The Value Of a Life

What is the value of life, they ask. Would I rather save one life or ten lives, they ask. I don’t know, I say. Do they, I ask.

Today starts out like any other day. I wake up half an hour after the alarm goes off, go to class, sleep halfway through it, and have breakfast. The rest of the day would pretty much have been ordinary too, had it not been for the impending text message on my cell.

‘Blood needed urgently

Anyone willing to donate?’

I sit in quiet consternation at the mucky black granite table of our essentially south Indian canteen, sipping my mixed fruit juice slowly, deliberating over whether or not to go present myself to the noble cause. I find numerous reasons to put off going. For one, I would have to take the trouble of travelling all the way to the hospital where the patient was admitted. Hello, they needed the blood, not me! And then, I would have to miss some of my classes. To top it all, I wasn’t even sure whether I could sit through the whole ordeal. Yes, sigh, I am afraid of needles. I have slight Trypanophobia. Then, I try to find reasons why I should go. I find only one: it is my duty as a human being. It is my duty as a grandson, son, brother, friend, nephew, uncle. That gives me a little push. I look out the window and see a cloudy sky with intermittent splashes of sunlight. This is rare weather for heatwave city, a.k.a. Vellore, and I think, ‘What better day, than today, to travel to CMC?’ I get off the chair and step outside, but still do not call the sender of the message. Then I remember the promise I had made to myself: to never ever say ‘no’ to any “good” opportunity that presented itself to me.  

And so, I find myself standing at the hospital’s main gate. I call up the patient’s father and he tells me to come to the adjacent gate.  For fifteen whole minutes, there is no sign of him. Though the sky is shady, the humidity is high, and my t-shirt gets drenched with sweat in a matter of a few minutes. Vile thoughts bubble in my head as I stand in a dingy corner near the gate. There I was, missing my classes to save his son’s life, and he leaves me standing out in the heat for so long. How long could it possibly take to reach the gate? I wince at the cruelty of my baseless thoughts and brush them away. I was just donating blood, not doing something extraordinary. I take a gander around the hospital campus. At just eleven in the morning, the hospital is brimming with people. North Indians, South Indians, North-East Indians, and even some goras. They are there as far the eye can see, dominating every nook and cranny of the dull campus. I can safely assume that the number of people in the hospital premises at that instant is greater than the actual population of Vellore. They are different people from different walks of life. They have only one thing in common. Sad eyes illuminated by faint rays of hope. All of a sudden, my heart is filled with a twisted kind of sadness.

Just as I am about to find a place to sit down, I see a genial looking man wave at me. He has sad eyes, but a smile on his face. He hugs me as soon as he comes within hugging distance. He thanks me profusely, for coming,  and calls me a ‘great person’. That somehow manages to make me feel very small. His son’s kidneys had haemorrhaged, he tells me as we make our way to the hospital ward where blood donations are taken care of, and they need blood to carry out surgery the next week. As we are about to enter the room, he steps aside and waves his hands over some candles burning in front of a portrait of Jesus Christ, in the fashion a Hindu does when he takes aarti. Hard times have the power to change peoples’ notions of faith. I could never have imagined a devout Hindu from some small town in Jharkand to bow before any God other than his own.

As we sit in the waiting room, he tells me that he has been there for months now. He has spent lakhs of rupees on his son’s treatment, who is just three years my elder. He had been selected for an extremely well-paid job during campus placements. But, oh, the futility of it all. On the day he is supposed to be sitting for his final exams, he would be lying drugged on the operation table. I find myself silently praying that he be able to sit for his exams, only to realize the effort to be in vain. Sometimes, I just can’t understand life. It showers you with happiness for a moment and then takes it all away, leaving you to writhe in the barrenness of a drought, in deep search of pond of happy memories, which can only be but a mirage. When he apologises, over the phone, for not being able to pay certain wages, my heart almost breaks.

This really gets me wondering. What is the value of a life?  Is it less than a hundred or, say, a thousand lives? Is the pain and grief of this father any lesser than the pain of a hundred other such fathers? Are his indomitable efforts at saving his precious child, any lesser, any less valuable? Life presents such a paradox. What would you do? Would you try to save one life or ten lives, if saving one life was more probable? Does that one life hold no value in front of those other ten lives?