Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Some illnesses can make us feel totally helpless.   You just can’t do anything except lie down and suffer.   The viral fever that kept me bedridden for a few days is one such illness.   I know there are worse things than a viral fever that can torture the very marrow of your bones.   This is the first time in my life that a disease left me totally enervated.   This is the first time in my life that I slept for some sixty hours continuously except for the essential intervals in between.   The sleep was a balm for the tortured body.   The mind too sodden with the side effects of all sorts of tablets I shoved down my throat needed rest. Eventually I fell in love with the rest.   I didn’t need sleep anymore.   I just needed to lie down and stretch the body lazily. The various pains had abated though every now and then a bout of cough would erupt pulling every nerve in your lower abdomen in a thousand opposing ways.   Except for the coughs, I fell in love with the rest.

I was thrilled beyond my wits because it is not often that one stumbles upon Don Quixote.   I greeted him with folded arms first, then shook hands with him before embracing him tight.   Really tight. So tight that he gasped and pushed me away.   “Real love does not display itself so smotheringly,” he managed to speak through the gasps. I apologised profusely and explained that I couldn’t contain my excitement on seeing him this Sunday morning when the monsoon clouds deceitfully played hide-and-seek in God’s own country. “Ah, gods and clouds!” He exclaimed. “Never trust either of them. They are part of the world’s madness.” “You were the sanest, Don,” I could not suppress my admiration of the man who single-mindedly pursued his dreams.   He laughed heartily.   “Where do you draw the line of sanity, my friend?”   Millions of people dying of starvation when tonnes of food is wasted due to mismanagement or sheer callousness.   Is that sanity? He asked me.

I am not superstitious.   Like Groucho Marx, I know that if a black cat crosses my path it means that the cat is going somewhere and has nothing to do with me except that it happened to cross my path.   Usually it is better that the cat happened to cross my path than a human being, especially human beings with staunch religious affiliations.   I am more likely to be killed by a gau bhakt today than a cat.   Marx becoming Marks! God!! Superstition is born out of cowardice and irresponsibility.   You are afraid of, say, water.   But you have to cross the river and there’s no other choice.   You get into the boat with fear in your knees.   Your knees tremble.   Your knees wobble.   The boat takes on your trembling.   Trembling is contagious.   Like a disease.   It spreads.   And the boat succumbs.   It capsizes, let us say.   You are saved, let us hope.   And then you blame the cat.   Because you don’t want to accept that you peed in your trousers.   The cat that crossed y