Her parents would not allow her to go school because no girl in their community attended school. She was a girl child of conservative Indian parents just as “Alexie” was a Native American; both were the unprivileged lot. Alexie defied the norms; she revolted. She learnt to read and write, she attended high school, joined a college, and started to teach. She is my iron lady. In terms of Lemony Snicket, she could be described as the least of lesser evil people. She is my angel.
Suddenly she opens her eyes and beckons me. I sit by her side. I hold her hand. She tells me in a faint voice” Read me Ramayan,the balkanda”, when Lord Ram is born to Dashrath and Kuashalya. I smile at her, assure her she wouldn’t die, touch her forehead and read. I read how King Dashrath prays to god to bestow upon him the joy and pride of being a father. He goes on to perform a yagya. Suddenly my eyes go back to her. I see her sleeping. I feel death around and yet the scene that I am reading is that of birth .I can’t concentrate anymore. She seems so helpless. My mind loses comprehension; it is the ultimate juxtaposition, the dichotomy that my mind is in. I realize reading is a very emotive feeling. Alexie loved his father, his father loved books, so Alexie decides to love books. Here emotion triggers reading and yeah reading triggers emotions and it’s an obvious fact. I try to be cheerful but I fail. Death is inevitable. Virginia Woolf in her essay “The Death of the Moth” says “Death is stronger than I am”. The text that I am reading to my grandmother is perfectly synonymous with her statement when she says “it was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers had set it dancing and zig zagging to show us the true nature of life”. Lord Ram is prancing about playing with his brothers and spreading joy to everyone who sees him. The joy is inductive to everyone but not to me because my mind is observing the onset of death. I guess she has lost all her will to struggle and face death. She is like the moth of Virginia Woolf. The moth is no human. Its life is relatively ephemeral. It cannot struggle as much as the human beings. But yeah she does depict the struggles of the moth. It gets lodged onto a window sill where it is barely able to move its legs. It wriggles and twists and yet it is nothing but the sheer onset of death. It appears that the author was troubled too. She portrays her own stifled mind-set when she writes about its struggles. Somewhere deep down in her soul she is experiencing those struggles and has a quest to break free of the chains that bind it. Woolf was very well read and yet she was stifled. Perhaps the less “well-read” people made her life miserable. But I am miserable right now. I cannot sit across death. I stop thinking.
Woolf says “Death is a powerful competitor of life” and it has to win eventually but it is not so rude that it takes away our right to fight for it. Every living creature is brought into this world with the basic most attribute, which is its ability to fight for its life which indeed is a precious possession.
But do I see my grandmother struggling? I believe she wants to die. She doesn’t like the evil and the less read people around her. She read so many things. All the scriptures she could lay her hands upon, all the books she could procure. She too like Alexie was “Reading to live”. She found her resonance with books. They were therapeutic for her, she used to tell me.
She has lost her will to struggle. She is behaving like Virginia’s “moth” and not like “Alexie”.He struggled to learn and here she gives up so soon. I wish I had narrated her Alexie’s story. She might have found struggle useful. But then what next? Woolf says “Death is inevitable”. But she had never read Woolf. Oh, she had read The Geeta. The Geeta says Death and Life is all in the hands of god. You should not worry about death because it will come; you struggle and live your life. Don’t expect anything from anyone. Just do your bit. And as I think, I see her so deep calm and composed.
I remember that somewhere Kafka says ‘the meaning of human life is to die”. He wrote well, so according to “Alexie” he was a well-read person. As per Snicket he must have been a less evil man. But death is not less evil. I am a normal human, I hate to part. I hate to see my grandmother die. I hate emotive writing. I am numb. Reading of birth and joy, I interpret death. I am reminded of W.H.Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues”. The last stanza perfectly describes my state of being. It goes
“The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good”.
Suddenly she smiles at me, I see her. She is like a firefly, glowing and beautiful. And here, I see the macabre magnificence of death as it comes. The soul is free. I cannot take it anymore. I have to escape from this strange alien emotion. I am transformed to the present. I try not to think of her. She must have attained liberty from the karmic cycle of life and death.
But my mind is still juggling with questions. Is death really evil? Does reading make one a better person? Do you win if you struggle more? I think of Woolf’s moth and my grandmother. No, death is not evil. It’s inevitable and it’s beautiful. ”The moth was decently uncomplaining and composed” and so was my grandmother at her deathbed. I am reminded of the struggles she had faced all her life. I think of Alexie. Both had faced all hassles and emerged as winners. While Alexie became a writer, she became a teacher. The struggles had paid off.
I suddenly realize the meaning of our lives. We are born, we are cared for, we are given the tools to fight and struggle because life essentially is a struggle. I now see why my grandmother taught me to read. She was equipping me to fight the world and carve my niche, however small it may be. I know I have to exert and strive and I am not afraid. I don’t fear anything, not even death. Death is ineluctable. It is the completion of a cycle, the closure.
