Shadows of friendships

Looking back over days spent with happiness or sadness, you can draw a map of sorts. You associate certain spaces with joy and some with consternation or embarrassment or anger. You associate the development of a relationship with little milestones. These milestones may be of your memories alone; the other may not even have noticed. In a relationship, it is often the small things that you notice about the other that leave the greatest impression upon you. It is the memory of these small, thoughtful, almost unconscious gestures that revive you when you think that there really is nothing left in that relationship that is worth keeping. When even the gestures stop however, the memories between you and the other fade away to nothing.

Occasionally you learn harsh lessons from people who at first appear to be the epitome of niceness. Sooner or later the façade of niceness shatters and what is revealed is a selfish, needy, egoistic inner self. More often though it is those you love who teach you harsher lessons. Certain words that come tumbling forth reveal a side that you would not have known had existed. Certain actions show that the gems of memories and moments that you have collected as treasures along the way are as valueless as old cobwebs. I find myself more often than not being the one who ends up with strings of sticky cobwebs all around me. Others always move on and yes for a certain type of person moving on is way more fun than being there.

Ask yourself why you make friends. Is it to pass time? Or is it a more meaningful exercise in order to share a journey that might not be along the same path but close enough that you can care? I make friends with great difficulty. Actually, I make friends easily enough but the trouble I have is with keeping them. Some of the friends I most cared about don’t stay within a reasonable distance anymore. Some of the friends of my college days have no longer the title of actual friends because we are so different from who we were when we were young. Life beat out of me whatever little lightness I possessed so that now, today, I find myself too ponderously weighed to attempt to make new friends.

I look back on my life and find I truly have only a handful of people in my life I can call friends. It is a sad testimonial to a life led in three countries. I find myself unable to even think of letting a person into my life. It is a surefire way to get hurt at some level or the other. At best it would be a way to get company when either of us needs it; at worst it will degrade to a status where I feel too much and get nothing in return. People do not have time for friends or any relationship that requires work. Its easy to take someone for granted. The tough part comes when you look around one day out of sheer habit and find nothing there, not even the memories of the words spoken or the shadows of gestures forever forgotten.

Explaining God

The other day an idle thought flashed in my mind – how would I explain religion to Appu? It intrigued S too and we both sat and mulled it over. For a child whose comprehension is limited to the real and experiential, how does the abstract make sense?

Appu knows math. He loves science. He can spell excellently. He knows how to make his own snacks. He knows how to love and laugh. He also knows what angers him and why. He feels anxiety. He knows sadness. He is an emotional child with a heart of gold. But he does not know of God. And I realized that I do not know how to teach him about God.

Well, I thought to myself, let me lay it out logically. I expect him to understand that which he cannot see, touch, smell, feel or hear. It is no use asking him to believe that the beauty of all creation is attributable to an unseen force. He would simply stare in confusion. If I tell him that God will protect him even when his parents are no more, he would ask me where does God live, what kind of car does he drive, can God come to my house and endless such queries. He would also literally wait for God to arrive at his doorstep and keep an eye on him. He will ask me to show him pictures. Imagine having to google God and show him the results as I do with fractions or earthquakes or orangutans. In short, there is no logical way I can explain to a child with autism, the idea of God. And then I have to ask myself - why should you know of the idea of God to be the best person you can be?

Appu is the epitome of simplicity. He has all the characteristics of a good human being – lovability, generosity, inner joy without having any of the characteristics like envy, pride, vanity or egoistical arrogance that mar essential human nature. If I cannot explain God to him, how do I explain God at all? That being the case, why is it that this nebulous concept has created rifts among human beings – rifts of the sort that no one can bridge, rifts of the sort that see madmen opening fire on innocents including children, rifts of the sort that are made in the name of a compassionate and loving God? And how do I explain intolerance to him?

If the world were ruled by those with autism, it would be a far better place. It would be a world of discovery, of playfulness, of generosity. They would not see the logic in fighting over something that no one has ever seen. They would share their food with someone who has none. They would not mess up the world they live in. They would take joy in little things. On the days I wake up to headlines announcing death in a hundred different ways, I wish with all my heart that those instigating violence be given the understanding of children like my son. At least there would be no more killing over what one ate or how one chose to pray or how one decided to dress or whom one chose to make love to. The world could do a lot worse.

More heart...

You can write down whatever it is that is haunting you. You can attempt to express the tumultuous feelings that envelop you when you are least prepared. You can try and talk to someone to ease the pain just that little bit. The truth, however, is that you are alone in your pain, in your frustration, in the sheer intensity of your emotion.

How can another human being fathom the depths of turmoil within you? It is simply not possible. All of us view our world through different lenses. The lenses themselves are determined by age, upbringing, environment, health, stress and any number of other factors. When no two people perceive their world in the same way, it is safe to assume that no two people process stimuli in exactly the same way as well. So no one can understand another’s response especially to conditions that they themselves have not been put through.

The thing about wanting to communicate is that it is a very human trait. Everyone wants someone to talk to, to listen to, to care about, to be cared for by. And sometimes you and your loved one share a problem so deep that he or she can actually do nothing to assuage you. Indeed, how do you ask for consolation from someone who is going through the same pain you are albeit in a different manner?

That is why we have friends to turn to. Most usually I feel free to vent. But there are days that hit you so hard that you want to be understood without having to explain. You are embarrassed at feeling too much, at knowing that talking is futile, at wanting to simply not have to be this way any more. So talking too becomes difficult. And when it becomes difficult, the words convey less than nothing. You feel lonelier than ever.

To those who classify this as whining, I point out that a whiner never takes responsibility or acts. It is not my nature to be irresponsible or laze around. However, many things that fall to our lot are not choices at all. They are challenges that last a lifetime if we are unlucky and a few months if we are lucky. I hate platitudes and I absolutely hate the statement that ‘Five years from now this won’t matter’. Really? Platitudes from people who are impatient in a traffic jam, who think not having the right dress to wear classifies as an emergency, who believe that their child not getting 99% in some exam is the disaster of a century are utterly ridiculous. Five years from now you could ostensibly forget your less than perfect dress or an affair-having spouse but can you forget that your child faces progressively worse complications that threaten the quality of his life? So never say to anyone “it doesn’t matter”, “my aunt’s son has it worse so count yourself lucky” or “you will come out stronger for it”. Just shut the hell up and leave if you cannot stand in silent solidarity. Pain is ugly. Grief is uncomfortable. If you only have friends to have fun, then you don’t know the meaning of either friendship or love.

Like I said, we are each of us alone in our pain. If you have it in you to make a suffering soul feel even for a moment, some alleviation of agony, then you have heart. More heart makes all the difference…