Sorrow From Cancer

In my last post ‘Joy of Cancer’, I had narrated about one of my close friends who had been afflicted by blood cancer.

He succumbed to the disease in the night of last Saturday, the 10th November. I received the news the next morning. I calculated that when he was taking one of his last breaths, I was having dinner at the marriage reception of one of my nieces.    

On receiving the news on Sunday morning, I rushed to his house. His body was encased in a frozen state inside a glass casket with ice. The family was waiting for the arrival of his younger daughter and son-in-law from Nigeria. They reached in the morning of Monday and soon after, his body was taken to ‘Swargadwar’ in Puri fror cremation. ‘Swargadwar’ literally means ‘gateway to heaven’. It is located near the temple of Lord Jagannath. In Odisha, it is believed that when a body is cremated in Swargadwar, the soul reaches salvation. I was there to bid him the final ‘goodbye’ when the vehicle carrying his body left his house for the final journey. Fittingly, the words ‘sheshayatra’ (final journey) was written on the rear of the vehicle. I looked on till the vehicle disappeared into the bend of the road.

After death, a person becomes a ‘body’! Talking of body, I am reminded of a scene in a T V Serial in which a accident occurs and several persons die. A man looking for his brother comes and enquires in the hospital where the injured were admitted. The person at the reception checks the list and says, “Your brother’s name is not in the list. Some unidentified bodies are kept in the morgue. Go and check.” The first man gets enraged and shouts, “What do you talk of ‘body’? He is my brother.” One man’s ‘brother’ becomes ‘a body’ for another!

My friend’s problem was detected on the 20^th July and he lived exactly for 3 months and 22 days after that.

He was an established writer of short stories. His stories contained delicate and powerful emotions and human relations and were not of the run-of-the-mill ‘boy-meets-girl’ type. For his creative writings, he had received several Awards including the Sahitya Akademi Award. He was in the Jury for selecting books for Sarala Puraskar, an award for excellence in Odia literature, established by a well-known industrial house. He could not attend the function to release his latest collection of short stories as he had just been admitted to the hospital at Vellore. A review of this book was published in a newspaper and I had read it out to him over phone when he was in the hospital-bed.

After our studies, both of us had appeared at the State Civil Services Examination. I stood First in it and he occupied the Second Position. A month after joining this service, I left it to join a Public Sector Bank. When I was leaving, he quipped, “Now I have become Adwitiya (second to none”. He was referring to the fact that he was no longer second in seniority in that batch.

Good bye, dear friend! 

Post Script

I read a piece by Mukul Sharma in the Economic Times of 12.09.2013.  He has quoted from Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "It happens rarely, but there are cases of sel-induced healing... Due to some reason, the tumour starts in the opposite direction, gets smaller, resolves and disappears." The International Noetic Institute found medically-reported cases of spontaneous healing. There is a possibility that the altered state of prayer, religious faith and medication may allow the process of self-repair greater freedom to operate. "Neurotheology, a new field which seeks to discover the neurobiological basis of spirituality and health, tells us that the well being of our body depends almost slowly on the strength of our belief in ourselves.", Mukul Sharma says.