A fully-developed human body has 206 bones within. And the significance of each and every bone and every joint is, perhaps, realised only when we get one or two of them broken. The realisation, sometimes, can be vicarious as well, when we find a loved one convulsing in pain, lying miserably on a couch with either legs tied upwards or hand fastened to the neck.
Last month, I went through such a realisation. The pain, though vicarious, was excruciating. The sufferer was my younger brother, Tahir. No doubt he is a living proverb in weakness and frailty and one can count most of the 206 bones in this what many in family refer to as live-skeleton.
But there are two contradictions. He has a sharp mind and extremely loud voice. And of course in energy and agility he seems second to none. It all happened when he chose to jump from a stool – height not more than 1.5 feet – for the umpteenth time and fell somewhat awkwardly on his left hand. In the very room I was giving some grammar lessons to my younger (and his elder) sister. Tahir stuck to the ground for a few moments and nobody cared. It was perfectly normal for us to see him jump and fall and then rise again to jump. Rise he did, but came straight to me with a puzzled and somewhat scared face and left hand stretched to my face, “Bhayya! Yeh mere haath ko kya hua hai?” (Brother! What has happened to my hand?) I saw his hand and then his face.
Why was he not crying? Doesn’t he feel pain? Many questions on such a pattern reverberated in my mind. His attitude was as if he was asking some general knowledge question. He was really puzzled as to why his hand which was straight a few minutes ago is now zigzag. He was continuously looking at his left hand, then right hand – comparing them!
Despite not realising the gravity of what had happened, my sister shouted at the top of her voice and started crying before I scolded her away and she ran to call mother and father from another room. His injured hand was in my hand. And this was perhaps one of the most trying times of my life. I was holding a broken hand of my 11-year-old brother, who was asking me what had happened to him. I had to brutally suppress my tears that were ready to burst forth from the eyes and on the top of it had to force a smile to soothe the child who I didn’t know was suppressing his pain or was more puzzled than pained.
“This is perfectly normal,” I declared while brandishing the fakest smile of my life, “good children do play and fall like this or how else will they learn?” I said this and many such things trying hard to lessen the gravity of a fact while in corner of my heart there was still some hope. “After all, the stool was not that high,” I thought. I twitched and turned his hand with utmost care in order to ‘fix’ it but soon realised my folly.
When I think in retrospection I realise all things described here happened as if within fraction of a second before parents rushed in. Ammi made some desperate attempts to rub the hand with Iodex and some stupid oil to no avail. Soon father and I took Tahir to our doctor uncle. He, and later the X-ray report, confirmed that a fracture in radius ulna bone of the forearm has occurred. Tahir was referred to an orthopaedic surgeon.
We duly visited that surgeon with my brother holding his bandaged left hand in his right. The boy’s psyche, as I told earlier, is in total contrast with his physique. Patience and endurance are his inalienable characteristics. Since his early childhood he was neither afraid of cockroaches, lizards, or mice on one hand or injections on the other. In the surgeon’s office he was still smiling but not for long. The surgeon hardly glanced at his forearm and the X-ray and blurted, “Haddi toot ker tedhi hogayi hai, behosh kerke operation kerna padega”. He surely meant that a child of 11 cannot bear the pain of straightening a twisted bone before wrapping around plaster of Paris and so, for effective completion of the job, services of an anaesthetist are required.
The doctor was perhaps trying to be frank but I was very much angry with his choice of words. I reckoned the first sign of tension on Tahir’s face after the doctor’s uttering of the words ‘behosh’ and ‘operation’. He didn’t say anything to the doctor but told me to tell the doctor that he can sustain any pain and not to ‘behosh’ him. He asked me what kind of an ‘operation’ is needed. It took a great effort on my part to soothe him. I omitted the word ‘behosh’ from my narrative and explained to him that “they will make you sleep, a sound sleep, in which you will feel no pain”. I further explained that operation is nothing but doing plaster and that “perhaps doctors, like military men, call anything they do as ‘operation’”.
He finally asked rather reluctantly, “Will I die?” Every ounce of blood in me was frozen for a few seconds. What’s all going on in the mind of the child? “You are a brave boy, a hero, afraid of no one except Allah,” I said, “since when you are scared of medical treatments and think of death? Just pray to Allah and everything will be fine. On our steadfastness in hard times we are awarded much virtues by Allah so just be brave!”
The child did brave everything that befell him. After plaster I sat in the night beside him (he was still in hospital under observation for a few hours). I pondered over the anxiety the family had gone through in the last 24 hours. I recollected the events from the past night till the very moment that I was living. Why, despite knowing that I could do nothing to reduce the ‘actual’ pain and suffering of my brother, my every effort, talk, and gesture aimed only towards lessening his pain? And I was certainly not an exception… the condition of the whole family was the same.
And my family too is not an exception. I have seen various individuals and their families, in such circumstances, behaving exactly as we did. What exactly I did, for instance? Sobbed behind bolted doors; deliberately lost a carom-board game; said some soothing words; attended him in the hospital; prayed extensively – and that’s it. Still I repeatedly felt that I have not done enough. This emptiness, this void kept me (rather us) ever vigilant and ever ready to rush and do any possible service to him.
From this I arrived at a larger point. While at personal and familial levels this ‘emptiness’ still exists and is appreciable in an age where family ties and social relations are declining day by day. But this ‘emptiness’ that drives us to do more is missing at the community level. After every disaster that shakes us, for example some riot, some bomb-blast, some displacement, some invasion, some fake-encounter, some rape – we feel outraged for a while and protest, raise slogans, contribute money… but then return, ever content and satisfied, to the normal course of life as if nothing had happened. There was and is a void of such a ‘void’ in me, in us, when our innocent and pious brethren in Islam were sentenced to death in Bangladesh. Do hundreds and thousands of their virtuous lives are less worthy than some broken limb of our dear one?
If only this ‘void’ and ‘emptiness’ would return to our community life as well!