“I who am blind can give one hint to those who see – one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf to-morrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. But of all the senses, I am sure that sight must be the most delightful.”
This is an excerpt from Helen Keller’s essay, “Three Days to See”.
I have never been involved in social work in school, nor did I enrol for the Social Service League in college. Actually, I wasn’t even sure if I believed in social service for that matter. (I’m still not sure if I do!)
I visited Nirmal Hriday, Home for Dying Destitutes for the first time in November, 2009. It wasn’t an official visit. I know someone who has been a very regular visitor for a very long time, and when he asked if I’d be interested in tagging along; it seemed like a pretty interesting way to be spending the afternoon.
I am not the first person to be writing about Om Prakashji and Yadu, far from that actually. I don’t even have anything new to say about my acquaintance with them. But being the human that I am, I like to give myself and my intelligence a great deal of importance and so to me, my story is very special.
When you are a person who tends to avoid visits to the hospital for vaccine shots or even visiting friends and relatives because the very thought of wards full of sick, terminally ill, or ICU’d patients makes you squeamish, a Home for Dying Destitutes does not seem ideal.
Nirmal Hriday these days is being renovated and major portions of the building have been scaled down, including the women’s section. What remains now, is the main convent building, and a dilapidated section, housing not even one-fifth of its original strength. When you have finally convinced the street kids outside not to demolish your car windows with their heroic bowling stunts, not to mention a few of whom would promise to guard your car with their life, you enter the main gate.
It is a small building on the left, like a dormitory, full of empty bunk beds, and we reach somewhere in the middle. I remember meeting Om Prakashji first. Let me tell you at the very outset that he is one of the biggest John Grisham fans. He has read every John Grisham novel and is these days on the look-out for one of his non-fiction works. Om Prakashji is from Kolhapur. He used to work in Jhandewaalan before he fell ill and had to be hospitalised. According the account he gave us, it was from there that he was transferred and brought to Nirmal Hriday, to be looked after, as he had nobody else to take care of him. That was 1969. Forty one years ago.
Sitting on the bed right opposite his, is Yadu. Yadu is a cartoonist; he was an assistant to Mark Tully, the BBC journalist. What were the circumstances that brought him here is a difficult question to answer. Now he spends his days drawing cartoons, at least one every-day and scouring the newspapers for any such comments that could give him new ideas for his work. It is a brilliant experience reading the hundreds of cartoons that he has drawn over years, and stacked beautifully on his bed. My friend got Yadu the sheets and pens which he prizes with his life. You can strike a conversation with him on any and every topic that comes to mind, although he is slightly partial towards politics.
I tend to become an introvert with people I am meeting for the first time, especially in situations that I am not sure how to handle. In my visits to Nirmal Hriday, I have assumed the role of the silent observer, replying to questions, smiling at others’ conversations, but unable to hold my own.
Om Prakash ji maintains a small pocket diary in which he asks all his visitors to document their names, mobile phone numbers, and any other details that they would like to share with him. His diaries are filled with names of students from across campus, as well as a score of others, from around Delhi, India, and abroad. His love for reading escapes nobody’s attention, and I feel my heart melting as he shows us books that have been sent to him by people who had come to meet him some time ago, who have now gone back to their respective countries, but remember him through this gesture.
There is an open enclosure towards the back of the building where many of the people sit to enjoy sunshine in the afternoons. My friend introduces me to Hiralalji. “She’s from your state, Uttarakhand ki hai Poorva.” Hiralalji comes from Almora, the beautiful Kumaon hills. Hiralal ji does not keep very well these days. Even as he sits outside he has to be placed on a higher chair, because it gets very uncomfortable for him otherwise.
There are a number of other people out here in the veranda, some old, some unwell, some on wheelchairs. Many of them recognise my friend, greet him. Even those who don’t know any of us are delighted to see us. Why does it have to be so difficult for some of us, I wonder? Why is just the fact that an unknown but helpful face visits them enough to light up their faces with a shine so powerful, a hope so tangible, and a love so palpable that you feel guilty when you remember that for the next few weeks you may get so caught up in your so called busy life that this visit would not even be important enough to cross out from your things to do list?
Two things that have always trivialized life for me have been the universe and disability. Why the universe? Well, because it is big. The vastness of the cosmos has always given me a sense of inconsequence. The idea that I’m but a tiny speck on this universe with its zillions of stars and their corresponding worlds, many of them possibly even brimming with intelligent life, black holes, worm holes, meteors, pulsars, quasars, asteroids and galaxies, an infinite number of light years in expanse, is enough to give me goose-bumps. What is the significance then, of a single human being, when there are so many baffling mysteries to be unearthed, or unstellarized for that matter. This makes me wonder if relationships, failure or success even matters when the world and its dimensions are unfathomable to us menial beings. The expanse of the universe and its gigantic proportions seem impregnable. Our galaxy stretches over an expanse of 60 million light years. The life span of the sun is considered to be 10 billion years. It is believed that the sun is 5 billion years old, with an equal amount of life left. We have an average human life expectancy of sixty six and a half years. As pointless as these figures might seem in context of my paper, they are true. We, as human beings do pay a little more attention to ourselves than we deserve.
Helen Keller, at another instance in her essay writes, “I do not know what it is to see into the heart of a friend through that ‘window of the soul,’ the eye. I can only ‘see’ through my finger tips the outline of a face. I can detect laughter, sorrow, and many other obvious emotions. I know my friends from the feel of their faces. But I cannot really picture their personalities, of course, through the thoughts they express to me, through whatever of their actions are revealed to me. But I am denied that deeper understanding of them which I am sure would come through sight of them, through watching their reactions to various expressed and circumstances, through noting the immediate and fleeting reactions of their eyes and countenance.”
This makes me dwell on another significant experience of my life. One of my best friends suffers from brachial palsy, it is basically a congenital condition in which due to complications during birth, certain nerves connecting her left arm to the brain were crushed, which since then has hampered its growth. There is a difference of a few inches in the lengths of her two arms. She cannot use it for much more than providing support. But you tend not to notice that the first time you meet her, no, she does not come across as any other normal person, she is one of the most strikingly beautiful persons I’ve ever met and she can carry herself with the dignity and grace that I have rarely seen anybody possess. From the years of her treatment, months of bed rest post operations, false hopes, loose promises, and her parents fussing over medicines, physiotherapy and what not, she has managed to develop the kind of self confidence that I have seen in no other friend of mine. There is nothing she cannot do, as she so fondly tells me, except of course tying her own hair, and for that, she has a simple solution-why tie it, leave it open! She teaches me independence every single day. From whatever life has taught her, the most important lesson is happiness. For her, whatever makes you happy is the right thing to do. The fact that people stare at her hand in public, or sympathize with her has done nothing to change the person that she was born as. It has only strengthened her belief in herself. She has taught me to believe in myself, to believe in what I feel is right, and to reject notions that I believe do not hold any good. She made me realise that neither is there a shortage of reasons in life to be sad, nor do we ever find enough reasons to be happy. It is up to us to decide whether life is worth living or not.
I come back now to where I started this experiment. During one of my visits to Nirmal Hriday, Omprakash ji mentioned the circumstances that brought him here. His was a simple story. The fact that there was nobody to look after him, caused the hospital staff to transfer him to Nirmal Hriday, in 1969. “For somebody like me, who never had a home, this place has been the perfect home. What more could I have asked for?”, he says. When I see him on his narrow bed, with a few dog eared books for company, in that dark room, with its damp walls and peeling paint, I find no words to respond. If this for him, is the best he has ever received in life, how bad was his condition before he was taken into Nirmal Hriday? How worse off was he, why was there nobody to look after him when he needed to be nursed back to health? Why has he spent the last four decades of his life in a home for dying destitutes? I can’t answer these questions. Nor can I ask him to provide me with answers. He is happy. A friend of mine asks him whether he thinks he should get his long hair shortened like everybody else has been coaxing him to, pat comes the reply-“You should do whatever you like best in life, if you think you look better with longer hair, keep it, like for me, I prefer baldness!”
I feel like cursing God at these times. Why these differences? But then, maybe if everything and every circumstance in life were the same we would never value one from the other. Neither would anything be good, nor would anything be bad. The fact that I have everything that one wants from life should make me feel fortunate, grateful to God. I should be happy that there is nothing that I lack, nothing that I should be resentful to God about. But much more than that feeling of gratitude for my good fortune I feel sad.
I was told that the situation is much better now, at least for somebody visiting Nirmal Hriday for the first time. Not only is the number of destitutes much less because of the building being renovated, but some of the sections have been shifted to the Seemapuri. From what my friend told me, the situation of the women, many of whom were rape victims, was so repugnant that at times making these visits would leave you so unsure and repulsed that coming back a second time would be a much tougher decision to make than the first.
Visiting these people, only with the intention of spending some time with them, maybe to bring a few smiles on their otherwise dejected faces leaves me with a sense satisfaction. There is almost no other way that I can contribute to their happiness, maybe lend Om Prakash ji one of my books, appreciate Yadu’s amazing talent, express my concern over their health, or maybe persuade some other of my friends to do the same. But these tiny gestures on my part which make little or no difference to me are tiny rays of life for them, their means for survival in an otherwise bleak existence.
Yes, I come out of Nirmal Hriday unable to smile at the boys playing cricket, traumatized as I look at the mangled beggar sitting right outside its gates, wishing I could give up my studies, stop bothering about why my friend said that to me, and why my mother can’t agree to let me to do that particular thing, because life suddenly seems to be made up of a much more important fabric than what I have so far been used to. But I realise yet again, as I write this paper, that it is not the bigger things in life that make it. It’s the smaller issues, the day to day experiences, the micro occurrences, that give you the inspiration to move on. If I decide that nothing in life is important enough to pay attention to, I will lose the will and the motivation to work, to learn, to enjoy, to live. Life would become a mere existence, and would I in any way be able to make a difference to the lives of any of these people who have touched me so deeply?
So, I continue to love, I continue to enjoy, I learn, and I work. I thank my friend for taking me to Nirmal Hriday with him. It gave me a new perspective on life and what I feel about it.
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