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.
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| 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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