Skip to main content

Liberating Love


It is with a heavy heart that I deleted the number from the contact list.  My Samsung phone cautioned me: Do you want to delete the number or remove it from the favourites?  And it gave me three options: Cancel / Remove / Delete.  When you have chosen a path after enough deliberation, there should be no hesitation.  I hit the delete option.

Last Christmas my phone showed a number of missed calls from a particular number.  Both Maggie and I were outside home and we didn’t hear the call.  I am usually reluctant to answer calls from unrecognised numbers and I never make a return call to such numbers.  Finally Maggie answered the call from that particular number when I was still outside. 

It was a call from a person whose number I had deleted from my contact list as well as memory some 15 years ago.  He said he wanted to shed a burden from his heart this Christmas day.  He said he had wanted to do it during many other previous Christmases but had no courage.  He also asked Maggie not to tell me that he was the one who called lest I block the number.

Maggie told me, however.  I didn’t block the number.  I was not interested in a call from that person, nevertheless.  I thought he wouldn’t call.  A day or two later, while I was sitting in a hospital where Maggie had an appointment with a doctor my phone rang.  I thought a phone conversation would be a good entertainment while I sat on the dreary bench in the hospital’s musty corridor.

It was that man who wanted to make his Christmas meaningful.  As soon as I answered he laughed uproariously which prompted me to move out of the hospital.  I feared his laughter would disturb the solemn and sad silence in the hospital.  I moved out on to the road.  I suddenly remembered that I had another work to complete in the town.  Let me do it, I decided.

“Do you recognise me?” The caller asked after the bout of laughter which strangely reminded me of Ashwattama after he had made his nocturnal and vicious assault on the Pandava camp when the Kurukshetra war was drawing to a close. 

How could I forget that laughter?  I told him I had no ill feelings towards him.  I have made it a policy not to harbour any ill feelings toward anyone because such feelings are harmful to ourselves.  He said he wanted to visit me personally and I said it was Christmas vacation and I would be available at home during the vacation.  But he didn’t come.  I didn’t save his number anyway. 

This morning I had to delete a contact for an entirely different reason: to stop hurting someone I love a lot and who loves me too equally.  Sometimes love hurts and it becomes necessary to keep a distance.  It was precisely that lack of distance that had created the uncomfortable situation between the Christmas caller and me.  He had taken it on himself to reform me.  There were a lot of people who joined him in the reformation process.  I found the whole process so hellish that I left the place altogether and moved to Delhi.  I didn’t want to be him to another person though I had never thought of such a possibility.  But love can be a burden sometimes.  Such love is counterproductive.  Love should liberate. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Good Friday and Some Arithmetic

Two and two is not always equal to four, my young friend Tony says. 2 + 2 ≠ 4, he reasserts. Tony doesn’t think linearly though his thinking has the precision of mathematical logic. See these two, Tony offers an illustration, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Then add another 2 to them, Ambani and Adani. What do you get? I smile in answer. It’s dangerous to answer Tony verbally. Now, Tony continues, let’s take two beggars from the street. And then add you and me, another two, to them. What do you get? Tony goes on with more arithmetic because he thinks I didn’t get it. (Modi + Shah) + (Ambani + Adani) = 4 persons (Beggar 1 + Beggar 2) + (You + I) = 4 persons Is the first 4 equal to the second 4? T oday is Good Friday. Good Fridays are sad because they are about the victory of vicious political power over simple goodness. Just a few days back, on what’s known as Palm Sunday among Christians, Jesus was led like a hero to Jerusalem, a political fulcrum in those days, by a hu