Most Sacred

 

Salman Rushdie grew up kissing books and bread before he could ever kiss a girl. The writer says that in his essay, ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’. It was a tradition in his household to pick up and kiss any food item or book that was dropped by mistake. “Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul – what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?” He asks. What can be more sacred than food and books?

Trust. That is my answer to Rushdie’s question. I hold trust above everything else.

Have you ever noticed that it is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend? That is because the enemy does not betray trust. The friend does. Trust is the very foundation of human relationships. Psychologist Erik Erikson places trust at the threshold of our psychological wellbeing. A person’s whole outlook is determined by the trust she is able to develop as she grows up and that ability to trust is built or crushed in the earliest days of childhood. A baby that receives proper care and tender affection is likely to grow up into a healthy personality while the one who is deprived of it will be fearful, confused and anxious as an adult.

Andrew M Greeley, American sociologist, is of the opinion that “the absence of trust” is “one of the critical problems in society” today. The predominance of prejudice, hatred and war today is due to people’s inability “to trust others and to radiate trust among those with whom (they) interact”.

Just look around at your own acquaintances and friends and tell me how many of them do you really trust? Can you open your heart to any of them? Personally, and rather tragically, my answer is in the negative. I wouldn’t dare to do such a thing as place my trust in any of them. Once bitten twice shy. I was naïve enough to be bitten twice.

I’m not grumbling, however. This is how our world is: fundamentally untrustworthy. If I failed to learn that lesson early enough, it’s my drawback and I can’t blame anyone for that. I deserved to be betrayed, not once but twice. [The second man who betrayed my trust when I was old enough to be wiser appears in my novel, Black Hole, as a character who is a history teacher in contemporary India and who shoves his erect penis into the mouth of one of his students saying, ‘We need to retrieve history from the invaders, boy.’]

There is no bigger harm that you can do to a person than betray his/her trust. When you betray trust, you are shattering the person’s entire universe. When you betray my trust, you make it doubly certain to me of my own worthlessness as a person. Your betrayal remains like a stigma etched indelibly in my soul. I gave you myself and you trashed it. That’s the meaning of betrayal of trust. I am not worth even your basic respect while you meant the world to me.

There are times when words don’t mean a thing. Even deeds don’t. Only feelings do. Broken trust engenders such moments. And feelings can linger like wounds that refuse to heal.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 378: What is most sacred for you? #Sacred