Perceptions
Seeds of Tragedy
Oishee Rahman’s parents.
Adolescence holds seeds of many tales. The sunny side is the story of progression to a fairy tale foothold in life, most lead to faceless standing for life. There are disappointments and dismay, there are bruises and blues still life goes on. And there are tragedies that deal unmitigated blows leaving permanent scars and the end devastates life. Only the inscrutable power can tell 'which seed will bloom and which seed will perish'.
The story of Oishee is the story of wrath of adolescence. Her most brutal acts of matricide and parricide are phantasmagoric. Such fury is born out of convoluted mind. It did not develop in a single day and fed on the omissions of parental care. What was once given out of unthinking love was withdrawn later with admonition. A rebel was born with fury as her master. So, Oishee's master became a demon unleashed that took the lives of her parents in a most diabolical manner. In most such cases the society is an unknowing observer, not an abettor.
Society moves with the changes of time. There are many factors of change - scientific and industrial development, economic and political development. In all these the influence of religion is omnipresent. And there are institutions that absorb the changes. The family is among the most important; then there is political institution and the education system. Every family is a sovereign institution in exercising its authority over its members, its offspring in particular.
For a family, a child for eternity has been 'life's longing for itself ' (Kahlil Gibran). Every child is different and unique. This is the nursery of raising a human being. Raising a child needs care and attention. It is principally a parents' world. The society by comparison is a peripheral orbit.
The parents decide how the responsibility is attended - to relax on the responsibility with profusion of privileges while they are engaged in their own world or locked in bitter relationship. Or when they go on with their lives and businesses leaving the child to suffer in neglect. There are families where the child suffer abuses for lack of bonding or if they are believed to have failed to fulfill their expectation. However, there are families who temper their love with discipline and duty.
In Oishee's case, some people point out the decline of the sobering influence of religion and there are those who heap wholesale blame on English medium co-education. Children in all ages by nature have never been known for wholesale devotion to the rituals of religion. However there are children who are particular about practice. The numbers I tend to believe have gone up in recent time. Hijabs are more in use and there are boys who have beard of clerical length. Indeed the boys and the girls in hijab are seen in greater number in city streets. For that matter the population of most cities has soared when the country has 160 million people.
And yes the co-education! The interest in girls and vice versa in boys is a perennial proclivity. Young men and women in our fathers time and in our time married for love when there was no co-education at school and college level. There are opportunities for greater exchanges among boys and girls in co-education English medium schools. But if there are willing partners they will always find ways of falling in love. The neighborhoods are open one cannot practically restrain boys and girls to meet if they decide to do so. Even English medium schools have prayer rooms for boys and girls. Even English medium school girls wear hijab and even fall in love!
The famous final frame of ‘Les Quatre Cents Coups’. (The 400 blows)
There is good company and there is bad company. The problem with the girl is that she fell into bad company. It is drug addiction that allowed the demon to take hold of Oishee. Drug is a social problem! Besides laxity is an abettor. The hapless parents were perhaps initially much too indulgent of their loving daughter and privileges abounded. Such circumstances turned the head of the girl and she picked up a bad habit and bad company. Restraint when it came only fuelled her fury. And when senses leave hell descends. Oishee brutally killed her parents who gave her life and love.
Profusion of privileges in an unthinking environment of laxity of attention or for that matter lack of loving attention and abusive neglect can both do hideous harm to the child in adolescence. It results in vagrancy and at the worst most savage murder what Oishee did to her parents. We mourn their 'most unnatural' death.
Here I was reminded of Francois Truffaut's film The 400 Blows. The many blows of most unkind lack of attention and heartless neglect that the adolescent child Antoine Doinel suffered at the hands of his father, step-mother and class teacher made him a petty thief. The touching tale of abandonment, his incarceration and deportation to a faraway correctional centre brings to fore the seeds of tragedy in adolescence. He finally escaped and found freedom in a solitary sea beach.
There are those who tell me the country is going through a bad time and the society is in a volatile situation due to political acrimony. Before long I was devastated by tragic deaths of two young boys in adolescence that occurred in two families I know. The younger one was a16 year old teenager that I knew from his birth. He had a lost look on his face. His father abandoned the child and his mother married for the second time and had little time for interaction with the boy. He was busy with his mother's baby and his mother's husband was nice to him. One day he got a revolver and shot him in the forehead in the dead of night. The note he left behind said, “Never love the world and the people.”
The other a teenager of perhaps 18-20 years was from a well-known family of great fortune. He was found dead in unnatural circumstances with the door locked in a major city of Northern America. He was brought out and was declared dead. I never saw him. But I cried. Perhaps my tears spoke for his inner needs.
Life can be unfair for a child in adolescence even when the child had very little; even when he had everything. For care and attention remains an uncharted territory; seeds of tragedy in adolescence scripts its own tale.
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