Skip to main content

Illness and Man




Some illnesses can make us feel totally helpless.  You just can’t do anything except lie down and suffer.  The viral fever that kept me bedridden for a few days is one such illness.  I know there are worse things than a viral fever that can torture the very marrow of your bones. 

This is the first time in my life that a disease left me totally enervated.  This is the first time in my life that I slept for some sixty hours continuously except for the essential intervals in between.  The sleep was a balm for the tortured body.  The mind too sodden with the side effects of all sorts of tablets I shoved down my throat needed rest.

Eventually I fell in love with the rest.  I didn’t need sleep anymore.  I just needed to lie down and stretch the body lazily. The various pains had abated though every now and then a bout of cough would erupt pulling every nerve in your lower abdomen in a thousand opposing ways. 

Except for the coughs, I fell in love with the rest.  A lot of images flash through your mind as you lie in bed with eyes closed.  The follies and blunders you committed all along, how people reacted to them, the games some people played with you, and a whole lot of other things.  Your life appears before you like a flashback.  Not everything is clear.  There are mysteries.  One of the things I have never understood, without all this flashback also, is why I drew so much attention of so many people who played a lot of games with my life.  Maybe, some things are destined to remain mysterious.  Maybe, that’s how life is: people play games and their motives vary.  And people like me are sitting ducks.

I fell in love with the ease of my rest after my Rip Van Winkle sleep.  I wished to prolong that ease for ever, for eternity.  But I know that’s not part of human life.  I had to get up and get going.  However, I was pretty sure that my experience was a presage of how things would be in the last moments of our life.  A flashback, an intense awareness of self and a lot of realisation.  Ah, too late it would be!

  

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJune 22, 2017 at 9:04 PM

    Isn't life all about making peace with its sea and are we not the old man still hoping to catch a big fish for the last time? I have always wondered how the definition of that fish change from people to people but then at the end we all become the old man!
    I hope you have recovered to set the wheel rolling. Warm wishes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 22, 2017 at 9:10 PM

      Very apt metaphor. We all love to go on chasing the fish, our special fish, until it will take us away.

      I'm OK now, more or less. Thanks a lot for the wishes.

      Delete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathJune 22, 2017 at 9:50 PM

    "A flashback, an intense awareness of self and a lot of realisation"- It is interesting that you got a glimpse of it in the present time and liked the process....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 23, 2017 at 10:26 AM

      Sometimes illness may have such positive sides too.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
48 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more