Hours after I sit and wonder at how exposed and vulnerable you feel when faced with the death of a child... a life taken away before it even begins..
You try to find answers that would help comprehend.. you need those answers to carry on, even if you have to invent them... In India we have a convenient panacea to all that defeats logic.. so if something is not the way it should be it is bad karma, and if another has windfalls it is good karma.. and then you delude yourself by saying that all will be well in the life yet to come..
Now Chetna's loss would be her parents bad karma.. but what karma explains this little life of barely a hundred days that were replete with jabs, pokes and pain..
Lat week a woman was beheaded in the jhuggi next to the one where we hold our secondary classes.. a muslim woman who defied social mores and left husband and child to marry a hindu man years younger.. they used to make stuffed toys and rarely mixed with others.. wonder what karma that was..
For a long time I wondered whether I could have done things fatser.. but from the day I met Chetna she was under medical care... and in her case funds that are normally long to come by, were raised in no time... how smug I felt thinking that this child would get her surgery at the right time and not have to gasp for years before fate conjured the right stars..
I guess this was maybe a way of ensuring that I do not start having delusions of grandeur and understand the limits of what I can do.. and yet it does not deter me from knowing that I have to carry giving it my very best..