Skip to main content

Friends



An old friend of mine underwent angioplasty recently and I decided to visit him today. I asked Maggie to join me since she knew him and more since I loved company for the hour-long drive. The friend is a Catholic priest who was a classmate of mine for 6 years in the seminary. Let me call him S.

   Our conversation happened to graze religion and I mentioned that I was no church-goer. Maggie thought that the priest would find that scandalous. On the contrary, S asked, “What’s the use of going to church if that doesn’t make one a good person? I know a lot of people who attend church as a mere duty. If you are a good person doing good to others, it hardly matters whether you go to church or not.”

   “He has his own spirituality. He meditates.” Maggie offered.

   “What more do you want?” S asked. “God is not the private property of the church.”

   Maggie was neither shocked nor scandalised. Living with me had made her familiar with similar, if not much more radical, views.  I didn’t mention, however, that my meditations didn’t require even a god. My morality and my goodness (however whatever little that is) are founded on the pure logic that goodness is the foundation of healthy living.

   I recalled how a student of mine resorted to a small trick last year to get me along with Maggie to pray in the school’s prayer room during the lunch break. “Would you do something for me during the lunch break?” She had asked me. “Please,” she pleaded. “Why not?” I said without realising what she was up to. However, when she got Maggie to the prayer room I refused to accompany her because I had been assigned a duty by the coordinator. The student wouldn’t believe that I couldn’t take a minute off from that duty for her sake. She felt hurt more because I broke my promise to her than because I refused to join her in prayer. A few months later, however, she told a friend of hers that it didn’t matter whether I prayed or not because I was a good human being.

   “That’s all what matters,” said S. “And people always see through what you are whether you go to church or not.”

   Maggie understood that my friends, very few as they are, are indeed a different breed of people.


Comments

  1. wingsJune 25, 2018 at 10:04 AM

    It is easy to go to any temple or church or masjid or mausoleum and say prayers. Being good is an unattainable pinnacle for both believers and disbelievers. Most of the disbelievers are ideal and strive to be good. They are indeed spiritual.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 25, 2018 at 5:45 PM

      I have also noticed that non-believers tend to be better at heart. Probably, they think and act unlike believers who do what they like assuming the confessional or the Ganga or something like that will wash away their sins.

      Delete
  2. pushpendra dwivediJune 25, 2018 at 1:53 PM

    interesting story telling

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anagha YatinJune 25, 2018 at 2:38 PM

    I so agree that going to temples or churches or mosques doesnt make one spiritual or a good human being. Being true to ones work and self does. Work is worship. Clear conscious is the only mirror where one should see the reflection and not in the eyes of the others.
    A heartwarming story.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 25, 2018 at 5:46 PM

      Thank you for joining me here and endorsing my views on this topic. I too take work as worship. I too believe in keeping the conscience clear.

      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
47 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more