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.
