Arun Shourie - Does He Know a Mothers Heart : How Suffering Refutes Religion

Does He know
a mothers heart?

How suffering refutes religions

ARUN SHOURIE

HarperCollins Publishers India

For mothers
who have had to bring up
special children

CONTENTS

Your neighbours have a son. He is now thirty-five years old. Going by his age you would think of him as a young man, and, on meeting his mother or father, would ask, almost out of habit, And what does the young man do? That expression, young man, doesnt sit well as he is but a child. He cannot walk. Indeed, he cannot stand. He cannot use his right arm. He can see only to his left. His hearing is sharp, as is his memory. But he speaks only syllable by syllable...

The father shouts at him. He curses him: You are the one who brought misery into our home... We knew no trouble till you came. Look at youweak, dependent, drooling, good for nothing... Nor does the father stop at shouting at the child, at pouring abuse at him, at cursing the child. He beats him. He thrashes him black and blue... As others in the family try to save the child from the fathers rage, he leaps at them. Curses them, hits out at them.

What would you think about that damned father? Wouldnt you report him to the police or some such authority that can lock him up? Wouldnt you try everything you can to remove the child from the reach of the father?

But what if the father is The Fatherthe T and F capital, both words italicized? That is, what if the father in question is God?

Why does the perspective of so many of us change at once? Suddenly, they exclaim, There must be some reason God has done this. Suddenly, they shift the blame to that poor child: Must have done something terrible in his previous life to deserve such hardship...

And yet the child loves. He laughs. He is filled with joy at the littlest thingsa tape of Talat Mahmood, lunch at a restaurant, the visit of an aunt or a cousin... What are we to conclude? That the cruelties rained upon him by his father have built his character? That they have instilled forbearance? Are we to infer, See, while to us the father seems cruel, in fact he never inflicts more hardship on the son than the son can bear?

Were we to say and infer as much, that would be not just obnoxious, it would be perverse. And yet those are the exact things that, as we shall see, a revered religious text says about God: He inflicts hardship upon us to build our character; He never imposes more hardship on a person than the latter can bear.

But that child is our sonAditya, our life. Adit is thirty-five now. He cannot walk or stand. He can see only from the left side of his eyes. He cannot use his right arm or hand. He speaks syllable by syllable. Yet he laughsyou can hear his laughter three houses away. He enjoys going out to restaurants. He loves the songs of Talat Mahmood, Mohammed Rafi and Kishore Kumar. There are some songs, though, the moment they commence, we have to rush and turn off the tapehe is so moved by them that he starts sobbing. There are others which he identifies with himself:

Tu aake mujhe pehchaan zaraa

Main dil hoon ik armaan bharaa...

...

Muskaan lutaataa chal

Tu deep jalaataa chal

Khud bhi sambhal

Auron ko bhi raah dikhlaa...

Mere baare mein, he declares with joyand laughs even more as in our rendering the last line has been altered to Papa ko bhi raah dikhlaa...

He loves these singers and their songs. He loves even more the tapes that his grandparents made for him, and the tapes that his uncles and cousins make for him now. He doesnt watch televisionmoving images bother him. But he does listen to the news over the radio. The newspaper is read to himamong the things he calls himself is the ghar kaa samvaad-daataa. He loves poems being read to him. Seeing Adits spirit, and how many of his poems Adit knew by heart, Ashok Chakradhar has gifted him many of his books, and even dedicated one to him. Every time you read the books, you have to begin at the very first page, not just the title page, but the very first, blank pagefor on them Ashok Chakradhar has written many an endearmentPyaare, ati pyaare Aditya ke liye... And if, while reading the poems, you pronounce even a syllable wrong, he hoots with joy, Galti. That was one of my fathers favourite games with Adit. He would deliberately make a little mistake, and Adit would catch him outhoot, and laugh, beaming with triumph... He loves everyone. Everyone in the family loves him. His maternal grandmother, Malti Shukla, was his life. He is ours.

And that God just does not stop pounding this helpless, defenceless child. The last two months have been traumaticagain. Adit has a very high threshold of pain. He has the forbearance of Job, as the devout would say. He sleeps with us. There is a routine to his waking up: he will open his eyes and get us to join in repeating things that his favourites say: Adit is my best friend. Adit is absolutely my best friend... Main nahin, Adit is the top tiptop, Adit is top tiptop Number One... So we were alarmed when he woke up one morning almost crying. By the evening a blue-white cloud had formed over his right pupil. We rushed from one hospital to the other... from one eye specialist to the other... The membrane of his right eye had ruptured. Fluid from inside the eye had oozed outthat was the cloud over his pupil... He was in extreme pain... Keratoconus with resolving acute hydrops, the doctors pronouncedthe cornea, instead of being spherical has become conical, they said, it may have been so for a long time. This has stretched the membrane, and has eventually ruptured it... We keep being taught these new words, Manju remarks as we come out of the doctors clinic one day. Adits vision, already limited, has been impaired furtherwe cannot say how much: it cannot be tested by asking him to read those eye-charts that you and I take for granted. He must be in excruciating pain, the doctor says, surprised that Adit is not even complaining.

It isnt just that Adit has a very high threshold of pain, like his two grandmothers he has taught himself to bear an unbelievable amount of it.

You have to go in for a cornea transplant, the doctors say. Will that require general anaesthesia? we ask, full of dread. Yes, of course. For how long? O, just half an hour for each eye.

An hour under general anaesthesia? We cant bring ourselves to put Adit under sedation for that long. For how long may we defer the decision? I inquire.

Well, indefinitely, says the doctor. But if you want his vision to improve, if you want to reduce the chances of this problem recurring...

We are paralysed.

ANITA COMES

I had not known Anita. Our aunts knew each other. We are looking for a nice girl for my nephew, my aunt must have said. We are looking for a good boy for my niece, Anitas aunt must have said. So, one eveningan evening that is naturally so vivid that it is as if it were last eveningmy parents and I drove up to Anitas aunts place.

We didnt need the forty-five minutes for which the tea lasted. Anita was dazzlingly beautiful. As we got into the car, I looked back to get another glimpse of her. My father started the car. My mother asked, Arun, pehle General Sahib nu mil aayiye, yaa ghar chalke enaanoon phone kar dayee e ki saadhi valon taan haan hi hair?Arun, should we first go and look up General Sahibmy uncle, Major General U.C. Dubey, who had taken ill that morning and was in the Army Hospitalor should we first go home and ring them up that from our side the answer is of course Yes? I said,