An hour passed like this, while the passing convoy offered us nothing but plumes of dust in return. I lost my mind, slowly, into strange thoughts. Why is helplessness so easily normalised? Why does nobody gently say, I am suffering? Simone Weil once observed that affliction, at its worst, strikes us mute, that it takes the very tongue by which one might cry out. This malaise of silence had become like a limb on the body, present and unquestioned.
Dr Ghulam Mohammad Khan
It was a humid morning in July. We left home for Srinagar, to see a doctor for my five-year-old daughter, who had recently taken to frequent nosebleeds. A strange unease sat with us in the car, and so we did not speak. My wife wore a desolate look. My daughter seemed weak, and irritable in the way small bodies are when they sense something is wrong before words can name it. I steered in complete confusion. Confusion has its own weather, and mine was thick with the heat and dust of Srinagar before we had even arrived, and thicker still with a bruise I could not stop turning over in my mind—the quiet apprehension of what a bruise might mean.
Kafka once wrote that a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. I had no axe that morning. Only a windshield, and a road, and the sense that somewhere ahead a diagnosis was waiting to either break the ice or thicken it. It is, in the first place, a bitter thing, to travel so far for care that should have stood nearby. But nearness, I have learned, is not a matter of miles. There are people, so many people, who simply do not matter here. A file, in their place, weighs more.
The heat only worsened. Even the car’s air conditioning gave up against it. More than ten miles into that silent journey, broken only by my daughter’s occasional moans, we were stopped without warning. The sun pierced the windscreen like a current of fire. We were told a convoy of important vehicles had first to pass, safely, and so the wait began. It did not end. It only stretched, the way waiting always does for those who are told to wait. Camus wrote of the absurd as the confrontation between our hunger for meaning and the world’s silence in return; that morning, the silence was not metaphysical but bureaucratic, and no less absurd for it.
When my daughter’s irritation passed beyond her small control, she scratched at her reddened nose, and the thing I had feared since morning arrived. A stream of blood fountained. My desperation rose like a river breaking its own banks. The sight of blood has always stirred something old in me, leaving my soul to writhe like an insect pinned and still living. My wife muttered a curse at those she could not name, those who had made us wait like this, like nothing. The blood stopped. The heat left her face sweaty and spent, and she fell asleep. There is a mercy in exhaustion. When a person grows tired enough, they either fall asleep, or they fall further inward, into the dark and narrowing well of their own misery.
The wait continued. The heat seemed almost in conspiracy with those who had stopped us. Looking through the rearview mirror, I could see my wife wiping tears with the edge of her dupatta, slowly rocking our daughter against her chest. She could not tell me that the heat was making our wait unbearable, and that our miserable little one needed the doctor in time. She did not need to. Her silence said it. It was the silence of everyone tied up behind us in that long trail of cars, and who could say how many of them carried their own helpless passengers, people desperate to reach a doctor, or simply to reach somewhere.
An hour passed like this, while the passing convoy offered us nothing but plumes of dust in return. I lost my mind, slowly, into strange thoughts. Why is helplessness so easily normalised? Why does nobody gently say, I am suffering? Simone Weil once observed that affliction, at its worst, strikes us mute, that it takes the very tongue by which one might cry out. This malaise of silence had become like a limb on the body, present and unquestioned. Nobody asks their hand why it is there. It is simply there. And that, it seems, is enough of an answer for anyone to live by.
After an hour and a half, we were finally allowed to move. By then the desperation and restlessness had already reached their peak. I drove in silence, thinking of all those trapped in buses, sumos, and cars, spending that eternity of a wait doing nothing but watching their own helplessness stretch out before them, unbroken. This was, I understood, a routine show on this road. A small, recurring theatre of waiting, performed for no audience but itself. Oh, the people. How unlucky you are. When souls were being handed their portion of fate, you must have been asked last what you wished for, and by then God, I imagine, had already grown tired, or bored, of listening.
When we reached the hospital, our energy was already spent. The heat was relentless, and so was the crowd, gushing like a river through narrow banks. By 12:30 pm we had submitted our ticket to the man at the chamber door. He called our name at four. By then we were drained of everything—drained the way a day can drain a person before it has even finished with them. This malaise of silence and endurance, I have come to think, is rampant here. It is infectious. It mutates perfectly in this part of the world. Perfect ground for it.
And to give the day the ending it seemed to deserve, the doctor did not even ask us to sit. He examined her in a minute, perhaps less. That was what the whole long day had been endured for. He took my daughter’s face in his hand, hurried, and adjusted his small torch to her nose, and saw in a second what I had failed to see in months. All this while I stood. He suggested a spray, and did not answer my questions. I was hurt. But perhaps he was right to hurry, since the worthless and faceless herd still waited outside, with a strange, raging patience. Kafka’s Joseph K., waiting endlessly before the law that would never quite receive him, comes to mind here, not as exaggeration, but as diagnosis.
What hurt more was what I carried out of that room. That there are so many people, so many pathetic people, who simply do not mean anything to a system that is, itself, pathetic.
The writer is an Assistant Professor at the HKM Government Degree College (GDC), Bandipora
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