The Bearable Heaviness of Being

Sita was not in her usual self. The gloom in her eyes and her sluggish movements suggested that. On the way up through the narrow stairs that smelled disinfectants, we tried talking about her father. My heart was sunk deeply in to an unpleasant mood. I was going to meet a man who was diagnosed with cancer in one of the kidneys. Sita’s father. How would his eyes look like? Will I see the terror of death in that or a shallow gaze fixed at distance? Will I be able to strike any sort of conversation with him? Sita was talking but my mind was already in the room with her father.

“This way sir.” Her polite tone makes me uncomfortable sometimes but hardly I ever objected. The exposure to the room was sudden as there was no visitor space in between. There he was lying in the bed that was slightly raised towards the head. He was reading a comic. He smiled. There was no fear in his eyes neither any distress. I talked to him for an hour.

Sita’s father was receding in my memory, but as if like a sequel the other day Tinu called me and told that her young aunt was diagnosed with cancer on nerves, from nose to brain. I get a chill in my spinal column every time I hear the term cancer. I even wonder how Cancerians carry that ominous zodiac sign with them for a lifetime. “How’s she?” I had nothing else to ask. “She seems to be facing it bravely”. Came the reply. Tinu continued “She told us that she does not differentiate happiness and sorrow at this moment”. What would you call this revelation? Calling it ‘profound’ would belittle her wisdom of the moment. No saint she is, but an ordinary woman. The wise ones say that the ecstasy of life begins when there is no fear of death in mind. Here is a woman who started living for the reason that she dropped the fear of death.

I thought of miracles. There is miracle in every pore of life though we fail to notice that. Miracle is not a mysterious cure, but the unwavering strength that life gives to the human existence when they go through the unthinkable. Think of that perturbed moment of sliding into a MRI machine. Think of those harrowing moments of waiting for the diagnostic report and think about that moment when someone whispers in your ears that something fatal is lurking inside. And you want to die. But nature has to comfort her divine children. She hugs them to bosom and softly tells “child, this too shall pass”. I am dumbfounded looking at the alarming speed with which the nature acclimatizes people with the most unbearable and alter it into bearable or may even to pleasurable. I could never stop wondering oh Mother.