As stories of human trauma pour in from New Orleans, I am fazed by the uncanny resemblance of these real-life incidents with that of the fictionalised content in Portuguese writer Jose Saramago’s Blindness.
In the Nobel laureate’s novel, blindness – a milky patch of white – catches up with the entire residents of a country. The ones affected initially are quarantined in a mental asylum with the guards given strict orders to shoot any one who wanders outside. Food is served once a day but things go out of hand when the number of the blind swells uncontrollably. There is looting for food, molestation, death and murder. Some blind men form a cartel to plunder the allotted food resources; the weak comply until there is more mayhem, dead bodies, and more guards firing upon the distressed innocent.
Stories from Louisiana’s Superdome looked no different. The men weren’t blind in the strict sense of the word. They could have been blind to the larger concerns of others. In the blindness that prevailed, everything happened that shouldn’t have. The healing would never be total.
I know a tsunami survivor, who cannot think of returning to the Andamans where her husband still camps hoping to get the promised tsunami relief. She remembers the earthquake that preceded the killer wave. The first one washed away household equipment. A larger one that followed then took away those who had ran out to the reclining seabed to reclaim their belongings. She was in a hospital, having delivered a baby girl just a day earlier. She had to put up there with just a shoestring staff until the dead and injured started arriving. She was safe but the trauma lingers on.
No amount of telling images on television can convey the true plight of individuals who are battered by calamities – natural or man-made. Between television and your vision is a space of “living room” comfort that robs a little of the sting from third-party agony.
With written words it is a different ballgame altogether. Reading Blindness, I had visualised a stretch of blind humanity, strutting on their own waste, sauntering on untold obstacles, dying miserably. However, what was overwhelming about the masterpiece was that despite the utter hopelessness of the situation, you are still prompted to believe in hope – in the “victory of civilised values over evil.”
Isn’t that the missing element in the New Orleans disaster stories? Isn’t there a sense of total resignation in the story of that boy who cried out for his dog and collapsed vomiting? In the harrowing plight of women who had to watch their girls being snatched away? In the surrender of men who couldn’t protect their womenfolk, let alone money and food?
This isn’t fiction; this isn’t cinema. These all raise disturbing questions – those that have started circulating in chain e-mails comparing the flashfloods in Mumbai with Katrina in New Orleans. As suffering endures, the bottom line becomes less murky: The invincible had woken up a trifle too late in protecting its own turf.
