One of the most vivid characters from the Bible for me
is the guy who lives in a cemetery. This man hated himself
so much that he went mad. Even metal chains failed to bind his madness. He
yelled at everybody. He hated everybody. He hated himself so much that he
wounded himself.
What went wrong with him, we don’t
know. Did he slip on a banana peel and was laughed at by people? Was he
insulted by a donkey that kicked him in his backside? Did he fall in love with
a girl who eventually ditched him and made him feel worthless?
He probably envied those who slipped
on banana peels but managed without a fall or, better, succeeded in converting
their fall into a waltz or something. Maybe, he tried to waltz too and the
steps never came right. The song he tried to sing may have jarred. It is even
possible that people pulled out the strings of his guitar and made a handcuff
for him. Life is like that. I know from experience. If you start falling,
people will kick you down to accelerate the fall. But the reverse is true too,
to be fair. Be a winner and they will build temples for you.
I read about the biblical masochist
(as I grew up, I imagined him as a masochist rather than as a mere self-hater)
as a teenager. He fascinated me right from the beginning. Maybe, there was
something of him in me: a man within who loathed me. That was long ago. Now I
will laugh with those people who laugh at my slips on banana peels.
It took me many years to come across
another character who loved the cemetery: Anjum of Arundhati Roy’s The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness [2017]. Like the biblical character, Anjum
is an outcast too. She is a Muslim hijra – doubly outcast in current India.
But, unlike her biblical counterpart, she is not a loser. She converts the
cemetery into her Jannat [heaven]. That is the best she could do in a society
that would have eliminated her had she not been a hijra. “Nahi yaar, mat
maro, Hijron ka maarna apshagun hota hai,” one of her assaulters says. She
escapes from her assaulters and takes refuge in the cemetery. She is broken.
She is a ravaged, feral spectre. It takes years for her to come to terms with
her destiny and convert the cemetery into her Jannat.
The Delhi municipal authorities will
come in the due course of time to demolish her Jannat which is, of course,
illegal. It is illegal for squatters to live in a graveyard. She tells them
that she is not living there, she is dying. Life-in-death!
Who portrayed that sort of life
better than T S Eliot? His classical poem about life-in-death, The Waste
Land, was published exactly a hundred years ago [Dec 1922]. Eliot’s
world is a kind of cemetery and we are all living in that cemetery. Quite many
of us are all as broken as Anjum, if not the biblical guy.
Eliot suggests a solution from the Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad. Datta, Damyata, Dayadhvam: Magnanimity, Compassion,
Self-control. Hundred years later, Eliot’s remedy remains valid. Since it has
its origin in our own much-vaunted ancient civilisation, we may not have a
problem about considering the solution seriously.
PS. This post is part of a series written for #WriteAPageADay. The previous post in the series: The End of the World
Hari OM
ReplyDeleteVery nicely tied together... and yes, ultimately, we are all in the waiting room of endings... YAM xx
Many of us live as if we were already dead!
DeleteEnjoyed reading this one.
ReplyDeleteGlad.
DeleteIn Cemeteries, history lives on, offering visitors a chance to reflect on both the past and their own mortality.
ReplyDelete