A Phone Call and a Destiny

Some phone calls are ominous. There was a time when I used to dread them. Mercifully they are very rare. They come from someone or the other associated with an institution of which I was a member for ten years of my youth. Though I bid final adieu to the institution somewhere down the line, the institution took a diabolic interest in haunting me throughout my life and making as much a mess of it as it could.

Image from ArtStation

When the call came today, I ignored it as I often do with unknown numbers. But when the call was repeated a few hours later, I answered it. As soon as I heard the connections mentioned by the caller, I knew I was doomed. It meant that they are going to mess up my life now that I have brought some order to it after I dealt with a protracted depression and the concomitant downsides of it.

A couple of days back, ‘destiny’ cropped up in a discussion in a class I was taking. I told my students that I never believed in ‘destiny’ as a young man. I narrated how I questioned Thomas Hardy’s fatalist vision as delineated in The Mayor of Casterbridge. As an undergrad student, I wrote my essay on the novel ascribing Michael Henchard’s (the protagonist of the novel) failures to his character. It was his fault that he lost his wife and child in a frenzy of drunkenness. It was his fault that he didn’t sustain his love for Lucetta. His fault again that he lost his step-daughter 18 years later. Whose fault else is it that he turns to drinking once again? And so on. I put the entire blame on Henchard.

But – I continued my class – as an older man now, having gone through a life of failure after failure, I know better. I know that Hardy became a neo-classical writer not for nothing: his vision of the world and human life in it has its relevance. Destiny does play a role in our life, a major one at that. You can be a Mayor today and a buffoon tomorrow. Destiny is Shakespeare’s gods to whom we are “as flies to wanton boys… they kill us for their sport.”

I have described myself as the “Joker in the pack” in my Facebook profile. That’s what the particular institution made me. I hope to continue my entertainment.

Asking Destiny what its motive is like asking Shakespeare’s boys why they play with the flies.

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