Sunday, June 1, 2003		Books

In my long teaching career, I have had to study and teach scores of novels, poems and plays, but if one book has to be singled out as a supreme song whose spirit takes you to the farthest reaches of human thought, and compels one to examine the phenomenon of suffering in its profoundest sense, it is, undoubtedly, Shakespeare’s greatest play, King Lear. Of course, my aim here is simply to use it as a spiritual grid from which my muses continue to draw nutriment. In fact, my theme really is suffering as a cognitive agent that brings true knowledge, and acts as a detergent of the human heart. I leave, therefore, other nuclear issues of King Lear aside for the moment. For, in the end suffering subsumes all related problems of filial ingratitude, the mystery of evil, etc.

Clearly, this is a little prelude to a story that I propose to unfold here. Year after year, I taught that book first at Patiala, and later at New York University till it became a part of my pulse, blood and bone. The peep into the human purgatory always left me at that time in a chastened mood. Still, Lear’s suffering remained in some ways a classroom exercise, though, I trust some residue of that excruciating experience continued to remain in business at the subconscious level.

And this should explain why in coming to the point of my story, I had to dip into that haunting tale of terror and suffering. As it is, in my present state of disability and affliction, I was driven each morning for a "walk" either to the Leisure Valley or to the Sukhna Lake, thanks to the thoughtful concern of my wife, and of retired officer-turned-homoeopath, dispensing magnanimities of medicine out of a deep sense of humanity. He was soon gone, but the touch of his noble spirit abides. It was all a passing moment of reprieve, and soon enough my situation compelled me to close in, once again, with the phantoms of reality. It’s there then on the Sukhna Lake promenade that this incident which triggered my muses took place in that hour of morning glory. The sun streaking over the Shivalik hills and lighting up a generous spread of water and vegetation had clearly raised the spirits of man, bird and beast around.

And then an old friend and colleague from my Patiala days suddenly materialised as though from a bush, and touched my shoulder in an affectionate manner. A person who for some private reasons, and out of a huge misunderstanding had drifted away from me grievously some 28 years ago. My wife, who knew the entire history of the tragedy of alienation, couldn’t believe her eyes either. As far as I was concerned, this unbelievable occurrence had the quality of an epiphany or a sudden illumination.

Understandably, we did not touch our troubled past, for that frozen lake of doubts, fears and malice was best left alone, we instinctively felt. In that moment of reunion, it would have been a fall from grace to open up old wounds. Such great injuries are not annulled through word or argument. A strange compact of understanding had made everything from the past irrelevant except, of course, some moments of shared camaraderie. We sat down on the stone wall alongside the promenade, and began to exchange pleasantries, and notes about our children, our Patiala colleagues, some already gone from the world. I trust, the loss of his wife and only son had mellowed the man, and there was a strange feeling of peace about him. We had, each suffered long and groped in that dark tunnel of doubt in our own way, but a point had been reached where our small quarrels now looked almost too silly for words. What madness had possessed us that an incident that took place when we were students was allowed to harden into a tragic impasse. A massive parade of ego and pride, if you like!

Surely, the incident in question is small in its own context, but the moral has larger dimensions. This brings me to Shakespeare’s swan song, The Tempest, which being his last play, is often taken as the poet’s testament in which he embodies a transcendent vision of forgiveness, compassion and understanding. It’s a journey from exile to homecoming, from darkness to light. The wheel of vanities is at last broken, and the spirit released from the bondage of banalities.

Well, to quote W.B. Yeats, both of us, I found, had "withered into the truth" after our respective ordeals of suffering. The phrase is from his poem The Coming of Wisdom with Time.

Why this tale of reunion soon proved a sell is not quite clear to me. How did a leak spring in the proceedings when the understanding, I thought, had been reached in a moment of grace? I suppose, in the end, ironies, ambiguities and imponderables inherent in the human condition can, anytime, anywhere, topple pyramids of sand-trust built on chance, circumstance or contingency. Had I been walking at that time on the promontory of my consciousness I could have made some sense of my situation. But no, my imagination of empathy was, I remember, fully roused. Hence this perplexity now.