Slowly letting go

I have been doing some spring cleaning, and dusting up very old books. A few of them were prizes for good performance that I had won in school – you know, ‘First in general proficiency’, that sort of thing – including the very first one, Simple Simon Rhymes, awarded at the end of kindergarten, which is now so tattered and run through and through with book lice and silver fish that it is falling apart, and I had to throw it away at last, after hanging on to it for a full fifty years, though it was a terrible wrench (I can still recite some of those rhymes from memory. I especially loved the one with the picture of a child in a dunce's cap complaining Multiplication is vexation, and division is as bad/ the rule of three perplexes me, and practice drives me mad). Thus we slowly get over our deepest attachments as the Shadow looms ever larger. I wrote about this in March 2013, and seven years have gone since then.

I also came across an old notepad in which I had made a single entry. It is headed Friday, 17^th August 2007, 1:50 p.m., Cabin 11, Durgapur Steel Plant Hospital. I was there because I needed to have an emergency appendectomy. I had been in excruciating pain for the last three days, but that day, relaxing after a very light lunch and the dextrose drip going, I had eased up a bit, enough at least to scribble a few lines. I had the operation that night, and in the long run, it turned out, it was far from perfect: a nerve along the right leg was permanently damaged. Anyway, as the poet said, I don’t ask to be spared from pain and sorrow, just see to it that I can bear it…

দুঃখতাপে ব্যথিতচিতে নাই বা দিলে সান্ত্বনা,

সহিতে পারি এমনি যেন রয়।  

Even back then, I was a very tired man, so bone-weary at times that a sudden break for hospitalization was halfway welcome: I could cry off work for a bit without a guilty conscience. But this is the last line I wrote in that entry – ‘Getting an enforced rest! God grant that it won’t happen again too soon (it did, but only in 2015). Pupu’s still too young: I need to soldier on for another ten years at least’. Fun fact: some people who absolutely love me, I discovered afterwards, had spread it around that I had had a heart attack!

So anyway, another twelve years have now passed, and I have been soldiering on, as forever. What happens now?