Coping with loneliness
K S S Pillai
There was a time when the whistle and the chug-chug sound of steam-driven trains from far off left me nostalgic about my native place. It was a couple of thousand kilometres from my workplace. I used to undertake the four-day journey every year, changing trains at three places. It was a feat to get into the unreserved third class compartment.
The unbarred windows doubled as doors, though it required acrobatic skills to wriggle through them. The wooden seats would already be occupied. Many passengers like me did not mind squatting on the floor, and we became lifelong friends by the end of the journey.
Now that I am a ‘senior citizen’ with attending ailments, I prefer air travel that would take me to my destination within a couple of hours. Though people are not interested in starting a new friendship with co-passengers during the short journeys, my latest one was an exception.
The woman occupying the aisle seat was so huge that there was hardly any room left in front of her. Seeing my predicament in reaching my middle seat, she tried to lift herself but failed. My son and another passenger gave her a helping hand, and she moved her massive body so that I could squeeze through. The plane was about to take off, and she buckled her seatbelt with difficulty. She was perspiring and huffing with the effort.
Minutes later, when the aircraft was cruising above the mass of clouds, she told me she was sorry for the inconvenience caused to me. She sounded well educated and was fluent in our mother tongue Malayalam, and English.
It was a two-hour flight from Kochi to Mumbai. “I was not always like this,” she told me. “I was slim before my knees were replaced. Something went wrong after the surgery. I could not move around, let alone exercise, without causing great pain. All kinds of treatment were of no use, and I started gaining weight.”
She had retired from the service of ISRO, Ahmedabad, five years ago. Her husband had also worked there but had died some years before his retirement. When she talked about her life with her husband, her voice quivered, and her eyes brimmed with tears.
Money was no problem for her, she said. She had a house in Ahmedabad and two well-educated sons in good positions. The younger one was in Mumbai. His Punjabi wife was an orphan and loved her like her mother. The elder son was in another corner of the country. Several times they had asked her to live with them, but she preferred the independence she enjoyed in her house.
Though her housemaid, who had been with her for several years, was a great help, it had become dangerous to live alone as she could lose her balance and fall any time. Her sons visited her with their families now and then but she was realistic enough not to expect them to live with her for longer periods. To strike a balance, she would go and stay with each of them for some time, keeping her house locked up.
Though she or her late husband had no close relatives in Kerala, she was often drawn to her native place. Despite the difficulties she had to face in travelling long distance alone, she visited the place the previous week to be with a relative who had undergone a complicated surgery.
Life had become a burden to her and she would pray to God every night before going to bed to let it be the last one. Though it would end all problems, she could not think of committing suicide and was waiting for the final call.
She was so practical and sensible that it would have been a friendship worth cultivating, but we knew the futility of starting it now and did not exchange our phone numbers or other details. I found my eyes filling up when she waved to me after sitting in a wheelchair with the help of air hostesses and was pushed away.
(The author is a retired professor of English. A regular contributor to ‘The Kashmir Vision’, his articles and short stories have appeared in various national and international publications)
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