Prema Jayakumar

Have you ever thought of what hell on earth is? One has been told that ‘hell is other people’, but actually hell on earth is one’s own self, one’s own griefs. And one of the things that make for hell is the absence of people one cared deeply for, people lost to death, or even to other irreversible causes. Of course death is the primary irreversible end, but it is not necessarily death, also partings due to misunderstandings, circumstances that prevent any kind of contact.

Christopher Marlowe put it beautifully in his wonderfully poetic Dr. Faustus. Asked by Faustus why a cursed angel like himself is not in hell, but wandering on the earth, Mephistopheles gives a very moving reply:

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. / Thinkest thou that I, who saw the face of God, / And tasted the eternal joy of heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand hells / In being deprived of everlasting bliss?’

I’ve always thought that these words were very true, that hell is not in things happening, not in the actions of others that cause you pain, but in the loss of something or someone held dear, in absence of hope and joy rather than the presence of pain. There can be relief from pain, but none from this kind of absence.

While partners, or children, are not necessarily sources of everlasting bliss, one has seen how the blight of the loss of a husband or a wife, (worst of all) a child, faith in someone or something, makes people lose the mainspring of their lives. The people who face such losses become less real, seem to be shadows of their earlier selves. They live and function, they go through the motions of ordinary life, they work, they even laugh and talk, but it is as though something that kept them alive has been lost as though these are just motions gone through to persuade themselves and others that they still lead human lives.

As said earlier, it is not only death, it is also a sense of betrayal that can cause this feeling of loss. In a way, the loss of faith in someone can be crueller even than loss by death, because that destroys even the memories of joy shared with that person. That becomes a false image, a chimera, even causing a sense of shame, for having believed in it, for having accepted that joy as a true one. And these absences become crueller when the outside world too seems to be in mourning, the wind blowing hard, the rain falling relentlessly. Absences have inspired others too to verse. It is John Crowe Ransom who said: Two evils, monstrous, either one apart/ Possessed me, and were loath at going: / A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart, / and in the wood, the furious winter blowing. It seemed fitting in these days of endless rain.

So, let us guard those we count precious, at least shore up memories of joy, so that absence does not become too cruel or destroy us altogether. So that even in the loss of someone or something, there are remnants lingering, making the absence more bearable.

Let me go off the subject for a moment to bow before something that is present rather than absent. The month is August and we cannot give ourselves to mourning absences alone. One cannot cross the fifteenth of this month without a salute to the freedom that we have been enjoying for three quarters of a century. One can take freedom for granted, but once again its absence would be an insidious sort of hell. And it is not against the loss of freedom in one swoop by an invasion or some internal disturbance that we have to guard ourselves against. Freedom is not necessarily lost in one fell blow, but in slow and negligible losses of the freedom to live as one pleases, in the loss of the freedom to dress, to talk, to eat, to meet people, to live with people. Freedom is lost in small incremental absences. Let us guard against such losses so that we do not have to mourn their absence. Let us wish ourselves, a long and uninterrupted life of freedom to be our own selves, and for our country, the freedom from hatred and prejudice, and the presence of strength and peace.