Blessed are the Healthy

By ChatGPT

I was at an electrical supply store in my hometown a few days back. A young salesman said the item I required was in the godown which was on the fourth floor of the building. I was willing to wait since I had no alternative. And I sat down to contemplate on a GODOWN situated on the fourth floor of a building.

When the young man didn’t turn up (should I say turn down) in the next 15 minutes, I enquired whether there was something wrong. A phone call brought the guy down, all puffing and panting. And sweating, of course. There’s no life in Kerala without sweat so much so that I have often wondered whether Yahweh sent Adam to Kerala when He asked him to live by the sweat of his brows. The young man delivered the item at the sales counter and then stood right under a fan to cool himself.

As I drove back home I said to my friend who had accompanied me, “You and I could climb up five storeys easily and come down without all that puffing and panting and showing off.” We were both in the middle of our sixties. He agreed instantly and confidently.

I got a chance to check that boast today. I was in a hospital in the same town taking care of a close relative who was admitted there. A nurse assigned me a chore that required me to go five storeys down and then return with a report from a lab. “There’s a lift,” she helped.

The lift was too full for my ego. Then I recalled my boast to my friend. Why not try it out really? I descended the five storeys faster than the lift, got the required file from the MRI Scan Room, and rushed up the five storeys back. Not a gasp. No puff or pant. The fan was helpful, of course.

As I patted my own back, I fell into another contemplation.

I had spent hours in that hospital more than a couple of days already. In the crowded corridors, I had noticed humanity stripped of its illusions. People waiting with anxious eyes, people carrying reports like verdicts, people wincing in pain. Patients who lay staring blankly at walls have always made me look at heaven like my favourite writer Albert Camus and raise the question: Do you care?

How blessed are the healthy! That was the answer I received this time. I was learning humility too, a virtue I never possessed.

I have always been quite a grumbler. About snarling traffic, venal politics, creepy inconveniences, unfulfilled ambitions, and a wounded ego. All the while my heart beat faithfully, my lungs beathed effortlessly, and my body carried me through the day without protest. Did I treat my health as an entitlement? Did I fail to see the grace (lexical deficiency) behind it?

“A visit to a hospital changes your perspective,” my sister told me as we sat outside an operation theatre in connection with another patient who was also a close relative. “I was at the Regional Cancer Centre in Thiruvananthapuram a few days back,” she continued. She was shocked by the sight of the suffering there. Especially little children with bald heads.

Camus rose in my consciousness again. But I suppressed him. There are moments of heightened emotions when Camus is an outsider.

I was forced to think of the quiet dignity of suffering. The frail old man whom I met by chance. He struggled to breathe. They had connected a tube to his nostrils. But he was happy. “I am 82. And it’s going good,” he said with a grin that belonged to one who had suffered much. “Who is going to be the Chief Minister?” He asked me. Kerala’s Assembly election results were out long ago but the chief minister was yet not decided since the Congress party is not cadre-based like Pinarayi Vijayan’s Marxist party. I opened a news channel on my phone and showed him the political scramble that was going on. “I’m a Congress-man,” he said. The pain in his words didn’t belong to his illness but to the venal political condition in the state. In the country, rather.

I liked the octogenarian’s spirit. I wished our politicians could understand that sort of spirit that doesn’t die even when a citizen is struggling with oxygen-supplying tubes in a hospital room.

I made it a point to bid farewell to that old man as I left the hospital this afternoon. I may never meet him again. But I guess I’ll remember him whenever I begin complaining thoughtlessly about life.