Life's Bitter Joke

Humor is of several kinds; I won’t be able to enumerate all of them, but I know for sure there is genuine humor which help widen our face-lines, and there is wry humor which would only arouse uneasy feelings in the listeners/audience, and there is yet another kind of humor which is cruel. There are similarly jokes, which instead of make us laugh, may only prompt us to shed tears, bitter tears. This is what can be termed as life’s bitter jokes, and today I am going to share about one such bitter joke one of my friends narrated to me. It is immaterial who had narrated to me, but the fact is that it happened today to people known to me. And believe me, jokes have no color or creed or nationality, and can apply to all people in all situations.

People do make mistakes, but if we fail to look at the people who make mistakes, and only blow the mistakes out of proportions, we are bound to lose the touch of humanness, and that may be dangerous. This senior lady, who had lost her husband some three decades ago, had brought all her children up single-handedly, courageously, crossing several barriers, hills and valleys. She worked hard to make a living, and even as she nears her seventies, she stitches religious habits for a group of nuns, and that keeps her going. She is assisted by her eldest daughter, mother of six children, and wife of a drunkard, who is the sole bread-winner of the family. The mother and daughter duo had received an order to make a religious habit for a nun, and today was the deadline.

The senior lady had not eaten during the day, struggling to keep the deadline, and rushed to hand it over to the nun, who on seeing the outfit, shouted at the lady at the top of her voice. There had been a lack of communication, but that was not the reason for her to lose her temper and shout at the lady, who had made this outfit with great care and love. Her daughter younger daughter, who stood close-by was stunned to see how her mother was being humiliated, and was deeply hurt by the rude and rough behavior of the nun. The senior lady and her daughter depended on the nuns to make a living, and they valued the orders of the nuns greatly, but they could not believe their eyes when the nuns began to pour out all their anger on the lady.

The mother and her younger daughter were both greatly hurt, but they are helpless; the ruthless and cruel way the nun had treated them was more than they could bear. If the duo was well off, they could just say goodbye to the nuns, but they cannot afford to do that. They have to repair the habit, by replacing it with another set, and the senior lady was ready to travel for three hours to purchase cloth to replace the one they had made with wrong measurements. When I think of this situation, I feel sad, and at one moment there were a couple of tears at the corner of my eyes. How could life be so cruel to the have-nots? Is not there a way out for them to live with the honor and dignity they were created with? Should they continue to live on the mercy of the people who could hire and fire them at will?

The one image which comes to my mind when I think of the bitter jokes of life, is that of clowns of ancient day plays; these were men from the lowest strata of society, who struggled to make both ends meet, and opted to make a living by making people laugh on stage. While they laughed and made others laugh on stage, the reality at back-stage and at home was just the opposite. They laughed while their hearts cried bitterly, and such is the laughter the mother and daughter would have been indulging in today, and when I heard this incident narrated to me, I was helpless as to how I could console the daughter, leave alone her aging mother. It is one thing to listen to others narrating to us as it happened to them, and it is another thing to experience it for ourselves.

Monkey Business

These days we often hear about tigers, elephants and monkeys chasing people. Many have been killed by Sundarban tigers, who had dared to visit human habitats, rampaging and harming anyone they found on the way. The same has been true in Purulia, Midnapore and Bankura districts of West Bengal, where hordes of elephants would walk through paddy fields, villages, knocking down whatever they found. They sometimes were in hundreds, too impossible for the meager foresters, commissioned to chase them away. We are surprised that these animals, supposed to be kept at safe distance have at last come to threaten us, and many are really frightened of them.

In many villages and towns, monkeys have become a nuisance, chasing people, grabbing any eatable they may have, throwing stones at them, and at times indulging even in 'indecent' behavior. We do not need Charles Darwin to say that monkeys are our distant cousins; the affinity is rather close and we cannot take them casually. I remember some twenty years ago, as I was preparing to join the college studies, one of the famous Mathematicians Fr Franz Goreaux once told me that he had a monkey in his room, and I was quite curious to see it. He took me to his room, to the looking mirror and asked me to look at the mirror for the monkey. And lo and behold, I found one, very similar to me!

Jokes apart, but what makes these animals enter into our reserved zone, the restricted area? Common sense tells us that we have plundered their food, and the starving animals are out to seek food to fill their stomachs. Fortunately these animals are not as vengeful and greedy like the human race; they would fight tooth and nail to fill their stomachs, but once their stomachs are full, they would not touch even if the best of food appears before them. How I wish we human beings had learned this great lesson, of moderation in our needs. Even when these animals prawl in our courtyards, they do not think of the meal the next day. They are happy about what they had got for the day!

In fact, what is happening today, the animals chasing us from our habitats, is nothing new in history. All these years, we had tried to chase these animals from their habitat, in order to rob the little resources they had; we had emptied all their stock, and they are today left to survive on what we have robbed from their habitat. They do today exactly what we had been doing for decades and centuries, and we cannot stand before them and claim innocent. But one thing is for sure, the destruction they have done and continue to do in our villages is far marginal in comparison to what we have done to them.

Human race knows only to be on the defensive; I wish the people living close to forests and rivers gather together something for these animals, and place them in places where they are likely to look for food; it would be better to provide them what they look for, so that they do not go hunting for them. It is natural that when they do not get what they want dearly, they may not hesitate even to kill people. If only we take steps to provide them what they want, then they would be more than happy to remain indoors in the forests. But that means we have to sacrifice part of our booty and share it with them. The monkeys are beckoning us to share what we had looted from them; but if we refuse to, then they would force us to share with them, and the consequences may be splattered with blood.