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These perils of xenomania!
By S Mukhtar. Dated: 9/24/2017 5:22:21 PM
"What breads to get?" asked the servant.
"I'll get myself," replied my friend.
Minutes passed.
"Meat or cock and what vegetables to get?" asked another servant.
"I'll get myself," replied my friend.
Minutes passed.
My friend himself made coffee…we enjoyed it… servants basking in the sun.
My face, whole figure and form rather, I myself felt, changes it showed.
My friend and guide, true genius, septuagenarian, of national fame, having held responsible positions, all well caught my grimaces and gestures. His ever young smile broadened and he spoke:
"No punishment is harsher than solitary confinement even if in one's own house. Better be with fools than all alone. My servants I haven't kept for serving me but just for breaking that confinement. And if I myself do some homework, it is not because servants don't obey but because I want to keep myself busy even though with trivial nothings."
"Family members, - none here?"
"My wife…what I have been have been greatly by her… left very early for her heavenly abode; three sons O in three foreign countries; two daughters in two foreign lands; all settled, married, with families; and me remembered only whenever they have some property or other problem here. Dear; an emotional, psychological, spiritual vacuum I have been long living in. Thank God that these good servants do to a meagre extent though fill that vacuum - but for their mere presence I would have perhaps evaporated away! I happen to feel they are not my servants but saviours!"
Yesterday I was to another friend. He had had a fall, profuse cerebral haemorrhage, death threatening; quickly operated upon, he was recovering fast. But oh he was craving crying to see his two daughters both settled in foreign countries; coming, he would soon be normal again.
A day before I had to be to another friend. Chronically ill, treated in USA also, he was longing to see his only daughter; she somehow came but stay she can't because of those foreign limitations and leave she can't on seeing her noble father's condition. My absence: My father's death - she too seems dying from that shock!
Happening to subconsciously remember hundreds of such elderly lonely parents, children in foreign lands, I myself felt mysteriously depressed.
O but one story overtook me all. My one doctor friend was, some 20 years ago, offered a job with emoluments 20 times his, in a foreign hospital of world fame. All happy, he the happiest, he was preparing to leave with full zest and zeal. He and all counted days for his taking over that highly respectable position - an honour to his home state. Then one cloudy morn his father said, "My dearest of dears, who will shoulder me to my grave if one I have in my luck?" The son, streams of tears down, stood up, unpacked one and all packing, placed everything at its place, and replied, "Father, go I now won't, never. With you I remain, all hopes that if I die first you will give me the last sip as my mother gave me the first sip of life." Weeks only passed when I saw the son wheel-chairing his now ailing father in a hospital, provided helpers looking on, to a waiting car. "Doctor Sahib, let this boy (my nephew) do it," I said. "Dear, we must be parenting our old parents as they long parented us - not a moral and spiritual obligation just; yes, this is one medical requirement too!" The father now almost a centenarian, mother a nonagenarian, theirs is one of the happiest families I know. True, they have had no perils of xenomania.