After a long time I ushered this New Year not by dancing the night away but propped up in bed with my right leg in a plaster cast.
Even if I hadn’t fractured my knee in an unfortunate parasailing accident, there was hardly anything left to celebrate about the year gone by. So while every year the dilemma I face before such parties is to decide between the swarovski-studded-brown-suede-boots-that-kill or the comfy-but-definitely-boring-black-pumps, this year I packed away both and was forced to have deeper thoughts occupying me. Things we normally don’t get time to think about while we go about the business of living.
It is amazing how pain and the entire process of healing can help you appreciate what you have but never noticed.
As I lay flipping TV channels I realised that although my pain was purely physical, pain is omnipresent in the world. So many people are in pain, seething with pain and blind with pain. India is still healing from the pain of Mumbai. Gaza is throwing up horror stories of pain and peril everyday.
The unfortunate fact about these times is that the pain felt in Mumbai leaves many cold in Islamabad and vice versa. The pain felt in Gaza is getting stilted, stoic responses from the powers that be in the UN and US. It is almost as if we choose to feel and acknowledge a certain pain, raising immense hue and cry about it and at the same time choose to justify some one else’s pain as destiny or the way the world works. Pain today has a colour, caste, creed and religion. This process of selective sensibility to pain is leading the whole world into dangerous times. As I battled with my pain popping one painkiller after the other, I reached a stage where my leg was numb. But pain is essential to healing. When a part of the body hurts, it is due to the release of prostaglandins in the blood stream. These prostaglandins apart from triggering pain act as the danger signals to the brain to initiate the process of healing.
By taking painkillers we simply suppress these prostaglandins and therefore the healing process. So hopefully through pain shall emerge means of facing and alleviating it.
While I tried to distract myself from pain, I rediscovered many forgotten pleasures. With this plaster around my leg, after ages I have had the pleasure of lying back and reading books from cover to cover, watching movies on TV while prostate on a couch, dosing off in the warmth of a golden winter sun and watching a scurrying squirrel climb up a tree-something working mothers (read superwomen) rarely get to do in the daily quagmire of urban lives.
While the much-awaited ‘Ghajini’ left me flinching at its graphic scenes of violence, one movie I really enjoyed was the 2004 musical comedy ‘Shall We Dance’ in which a disoriented, middle-aged Richard Gere escapes the painful drudgery of his picture-perfect life by joining a dance class.
As he ends up home late every night, his wife predictably suspects an affair and hires detectives to spy on him. There is this undercurrent of attraction between him and Jennifer Lopez, an instructor at that school but nothing really happens. The movie aptly conveys how sometimes just the presence of a new person in the most platonic of ways or introduction of a new activity can give so much happiness. When finally confronted by his innocent enough getaway, his wife is angry as to why he didn’t tell her about his dance class, he replies, “Because I was ashamed of wanting to be happier, after all we have.”
I remembered the many times in my life that I joined a dance class and withdrew within a few days as I felt it was too frivolous an indulgence. As a student I felt that idle hours spent pirouetting would take away from the seriousness of pursuit expected of me.
As a newly-wed bride, with my husband serving in Kashmir, I felt ashamed of wanting to dance while he faced life and death situations everyday in the valley. Then once we enrolled as a couple only to see his boss join the same class! The idea of spending the office after hours in mirth and abandon with the boss watching-that was sure to make his boss assign some extra tasks to him — made us withdraw from the class yet again. So I never went beyond the preliminary steps and stance lesson. However, in parties I continued to dance with a strange mix of Bollywood-meets-bhangra, something that needs neither technique nor finesse.
This New Year has come with its own set of woes and pain. The Satyam scam haunts Corporate India. The oil sector, truckers and Delhi lawyers have already been on a strike. People all over the country are facing days without essential commodities, petrol and paychecks. There seems no getting away from the pain of living.
But the relief to pain can come from the strangest of quarters. Two days after my accident, my story on India-Pak relations was run in this newspaper.
I was flooded by hundreds of letters from numerous Pakistanis extending great love and desire for better relations between the two countries. They invited me to visit my ancestral place in Pakistan promising to take care of me there, come what may! To say the least I was overwhelmed by the milk of human kindness flowing on both sides of the border, as opposed to the ugly rhetoric showcased on TV channels. And one particularly painful day as I sat crying holding my hurt leg, my five years old surmised, “Ma, why are you crying? You have a plaster on just one leg. At least your other leg is not hurting.” Trust children with their fuzzy logic to let you know that the glass is indeed half full. So I avoid the TV News and watch every dance show around these days. Not being able to move a leg has had me hooked to the vicarious pleasure of watching people accomplish impossible calisthenics.
I eagerly await the day my plaster comes off. Some day I may take up the offer to visit Pakistan and see my ancestral place. But surely in the near future, I will join a dance class a la Richard Gere and dance my heart away, swaying and swirling to enthralling music. In times like these, no-one should be ashamed anymore of wanting to be happier.
Shivani Mohan is an India-based
writer. She can be reached at
smshivanimohan@gmail.com
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