Renaissance of Life
Stirred by Subba Rau’s intellectualism, Suresh pondered over his right to live after having snuffed out Shanti's life.
‘What does my killing her really mean?’ he thought. ‘By ending her life what I deprived her were the possibilities of life. Oh, the poor thing, what dreams she might have had and what life would have offered her! How happy she would have made her man and their children! Who knows what difference she would have made to the people around her? Why wouldn’t she have enriched the society at large and contributed to the world even? But my senseless act ruined all that, didn’t it? And being featured here what does life hold for me either? If only I were hanged, I wouldn’t have to endure all these despairs of denial. She is dead and gone, and as they say, the dead have no problems, but my crime has made me a lifeless corpse! Wouldn’t it be burdensome living in the denial mode? It serves me right for depriving the possibilities of her life!’
‘What about all these who are locked up here?’ he began to wonder. ‘What possibilities of life do they really have behind the bars? Don’t they realize that by slaying whom they hated, they compromised their own life forever? But, isn’t revenge a mad emotion, and murder its negative outcome? How naïve it is to imagine that the threat of the gallows would deter one to resort to murdering! It is man’s negative mindset that makes him go after someone’s throat. In his mad rage, would man ever envision the noose around his own neck? Having avenged himself, possibly, he wouldn’t even care if he were hanged then and there. If only one realizes that by killing the other, he was burying the possibilities of his own life, won't the sense of self-preservation obliterate the urge for revenge? And the law, instead of stressing upon the dangling by the rope, would serve well by highlighting the despairing aspects of life behind bars. Then, wouldn’t it be a case of saving a life to save lives?’
It too dawned on him that since the possibilities of his life were within Tihar, he should be alive to the reality of it all. With the appreciation of the situation of his life thus, he began to see what possibilities it held for him. And as the empathy he developed for the fellow prisoners gave him a new insight about himself, he found solace in helping the troubled. Thus, as he tried to make life easy for others, he was relieved of his own pain as well.