Thomas the Saint

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His full name was Thomas Augustine. He was a Catholic priest. I knew him for a rather short period of my life. When I lived one whole year in the same institution with him, I was just 15 years old. I was a trainee for priesthood and he was many years my senior. We both lived in Don Bosco school and seminary at a place called Tirupattur in Tamil Nadu. He was in charge of a group of boys like me.

Thomas had little to do with me directly as I was under the care of another in-charge. But his self-effacing ways and angelic smile drew me to him. He was a living saint all the years I knew him later. When he became a priest and was in charge of a section of a Don Bosco institution in Kochi, I met him again and his ways hadn’t changed an iota. You’d think he was a reincarnation of Jesus if you met him personally.

You won’t be able to meet him anymore. He passed away a few years ago. One of the persons whom I won’t ever forget, can’t forget as long as the neurons continue to strike the synapses within my body, despite the fact that he was quite an ordinary person. What made him stand out of the ordinary, for me, was his saintly lack of an ego in the ordinary sense of the term. Thomas was a constant reminder for me of the plain truth that you don’t have to do great things to be great but do your ordinary duties with all the love you can bring into it.

My first experience of his tenderness was when I was 15 and was quarantined due to chickenpox. When my quarantine started there were already two others of my group in the isolation room. But they recovered and left after a few days leaving me alone. I felt lonely though someone or the other came with food four times a day and occasionally one of the trainers [let me use that secular term for the clergy members for the sake of the ordinary readers here] visited too.

The only visits that remain in my memory are those of Thomas Augustine. He didn’t come at the front door to visit me as other elders did. Behind the quarantine was a hockey playground which couldn’t be seen from the main buildings of the seminary. The residential building of the priests and other clergy blocked it. And I was staying on the ground floor of this particular residential building.

Thomas Augustine would come on that playground and call me out. “Come out through the window,” he would gesture to me. I was small enough to pass through the window bars. Or maybe the windows didn’t have bars. My memory isn’t good enough now. But I remember my joy in being let out of the quarantine-prison albeit for a half-hour walk with an angel in the playground. This was in the late evenings when everyone else in the seminary was busy with the study hours of the system. The entire place would be eerily silent. Not one sound anywhere. You would hear if a pin dropped. Such is the ambience of Catholic seminaries at certain hours.

I don’t remember what Thomas Augustine and I talked in those evenings. I was just an ignorant 15-year-old and he was about 25 with years of seminary-imparted wisdom. We must have talked about my family, childhood, and other immaterial things. He was only indulging me like an elder brother making sure that I didn’t feel lonely and dejected in that temporary prison of mine. What refuses to leave my heart is the feeling of tenderness he left there during those walks.

I met him a few times years later on various occasions. His tenderness hadn’t ossified an iota as it happens with a lot of people over time. He was ever the same angel with the same winsome smile and placid demeanour. What fascinated me about him is that he never seemed to change as he grew older. He possessed the same serenity as a young man, the serenity that stayed with him till his end. How blessed he was! I went through a lot of agony as I grew older and am yet to arrive at the kind of serenity that Thomas Augustine had all the time.

The last I met him was in his coffin. He lay in the Don Bosco’s Thattazhathamma Church in Kochi a few years ago. His face still carried his characteristic benedictory tenderness.