Illness is like a flower. You can see it blooming petal by
petal, if you have keen eyes. You may even hear the music of it, provided you
are listening hard enough. Standing in front of a mirror, counting the boils on
my body I suddenly become aware of the fact that a healthy person, however he
is in love with himself, does not know his body the way he knows it when it is
afflicted by an illness. I see a man in the Metro rail, impeccably dressed in
his cheap clothes, complete with a tucked in shirt, ironed polyester trousers
and clean shoes. He holds a small bag in hands and curiously I find a plastic
bag with a tube attached to it hanging from his hip. Dark yellow fluid inside
the transparent plastic bag plays see-saw as the man walks further, alighting
carefully from the escalator. Like the Russian painter, Ernst Niezvestny’s
paintings he is a man turned inside out. I could see his tired kidneys
struggling to filter fluids and catheter that juts out from his private parts
pushing out the left over fluids in a process called dialysis. Or is he like
the paintings of Francis Bacon, totally vandalized by illness and lost clearly
contoured face? But I am sure that man knows his anatomy than any of those people
with powdered faces, toned bodies and shapely ears glued to mobile phones or
headphones.
(Vitruvian Man by Da Vinci)
I lie on my bed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, hands and
legs splayed. I could feel my back painting and the pain creeping up to my neck
then blooming into small boils inside the thicket of my mop. I move like
Muybridge’s man as if I were recording the movements of my irritated limbs
frame after frame in a camera. Then I lay still like a Modigliani nude. Then I
become a Christ rendered by Gauguin. I look at the unmoving fan which had gone
dead after a major power breakdown in the neighbourhood. The locality is silent
as televisions are not rending out the sorrows of bedecked housewives and
newscasters disappear into a vague nothingness. I hear the tired and harassed
women taking from balcony to balcony exchanging similar stories of deprivation
suddenly caused by the power breakdown. Each sound is underlined with fluorescent
lines as if they were the notations from a musical score that a weary child
tries to rote.
I could hear the viruses moving in my body, mocking my
immune powers that I thought were there intact for the last few days. Viruses
can play havoc in the most unexpected days and unexpected ways. The Starbuck
coffee that I had drunk yesterday evening with a friend at the Nehru Place
metro station which dons the characteristics of a mall than a railway station
looks absolutely remote. His voice echoes in my ears along with the mocking
sounds of viruses, resulting into a buzz of intolerance. I drink water and
water tastes like medicine because doctor had told me to drink a lot of water.
When doctor advises any mundane thing could turn into a medicine. I look at my
body like a tired Lucien Freud character would have done and find out the
boils. It is chickenpox. The viruses cause heat and they bloom into boils, turning
your body into a garden of boils. You can just wander alone there looking for
surprises, a ruptured lesion and a ripe pimple and the innumerable ones that
grow up here and there like a crescendo in an orchestra.
(Orhan Pamuk)
I don’t remember bedridden days. I must have, during my
childhood days. But when you are child and you are ill, you take that too as
fun. If the illness is not terminal and it still gives you mobility and it does
not render you completely weak, even illness could be your friend. You pick up
your old toys and dolls, you find out those picture narratives and story books
which had been tucked into shelves and you play or read. When friends come you
invite them to join in your charade. If you do not have a contagious disease
evenings are pleasant. But nights, perhaps in nights you go away to those
places of toy lands and magic lands as seen in the picture books. Illness in
childhood is the first lesson to focus and concentrate on things. For the first
time a child gets a chance to be alone and focus on things around him. He
registers things and they would never fade from the memory. I remember a
character in Orhan Pamuk’s Black Book. This young boy is dumb and deaf. He
keeps looking at the golden fishes in his private aquarium. In the evening when
his cousins come he plays with them and paste pictures and news in a scrap
book. Rest of the time, he looks at the streets of Istanbul, Bosphorous River,
trams and busy people walking along the streets, Alladin’s shop etc from his
window. He grows old and dies in that room, never telling the world what he had
learnt from his observations.
(Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)
There was a time when every youth in this country wanted
some kind of terminal illness that rendered them silent. They were the days of
pre-gloablization and the days of nationalist economy. Options were limited for
the people to choose from. Illness and muteness was something that attracted
love. They hid their illness and even rejected their love interests only to
gain all sympathy at the moment of farewell. They sang songs in popular
narratives and they became the most beautiful popular songs ever. If aggression
did not bring you the desired love illness did. So most of the heroes in
popular movies found their love when they were either beaten up or bedridden.
Interestingly, these movies never spoke of those women who were prone to
illness. Like their feelings and emotions, their illness too was a castaway
subject.
(Vincent Van Gogh)
Growing up in those romantic days, whenever I felt illness
(I was never bed-ridden in the conventional sense) I thought of all those ill
heroes in art, film and literature. Didn’t I feel like coughing out all those
blood surrogates and falling dead at my beloved’s lap as Kamalhaasan did in his
movies? Didn’t I feel like looking at that last leaf painted on a wall? Didn’t I
feel like Van Gogh who had given his ear as a gift to his love interest? Didn’t
I feel like the Pope who was about to die and dies in fact after seeing a young
sister’s vagina in a European movie? Didn’t I feel like becoming a Jack
Nicholson or Mohanlal who were ill in the movies? Illness has a lot of romance.
It takes you to the micro worlds of existence. It opens up the worlds of
spirits and gnomes.
But I wait for the day when I could defeat the rioting
viruses in my venal streets by water cannons or by medicinal interventions. I
want to bring peace to my body. I want to see my body singing once again to the
tunes of love and love making. I want to make my body strong as a fortress
where I could keep my kids protected from invaders. I want to make my body a
theatre of emotions so that it could write itself in words that even I do not
know existed before. I want to come back to you, hale and hearty. I want to
hold your hands and walk along the streets, to the work place and to the dream
lands. I want to become healthy again and my body spotless and soul pristine so
that vile old women will not entice me with their tearful eyes. I want to run
around in joy behind my son and daughter and all the kids in the world. And I
want to hold the hands of all those old people who lived a creative life, a
meaningful life and now needs a touch of God. Let me wake up to that great day
sooner than later.
No comments:
Post a Comment