In Whose Name Do We Suffer?

But despite this charge,this is in some ways a profoundly religious book. Eliot once said of Tennyson’s poetry that what made it religious was “not the quality of its faith but the quality of its doubt”. The book is not simply an intellectual claim: suffering refutes religion. It is not simply an exposé of the cant of priests and gurus about suffering. It expresses a deeper existential indignation that presupposes that there is someone to be indignant at. It is an indignation that often makes sense only against the backdrop of some claim that this is not all meaningless,of some claim that there is value that is not ephemeral. It is the depth of the doubt that grabs you.

Shourie’s book will generate so many conversations that will help overcome a culture of avoidance. We are supposedly a religious society; but we actually never debate religion: the quality of our faith makes us irreligious. There is a silence about so many forms of suffering; and perhaps this will open a conversation about how we cope with extraordinary and relentless suffering of children. Most of us cannot even imagine what it is like to be confronted with such situations.

But what makes the book moving is Shourie’s personal account. Despite a sense of unavenged cosmic indignation,the book is suffused with extraordinary tenderness and love. Reading about Shourie’s family coming together to participate in Aditya’s life; Aditya’s own struggle and receptivity; and the reservoirs of courage that are summoned in the face of great physical and emotional pain is a bracing experience. Love creates value. But there is still no resting place in the redemptive power of love. Aditya’s mother is afflicted with Parkinson’s.

Shourie is an extraordinary public figure. Reading this book,it is hard not to make comparisons with accounts of the inner life of another public figure: Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle’s indomitable resolve is often attributed to his daughter Anne,who suffered from Down’s syndrome. She was the emotional centre of his life; he seemed to open up to her in ways he did to no one else. But just as Shourie draws strength and a deep joy from Aditya,de Gaulle described Anne as the joy who “helped me overcome the failures in all men and to look beyond them”. The character of the Shourie family comes through and through. But there is also the pathos of these two powerful men,for whom it is tragically humbling to come to terms with the idea that they cannot help the most important thing in their lives.

De Gaulle made the most tragically beautiful remark at Anne’s death,“Now she is like all the others.” Shourie’s account,perhaps with less poetry and more bluntness,touches on similarly deep questions; it puts who we are into question. He is open to the idea that people cope with this abyss in many different ways,and draw solace from many sources. There are tantalising accounts of encounters with a range of gurus from Sai Baba to Krishnamurthy. But what he will not stand is anything that will subsume the suffering of a child in a larger narrative. Shourie persuasively articulates the view that in the face of suffering you can either be with the victim or the torturer. If you provide consolation for suffering you side with the torturer and deny the reality the victim faces. Perhaps more than he recognises,God may be on Shourie’s side. After all,the only way in which God cannot appear as torturer is to suffer himself. This is why Christ suffers. This is why Krishna cannot answer Draupadi’s loss of her sons,and dies forlorn under a tree. There is no answering a mother’s cry. But this book still has the extraordinary courage to make most of life.