MOHAMMAD SHAFI KHAN
One jade line unbroken to Doomsday : She is
gone! – the nurse’s words. And again the flat line
(She is gone!), for in the ICU green, the monitor’s
Pulse was.
But the heart unable to empty itself.
-Agha Shahid Ali
Death’s harshness maketh longing shed blood,
death a hunter shoots arrows into the dark.
-Iqbal
No one will ever know the point of time, specific in time and place; when, where, how the marked dart will hit one to induce breathlessness to snap the thin chord of one’s life. Never never to breathe a moment of Time- and Life again.
Open eyed I see the garden is of mesmerizing beauty, but to no avail,
For what am I? else than a dew drop erased (out of existence) by the very first shoot of the morning sun.
-Galib
Even though the Serial Time’s appointed time to announce death – one may know well in advance because of disease primarily – it seems that disease is ever in hot pursuit of life. But we never know when the dart will pierce the heart. Despite disease and death, that unknown and unknowable creates hope, hope for life. The very elan vital of life. Hope sustains life.
Man’s ingenuity to defeat the disease utterly impossible, but a possibility remains only to contain and control disease to prolong life. Disease prevails in the long run. There are in this run of time – I mean the postmodern – state of art hospitals even in the third world countries with physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nurses of top class expertise to ward off disease. Do you know, my dear daughter, what “the third world phrase “ means? As among people there are those sitting on the summit of Fortune like the Ambanis and PremJis of whose dazzling luxurious ways of life you often talked, there are super-rich countries in the world as against those extremely poor, where poverty eats into the very vitals of society and state. You can well imagine La Miserables of our own country – ill fed, ill clad, ill looking. It is such poor countries which the richer countries of the world characterize as “the third world”. The first world inhabited by the rich, the second by the so called middle class and the third inhabited by the poor of the third estate of the Estates General, the exploited peasantry and the labour class. It is not that in these poor countries there are no rich people. There are and for them there are state of art hospitals to cure them out of disease. In our country, still a third world country, there are as in other third world countries two healthcare systems, one for the rich one for the poor majority. Similarly two education systems. Both the rich systems having become an industry now. A duality they say is very natural. Can’t be eradicated. There are ups and downs in the nature itself. Even this unjust duality is called republicanism. You may ask what is republicanism as you were in habit of asking questions. Well in simple terms it means that a chronic heart patient like you since childhood ought to receive treatment to get cured in a quality-care hospital free of cost, because people like you and me pay the taxes to run the state institutions. But who else than you should know that it is not the case. Recall how a particular doctor in a well-known hospital refused to treat you even though it was a government hospital and we had to go to Delhi for your treatment. Our democratic Republic of Indigo has a dichotomy of approaches, one to the first and second estate and the second to the third estate. I write it with pride that your father belonged to the third estate- a primary school teacher, and belongs to it even now.
You passed through a process of death all through 45 years of your life, fighting death from hospital to hospital, from city to city, from Srinagar to Jammu to Delhi. There is a world of difference between dying and death. Your disease unfortunately made you belong to the former painful category. While dying in a hospital, you know you were finally dying, you had said to your elder sisters nursing you on your death bed in the hospital that you were departing fully satisfied with your father and mother regarding how they had left no stone unturned to make you receive the best of the treatment at the hands of reputed doctors and hospitals till the very last breath you heaved. Nothing more than your generosity and respect. To every parent his or her child matters more than their own selves. But I, your father, my dear daughter, know it, honestly speaking, that what we did was quite small even though it being a precious little. Much could have been done which we couldn’t. Even though what we did was beyond our means.
If not in straitened destitution O Salik
Of a thousand delicacies healthiness is the finest
Unfortunately heart diseases, killer carcinoma, Parkinson’s and many other fatal disease cost too much to be treated. Very expensive indeed for the underclass resulting in their death earlier than otherwise. There are frequent heart failures in this paradisaical valley of Kashmir. Factors responsible – sedentary lifestyle, excessive meat consumption, highly spicy and oily cuisine, drug abuse, smoking, etc. and for the poor the very opposite of all this this – malnutrition. And then the skyrocketing prices of the drugs soaring higher and higher month after month in the capitalist economy of the Republic of Indigo. On the other hand a very large number of people in Indigo are on the drug – bound time, majority of whom are the poor more prone to disease than their rich counterparts, because of their low quality of life.
Dear Seema, while I write these lines a strange idea about death crossed my mind. Though audacious anyway here it is. It is about poet philosopher Allama Iqbal ( 1875-1938). Disease claimed him at 63. One may think “before his pen had glean’d his teeming brain.” Even so no less what he had already glean’d. You know all should die, all have died, all will die. Laity and special – all. Death is a great leveler. But when a man like Iqbal dies at 63- could have been 73- 83- 93. O these illusive numbers! It is as if the whole world has come to an end. Urdu poet Fani has the right words:
“Fani! I have seen the pulsating universe seize pulsating.” Imagine Iqbal living longer we might have had some more beautiful poetry and ideas and thought-provoking narratives from his pen which the community he belonged to would benefit from in particular and in general whole mankind. He was a universal thinker and a didactic poet. Even then what he has left with us is so great and splendid to understand and follow. Destiny or fate (or what?) made him suffer pain to utter in a moment of pain with his hand on his heart:
“O God! How it aches here”
A poetic expression of pain and he was no more. (“refer The Ardent Pilgrim by Iqbal Singh”)
Dear Seema, you too had an aching heart to live, dying through 45 years you lived. Now when I think of it, your surviving father, I ardently desire ‘to fade far away, dissolve and quite forget the fever and the fret of life’. Maybe I am desperate in despair but when your agonizing misfortune I visualize, it announces a heartbreak.
You know your disease was not inherited but acquired. You contracted a fatal infection of RHD from the people and environment around you. Otherwise you were born a healthy child. World is so full of so many ills and oddities. Anyone is prone to fall to one of them. Alas you too were one to fall when you were a little girl of just seven or eight. God’s creation plan. What can one say? Since early childhood your life has been a story of pain, of hospitalization, of surgeries big and small. Two open heart surgeries and three pacemaker implantations. You know at the time you died in SKIMS Soura you were running on pacemaker no. 3. That is why ‘ICU green the monitor’s Pulse was.’
Whereas your heartbeat was gone, dead. Dear, to me your story is aptly described by an English novelist Thomas Hardy in one of his novels where his unlucky heroine dies in the Salisbury-plane, a tragedy. That is what your life was. Quote unquote. “happiness is an occasional episode in the general drama of pain that life is. Justice was done and the President of immortals had finished his sport with Tess.”
We had been visiting Delhi in sweltering heat and winter chill for your treatment. In between the respites of your hospitalization and attendance in them, we used to visit the Dargah of Sufi Saint Hazrat Nizam-ud-Din Aulia. To pay obeisance to enrich ourselves spiritually and to pray for your health. I recall how you shed tears there for your condition of heart. How sorrowful now to recall. How you longed for visiting Delhi but only as a visitor without that huge bundle of the record of your papers of disease, files upon files, diseased papers, which you jealously guarded in your attache case. Just visit the historical places and ruins of Delhi. I very often kindled this visitor’s desire in you by citing to you a couplet of Maulana Hali:
You will return with a scar in your heart O visitor
Do not ever go into the ruins of this city.
But it was not to be. You are now gone to the hereafter, into the heavenly abode by the grace of Allah. We pray for you let it be so. Without those diseased files. May you rest in soulful bliss of Almighty. Amen ya Allah.
Postscript
You know in the lush green Summer of the Pir Panchal valley in the south of Kashmir (Shopian) your vegetable garden just outside your bedroom is in full bloom with the green of tomatoes, chilies, cabbages, apples peeping out of green leaves of your apple trees. Enlivened in mid day sheen of the sun by the cooing of the doves. Their notes the cheering music soft touching the inner recesses of mind and heart. Everything remains as it is. Only you have changed your place to heaven’s greens of abundant fruit hopefully as promised by the Lord. But for us the worldly the Lord has bestowed upon us the ‘the still sad music of humanity’ to chasten our souls:
Now and in time to be
Wherever green is worn
A terrible beauty is born
-W.B. Yeats