I must seek everyone’s apologies for my absence for the last couple of weeks. This was necessitated by ill health of various kinds. As it was a prolonged phase of ailments, it led to several thoughts around the process of sickness and healing. It seems to me that medicines do play their role in healing. However, the role of targeted treatments as also relevant treatment mechanisms should not be overlooked. More so, supportive care is central to healing. And my latest health episode has also firmly led me to believe in the importance of emotional well-being as central to human health. In all, it seems to me that human health is an amalgam of balanced approaches.
One of the problems that result from ill health relate to self-esteem, self-worth or at least, lack of belief in oneself. This is natural because convalescence from a debilitating weakness leads to the emergence of different thoughts in a person’s mind. These things should not be ignored or cast aside as ‘figments of the mind’ in an irresponsible manner. Healing is a process and there is, often, a multi-pronged, multi-spectrum perspective to healing. These are my personal conclusions drawn from my health episode that led to the awkward and unannounced absence of my column for a couple of weeks. Maybe, health practitioners of different orders who read this column might like to shed more light on the issue.
During this time, as I was sick, I was also working and teaching my students online. This is not to claim any false bravado. It is a result of our lives that we lead lives of disjoint and disconnect. I think one should pace down one’s life perhaps. Or if not slow down, then, at least, pace oneself better, so, everything is in place.
In James Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in the first chapter, Stephen Dedalus falls ill because a boy had shouldered him into the ditch. Stephen is sent to the infirmary to get well. He finds Brother Michael there. He thinks about the different hierarchies, why some teacher is called Father. He also thought the infirmary was a place where there were bitter medicines with bitter smells. But his experiences are different. He also meets an older boy there: Athy. He has a nice conversation with Athy there.
Quote:
“You have a queer name, Dedalus, and I have a queer name too, Athy. My name is the name of a town. Your name is like Latin.”—Project Gutenberg’s edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Athy asks Stephen if he gets a newspaper at his place, where ‘there is news about everything, even politics’. Stephen has high fever and was near delirium. The ailment has not been diagnosed and stated. However, he had been ‘shouldered into the ditch’, where the water was ‘cold and slimy’ and he has high fever. So, this is akin to the seasonal fever that many of us have had in our lives. Stephen heals slowly. As he heals, he learns about many new things from Athy. Much later in the novel, Stephen says “by thinking of things, you understand them”; thus, specifically stating that cogitating on any issue would lead to clarity in the mind.
Stephen’s condition is bad because he does dream of his family back home, he dreams of happier days. Then the dream snaps back to reality, and he realizes that it was a dream. When he had entered the infirmary, his spirits were very low. He thought he was going to die. And then, he recovers slowly.
It is the clarity of mind, as Joyce tells us through Stephen, that is central to our life processes. In a very different text, Mahesh Dattani’s Tara, Chandan and Tara are conjoined twins and they have been successfully separated through surgery. The surgery has been a success and it is the rarest of the rare occasions. They twins have an artificial leg and they had been conjoined even at the pelvic region. Dr Thakkar, the eminent surgeon, tells us that this is a rare occurrence. Chandan and Tara sometimes have to listen to barbs from their peers. Both are intelligent but Tara is brilliant and outstanding. Patel, their father, prefers Chandan, the shades of ‘boy preference’ in Indian society get clearer. Dattani is known for talking about the “invisible issues of Indian society” that no one else talks about.
There is the issue of physical deformity from the normative modes of social reality. However, Tara does not feel anything so and when Roopa, their neighbour, makes fun of her, she gives it back neatly. Chandan listens to Brahms, the German music composer. Tara, listening to the music, says it is Beethoven, not Brahms. They disagree. There is no sense of inferiority that Chandan or Tara feel. They do accept life’s reality and they are combative with social idiots. Their healing is medical through surgical procedures but mental through sheer inner strength too. Healing, here, is a process. It usually is.
