Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt — writes J.M. Coetzee in Waiting for the Barbarians. This one line has stayed with me from the time I read that novel. This was the third novel of Coetzee I was reading and I haven't read him since the day, 25 August 2014, I finished it. I have been on a break from Coetzee and I hope to read Disgrace once again soon.
Coetzee had answered a question, through this line, which had been nagging me for some time. I always wondered about my inclinations and biases when it came to pick a book. In my teenage, which lasted up to the age of 23, I always picked up books which were emotionally lacerating. My instincts led me to choose books which made me blank with their last line.
"There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap years." — wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Ivan is an ordinary prisoner in a Soviet labour camp in the 1950s, in Stalin's USSR. This single line is haunting beyond measure once you arrive at it which coincides with Ivan's bedtime in gulag.
I never felt a need to relate with any of the characters of the books I read. Their pain did the job. Pain is universal, happiness is inherently subjective and local. A woman losing her child at birth, a son grieving over the death of his mother, or a father losing his grown-up son; the pain is the same irrespective of the geography, anthropology and politics. It will be the same in the USA or Burma or Liberia. How one deals with that pain is something very local, having evolved over centuries guided by traditions and exigencies.
What I find strange is the way society limits and regulates the expression of pain. I am not aware of the restrictions placed upon the expression of agony across different cultures but I can talk about what happens (used to happen) in the western state of Rajasthan, India. The villages in Rajasthan have Rudaalis who are professional mourners. These women, who live at the margins of the village ecosystem, are summoned when an upper caste male of the village dies. The womenfolk of the so-called upper castes are prohibited to display their emotions in public. These Rudaalis are hired to cry on their behalf, to represent their grief and to broadcast their wailing through their voice in the community. I wonder what makes Rudaalis so good at their job.
Pain is a very grand word. But what exactly it means? The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines pain as — "An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage". Coetzee certainly didn't have this definition in his mind when he declared the truth of pain above everything. A sprained neck or a bruised toe is certainly painful and we do have the ability to verbalize these kinds of obvious 'painful' experiences. Even a baby who doesn't have the ability to express the physical pain through words can do so by crying. But physical pain can be cured.
What can't be cured through modern medicine is anguish frozen deep inside our hearts, a festering wound of an indelible past. I reserve the word 'pain' for physical sufferings. I prefer to use the words — anguish, agony, heartache, grief, torment and affliction for various shades of mental sufferings.
I have always preferred two Sanskrit words to describe any kind of unintelligible pain — व्यथा & वेदना. The Buddhist teachings have a vast literature on the word वेदना.
When Kunti went to meet Karna before the impending battle of Mahabharata, she was in deep pain (read anguish). The verses from Rashmirathi beautifully portrays her condition.
सुत की शोभा को देख मोद में फूली,
कुंती क्षण-भर को व्यथा-वेदना भूली.
भर कर ममता-पय से निष्पलक नयन को,
वह खड़ी सींचती रही पुत्र के तन को
When Karna hears out the confession of Kunti and responds, his response exudes the pain that he has lived throughout his life. In Coetzee's framework, all this pain is truth.
डूबते सूर्य को नमन निवेदित करके,
कुन्ती के पद की धूल शीश पर धरके।
राधेय बोलने लगा बड़े ही दुख से,
‘‘तुम मुझे पुत्र कहने आयीं किस मुख से ?
‘‘क्या तुम्हें कर्ण से काम ? सुत है वह तो,
माता के तन का मल, अपूत है वह तो।
तुम बड़े वंश की बेटी, ठकुरानी हो,
अर्जुन की माता, कुरूकुल की रानी हो।
‘‘मैं नाम-गोत्र से हीन, दीन, खोटा हूँ
सारथीपुत्र हूँ मनुज बड़ा छोटा हूँ।
ठकुरानी ! क्या लेकर तुम मुझे करोगी ?
मल को पवित्र गोदी में कहाँ धरोगी ?
‘‘है कथा जन्म की ज्ञात, न बात बढ़ाओ
मन छेड़-छेड़ मेरी पीड़ा उकसाओ।
हूँ खूब जानता, किसने मुझे जना था,
किसके प्राणों पर मैं दुर्भार बना था।
Lama Tsongkhapa (1357 — 1419), who was a great master of Tibetan Buddhism said that there are eight types of suffering.
1. The suffering of birth.
2. The suffering of old age.
3. The suffering of illness.
4. The suffering of death.
5. The suffering of encountering what is unpleasant.
6. The suffering of separation from what is pleasant.
7. The suffering of not getting what one wants.
8. The suffering of the five appropriated aggregates.
This neatly encapsulates every kind of pain Coetzee proclaimed to be the truth. But is Coetzee right? Is pain the only truth and everything else is subject to doubt? Literature has its own limits. It does a very good job of portraying the problems but offers no solution. It creates a thirst but offers nothing to quench it.
Can this pain be cured? Advaita Vedanta claims it can be.
Isha Upanishad (Mantra 7) says:
यस्मिन् सर्वाणि भूतानि आत्मैवाभूद् विजानतः।
तत्र को मोहः कः शोक एकत्वमनुपश्यतः ॥
"He in whom it is the Self - Being that has become all existences that are Becomings, for he has the perfect knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief who sees everywhere oneness ?
Buddha showed us the path 2500 years ago. All the pain is merely an outcome of our ignorance. I have personally experienced that the pain can be dissolved with a little maturity and understanding. And that's a relief.
Coetzee is wrong.
उदास’ शब्द ‘उदासी’ की जगह नहीं ले सकता।
— निर्मल वर्मा
PS: For a more complete description of suffering, one may refer to the editorial, "Bending Low with Load of Life: Meaning of Human Suffering" in the May 2021 issue of Prabuddha Bharata.
