A Wounding Kindness

Last week, I visited Tirupati Tirumala for darshan.

It was a beautiful journey overall. As pilgrimages often do, it also brought me into the company of strangers. I met people who would ordinarily pass one another without a word. On Tirumala though, I suddenly find them sharing stories, exchanging smiles, and speaking with the familiarity of old friends. For a brief while, everyone seemed to belong to everyone else.

I have always enjoyed this.

And yet, somewhere along the way, I found myself, being advised for a problem I had not shared.

It happened as I was seated in the section reserved for wheelchair users and senior citizens. As I waited to enter the temple there, conversations began as they usually do. People asked where I had travelled from, whether I had visited before, and then, almost inevitably, about my disability.

I have never quite understood how they make this transition so effortlessly.

One moment, two strangers are speaking about a journey with me. The next, one has assumed the responsibility of correcting my existence.

A gentleman there assured me that my disability could be cured. Another suggested that I drink pineapple juice mixed with cinnamon powder and turmeric. Apparently, this would help me lose weight, after which I might begin to walk.

I listened politely, but helplessly. As phone are not allowed, I could not escape to another world. I was being offered a solution to a problem whose history the person offering it knows nothing about. Stranger still is the confidence with which he offered it.

I wondered whether the gentleman imagined that, after all these years, all the doctors, all the hospitals, all the attempts, all the explanations, the one thing that had escaped us was a glass of pineapple juice.. !

I do not say this to ridicule him.

Perhaps he genuinely believed it.

Perhaps he had heard of someone who had benefited from something similar. Perhaps he thought he was giving me hope. Perhaps the possibility of helping a stranger pleased him.

I would like to believe that he meant well. I tried to believe at least.

But I have noticed throughout my life, how a person’s intention and another person’s experience of that intention can exist very very far apart. Sometimes, a sentence spoken in kindness arrives as an accusation. And sometimes, the person speaking never knows that an accusation has been made.

Anyways, I have often wondered why disability seems to grant strangers a peculiar authority over another person’s life. There is no ceremony, no permission sought, no agreement reached.

And yet, upon seeing a wheelchair, something changes.

Questions that might otherwise seem intrusive become acceptable. Advice that might otherwise seem presumptuous becomes an act of generosity. A person’s body becomes public knowledge, and their future becomes a subject on which almost anyone may offer an opinion.

The wheelchair, it seems, serves as both evidence and invitation.

Evidence that something must be wrong.

And invitation enough for someone else to explain how it might be made right.

I wonder whether this is compassion.

May be people see another human being living differently and sincerely wish to spare them whatever suffering they imagine accompanies that difference.

Or may be it is something more complicated.

May be we find it difficult to encounter a condition we cannot immediately explain or change. We feel compelled to offer a remedy, not necessarily because the other person has asked for one, but because leaving the matter unresolved makes us uncomfortable.

The advice, then, may be as much for the comfort of the person giving it as for the person receiving it.

I do not know.

And I do not wish to be unfair.

Over the years, I have received hundreds of suggestions. I have listened to most of them with a hurt patience. Some suggestions have been useful. Some have been amusing. Others have been offered with such certainty that I have briefly wondered whether I was the only person unaware of how simple my circumstances apparently were.

Usually, I smile.

I thank the person.

The conversation ends.

But occasionally, something remains.

A remark that took someone fifteen seconds to make can occupy my thoughts for hours or even days.

I begin to question why I was hurt. Why I could not simply accept the advice as an expression of goodwill. Why something apparently harmless should disturb a peace I had spent years cultivating.

And then comes the more uncomfortable question.

Am I being unkind to someone who was only trying to be kind?

It is an exhausting little trial, conducted entirely within oneself.

The stranger has already left. The advice has been delivered. The case, as far as he is concerned, is closed.

Only the person who received it remains in the courtroom.

And yet, I also think about how my mother would have heard this and how the many mothers of children with disabilities out there hear this.

I think of another mother who has spent years accompanying her child through hospitals and consultations. Who has learned medical terms she never wished to know. Who has endured uncertainty, disappointment, hope, and the slow accumulation of responsibilities that cannot easily be explained to someone who has never carried them.

I imagine her sitting beside her child when a stranger arrives with an answer.

A particular food. A prayer. A treatment. A doctor. A remedy that apparently worked for someone, somewhere.

And I wonder what she must feel.

Does she smile and thank the stranger?

Does she explain what she has already tried?

Does she feel obliged to defend the years she has spent caring for her child?

Or does she simply remain silent, knowing that the stranger will soon leave, while she must continue living with the weight of everything that has just been so casually discussed?

What troubles me is the accusation hidden inside the suggestion, even when no accusation was intended.

Have you tried this?

Such a small question.

And yet, beneath it, a mother might hear another.

Have you really done everything you could?

I wonder how often we unknowingly ask people to account for their suffering before we have even learned their names. We rarely imagine that we are doing this. Instead, we imagine ourselves being helpful.

And perhaps that is what makes the whole thing so difficult. Cruelty is relatively easy to recognise. One can object to it, reject it, or walk away from it. But what does one do with kindness that wounds? How does one refuse a suggestion without appearing ungrateful? How does one explain that a person’s concern has crossed a boundary when the person crossing it is so certain that the boundary was crossed out of love? There is something almost ridiculous about having to protect oneself from another person’s goodness.

I remember then a saying often attributed to Rumi, who asks us to consider three questions before speaking sometimes.

Is it true?

Is it necessary?

Is it kind?

The first is difficult enough. Much of the advice offered to people with disabilities is presented as truth without anyone having taken the trouble to establish whether it is true.

The second is perhaps more important.

Even if something were true, why must it be said? Why must every observation become a recommendation? Why do we find silence so unbearable that we would rather fill it with advice nobody requested?

And then there is the third question.

Is it kind?

I think this is the hardest of all. Because kindness cannot be established by consulting the intention of the person who speaks.

A person may intend to offer hope and instead remind someone of a lifetime of disappointments. A person may intend to offer encouragement and instead suggest that the life being lived is somehow insufficient. A person may intend to offer a cure and, without realising it, turn another human being into a problem.

Perhaps kindness requires something more difficult than good intentions. Perhaps it requires the humility to recognise that we do not know another person’s life merely because we can see their circumstances.

At Tirumala, we were all waiting for darshan. Some of us were standing. Some were seated. Some were elderly. Some had disabilities. Each of us had arrived with our own private history, our own hopes, our own reasons for being there. And I found it strangely ironic that, in a place where we had come to surrender our certainties before God, we could still be so certain about what was wrong with another person.

I do not want people to stop speaking to strangers.

Quite the opposite.

Some of my loveliest memories have come from conversations with people whose names I never learned. I do not want curiosity to disappear, or concern to become something people are afraid to express.

I only wish that concern did not so often arrive disguised as a diagnosis.

That curiosity did not presume a right to explanation.

That kindness did not always feel compelled to offer a cure.

Perhaps we could speak to a person in a wheelchair about the weather, the journey, the temple, the length of the queue, or the extraordinary coincidence of finding ourselves in the same place at the same time.

Perhaps we could allow a conversation to remain a conversation.

I returned from Tirumala with gratitude.

For the journey. For the darshan. For the strangers who spoke to me. Even, in some measure, for the gentleman with the pineapple juice, who probably went home believing he had helped someone.

I bear him no resentment.

But I continue to wonder about the strange burden of unasked kindness.

Not every person who appears to be suffering is asking us for a solution. And not every person who lives differently from us is waiting to be rescued.

There are people who have spent their entire lives learning to live with what strangers believe they must overcome. There are mothers who have done everything within their power, and who deserve to be met with respect rather than another suggestion. There are lives that are complete, even when they do not resemble the lives we imagine for them.

And there are wounds that are not caused by disability at all, but by the repeated insistence that a person ought to be something other than what they are.

Perhaps the next time we meet a stranger, we could resist the temptation to become their physician, their counsellor, or their saviour. Perhaps we could simply be another stranger. Perhaps the gentlest kindness is the one that leaves another person’s dignity exactly where it found it. Because how is it ever a kindness when it requires another person to feel incomplete before we can feel helpful.

A Sitar in the Dark

Last night, I woke up around 2:00 am. A not-so-pleasant dream again. I was thirsty. I reached for the bottle beside my bed and drank.

It was while lowering the bottle then, I noticed that sitar. It had been close to four years since a friend gifted the same affectionately. It had been moved occasionally, cleaned diligently, examined curiously, and once-in-a-while it was also handled with the enthusiasm of an irritating boy who knew absolutely nothing about playing any musical instrument.

As my eyes fell on that Sitar, a strange thought hit me. The sitar’s wood had aged by now. One or even two of its strings had been replaced in the past. Scratches had gathered on its surface. 

Yet, I was sure, in the right hands, the sitar would still play out a beautiful music. That aged wood would not break. The replaced strings would not go out of tune. The scratches would contribute nothing to the creation of music.

The instrument would simply do what all beautiful musical instruments do. It would help sing.

Maybe, some of us humans are also like that. We age. New people enter our lives. Some leave. Some parts of us are replaced. Some are repaired. Certain experiences polish us. Many others leave scratches.

And if we are fortunate enough to encounter the right hands, maybe of a dear friend, a parent, a teacher, a companion, perhaps even a stranger, we will discover that none of the hurts has taken away our capacity to bring our inner music out.

But not all of us are so fortunate though. And certainly, I am not among those fortunate souls.

The rest of us, like me, still carry festering wounds instead of scars. We make new friends but secretly miss the old ones. Our bodies grow older, but certain thoughts do not age at all. And then we can take our extraordinary imaginations, our memories, our ability to construct impossible possibilities, our hopes, and employ all of them to make ourselves feel entirely miserable, the whole night. We will build an entire future around something that can never happen at all. And there we doom ourselves, feeling miserable each minute.

When that thought hit me, something became very clear. Given our imagination, memory, aspirations, and hope, we possess nearly all the ingredients required to assemble joy. And yet, from time to time, we arrange the very same ingredients differently and manufacture sadness within us. And we do that in such an expert way too.

As I lay thinking of this silently, my eyes fell on the sitar again. A faint ray of light was entering through the window and falling on the beautiful gift. And somewhere between two gulps of water and an unfinished night, I began to overthink myself into anxiousness. My mind had already decided that sleep was no longer part of the night's schedule. So, I surrendered.

‘Think of little Sahana on a swing’, I told myself to escape my misery.

The image appeared immediately.

For a moment, she was laughing.

The swing moved forward and back.

She laughed out loud.

For that moment, I smiled.

I pulled the pillow closer and shut my eyes with slightly more determination to sleep and to sleep with positivity.

But thoughts of those ingredients came back again.

The imagination I possess.

The memories I have accumulated.

The situations I have lived through.

The people I have loved.

The people I have lost.

The friendships I still carry.

The futures I continue to imagine.

The aspirations toward which I move.

They were all there.

And I knew they could all be combined into feeling gratitude and joy. And they also could be combined into feeling miserable.

And each time, like most, I assembled the misery. I simply resisted the combination that led to joy. Choosing joy felt like effort, when misery flowed more naturally.

Is there anything wrong with me?, I wondered.

By then, I had drifted. Think of little Sahana again, I tried telling myself again. Yet I had drifted far away by now.

May be, it is such miserable drifts that will allow me to find a natural joy someday?, I ask myself. No answer arrived. And I continued to feel a numbing sadness. Maybe allowing myself to drift was the shortest road back toward becoming joyful the next day?, I checked with myself again. No answer came this time too. And I lay there, wide awake, at three in the morning to survive just another sleepless night.

I lay there to experience again, the hurts of the past, the melancholy of the future, and all of it condensed into the present. Is there any way out of it all?, I wondered.

Who knows?

Who truly knows?

We Love The Scar, But Ignore The Blade.

 

Tonight, I kept thinking of a child and a stove.

It is a small, almost ordinary image: a child returns to its flame, touches it, screams in pain, and learns resilience to touch it again. With greater speed each time.

Two adults are watching this. After a while, the adults begin to admire her. They say she is strong from within. They say she is brave to go back and touch it. They say there is something gritty in the way she has learned not to cry for long. Yet, all that while, the stove remains where it is, firing on with its authority, as if it had been placed there by no one. The two adults ignore the stove.

I have begun to suspect that this is how we speak about ‘Inspiration’.

For so long, we have loved stories in which a person is first wounded by the world and then becomes admirable. We are moved by the one who survives suffering and returns smiling, by the one who escapes hunger and reaches richness, by the one who crosses ruin and arrives to greatness. These stories do move me. I do not dislike their beauty.

But I have also started to feel uneasy about what sits beneath that beauty. At some point, we stopped merely honouring resilience and began arranging the room around it. We began speaking as though suffering is not an error, but a necessary corridor through which inspiration must pass.

And I cannot believe that approach anymore. It seems to me that real inspiration is elsewhere. 

I realize true inspiration is not just in teaching oneself to endure the unbearable, but in pausing before it and asking: why was this made unbearable at all? Who left it this way? Who benefits from calling endurance noble when repair would actually be possible? Why are those two observing adults not turning off the stove?

I also think of those who did not simply admire suffering but interrogated its core cause. There is something far more radical in a person who looks at illness, poverty, violence, deprivation, not as fate, not as character-building effort, but as a flaw in the everyday human choices. 

'To reduce suffering before it ripens into life-long tragedy': that feels to me like a truer form of inspiration, may be even love. It is less theatrical for the world, perhaps. Less easy to praise in speeches. But such inspiration is more moral.

The strange thing is that we often wait until damage has already entered the body, the mind, the family, the neighborhood. Then we rush in with remedies and call ourselves compassionate, may be inclusive too. We offer treatment after trauma, recognition after neglect, opportunity after long humiliation. These acts matter. They are not empty. But they also carry a faint sadness, as if we have grown accustomed to meeting people only after the flood has reached their throat.

Why do we remain downstream for so long? Why does prevention seem less stirring to us than survival?

Perhaps because prevention does not flatter us in the same way. There is no dramatic before-and-after, no heroic scar to point to, no visible proof that pain has refined the soul. Prevention is almost impolite. It removes the spectacle. It suggests that many of the burdens we praise people for carrying, should never have been loaded onto them at all. And maybe that is what disturbs us most: the possibility that human beings are not failing to be stronger, but are being asked to bear too much.

Now, I do not want to stop admiring resilience. That would be cruel. There is grace in the people who continue despite everything. But I no longer want to build a moral world that depends on their continued endurance for its most inspiring stories. I no longer want to look at a wound and praise the healing so intensely that I forget to ask what caused the wound.

The world needs to remember this. When a weight is lifted from someone, their strength does not disappear. On the contrary, it becomes visible in a new way, less as strain, more as possibility.

A child relieved of fear may become curious. A mother relieved of impossible choices may become generous in new ways. A community relieved of constant injury may finally reveal its intelligence, its humour, its hidden music.

So perhaps inspiration is not the art of loving the scar. Perhaps it is the quieter act of reaching toward the blade and ensuring it no longer cuts anyone. And so, the most honest question I live with tonight is not how resiliently the child touched the flame, but why the two adults never turned the stove off.

3 AM Fever Dream: When Joys Turns Dust

 

3 am that night. I was in a feverish, delirious world. Light was hitting my eyes in pulses. Not one light, but many. Each strobe of light felt hard, changing in colour, intensity, and speed. The dizzying lights also kept striking me repeatedly without choosing a place to land.

A whole strain kept moving through me initially and then went like a mild jolt all over the body. I felt light-headed for a few seconds, and then a great strain again. I tried to turn over then. From one side to the other. But that too felt like a task with too many steps.

I was in a dream, but I also knew I was awake. The two states stood so close together that they shared the same breath, though I could not. 3 am that night. It seemed nothing was blocking me: no hand at my throat, no weight on my chest, and then there was no air to take in too. I was suffocating, shivering.

In those horror-filled minutes, a snapshot arrived too. My entire life, was passing as a reel, in my mind. The good that no longer exists, the bad that has chosen to imprint itself. I felt a door to the inventory of my memories had opened. And I could see a hundred snakes chasing me deep into that room.

The delirium reduced in intensity. And I lay there with my mouth dry.  A glass of water was not far in distance, but felt impossibly far for my body to reach. Although awake, I could not reach. I would not lift. I should not bargain. It was as if someone passed a verdict I could not appeal.

‘Ofloxcin?’

‘Citralka?’

These words passed my mind.

‘No, I am overthinking this. It is just another bad nightmare’, I tell myself.

The respite began slowly. I could almost measure it. A fraction less pressure behind the eyes, a breath that did not feel heavy. I knew. In twenty more minutes probably, my fever would break. Sweat would come. And it would cover me like a new skin. Then like the first floodwater of a river running through land that has been dry for a year, a mild energy would rush in. I knew it would. I have lived this feverish delirium many times before. I only had to hold on a second longer. One more second.

“You cannot. Not anymore,” a voice said from within me.

Another thought rose, not louder, but more stubborn. ‘At least for what you love doing in life. Please hang in there for a few more minutes’ It sounded less like encouragement and more like a small legal argument.

I was now in the room of memories completely. The snakes were no longer behind me. But my phobia of them throbbed in my heart. The door had been open all along in the hallucination, I realized. I had simply never noticed it. Within that room now, I saw the things I am proud of. They felt like a dream. And then, I remembered the things I am ashamed of, too. They responded like real. Pride and, Shame. Both stood there. 

‘Can I look into the things I am proud of and find the strength to survive this night. Just another night?’, I thought. ‘Is there enough joy in the things I loved from my past to give me the strength to carry forward?’

No answer arrived.

The delirium was wearing off faster now. I am now fully awake. The ‘room of memories’, had clear outlines. I could see the memories manifesting before me. And I began to review them. One by one. In that review, I saw moments I had truly, madly loved. People I had believed in with reckless confidence. Joys I had felt so fully that I once thought they could not possibly fade. And yet, here they were all now: present, but somehow bland that night. Not false. Not erased. But simply unable to lift me through that fever. They sat there like photographs that prove something happened but can never ever reproduce its warmth.

In that moment, a realization arrived, sudden and private. It was like a judgement on my entire life. It left me shocked not because the force of that feeling was new, but because I was finally hearing it without distraction.

‘So, this is how it is always going to be Sai', a voice said. 'Every success. Every joy. Every happiness. All of it will mean nothing in time. And they will lose the power to inspire you', it went on. 'You may overcome any pain and suffering and all. You may even find a provocation in arrogantly defeating them. But Sai, can you now see this room and bear the thought that all joys you have ever felt will come to mean nothing in time? In fact, all the joys that are felt truly are nothing over time. Not only for you. But for everyone’

The thought was complete. It merely placed itself inside me. It felt like a rule I had failed to notice all my life and now could not unsee.

The fever had broken. I moved to reach the bottle of water. As I gulped faster than I should, I could still be in the room of memories. ‘So, is this why we do not cling to happiness?’, I began to wonder. ‘Is this why a purpose an illusion too? Because no matter how big, its achievement will fade in time’, I asked of myself, now fully awake.

I looked at my watch. 43-148 bpm. Two high heart rate notifications. I adjusted the pillow, pulled my blanket harder, and shut my eyes tighter. The room of memories was still there. I let the voice in it take over me.

'A sense of purpose is also not enough Sai. You may see meaning today in your passion. But that is to give you a sense of self-importance and save you for today, this hour. You may survive a few months or years for purpose and passion. But with enough time, you see the meaninglessness of purpose too', the voice said. 

‘Is this why detachment is sought then from everything?’, my thoughts raced now. ‘Is that why we have to see ourselves as  just an instrument of good rather than goodness itself? Is that the reason why we focus on just the practice, not the trophy? Is that why we have to be a helper, not a hero? And is that why detachment from both the good and the bad allows us peace? So that we can even enter the room of memories with humility and nothing more than that?' 

Three friends were beside me that night. And there was this urge to wake them and debate this. I wanted someone to say, yes, that is how it is, or no, happiness from the good of the past do not ever fade.  But I wanted them to sleep too, innocent and unreachable. In their own room of memories.

So, I lay under the blanket there with the argument still hot in my head. And then my eyes fell on that one large, open book in the other room

 “

You have a right only to perform your actions,

but never to the fruits of those actions.

Let not the fruits of action be your motive,

nor let your attachment be to inaction.

”

It had said.

To my extreme distress and against every nerve in my body, I understood that the shloka was right. Not because we must never hope for results. But because even the sweetest fruits of our best actions ‘rot’ with time. In the ‘room of memories’, praise fades. Outcomes unravel. Inspiration dies. What once felt like proof of honest work can turn into a footnote, and then into nothing at all.

And if such a decay of good work over a long time is allowed to sadden us into stopping, if it teaches us that goodness is pointless unless it stays shiny, then we will end up doing less good than we otherwise would have.

So detach, even from good, I realized. Detach, not in the sense of becoming indifferent, but in the sense of becoming ‘unbribable’ by happiness for you to do what is necessary. Do the thing that you are capable of and let it pass through you. Let it belong to the world, and not to your identity. That is the only way you can keep yourself from being discouraged, when the world, inevitably, forgets. As it will. And as it should.