He sat in his wheelchair, his hands gripping the sides, his face expressionless, even while his eyes darted keenly across the room. We were meeting for our golden jubilee celebrations of graduating from one of the premier institutes in the country. It was cause for rejoicing. Yet he sat there quietly observing the scene but not making a sound as his nurse tended to him. Despite his afflictions, he had come to the celebrations and as old friends of yore entered the room, his eyes would probe his memory for some recognition and if it came, his right hand would turn with a thumbs up. But he could not indeed would not speak. No one knew why and he would not let anyone find out. Or find a cure.
All through the evening his friends came by his chair and spoke to him about their memories of him and how fondly they thought of him. They pressed his hands as he looked expressionlessly at them each one hoping for a glimmer of recognition or for a word. Some returned to their chairs in tears others in puzzlement.
He had been a colleauge of ours fifty years ago- an active participant in the school activities, a exciting forward in the colleges hockey team. He had had an active professional life gradually ascending the ladder in his chosen profession, had married and had two kids. It was a normal success story in seventies in India. Then something happened and he sought comfort in his despair in one of those esoteric religions as many of us tend to do. In his case it was christian science a religion founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the seventeenth century.
Christian Science teaches that the "allness" of God denies the reality of sin, sickness, death, and the material world asserts that man and the universe as a whole are spiritual. Christian Scientists believe that through prayer, knowing and understanding, all things are possible for good through God . They believe that Jesus Christ's way of healing is available to all people, now as much as in Biblical times. While there is no compulsion on Christian Scientists either to use Christian Science healing or to eschew medical means, Christian Scientists avoid using the two systems simultaneously in the belief that they tend to counteract or contradict each other, as material medicine and Christian Science treatment proceed from diametrically opposite assumptions. According to Christian Scientists, medicine asserts that something is physically broken and needs to be fixed, while Christian Science asserts that the spiritual reality is harmonious and perfect and that any belief to the contrary needs to be corrected.
He had become deeply immersed in its teachings and indeed became an elder of the church. But then a few years ago tragedy struck and he gradually started loosing control of his faculties. Since he would not go to a doctor let alone a specialist under the decrees of his church, the conditions worsened. He withdrew into himself and someone who had been a cheerful part of our group refused to see or meet us despite our appeals.
This was the first time we had seen him in a long time and as the evening progressed, he was the cynosure of all eyes because none of us could understand or fathom what we were seeing. And then suddenly he started dancing in his chair with both his hands uplifted in tune with the beat of long forgotten songs of our youth that were playing in the background. One of us held his hands to help in his dancing and to perhaps encourage him to get up or to even speak. But that was not to be and he soon sank back into his wheelchair exhausted by this little effort while his nurse wiped the sweat off his brows.
When time came to leave, each of us went by his wheelchair. knelt by his side and said our farewells. When time came for me to hold his hand I was overcome with emotion and tears came to my eyes as we had been good friends all our life and played together many a time on the hockey field. But these were not only tears of ineffable sorrow but of deep anger and frustration. Which religion,I raged inside, compelled a man in his prime to abjure medicine that could cure him in the name of religion? What humanity was there in any faith to reduce a perfectly normal human being, a loving husband and father, a good friend to turn into a vegetative state?
Even as I left him my fervent wish was that this gathering of friends would spark in him a desire to return back to a normal life, that his logical engineering mind would overcome the miasma of blind faith, and that he would one day soon signal to his caregivers " take me to a doctor, I want to live."
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