Beauty of Broken Bones

As in the previous blog, Safar-A Journey of Life, I apprehended that my left knee was not keeping well. I did MRI and found a chronic ACL tear and a grade II meniscus. It needed surgery and, shockingly, a prescription of six weeks' rest. I am discharged from the hospital, and now I have started the rehabilitation process. It was a leg twist that turned into suffering. Movement is crucial for growth, and I am seized in freedom. I am quite aware of this circumstance. I have been injured in my life. The story ebbs and flows. It contains both pain and humour, setback and resurgence.  

The sunset in my village carries a promise of life, making everything picturesque, as Milton says beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. My eyes were never tired of creating sense and scene out of everything in my village, and here the heart beats loudest in the world’s quietest places. Time grows playing with mud and mustard. Snow falls in the gentle quietness of winter nights, and roofs never felt the burden of wind and snow. It was that one tin sheet of roof that got separated by the heavy winds of night and fell aimlessly into the courtyard of my house. Grandmother placed it over the henhouse. The plot was set.

 One fine evening in 1990 when I was struggling to catch chickens with my grandmother, the same tin sheet of roof blown by those western winds sliced my forehead and blood rushed out. I was dreadfully silent when one of my distant Dr. Uncle stitched my forehead, and during those days stains of stitches would leave imprints. My forehead in between the brows still has an inverted moon as a sign of that cut. The needle mercilessly pierced the skin. I dropped a tear and did not cry. I could create no meaning out of it. My grandmother regretted it. She is believed to have punished the chick that I had failed to catch.  The ritual evenings of childhood were determined by sending the pet to their dwelling places. A lot of buzz and wit was needed to close the day for pets and kids in villages. But it needed western winds to injure me. It feels like a western plot in cohort with my grandmother.

A few years later a maternal uncle at around 10 pm at night was ironing the clothes while I was dangerously half-asleep close to the iron. I opened my eyes and saw my reflection in the soleplate of the iron, very clean to prevent clothes from stains.  I checked my hairstyle. I would do that 36 times a day when I was in 7^th class. I adjusted my hair and the iron accidentally fell on my right eye, creating a 'srrr' sound that cut through the silence. Pain, soaring, irritation and swelling made the night one of the longest in my life. Then a gentle but resilient table fan of the 1980s, which had survived the conflict of 1984 in Kashmir, gave respite by blowing air into my sore and painful eye. I got luckily solace. The feeling of the table fan was not less than that of a mother hugging and consoling me. The soleplate of iron was an assurance of pain and happiness. Today I connect my youth to that reflection of a strange mirror – a soleplate of iron. It never stained a cloth, but it did blemish my eye- a mark that is nostalgic with the socio-political and cultural struggle of my young days.  Scars that remained meant that pain and the past are memories and I have survived.

Back in 2015 I was hosting an International seminar in Islamic studies in Srinagar, a bad omen/an evil struck me. I fell from a stair and had a Jones fracture. I broke my metatarsal bone in the right foot. A six week rest was recommended by the orthopedic. It broke me completely. Six weeks rest 11 years before at 29 would mean caging a bird. In 2017 I met a bike accident and received 7 stitches in my head and two on my chin bone. Chin bone had a minor fracture, along with a new problem called cervical.  Despite all of this I went to gym and worked hard to shape myself and gave vent to all my past stumbling and frustrations. Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, speaks of the absurdity of existence and an endless struggle of life without any end. My gym sessions after the accident were not mere physical training; they were acts of rebellion against absurdity. Each repetition of iron weights was a declaration that pain would not dictate the terms of my existence. Like Sisyphus pushing his boulder, I found meaning in the very act of resistance In 2025 when a heavy mirror from an Almirah in Thannamandi stuck my eye brow. I drove the car with one hand and covered the wound with another only to receive another needle into my skin. I came back after few minutes and cried in one corner of my room. Few minutes later I made a strong cup of tea and cherished the existence. Marcus Aurelius perceives this universe as a single interconnected whole (the logos). What seems like random evil (a mirror falling, a stair giving way, a bike sliding) is part of a larger rational order we cannot fully see. Our task is not to understand every “why,” but to respond with virtue. My car and the right hand and a huge cry were stoic response to the pain and suffering. But I have learnt like stoics never to ask why?

 Finally in 2025 I twisted my leg to receive a surgery. I m right now in the bed, kind of quarantine and writing about those stitches, cuts and fractures and what life has to offer in between this.   This way one can access that in my life injuries are constant, but thank God they never became lethal. Nietzsche reminds us that suffering is the crucible of strength: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” The fracture became a paradox -a wound that taught me resilience. Life will cut and slice more but I will not cease my resilience and rebellion. I will keep my car ready. I will keep my needle prepared.  I will toughen my skin.