"Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13)
Here is the heart-warming story
of a committed old patriarch who braved gravest risk to his own life by
guarding over the life of his small-pox-afflicted daughter-in-law, as her own young
husband and parents took a practical view and fled from home abandoning the
young woman to her fate.
In those days, smallpox used
to erupt overnight and spread rapidly as an unchecked scourge that would wipe
out whole villages in no time. In ancient Kerala, where the disease was
intertwined with frightening superstitions, it was almost a certain killer. The
sick used to be abandoned overnight, their family and the entire neighbourhood
fleeing to faraway relatives’ places to save themselves from this evil disease.
And the patient’s remaining few days on earth would be a horror. Rejection by family and chilling loneliness; hunger and thirst; desolate nights with no
electricity to provide light; hungry and
frightened country dogs intermittently howling together at night; eerie moonlight
creating weird patterns on the landscape; superstitious beliefs in evil spirits
sowing pepper-like seeds of smallpox far and wide throughout the night and benevolent spirits continually chasing them on horseback with lashes in their
hands; and, above all, the fear of impending death – these were enough in themselves to frighten
and kill even the most stout-hearted of men. In the circumstances, an abandoned
smallpox victim was destined to die unless some miracle intervened.
A miracle did intervene to
save this young woman. The bold father-in-law, who was years senior to her
grandfather, stubbornly refused to leave her, much against the entreaties of
his family. The patient was shifted to the Annexe house for sick members of the
family. A few ruffians who were lucky to survive an earlier epidemic, thereby
developing immunity to the infection, were deployed for nursing her. The old
man stayed indoors regularly monitoring the patient’s progress. The men shored
up their courage by drinking country-liquor all the time. One late evening, the
drunken men reported the patient’s death. The old man permitted them to go and
get drunk further at the faraway toddy shop, as they would need to muster extra
courage for wrapping up the body in mats and burying it in a remote corner of
the compound.
The old man stood in front of his house, alone, with his dazed eyes focusing nowhere. He had lived his fruitful years without regrets, and now he had no appetite to live any further. He was now willing
even to die. One eye-filling glance of her dead body – that was all he wanted
now. He threw caution to the wind, and his legs took him to the Annexe. He peeped through the half-open door. In
the flickering light of the primitive kerosene lamp, he saw her motionless body.
He calmly regarded her for a while. Suddenly, did he notice her lips parting a
little? Or, was it a trick played on him by the flickering flame of the lamp?
He flung open the door and rushed forward with his heart leaping to his throat.
No, it was no illusion. Her tongue moved to wet her lips. He snatched the nearby
bowl and carefully poured from it drops of water into her mouth. The drops
slowly sank in.
His ecstasy was abruptly disrupted by the advancing sound of discordant singing by the drunken men returning from the toddy shop. These
brutes would soon bury her alive. He grabbed a kitchen knife and threw himself
upon them. Surprised, they fled.
The young woman survived; it
was the old man who died.
At the end of the narration, my maternal grandmother’s
eyes were moist, with tears of pride. The old man was her great grandfather!
K X M
John
21/04/10
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