Inhumane
A Personal Essay about the Need for Compassion
It is cold in Melbourne, at this time of the year, and we go for our customary walk every day, all bundled up in flannel and fleece, looking like walking cloth bags.
Lots of cars whiz by, and some pedestrians. Some of them are walking dogs. Some, pushing prams.
Yesterday, we saw a woman who was both old and infirm. She was stooped over, walking with a great deal of difficulty, holding a stout stick, which came up to her shoulder, because she was so bent over. She was holding the stick in one hand…and pushing a pram with the other. In front of her, walked a young woman, holding a phone, talking and laughing into it.
The young woman looked back from time to time, with a frown and a scowl. Clearly, the older woman was not being very obliging: she was walking much too slowly. When the old woman saw her looking back, she tried to walk faster, something she clearly could not do, but she tried. The younger woman, after turning back, went back to her interrupted conversation on the phone again, responding to whoever was on the line, with peal upon peal of laughter.
And the old woman plodded on, behind her, in obvious and visible pain.
They were related, either by blood, or marriage. The baby in the pram was obviously the young woman’s infant son or daughter.
I wonder if the young woman thought to herself, even once, that her child would grow up seeing this example in front of her every day, and realise that he must also treat his parents or/and grandparents in the same way?
We didn’t utter a word to each other, my husband and I, all the way back home. It was an ugly and stark example of inhumanity, that we tried, vainly, to forget. But in my mind’s eye, even now, is a picture of that old woman, in an ochre salwar kameez, with a sweater over her cold self, bent over, trying her best to walk quickly, so that she does not irritate her daughter or daughter in law.
And I remembered ‘Old Women’, a poem written by K. Satchidanandan that I taught to my students in College, once. The poet compares old people to guiding maps, and he says, in the poignant last quartet of the poem:
You can fold them
and keep them handy :
who knows, they might help you find
your way home.
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
This has been written as a response to an invite by Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, to be part of Sahil Patel’s initiative and new pub ‘Reciprocal’, the primary aim of which is to foster a writing community that supports each other.
Shoutout to three writers I admire, and a story each, that they have written, which made me fall in love with their words all over again: I. Trudie Palmer Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她), and Harry Stefanakis
