February’s Challenge

Two things happened this morning. One was a message from long-term friend, Jose Maliekal, who is a Salesian priest. The second was that I started reading a novel titled A Man Called Ove. Both together reminded me of the challenge I have undertaken for February: Blogchatter’s #WriteAPageADay.

Maliekal’s message was about Don Bosco’s love for keeping the boys under his care productively engaged even if that meant disturbing the sleep of a visiting bishop. Was the missionary in Don Bosco driven by recklessness or temerity? Maliekal’s message raised that question. And the message ended with an apparently wavering hope that I loved Don Bosco though I didn’t love his priests.

Ove in the novel is a 59-year-old man (just a couple of years younger than me) who is “the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman’s torch.” Once upon a time I was just like that. And Don Bosco’s priests and some other equally spirited people in Shillong took it upon themselves as their life’s mission to put out the torch in my forefinger. They succeeded and I became a better person. Better, according to me.

I’m grateful to all the Salesian [Don Bosco’s missionaries] and other zealots in Shillong who taught me some of the most essential lessons of life that I had failed to learn in the due course of life. Maliekal’s message this morning reminded me of all that. And Ove, the protagonist of the novel I picked up later in the morning, turned out to be just the kind of ridiculously odious person I would have been without the missionaries.

This is not to say that I love missionaries. Far from that. I’m scared of them. I’m scared that any day some of them might just force themselves upon the remaining fragments of my life just for the heck of it, if not for the love of Jesus. To tell you the truth, the missionaries of Shillong are yet to disappear from my recurring nightmares. My reading and writing are all meant to keep certain memories away. Memories are more traumatic than the tortures you endured.

“I keep myself busy in order to preserve my sanity.” I wrote in response to another message this morning. I undertook Blogchatter’s challenge for Feb precisely to redeem me from certain nightmares. The truth is I am still wondering what I will write about every day. I don’t want to write about my nightmares, of course. There are the country’s nightmares. The planet’s nightmares. To write about. Or maybe dreams instead of nightmares. Whatever. Let Feb come. I’m not scared of that, at least.