As the sun does to the rose

I visited two unlikely places yesterday along with a friend whom I shall refer to as J. A cousin of J’s was an inmate of a sanatorium meant for men who were shifted from a mental hospital. This cousin had undergone treatment for years at the hospital. Now for the last few years, he is in the sanatorium and he looks perfectly normal. He talks like any other normal person too though years of psychiatric treatment has given him a conspicuous stoop. He seems to find it hard to look up into your eyes as he speaks due to the stoop. But he does smile a lot. There was an occasional laughter too, subdued though it was.

“Have you retired?” He asked me. When I answered, his instant remark was, “Your grey hairs gave me the hint.”

I had the same grey hairs when I met him two years ago along with J and I was teaching then. He had probably not noticed it that time. But he remembered me and also the fact that I was a teacher though the visit was very brief.

“My hairs are grey too,” he added with a childlike smile. “I stopped dying it. My sister used to courier me the best dye, Bigen. I told her not to send it anymore.” He had handsome salt and pepper hair which was more neatly combed than mine. His cheeks carried the sheen of a neat shave, again unlike mine.

A staff of the sanatorium brought a register in which J was asked to enter his name. It is then that we noticed that after our last visit in 2022, the cousin had received only four more visitors to date.

That realisation was a shock to J. Relatives should be more sensitive, he said to me as I drove him to the next destination. J couldn’t visit the cousin frequently as he lived in Vishakhapatnam and made only rare visits to Kerala. He told me he would make a request to the family members in the WhatsApp group to visit the cousin more often.

“He raised a demand recently,” J said. “He wished to marry. An impossibility.”

Who doesn’t want to touch the tenderness of love? I thought. I was reminded of a metaphor employed by Melody Beattie in The Lessons of Love. You don’t blast a heart open, she said. You nurture it open, as the sun does to a rose. This reflection of mine was reinforced at our next destination.

J wanted to meet one of his friends who is now an inmate in a house for some Catholic priests who are suffering from severe illnesses or incapacities. J is a priest himself. I knew his friend too and wanted to meet him.

T, the ailing friend, recognised me easily enough. He had met me two years ago with J in the same house. He had not lost his characteristic smile at that time. Now the smile was missing. “I remember your exquisite sense of humour,” I said. “Do you still crack jokes?”

Without even a hint of a smile, he said, “Now my life is a joke.” He looked sad.

J had already warned me that more than Parkinson’s it was depression that was consuming T.

“Three persons died here after your last visit,” T said while we had a cup of coffee with him in the spacious dining room in which the dining tables all carried very neatly arranged table mats each of which had a glass tumbler placed inverted in a quarter plate. Cups were kept in a tray. There was milk in a thermos, sugar in a small jar, and instant coffee powder in a glass bottle. J and I prepared our own coffees while T sat opposite to us making an effort to feel cheerful in spite of the gloom his remark carried. It’s not easy to look cheerful while living in a house where people apparently come to die.

T had been cheerful by nature. After more than three decades of our separation, I still remember the way he used to make us laugh especially at the dining table with his spontaneous quips. Here was an entirely transformed person though T looked much healthier than most others in his house.

As I drove back home all alone, I pondered on the inextricable loneliness that can afflict Catholic priests especially when they reach certain incapacitating situations like T. A person like me has an intimate company in my wife. Her love is like the sun kissing the rosebud into bloom. That tenderness can sustain me through hell or anywhere.

Can God be a substitute for that kind of tenderness in the case of celibate priests and nuns? Maybe. I am none to answer that as I have hardly any contact with God. But I found myself wishing that the priests in the house could experience the nurturing kiss of Beattie’s metaphorical sun.

 Next post in this space will be a poem written by a young guest, Diya Geomin.