Too Much Is at Stake: Still Left with Great Things to Fight For

January 1, 2008

Start of a new yearly unit of time. I thought it would portend some new freshness in my stale life, but while I write this, around 11 in the morning, I am in one of those terrible swirls of moodiness, boredom and snappiness.

Even depression, when you feel that your existence is the greatest weight on your shoulders. When you even go to the extent of wishing how great it would have been not to exist at all, replaced by the painful ennui.

I just toss around in the ring of pain, depression, gloom and doom.

People will even say—it is a psychological case. But what even if it is? Who wants to get himself nettled in the dangerously, poisonously lugubrious waters?

Please do not interpret it as escapism or a case of putting the onus on external factors if I say that most of what has become of me is due to multitudes of external factors—the factors against which I could have had very little effect even if I had tried my best and exerted my full potential.

Factors like luck, fate and destiny are too far and vague, and my ideas regarding their blameworthiness are as conspicuously vague, undefined and impermanent. All in all, they stand on a very shaky foundation.

There are concrete causes—stony, barren, cold—which stare me in the face, plague my chances.

They are many, and I won't take the trouble of naming my enemies.

The mere simple logic of it requires that I should try to shake off the Baitals from my long-loaded back. But they won't go, so strongly are they glued to my back.

It is not that I have not tried to rid myself of them. In fact, the largest chunk of perseverance, management, efforts, toil and boil has been dedicated against them. But the stubborn ghosts would not go.

Now they seem threatening to my vitality, freshly rejuvenated after each depressive pang. But those parasitic suckers, creepers, shackle me comprehensively.

It is an almost annihilating web. It keeps sticking onto your hands, face, clothes and all.

Who knows, I might not be able to clear myself of these bloody vines till my last breath.

I will be like a half-dead, crippled cockroach, being eaten alive and dragged in all directions by a pack of ants. So tiny are they, yet such a big force to reckon with in their combined, lined, chained ferocity.

They gnaw away the threads of my existence, chop off the limbs, suck away the juicy vitality, and I just keep giving everything, every moment, in order to give myself the belief that I am alive.

But is it life?

Constantly defying the annihilatory overtures is perhaps no life. It is merely a gloomy, dark journey through the passage of death.

It is completely shut off from all the lively worldliness, pleasantly scattered around at every nook and corner, at every step, at every drop or rise of a moment.

But the invisible stone walls of this dark, invisible tunnel to the ultimate gloom don't allow you to feel, smell, see and enjoy the things which exist for you, which were perhaps created to fulfil your purpose of being on the earth.

But once the things on which you hold all rights on natural accounts and deeds have been shut off from your being, aren't you the person sinned against fearsomely and criminally most?

I leave the sinners with their sins.

Ultimately, every sin, every misdeed boomerangs on the committer. So I hope. So I leave them with the same fate.

The causes of my pains are bound to suffer for their misdeeds, later or sooner. May God provide them courage and bearability during those hellish moments.

Thus, whiplashed by the circumstantial storms from all sides, I am clinging to the sinews left over to me.

My niece, Safia, is there, and to bear all agonies in order to ensure even a slight good thing for her future can be—and in fact it is—a good thing to keep always in mind.

Then there is my brother, Tina. How can I allow myself to be eaten by oblivion without taking some definite steps for the safekeeping of his future?

I have noble causes to bring smiles to the faces of my suffering sisters.

I have the greatest causes in bringing happiness to the souls of my aged, weak, ill parents.

Too much is at stake.

I am still left with great things to fight for.