Losing a loved one is one of the most traumatizing situations a person can go through. No wonder most of us crawl into our shells, ignore the real world, and wallow in grief for months, even years. That’s quite understandable, even expected.
But a bit different from ordinary mortals is Sarita Shrestha, who has exchanged her pain for strength and crafted an entire book out of her final separation with her husband, Nawaraj Kaji Shrestha. The book has turned out to be a sort of journal that talks, in lucid detail, of events since her husband’s illness, subsequent treatments and his foray into the other world. While its informative and cathartic value cannot be negated, the literary value also slowly begins to build up as we go through the pages.[break]
The memoir, as mentioned, begins chronicling days from when a disease afflicts Nawaraj Kaji and begins to weaken him. Unable to diagnose the disease in Nepal, the couple, with their daughter, flies to Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok, where chemotherapy and constant medical care for lymphoma seems to revive the patient. The pages after that are a constant struggle of trying to keep the patient in good health – through visits to cancer hospitals in India, Bharatpur and Bhaktapur, through their son’s engagement and other social obligations, through times of momentary wellness lapsing back to terrible side effects of the medication.
It’s a harrowing experience that we’ve all faced some time or the other – the excruciatingly slow wasting away of a dear one. And when the person in question is someone supposed to be with you all your life, it’s all the more miserable. But the writer bears it remarkably well, constantly drawing support from her relatives and well-wishers, from religion and spirituality. The courage of a woman, who tries to gather the threads of her fraying life, is evident in each page.
The words might lend hope and guidance to someone going through a similarly frightening situation. The writing is very simple and spontaneous, and could have done with a bit more polishing. But even this record of events is adequate to guide others who are undergoing the illness or death of a near one in similar circumstances. They can even learn about hospital and illness conditions, methods of recovery and economic management through this book.
In the midst of her husband’s illness, the author also notes down other important things that are happening around her – worries over her daughters’ marriages, the never ending chores, festivals and fairs, the need to build ties. She reminisces about happy times spent with her loving husband, about her marriage that happened in unusual circumstances. At many points, her writings begin to simply sound like a chronicle of events, complete with mentions of date and time. This is something that should have been avoided. Although it’s a natural occurrence in a factual narration, especially from a non-writer, such nitty-gritty takes away from the emotional structure. Another distraction in the memoir is that the writer constantly takes time off to thank the people who helped her. Although this is also normal, repeating the names and kind deeds of the same person nearly fifty times or more in the course of the book will certainly deter readers.
Shrestha does not restrict herself from the practical and mundane. She talks candidly, and at length, of the difficulties of staying on as a guest for too long. She talks about the way she feels like a burden to the hosts, which is really honest and true. At other times she describes her fear of funds, agonizing over the expensive medication and stay abroad, which is again quite justified, and makes us empathize with her. She also mulls a bit on religion, God, the unpredictability of life, relationships and togetherness. These snippets of her understanding are quite interesting. The best sample of her writings can be seen towards the end, where she speaks out extremely well on the absurdities of the caste system, and the ways in which she was pettily disregarded and made to feel excluded from her husband’s family for her entire life just because she happened to be a “Manandhar” and he, a “Shrestha.” These essays on the meaninglessness of caste differences, which serve no purpose other than to humiliate the supposedly lower caste, are quite coherent and laudable too.
But again and again, in the midst of her wanderings, the author comes back to what she had set out to do – to express her loneliness and sadness at being left alone by her husband of 30 years. The scene when she describes his departure, her disbelief and state of suspension have all been presented very well and it makes for a poignant and heart-wrenching read. The lines that emerge out of such unbearable trauma are beautiful, “My feelings, my fragrance, my light, my togetherness, my life, my wealth, my happiness, my peace, my path-bearer, he was everything for me.” At such times, everything else fades away before a wife suffering in isolation.
The writer, currently pursuing her M. Phil., is too much in love with reading and writing to do anything else.
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