The People Who Pass Through Our Lives

“On forgotten village roads,
young men stop
to give schoolchildren a lift,
taking them along on their journeys.
At busy city crossroads,
they quietly leave behind
the childhood they once carried.”
– N. Sivanesan

Is there anyone in this world who remains unchanged? And if I were to say that it is not merely human beings, but the entire earth itself that is made of change, would anyone disagree? Everything around us is in constant motion: the days, the hours, the seasons, nature itself. And it is not merely that these things change. Do they not change us, too, as they pass through our lives?

I have always felt that one need not be a leftist to accept the Marxist proposition that everything changes, except the law that everything changes. Consider Hitler, who came to power speaking of revolution, only to dismantle the very idea of revolution and establish dictatorship as law. Could we not add his name to the dictionary as another meaning of change, a reminder that even those who promise to transform the world can become its most terrible instruments of transformation?
Words, actions, money, attachment, hunger, affection, humiliation, authority, circumstance, fulfilment: the reasons that bring about change may differ from one person to another. But is change not the one unchanging law of this world? And yet, everything that has refused to yield to change continues to exist somewhere, does it not? In little villages ringed by mountains, where monkeys still swing from branches and cling to dangling roots, living as they always have, seemingly untouched by the evolutionary journey that transformed their distant relatives into human beings.

Whether it lifts us up or brings us down, change is indispensable to our lives. But what happens when that change comes to us through another human being?

“The music stopped
long ago.
Yet I keep playing
musical chairs,
moving from one chair
to another”

I am reminded of this poem by Nesamithran.

The music has stopped, but I continue searching for a chair, moving from one to the next as though the game were still going on. Perhaps this is what happens when the familiar ways of living no longer satisfy us. While everyone around me seems caught up in the familiar routines of marriage, family, income and the everyday business of living, my mind, wearied by the sameness of it all, begins to wander elsewhere; like a bird that builds its nest in someone’s home and, once settled there, begins to see the owner as a stranger, I too find myself looking at my old friends and familiar faces as though they were strangers, while seeking new friendships with unfamiliar minds that drift into my life like clouds, longing to travel alongside them even when I have no idea where the journey might lead.

And yet, even along such uncertain journeys, life never entirely fails me. In a book bought reluctantly, perhaps because someone insisted I buy it, I sometimes discover one or two poems that capture my heart. In much the same way, life never fails to place a few beautiful human beings along my path. Even when life itself loses its way, my longing to seek out new souls never does.

During the years when Clubhouse was at its liveliest, most of the people who travelled with me through those virtual rooms were in their forties, fifties and sixties. We would spend our nights talking and laughing together. Once, R. K. Anna joined the same room, only to leave almost immediately. Later, looking at me, a man still in my twenties, he asked with genuine astonishment, “How are you able to spend time with people like them?”

“Why, Anna? Aren’t they all our people?” I asked, unable to understand his surprise.

“No, that’s not what I mean. I can see the difference in our ages. I can’t even spend half an hour with them without feeling out of place. That’s why I left straight away,” he explained.

I still could not quite understand him.

Another friend once asked me, “How do you manage to get along with people much older than us? Their taste in music, the way they watch films, the silly jokes they make. Surely everything is different from what we like?”

At the time, I had no answer.

On another occasion, Sridharan Mama saw a photograph I had posted with a college student and asked, with a trace of mockery, “What is this? You’re even making friends with boys so young?”

All I could do was laugh it off. “I have friends in their twenties, and I have friends in their sixties.”

In a way, it was true. Whether twenty or sixty, which sky would turn away a bird that came looking for it?

It is not just me. Every one of us is searching for a sky somewhere in another person. And somewhere, in turn, we become the sky that someone else has been searching for. Put simply, is this not what life has always been about: seeking shelter, and becoming shelter for another?

But does life allow us to travel alongside everyone who finds shelter in us? No. That, too, is a law of nature. The sky cannot become a nest, can it? And yet, no bird that has come to rest there has ever left without shedding at least a feather of its own. Even after it has flown away, what is it that we gather to adorn our own wings, if not the feathers it left behind?

The film Narai Ezhuthum Suyasaritham centres on two men at opposite ends of their working lives: Manikandan, who is searching for a job, and Delhi Ganesh, who has retired. The foundation of the film is the following Thirukkural:

The world ordains two different ways: Acquiring wealth is one, attaining wisdom another (374)

Manikandan is an educated man, yet so poor that he cannot even afford to buy himself a cup of tea. He wanders in search of employment, while Delhi Ganesh, a retired man of means, helps him transform his circumstances and move towards a better life. Their acquaintance begins in conflict, but as the days pass, their relationship gradually blossoms into friendship. There is something extraordinarily beautiful about watching that transformation unfold.

Long before I grow old enough to have grey hair of my own, this film made me understand, with a force that demanded to be heard, that age is no barrier to friendship, or to any other human relationship.

Delhi Ganesh is a man accustomed to snapping at everyone around him, his behaviour shaped by male pride and the authority he believes comes with being the head of a family. But after he becomes close to Manikandan, something begins to change within him. For the first time, he apologises to his wife. He plays affectionately with his granddaughter. He begins to understand the feelings of his sons.

Under Delhi Ganesh’s instruction, Manikandan shaves and goes for an interview. For the first time, he is selected for a job.
How a person who enters our lives from a place we never expected can alter so much within us remains one of life’s most inexplicable wonders.

There are many people in this world who refuse to accept the key that life offers them. They continue to wander through the world with nothing but a broken lock.

In Illathavargal, a short story by Jayakanthan, an elderly man lives alone in his house. One day, a thief breaks in, only to hide himself inside a room. The old man discovers him. Without raising an alarm, he locks the room from the outside and begins speaking to the thief through the window.

The thief introduces himself as Tony and claims that he has come there after fleeing a murder case in a nearby slum, only to find himself trapped in the old man’s house. The elderly man, who has no one for company, invites him to play cards through the window.

With no way to escape, the thief spends the first two days doing as the old man asks, though not without considerable irritation. But as time passes, he begins to recognise the goodness of the man who has trapped him. His heart softens to such an extent that, when the old man is away, he even washes and hangs out both the old man’s clothes and those of his wife.

The old man, meanwhile, keeps trying to persuade him to change his life.

“You’re a good man, you know. I’ll protect you. I’ll find you a job. But only if you promise me you won’t steal again. Only if you promise you won’t go back to living this kind of life.”

He tries one way after another to reach the man’s heart. He even prepares tea and brings it to him.

At one point, the thief discovers that the very room in which he is imprisoned contains money, jewellery, vessels and all manner of valuables. He could easily take them and disappear. Yet, on the third day, Tony writes a letter, leaves it behind, and escapes with nothing but the money he has won at cards.

In the letter, he writes:
“I thought about taking the money I won, too, sir. But my circumstances aren’t good right now. I’m taking the money I won, with your permission. When better days come, I hope I can return and meet you as a good man myself.”

The old man’s eyes fill with tears as he reads Tony’s words.

When I visited India for a vacation, the college where I had studied invited me to return and speak with its students. I accepted the invitation and spent two hours talking with them. When the conversation ended, I asked the college administration if I could be dropped at Ashok Pillar on the college bus. They called a student and asked him to accompany me there.

As the student and I were preparing to leave, the college principal asked to see me. I went in, and what began as a conversation stretched into a long exchange. By the time I came out, half an hour had passed without my realising it. The student was still waiting for me at the entrance.

“Why didn’t you leave?” I asked him.

“Sir told me to take you with me,” he replied, with an innocence that left me momentarily speechless.

“Thambi, he asked you to take me on the college bus. The bus must have left by now. Do you think I don’t know how to get to Ashok Pillar on my own? You should have gone,” I told him, a little sharply. He paid no attention to my irritation.

“How could I say I’d accompany you and then leave by myself?” he asked, with genuine concern.

Is that not the power of the language of love? It can silence us without uttering a single word of reproach.

It took us three hours to travel from Avadi to Ashok Pillar. But those three hours were enough for me to learn a great deal about him. Introducing himself as Jay, he poured out the details of his life as though reading from an inventory: his home, his family, his studies, his dreams. Even after I had left, he continued waving goodbye.

At the time, I let him pass into memory as nothing more than a small part of that particular day.

But from then on, my days no longer seemed to dawn without his calling me, day after day, to ask how I was.

Once, while we were talking, Jay mentioned his father, who had passed away. Then he said, “I think my father is the one who sent you to me.” I had no answer. I fell silent.

The film Baththa, which I watched recently, found its way into my heart in a way I had not expected. In some respects, it can be seen as another telling of Jayakanthan’s Illathavargal.

Baththa is a man whom the entire village fears. Sabari, without realising who he is, locks him inside a school toilet. The film spends much of its time with Sabari unable to find a way to let him out, yet worrying that Baththa might die of hunger. Every day, he places porai, a simple snack, by the door so that the man inside will have something to eat.

Sabari tries everything. He laughs, scolds, threatens, speaks gently, pleads and, in the end, even weeps. Yet Baththa remains trapped.

One day, when Sabari has to leave for his village, he worries about how Baththa will find food after he is gone. So he tells others where the man is, saving his life in the process. The boy who had unwittingly imprisoned Baththa becomes the very person who rescues him.

Baththa never learns that Sabari was the one who had locked him in until the very end. In the final scene, Sabari steps forward himself and reveals the truth.

“I didn’t put the porai there on purpose, Anna. I only had enough money to buy porai for you.”

As he speaks, tears stream down his face. I can only imagine how many eyes in the audience must have filled with tears of their own. Unable to speak the truth without breaking down, Sabari can manage only these broken words, yet they are enough to break Baththa’s heart. The film ends with Baththa himself transformed.

I have often wondered how people who enter and leave our lives in one form or another possess the power to change our lives so completely.

Life keeps placing hundreds of people along our journey. They are like the kolams that spread across an entire street to welcome the gods carried past on temple chariots; like playing cards left scattered in a corner of a house when death interrupts a game midway; like the ground beneath a sacred fig tree, speckled with the droppings of birds that have come and gone; like empty liquor bottles abandoned among the graves of the dead; like trees spreading their shade beside little railway stations where trains pass without stopping; like women walking along the road, leaning beneath the weight of water-filled pots balanced on their heads and hips, while, back home, books sit tilted and crowded on their shelves, waiting to be read.

Like these, there are countless others all around us, each living a life we may know nothing about, each carrying stories we may never hear, each crossing our path in ways we may never fully understand.

Truthfully, human beings and life are not two separate things. To understand people is perhaps the greatest key to understanding life itself. I have come to see those who allow more people to become part of their lives as the ones who can best show us the way along life’s uncertain roads.

Life keeps introducing us, in our everyday existence, to people like Manikandan, who entered Delhi Ganesh’s life; Tony, also known as Duraisamy, who found his way into the home of an old man living alone; and Sabari, who changed the very course of Baththa’s life. But when I wonder whether we ever have enough time to stop and truly see these people, another poem by Nesamithran comes to mind.

“The bird that flies away
to build its nest in the clouds
after nailing to the cross
the hands that once reached out
to embrace it
finds, when it returns to earth,
no nest in which
it can dwell”