The Farmer with Cancer: Mother Tulsi, the Shadow of Death and the Last Refuge of Faith

 **2003**

The farmer is with cancer. Not so well.

The dangerous doubts have been confirmed.

The farmer—the distressed farmer of some passage in the pages before—has a malignant tumour by the side of his neck, below the ear.

It is utterly devastating for him and his family.

He has three sons and no daughter.

The elder one is a weighty fellow of nineteen, having worked out in an akhara for a few years and gobbling up the major portion of the family's diet. He now helps him in farming matters.

For, given the technicalities involved with the modern game of wrestling, such sons of the soil, leisurely rolling in the sands of the akhara under the stern, unsophisticated guidelines of ustads, have no future.

At the most, they get a certificate for local bullying—and as most of them are considered dumbwits—only a selected few graduate to the next level, with its more shiny profits, including land grabbing, political patronage, etc.

The second one, the farmer's second son, has a fair colour and possesses good features in surprising contrast to his parentage.

He did not seem cut out for the rough and tumble of farming. But now he is getting into the mould—a farmer in the making.

The third one, of tallish and thin stature, is deaf and mute.

For a couple of years, he was at the centre for boys of his special abilities, but having learned the elementaries of sign language, he now sternly forbids, in sign language, of course, any attempt to send him back to the place.

Thanks to his different ability, all and sundry in the locality try their hands at sign language as per their capacities.

I wonder if he understands the fatal word now clinging like a curse to his father's neck.

Well, for the goodness of its simplicity, let us hope that he does not understand the fatalistic word which has come to acquire the sobriquet of death itself.

His wife, buxomly built, now appears sulking to the limits over her heavy proportions, and all this with good reason.

After all, the word strikes such terror across all castes, categories and classes over the face of Earth.

Forget about the advancements in the medical world, chemotherapy, drugs, stages of detection, post-surgery treatment, etc.

The cruel summary of the thing is that the mere knowledge of having it in one's body is sufficient to kill the person the moment the person, who has been otherwise going healthy up to that time, comes to know of it.

The way he is being crushed down, despite all the assurances, is sufficient to throw light on the dark and cavernous gloom carried within the fearsome word.

It is like a black hole: gobbles down the whole worth of the thing.

People surrender themselves to be cut purposelessly—in the countryside, at least, it is so, because we have not a single case of successful cancer treatment in the whole area.

At the doctor's table and from then onwards, it becomes even worse, and death takes shrieking, merciless steps towards the fulfilment of its definition.

Let us see for how long death will have such a free hand in snatching its prey before we devise some means to daze this almost invincible fortress.

The farmer in question is on some Ayurvedic medication procured from some vaidya in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan.

It has to be given to him twice daily with a mixture of crushed and mashed tulsi leaves, the plant being worshipped and much revered in India.

So people—there aren't many in the village who keep this holy thing in their courtyards anymore—look on with some apprehension as Mother Tulsi's crown goes almost bald.

But then it is for such a thing only that we worship this plant.

If the ancient system of medicine finds the plant capable of fighting against the dreaded disease, then that alone makes it worshippable.

We should not demand anything more.

If faith is blind and under its unquestioning will we heal, does such a miracle not let us worship Mother Tulsi as a divine plant?

We have many plants in our courtyard, and I have given every right to the grief-stricken wife, who already seems in a mourning state, to use the whole floral assembly to the last leaf.

In such a case, we can only pray for miracles.

After all, when we fail in our efforts, we throw our surrendered being to the ship of faith.

Many a time, both are lost in the sea of oblivion.

Sometimes, the boat sees the shore quite surprisingly.

Even then, we rob, with our intellect and reasoning, the little good happening of its mystical veil and start slowly, slowly attributing the happy ending to this and that—explicable factors.

All in all, we remain faithful as long as reason has deserted, like a coward, the field.

The moment victory is achieved, it runs back to claim its share.