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DOES HE KNOW A MOTHERS HEART
by Arun Shourie.
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If one is, for whatever reason, not familiar with personal details of the authors life, and is only familiar with the valiant battle he's continued in the public life from emergency era onward if not before, the opening in this book is startling, and one immediately wonders how this man with so huge a dark cloud on his family as an only child burdened so very tremendously.
His account of the personal part is as simple and direct as his writings have made a reader expect, not shorn of emotional part. But here he begins the story by asking a question that really doesn't belong as much to an Indian frame - whether of philosophy or faith, tradition or bringing up - as one of an abrahmic one, and this is where he moves on to, after the personal account, asking the question that the title has incorporated.
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"My father’s courage as he evacuated Hindus in July-August 1947 out of Lahore—where he was City Magistrate at the time. The courage with which he settled, comforted and on occasion quelled the raging refugees in camps across Punjab. My mother’s courage as she comforted her mother and father when they lost a young son, as husbands deserted two of their daughters. My mother-in-law’s courage as she went on looking after all of us even as rheumatoid arthritis twisted and turned and crippled her hands and feet. Malini’s3 courage, Veena’s4 courage evident in the dignity and fortitude with which they have borne blows of unimaginable severity, faced life, brought up their children single-handed, and, on top of it, continued working . . . Here we are: we get so puffed up just because we have stood up to some authority-of-the-moment. And here are these girls: they have stood up to life itself."
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"Adit has taught us lessons upon lessons. He has given us a sense of proportion. I am dismissed from the Indian Express? But he hasn’t had and isn’t going to have a job at all. In losing my place at the Express, I feel that my tongue has been yanked out? But Adit can scarcely speak at all. At every turn of this kind, I have but to look at him—he is laughing away, almost breathless, with someone over some little joke, happy in his little world."
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"Malini was born to Mithu Chib—now Mithu Alur. She and her husband were in London at the time. Malini too had been struck by cerebral palsy.
"They had returned to India. Mithu is another of those ladies who just won’t give up or give in. She set up the first school for spastic children. Her sister, Mita Nundy, set up the second one in Delhi. It was in all of two or three rooms.
"Anita would drive Adit to the school. Soon, she joined it.
"Again, so many helped. Mrs Nargis Dutt had helped raise funds for the school in Bombay. For the school in Delhi, Mr Rajiv Gandhi, then the Prime Minister, sanctioned governmental assistance. Mr Jagmohan, then the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, sanctioned land at institutional rates. Mr N.A. Palkhivala got TISCO to send steel at a concessional rate . . . A building specially designed for wheelchair-bound children came up. ... "
" ... Many placed impediments. One casteist minister, who contributed to ruining several institutions, demanded to know the caste-wise breakdown of students and teachers and the reasons why the school was not implementing the reservations’ edicts of government . . ."
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"Subbulakshmi began a song, Yaad aave, Vrindavan mein Krishna ki leelaa . . . She had just sung a stanza or two, Adit pursed his lip and began to cry . . . I immediately took him out of his chair and lifted him on to my shoulder and pressed him to my heart . . . ‘Adit tum royo mat, yeh to gaanaa hi hai . . .’ ‘No, no,’ Subbulakshmi said. ‘That shows how much he understands music. I have a granddaughter. She too, on this very song, at this very line, begins crying . . .’"
"Thirty years later, a role reversal. We are in Chennai. Adit is to be examined at the Sankar Nethralaya. We are staying at the house of dear friends. Recitations and bhajans are often going on in their home. Early morning. Having completed my pranayama and asanas, I come out of our room. Subbulakshmi’s voice. She is singing Meera’s bhajans.
"I rush back, bring Adit out—for he knows this set of bhajans. He is all attention—he has his head lowered as he does when he is concentrating. I am stroking Adit’s shoulders and back. Subbulakshmi sings:
'Ansuan jal seench seench prem bel boyee . . .
"I just cannot hold tears back. I try, but I just cannot, though no sound escapes my lips. The song over, I take Adit back to our room. I have deliberately kept myself behind him, out of his sight, gently pushing the wheelchair. But he turns, pulls me to himself. Takes my head to his chest, holds it there, and, as he often does, twirls my ear. ... "
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Here on, he turns to questioning religions, looking at Bible - both Old and New Testaments - and Koran.
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"Suppose there are forty-five righteous persons, Abraham asks. Will You spare the city then?
"God assures him, I will spare it . . .
"If there are forty? Thirty? Twenty? What if there are ten?
"Each time God says ‘I will not destroy it for the sake of forty/thirty/twenty/ten.’12 The same argument could be taken to there being just one righteous person in the city. And God would have to promise not to go ahead with His resolve to destroy the cities. But Abraham does not press the point. Set those two cities aside for a moment. And think of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the coastal settlements that were hit by the tsunami, think of the regions in POK in which nearly 90,000 people were killed by the earthquake. Could it be that God did not find a single righteous person or ten or twenty in any of them?"
"Two angels come to Sodom in the evening. They reach Lot’s house. He prostrates before them, invites them to spend the night in his home.13
"Men from Sodom surround the house. ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight?’ they demand. ‘Bring them out to us that we may know them carnally.’14
"Lot begs them to spare the men. ‘See now, I have two daughters who have not known a man; please, let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you wish; only do nothing to these men, since this is the reason they have come under the shadow of my roof.’15 What have the poor daughters done that their father should be so ready to make an offering of them to the lust and vengefulness of the Sodom men?"
"Lot and his family leave. Lot’s wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt.17 Reflect for a moment: Why has this fate been visited upon her? Because she disobeyed a command? Because a longing for what she was leaving behind lingered in her heart?"
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"Nor is His obsession about being revered limited to individuals. Pestilence, destruction, death are brought down on entire peoples—including, and especially on the people He has Himself chosen. Entire cities are obliterated for faltering in their reverence of Him. ‘If there is a calamity in a city,’ we read in the Book of Amos, ‘will not the Lord have done it?’26 God sets out how He will bring down cities and empires because they have had the audacity to browbeat the people He has chosen.27 Then he turns on the chosen people themselves. In part this is because of what might be seen as personal sins and wrongdoings:"
" ... I will punish all—the circumcised as much as the uncircumcised, He declares, because the former—‘all the house of Israel’—‘are uncircumcised in the heart’. Through His prophet, Jeremiah, He decrees calamity upon calamity, and declares that, though the people, hammered thus, shall cry out for relief, He shall not relent. ‘They shall die gruesome deaths,’ Jeremiah reports God as having told him. “They shall not be lamented nor shall they be buried, but they shall be like refuse on the face of the earth. They shall be consumed by the sword and by famine, and their corpses shall be meat for the birds of heaven and for the beasts of the earth . . .’ ‘Behold, I will bring such a catastrophe on this place, that whoever hears of it, his ears will tingle,’ God vows. The days are corning when this place shall not be known by its name but as ‘the Valley of Slaughter’. I shall cause the cities and their inhabitants to suffer defeat and destruction at the hands of their enemies and of those who seek their lives. I shall break the cities ‘as one breaks a potter’s vessel which cannot be made whole again’. ‘I will make the city desolate and a hissing; everyone who passes by it will be astonished and hiss because of all its plagues. And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and flesh of their daughters, and everyone shall eat the flesh of his friend in the siege and in the desperation with which their enemies and those who seek their lives shall drive them to despair.’ ‘Their infants shall be dashed in pieces,’ God declares, ‘And their women with child ripped open . . .’30 All this for what? Because they have ‘committed prostitution with pagan gods’! ‘Because they have forsaken Me and made this an alien place, because they have burned incense in it to other gods . . . and filled this place with the blood of innocents.’"
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December 30, 2020 - December , 2021.
Kindle Edition, 432 pages
Published February 25th 2013
by HarperCollins Publishers India
(first published July 2011)
ISBN:- 139789350295410
ASIN:- B00BL04VWQ
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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4426951821
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