Our young blogger friend Ashok has an interesting post on his blog “In the words of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade” which has prompted me to write this rather poignant post.
During my recent frequent visits to the hospital for physiotherapy, I came across a story from a doctor who used to bring his daughter for physiotherapy too. She had met with an accident while riding pillion on motorcycle and had had multiple fractures on her leg. The doctor and I got to talking to each other and this is the story that he told me.
He is a pediatrician and his wife a gynecologist. A perfect college romance followed by a perfect family life with two children. One son, killed two years ago while on a motorcycle by a drunken truck driver and the daughter currently undergoing physiotherapy who was widowed at the same time as the son and son in law were riding together on the motorcycle.
Since then, the wife had been out of sorts and had taken to spiritualism in a big way culminating in her wanting to go away to an organisation doing scial work in the South as part of the orgnisation’s missionary work. Just two months earlier, the father and the daughter finally gave her permission to go away to follow her bliss. Yes, that is the expression used by the father!
Now, the father is saddled with his practice, his temporarily handicapped daughter and running the household.
A lesser man would have broken down. Not this spirited man of about fifty, who is determined to find his own bliss seeing that his daughter is fully rehabilitated and to serve his patients with full commitment. In typical Indian fashion, he accepts his lot as his karma!
Since then, I have been thinking about this family often and the intense experiences that they have undergone in such a short time. I was talking about this with some other friends the other day when one of them chose to comment on the wife leaving the husband at such a time. He was all praise for the husband for being so understanding and letting her go. Another friend, more shall we say, worldly, quipped whether he would have let her go, had she decided to go with another man!
That is a very interesting way of looking at a broken relationship. Since that discussion, I have been thinking of possible answers to the question and find it impossible to!
Leave aside the Indian context to the story, I wonder whether this question can be answered at all in any other context as well.