It’s a robust belief that our ancients were the inheritors of a primitive disclosure from God. This was also seemingly the basis of what their physicians did, or said, by decree, so to speak. This belief holds good in this, our high-tech age, also time, although most thinkers — including scientists — would want to give deft pictures of our supplementary, also profuse, yet diverse nature.
The association of disease with death, as inevitability, as G. Venkatesh, Assistant Professor at Karlstad University, Sweden, writes in his poignant, riveting, book, “Till Death Do Us Reunite” is not as much associated, as our ancients thought, to elemental fault, or deviant happening. It relates more to healing attempts with medical intervention as much as supernatural entities, prayer, visualisation, and so on. It pertains to hindsight too — “What if the diagnosis was established early, or if doctors were pre-emptive, or aggressive, enough to nip the cancer ‘bug’ in its bud? — in terms of a simple distinction between matter and spirit, where the two elements could be intangibly dissected within and outside of the cultural context of humanity. Or, as George Santayana said, “Life is neither a spectacle nor a feast, but a predicament” — that is, so long as one lives.
The book chronicles heart-rending events from the time Varshita, Venkatesh’s doting wife, showing hidden signs of something being wrong with her health. That it did not take them long to ‘smell’ trouble, as it were, is not the point in context. They reached out to the best available medical facility, also specialist doctors, in the quickest time possible was also another thing. It was all predictable. There was a strong sense of deferment in the air — the song of everyone’s burden in life-threatening illness. “This just can’t happen to me, or us.”
Venkatesh recalls how they met in 2007 on a matrimony website, and got to know each other — and, that everything was hunky-dory from the word go. They got married at 36. To paraphrase Venkatesh’s perspective: “The honeymoon in Kerala. Varshita had organised everything. All by herself. We hopped from one location to the other, enjoying our new-found closeness, overcoming any ‘icicle’ between us that may not have melted, learning to shed our inhibitions, and being in close communion with Mother Nature in God’s Own Country. Backwaters, forest-trails, mountains — we took them all in.”
It’s just five years later that Varshita was diagnosed with breast cancer and other negative paraphernalia — a sequel that no one would want, or wish, in one’s lifetime.
As Venkatesh reminisces, there was all darkness – with not even a silver dot, in the gloomy cloud: “I noticed that Varshita was finding it difficult to breathe. The nurse told me that nothing could be done (It was soon the last ten minutes of her life). I sat beside her; I held her hand. I hoped she would recognise my touch. I was not sure whether she’d hear what I said, or feel my touch. She’d not opened her eyes for two full days. I told her she’d always live in my heart… (I thought) she would be safe in god’s hands, away from the pain and suffering. That she must bless me from heaven as an angel. She opened her eyes wide, one last time, and saw me. I’d never know what she wanted to tell me and I would also never know if she had seen me, felt my touch and heard what I said. It was a Full Moon Day when she ascended to Heaven.” It had rained early in the morning — in consonance with her name, Varshita, meaning rain.
Venkatesh’s heart-breaking book is not just about suffering, pathos, or death be not proud. It’s about Varshita echoing Yvonne Woon’s transcendent metaphor, “I’m not afraid of death… I’m afraid of life without you.”