Silent Life by Chaman Nahal

Author:Chaman Nahal [Nahal, Chaman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789351940661
Publisher: Roli Books

I returned from Australia determined to get my life into a greater rhythm; time was running out, and I had achieved so little. I generated an enormous sense of guilt in myself, whipping up a tremendous hysteria. My lapses were many but right now I could pin my pettiness to my drinking. I was finding convenient alibis for it in this or that misadventure. But there were greater pockets of sorrow around me everywhere, in the lives of those I knew and thousands I was not even aware of. An aunt of mine had successively lost three grown-up sons, one after the other. Children were routinely sacrificed to gods or goddesses in our villages for silly favours; small children were also sold for petty sums in those villages to satiate hunger. A comatose woman (as reported in the papers) was raped in a hospital ward, had become pregnant, and when her family decided to retain the child, had eventually given birth while in coma, not knowing a thing about what had happened to her, her body responding to its own secret cadences. What right had I to be self-righteous in the face of such mammoth suffering? This drinking of mine had to stop.

And then in early 1984, my father passed away. He was ninety-one, but so upright and morally correct had been his life, I thought he would live forever. And then in the same year, Ajanta, our older daughter, gave birth to a boy. Her husband, a scientist, was then in France, where she had been living after marriage. She was expecting the baby when she came on a visit to us. Her son Arjun was born in New Delhi.

When Arjun was born I knew I had to quit. A new generation had come into existence, demanding attention, demanding consideration, and I couldn’t keep on with my own self-centred escapades. If I was so miserable, there were other ways of ending that misery. There were rivers or wells in which one could throw oneself. There were the railway tracks and the trains went over you fairly quickly. The fast moving local buses were not too bad, either. The fan overhead was a perpetual reminder of what else could hang from that hook. The razor blade cut through your veins almost painlessly. There were poisons. There were sleeping pills. There were daggers. There were guns. Only I thought it was too easy a way out, almost cheating on oneself. A path was laid out for you, rough or fair. Why not live it out? Why be a coward?

Just then came a visit to North Korea and I deferred the monumental struggle – which was as well. For in Korea I drank alcohol laced with herbs and animals – Insam (Ginseng), the rejuvenating root native to Korea, and lizards, snakes, toads and other animals, which you could see lying in the bottle – dead and assimilated into the liquor. In the Arabian Nights we read of human beings shoved into wine caskets, their bodies disintegrating inside, and those wines acquiring a more scintillating flavour.

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