Prema Jayakumar

April, at least for the people of Kerala, is not the cruellest month of the year. And since there are festivals across India at this time, it is a time of hope all over this country at least, not just in this place. It is generally a time of renewal, a time when life restarts. The Indian astronomical chart starts with the entrance of the Sun into the first ‘house’ of the Zodiac in mid-April. With the promise of new life in the Easter Egg, the promise of a new and fresh year in the celebration of Vishu, the celebration of life after the austerities of fasting in the month of Ramzan, the air is filled with a vision of a new life. And one can’t help but join in the celebrations. As Dr. Ayyappa Paniker made his Konna tree say: ‘The time is Vishu, and I’m a kanikkonna, I can’t help but flower’. However much you resist it, in spite of the enervating heat and the stifling dust, in spite of the smells and the smog and the disasters of day to day life, there is a feeling of a new beginning, a new start, in the atmosphere.
Perhaps we are so particular about the new starts and the new beginnings because we are in the midst of crises all the year through and hope that, with the new start offered by the festivals, marking a departure from the routine, we can enter into a life that is better. That the golden sunlight, the brightness of the flowers, the joy of the gifts and the extra-good food, will bring us some sort of a better period than the last one.
I have sometimes wondered why we celebrate so feverishly, so hysterically. Maybe, the human animal cannot live without expectation and remain human. W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet who could speak so understandingly of the human condition, said, ‘Nor dread nor hope attend / A dying animal; / A man awaits his end / Dreading and hoping all.’ It is not that we are sure that something, life for us and the world around, will turn out well, but the certainty that something will make sense finally, in spite of the chaos in between, that there will be resolution regardless of the end result. And somehow memory has this gift of remembering the pleasant places and times, allowing us to forget the unpleasant ones. And it is perhaps this convenient lapse of memory or the dulling of memory that makes it possible for us to forgive some of the injuries that have taken place in the past. We have the hope that people can mature, change for the better.
As the poet Sugathakumari said : Pavam manavahridayam – or tharakaye kanumbol / athu ravu marakkum / puthumazha kanke varalcha marakkum / palchiri kandathu mritiye marannu sukhiche pokum. (The poor human heart cannot help forgetting the night at the sight of a star, forgetting the drought at the first rain, forgetting death at the sight of a child’s smile and staying happy). Thank god for the human condition that allows for hope even in the midst of sorrows.
This applies not just to the individual’s life. Sometimes when the polity seems to set all rules at nought, when one wonders if the world is going to collapse because the centre cannot hold, one remembers before now too, the world has lurched to one side, seemed on the verge of collapse, miraculously righted itself and gone on. I shall go to another Irish poet who put it so well: History says ‘Don’t hope / On this side of the grave!’ / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme. / (Seamus Heany)
So let us wish for a year when the words hope and history rhyme and tidal waves of justice, small ones if not an all-encompassing massive one, rise up and sweep away the messes we have made by the wayside. Let us wish each other a happy Easter, a happy Vishu and a happy Eid.