He almost bounded out of bed that morning. The tryouts were happening and it was his dream to make it to the Army. Born in a remote village nestled deep in the heart of Tamilnadu, he had been a brilliant student all his life and an exceptional athlete. He loved to run, the wind in his face and the exhilaration after he breasted the tape, even the winded breath rasping at the back of his throat – these were just the moments that defined how he felt after a run. He loved the win – the motto was “Play for Sport, not to Win” – but he never managed to dampen the competitive spirit in him. He could never stop the bile from rising when he lost just as he could not contain the exuberance of a win.
But, this morning was going to change all that. The Army had always been an aspiration of his, he loved the starched uniform, the near regal bearing, the power that came with the position, the respect that flowed out like a halo from it. His early dreams had been that of a Colonel in the Army leading his men into battle – a throwback to the Cheran dynasty of yore. He had not the faintest idea how long or how one became a Colonel but it became his lifetime ambition. And today, he had his chance at the first step to it !
He could barely complete his morning tasks and wolf down some breakfast. He went to the local primary school where the tryouts were to be held. There was already a queue of young men there – eager and nervous, strapping lads in their vests and a pair of shorts. There was a man sitting at a table with a big register. He went across and checked if his name was there and sure enough it was. First step crossed! He then went to one of the boy’s restrooms which was doubling up as the changing room. The stench hit him causing the Brahmin in him to almost back up as fast as he entered. Then he caught himself and advanced. Removing his shirt and his slippers, he kept them on one side, neatly folded, on the floor and walked out into the sun.
Taking his place in the line, he sneaked a look at what was happening up ahead. Measurements were being taken – height, chest circumference and weight. The line moved along and soon it was his turn. The sun was high up by now and he was beginning to sweat. As his measurements were being taken, he could feel his sweat pooling in his armpit and the small of his back. He realized that his palms were also sweaty and wiped them on the seat of his shorts. The line moved on and he was soon in front of a doctor who kept a stethoscope to his chest and back, then tapped on his knee and elbow, examined his eyes and mouth. The doctor pronounced him fit and off he was to the second stage of the tryouts – the physicals.
He first had to run 5 KM – a normal enough event for him. He knew he would do better than most of the other boys there and sure enough he did. The next event was pushups which went a little average. Sit-ups were still average. He began to feel a little scared that he was going to score average and would not make the cut after all. The next even was the parallel bars. He took a running start and approached the bars. Suddenly a thought struck him that he had not wiped his sweaty palms. It was too late now. The bars were in front. He reached out, grabbed them and swung himself up on a full somersault. Suddenly, his left arm slipped and he could not complete the swing. Jerked about in mid flight, his body crashed spine first into the ground. Everything grew dark and silent.
When he came to, water was being splashed on his face. Anxious faces peered at him like he was in a zoo, asking if he was OK. Surprisingly, he could feel no pain. He waved them silent, asked for some water and drank it eagerly as it was poured into his throat. The Army doctor told him that the stretcher was on the way. Then he tried to sit up and realized that something was horribly wrong. His hands were moving and supporting his movements upward. But, his legs lay just as they were on the ground, slack, unmoving, like two beached dolphins sunning themselves. He tried to wiggle his toes and found that his legs were no longer listening to him. Suddenly he realized that his bladder felt full and he wanted help to get to the rest room. Before he could open his mouth, he realized that he had urinated right there lying down on the ground. He seemed to have no control of any of his body parts. He started crying like a baby, whimpering at the inexplicable turn of events. The doctor finally got his stretcher and he was carried out to the nearby Government hospital.
At the hospital, he was examined first by the Army doctor who then called in some others to examine him. Finally, after prolonged discussions, they retired and let his mother come and see him. His mother could not still comprehend what had happened and assumed he was ok. Seeing his tear stricken face and lack of comprehension, she sensed that something was amiss. She walked out to ask the doctor and stood at the fringe of the group of doctors who were still discussing her son. Her unread mind could not comprehend the words being used. She waited patiently, having been used to it all her life, knowing she will be told when it was time. Finally one of the doctors turned to her and when he opened his mouth, her world fell apart.
He woke up in bed, his first waking sight was his mother, staring numbly stricken at him like he was some kind of an accident victim lying there in a pool of blood. Then he remembered that he had not been able to move his legs. He looked down at them. They still lay like two slabs of meat, slack and somehow lifeless even though his blood was flowing through them. He touched his thigh. It was still warm – which must mean something? He suddenly realized that while his hand could feel the warmth of his leg, his leg felt nothing. He tried a few more spots on his leg with the same result. Then he tried pinching his flesh. He pinched so hard that he left a bruise but no sensation at all. His mind went into a vortex of panic trying to reason out what was happening. He felt like a leech trying to climb an exceptionally slippery wall and ending up where it started, only leaving silvery trails where it had tried to move up but not actually reaching anywhere. While he was still trying to climb these walls, he heard the whimpers of his mother breaking down.
He felt like someone had just taken a rock and dropped it down his windpipe to his heart which now seemed to weigh a ton and was apparently in danger of being torn by the weight of it. His world spun around in a vortex that seemed to be framed by feet of various shapes and sizes, a psychedelic nightmare of object fixation and an aversion complex. His head spun out of control and he passed out. When he came to, a doctor was leaning over him murmuring in a satisfied fashion – apparently pleased at his having regained consciousness. The doctor then proceeded to explain to him what had happened. He had injured his spine rather badly and the doctor felt that the nerves passing through to his waist and legs had either got pinched off or damaged. Only time would tell. As of now, he did not have the use of his legs and had to move about in a wheelchair. He would need to keep a urine pouch and a stool bag with him all the time since he did not have control of his sphincter. He needed a nurse to help him all the time. He needed massages and exercise to prevent “atrophy” of his muscles – he had to look up the meaning of that.
Each of these sentences hit home like hail stones bouncing on a tin roof – resoundingly loud and impactful. His dream of being in the Army had shattered into such tiny fragments that they had lost all semblance of having been a dream. His current nightmare of being wheelchair bound for the rest of his life was like a shroud in his mind, black and overpowering. He wept like a child that has had his favorite toy taken away from him. Only, this toy had been broken into a million pieces and would never be returned. After what seemed like hours, he found that he had run dry of tears. He continued to weep, dry, racking sobs but the tears had stopped completely. He was not able to shed a single tear then.
Over the next year, he went from bad to worse. He put on weight since he did not have any opportunity to exercise – not that he felt like it. His legs thinned down to the bare bone. His arms became flabby and he had a quadruple chin. The physique that he felt proud of once was wasted, rotten like the worm that one almost bit into when biting into an apple that seemed sweet and ripe. Worst of all was that most of these changes were inside – he was rotting away inside while outwardly, his appearance was still normal albeit out of shape.
Worst of all was the impact on his mind. He spent hours reading his books, eating and sleeping. His friends who came to visit him were turned away with sarcastic barbs, scornful glances, pointed ignoring and sometimes, his falling asleep. Soon, they stopped coming and he became a social outcast. His mind became a cesspool in which he continued to pour self pity, hatred and frustration in liberal doses, pity at what had happened to him and how he would have been if it had not happened, hatred at all those pitiful glances that acknowledged the helplessness of his condition and frustration at not being able to do anything on his own. It was like a witches’ brew that he slow cooked over the fire of his anger which was in plenty.
His mind felt like a crazed psycho, searching and seeking for an outlet that could come his way, one that he would be able to vent all his pent up concoction on. All that frustration, hatred and pity would warp itself into a projectile of harsh, uncaring, incisively corrosive words that would spew out like a gush of vomit, demeaning, debasing and corrupting the mind of the listener, making them cringe and quickly withdraw the hand extended in help. He succeeded in pushing away every single person that wanted to help or come close.
He pushed away all of them except for his caretaker. She was a little girl of 15 from the same village. She had a sweet smile and for some reason, the more vicious the words that he would spout, the more sweet the smile would be. She had a soft voice that would interject into his thoughts very easily and a tread that was softer still – able to slip in and out of his room without his being aware at most times. No matter how hard he tried to push her away, she would return to ask him if he needed anything more. She wanted to become a nurse, she said.
After about six months, his first intense bout of depression dawned. It was a period so black and bleak that his soul felt starched and stretched into an unending spiral of emptiness. That was his first attempt at escape – by killing himself. The irony of it all was that he was incapable of doing that as well, given his condition. She found him trying to raise himself off his wheel chair in an attempt to hang himself, weeping with frustration at not being able to lift himself even an inch off the chair. She pretended that nothing had happened, gave him water and helped him into bed. He could not look her in the eye for two days after that but she was ever the sweet, forthright, attentive and caring. No different from earlier.
The next bout was even more intense. He sat in a dark room for three days and went through vicious cycles of mind numbing emptiness and bone chilling hatred. Day four was when he tried to slit his wrists. She came and calmly took the knife away like she had been watching him throughout. Day five, he came upon the rat poison. Mixing it with water, he tried to force it down, past the tightly constricted throat and the retching that threatened to bring it all back out. When he came to, he found himself being fed glassfuls of salt water and being held in a sitting position. Soon, his stomach rejected the brine and with it all the poison he had ingested. He was left, weak and gasping on the stone slab of the bathroom.
The next day, the doctor was called in and prescribed restraints for him. He spent the next few days with his arms tied to those of the chair and a head restraint to prevent him from “banging his head open”. He almost laughed for not having thought of that method. Then, one week later, when everybody had thought he was reconciled to being tied up, she freed his right hand first and then his head. Slowly, she completely removed his restraints every day after having painstakingly put them on under the supervision of his teary eyed mother.
Then one day, he felt like seeing the sun, feeling it’s warmth on his face, turning his face up to it and basking in it. He asked to be taken out, meeting with incredulous disbelief in his mother’s face. Finally, she relented and asked the girl to take him around the back of the house to the garden next to the village temple. The back of the house was so that he would not attract the glances of the neighbors and their unwanted attention. So he set out, almost a year after his accident, to experience the outdoors. He felt liberated, a sense of release prevailed. He actually felt he could smile that day.
On the way there, he caught sight of a mother and a child. The child was lying in a sheet on the stone platform built around a tree while the mother was working in the fields. He felt something amiss about the child and observed it closer. He then realized that the boy was about 6 years old but was still made to lie on a blanket next to a field when other kids his age would be climbing trees or playing in the school yard. He asked to be taken closer and was shocked when he approached the child. He saw the wasted arms and legs, painfully thin to the point that you felt that they would break if you touched them. The child’s face itself seemed molded to his skull, like a mask of skin on a face of bone, stretched thin and barely covering the hollows. Then he caught sight of the eyes and came undone. There was life in those eyes, laughter and a spirit that did not recognize the limitations of the limbs. There was a bowl of water nearby and he watched the child struggle, a marathon attempt to push himself up on those sticks of hands and then use one of them to lift the cup, trembling and spilling water, to his lips and sip on the water. The effort nearly killed him. But what made it all magical in the end was the smile immediately after. He looked up and saw the mother waving at the boy and the boy’s pitiful attempt at a wave but with an unwavering smile.
That night, he lay awake in bed, riveted by the smile and the spirit within. He felt as though he had wasted the past year of his life completely. If a six year old could deal with such a debilitating handicap, why could he not deal with his? The morning dawned and he felt strangely rejuvenated even without having slept a wink. He had hit upon an idea past the witching hour and had spent the rest of the night trying to figure out how to make it work. That morning was spent in writing out a letter of intent. The next task was to deal with facing people. He asked to be helped into his best shirt and trouser and combed his hair neatly. He then went down into the street only to met with stares of disbelief and pity. He smiled back and realized that the people’s faces either turned away or smiled back. It seemed like a good way to deal with unwanted pity.
Their house was on the street of Brahmins at one end of which was the village temple and the other end of which met the main road next to the village bus stand. He wheeled down to the first house and knocked on the door. The village had a tradition now for over 20 years. The youngsters would all leave town after their school and would go to Engineering College and then would go abroad for their doctorates and work. As a result, the town population, especially in that street consisted of only grandparents who received monthly cheques as substitutes for visits from grand children. The cheques were cashed and ignored. His first attempt at explaining his plan met with a patient hearing – probably they had not been visited by anyone before and were glad to have a visitor. But the visit bore fruit and he had a promise of some money. But the single visit left him exhausted. This way, he covered the 16 houses in the street in a week’s time. Each visit left him more inspired and eager to make the next one. By the end, he had Rs 41000 and a list of 37 addresses that he could write to for more help. The whole exercise was immensely satisfying.
The next week, he scouted around for a place. He found one at the edge of town, a ruined house with a large garden space. The next month was spent in refurbishing the house and setting it up. His first invitee was the boy from the field. Soon, he had a group of 4 children in varying ages from 6 to 14 and 2 adults who were suffering from Alzheimers and Parkinsons. The tough part was finding people to care for them. His caretaker girl came in to help and she brought in a set of aspiring nurses from the village and nearby places. He soon had a staff of about 10 nurses, one male caretaker and himself.
He soon realized that the money was going out faster than he had got it in. He needed a steady source of funds. Some one suggested that write to the governor. He thought of it and decided to, having nothing to lose anyway. He was surprised when he got a response asking him if he could come across to Chennai for a meeting. He went and was dumbfounded to learn of various grants the government was offering. He met with a panel of high sounding government officials who heard what he had to say. The next few weeks went in a flurry of visits of bureaucrats from Chennai who had a lot of advise for him on what he should do and how he should do it.
He finally decided he had enough and wrote to the Governor that he had not wanted help in running his place. He had only asked for monetary support. The next day he read in the papers that the governor had been replaced by the Centre on suspicion of fraud. He felt broken and dejected, as if his life source had been snuffed out. He could not meet the eyes of his staff and the children that day. He spent the next few days in complete misery not knowing how he would pay the staff their salary that month. Then one morning, a car stopped outside the office. A young man got out and walked up to him and explained that he had been sent from a private firm in Chennai who had heard of his work and was interested in providing funding.
He sat at his window and looked out at the yard now. It was seventeen years to the day that had happened. He now had a 10 acre campus and a mailing / sponsor list that was a mile long. Sponsors actually came to visit him. He had a monthly newsletter that went out to all of them. The campus had a polio section, a paraplegic section, a polio section, an epileptic section and a general section apart from the geriatrics with a strength of 300 invitees. He now had a vocational section where the residents were trained on various life skills and then went on to actual work in terms of making various handicrafts, garment stitching, mattress stitching, simple made ups, wood craft etc. He had tied up with a hospital for a twice a week check up and treatment on site for all residents.
He looked down at the newspaper article in his hand. There was a photo of him at the Mumbai Standard Chartered Marathon breasting the tape in his wheel chair and the article went on to talk about his institution and efforts. Then he opened the envelope next to it which contained a letter of commendation from the President of India for his effort. It was his 37th birthday. He smiled at the question that the article in the newspaper ended with – “Could any man do it?” And he thought – “Yes I Can”.
