Sickness however brief changes your relationship not only with the things around but also with your own physical and emotional being. It’s invisible but perceptible presence of your end that makes life precious.

Poet Bertolt Brecht puts it very succinctly when he says, “Almost everyone has loved the world when on him two clods of earth are hurled.” Pain and subsequent helplessness is what one is confronted with when sick.

Baba Farid, the pioneer of Punjabi poetry, had a long life lived to the full. He was a saint of legendary status who could be rightly called ‘mahatapassvi’[a great ascetic]. As age caught with him he was filled with anguish: “Budha hoya shaikh Farid, Kanban laggideh / jay saovarhiyan jiwana, bhi tunnhosikheh [Shaikh Farid has grown old, his body shakes / the body will be reduced into dust even if one lives for full hundred years]”.

He probably composed this couplet when he was in his eighties. It gives us a hint that he suffered from essential tremor or Parkinson’s disease and makes him think of brevity of human life. The difference between short and long human life becomes meaningless when juxtaposed against the unending flow of time, immeasurable and unfathomable. He seems to have employed the famous Biblical phrase; dust unto dust. In a unique expression he describes the sense of existential human helplessness when old age and sickness catch with one.” Inhin nikki jan ginthulldongarbhaviaumm / ajj Farida koojra saokko han thiviumm [With these small legs of mine, I have traversed desert and mountains / But today my water bottle appears as if it’s hundreds of miles away]”.

Baba Farid has hinted at the psychological dimension of individual’s life when its fragility becomes unbearable. He was given to traveling far and wide. He and Baba Guru Nanak are the two toughest men in the modern cultural history of the Punjab. But their physical toughness was proportionate to their empathy.

Baba Farid talked of old age, sickness, fragility of life and human helplessness when confronted with approaching end.

But it is not just old age that makes an individual prone to disease. Extreme emotional stress can debilitate an individual as young as legendry Sahiban, one of the main protagonists of celebrated tale of Sahiban and Mirza. Mirza, Sahiban’s cousin, after completion of his studies leaves city of Khiwa on the left bank of the River Chenab for his home town Danabad which is situated away on the right side of the River Ravi. Aftermath of his departure has a devastating psychological effect on her. She becomes bed-ridden with her emaciated body.

Poet Hafiz Barkhurdar (17th century) describes her condition thus: “Sahiban dehan buttiyan. Nukk de vichdukhaa / baajhvisaalnanikleybirhon jinn balaa /Vaidkehansaudaahai, aakhaneinnakaa/ suddh ajvain kuttke, ghoti yadaenbanaa…[ They make Sahiban inhale smoky herb laced wicks through the nostrils/ But how can the monster called love be exorcised without lovers’ union? / Apothecaries declare it’s a sign of insanity while other say there is no such a thing at all / with crushed ginger and Ajwain seeds they make potions and make her drink]”.

It was a glimpse of the story of woman in love when she had to suffer socially forced separation. The worse disorder is lack of love and connectivity. A woman brought her young son to poet Sultan Bahu [17th century] who in her opinion was misguided and had gone astray. Bahu started the dialogue; ‘do you love animals’? ‘No, pat came the reply’. ‘Do you love birds? We have so many”. ‘No’. ‘Do you love trees and changing seasons’? ‘Not at all’. ‘Do you love some woman’? ‘No way sir’. Sultan Bahu looked at his mother in sadness and said; ‘lady, I am sorry. He is a bottomless pit. He will not hold whatever is put in it. The disorder is incurable’.

Disease changes individuals by bringing to fore the stark reality of uncertainty of human life. Humans have grown smug in the belief that they ’have sat in houses held to be indestructible/ of those cities will remain what passed through them, the wind’. It seems in the distant past disease/pandemic devastated humans putting their very existence at risk because of their inability to understand nature and its working. In our contemporary world it’s the other way round. Aggressive exploring of nature and its forces has created unprecedentedly dangerous situation with fallout at global level. Exploration has in reality turned out to be no-holds-barred intervention in the natural processes.

Profit-driven economic, political and social structures have played havoc with naturally evolved ways of living. What was for centuries flaunted as ‘conquest of nature’ by clergy, scientists and scholars has proved to be an utter disaster not only for humankind but also for other creatures inhabiting this planet. What is now urgently needed is to fundamentally revise our conceptual framework which wrongly places humans at the centre of the things. Hasn’t current pandemic shown ‘as flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport’? In order to survive we have to be partners, not masters. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2020