Tomorrow is Onam, the annual harvest and Hindu cultural festival, celebrated in Kerala, and every part of the world and the country, where there is Malayali presence.   

Legend has it that it is on Onam that the benevolent Asura King Mahabali who once ruled Kerala returns to visit the subjects of his erstwhile kingdom from the netherworld where he was supposed to have been banished by Vamana, the fifth avatar of Hindu deity Vishnu.

Though the festival is intricately associated with Hindu mythology, it is celebrated with gaiety, fun and frolic by every Malayali (as a person belonging to Kerala is known as), irrespective of faith and geography. Malayalis who are known to emigrate to all over the globe to make a living make it a point to return to their ancestral homes to celebrate Onam with their elderly parents, relatives, friends and loved ones.

 Onam festivities are known for games, especially the Tug-Of-War, and other games and competitions, partaken by children and women with equal gusto. One of Onam’s many attractions is Pulikali (tiger dance), in which well built (read obese) men, painted as tigers on their elaborate torso dance in public places. Pookalam(a carpet created out of flowers, picked by children, ideally from the neighborhood or their own gardens) adorn every Malayali home. Sumptuous lunch on Onam consists of Sadhya, a lavish serving of rice, numerous vegetarian dishes and various types of payasam(an extremely sweet kheer), plantain, pappad, ghee and pickle served on banana leaves, laid out on the floor, and consumed by people seated on the floor.

As I write about Onam within the cold environs of the ICU I work in, I peek over the computer screen to read the vital parameters displayed on the monitor connected to a 38-year-old woman.

Skin and bone, with a distended abdomen she is an apology of a ‘human being’. She had been ill for over 20 years. Constipated and anorexic, she has been unable to eat. She was brought to the hospital by a NGO involved in palliative care who found her in extreme squalor and inhuman circumstances of her ‘home’.  Good Samaritans of the organization attempted to give her a chance at life by admitting her to the hospital.

 The woman orphaned at a young age was reared by a kindhearted man, who married her off to a man who he thought might take care of her. Very soon, she was ditched by her husband. To fend for herself. Unable to take care of her daughter by herself for unfavorable financial and health reasons, she entrusted her to an orphanage.

In the hospital, she was admitted to the ICU. She needed to be fed, and her chronic constipation treated. She was fed through a tube. Her body, not used to feeds for a long time had crucial electrolytes go berserk (something called ‘refeeding syndrome’). She developed seizures. As her doctors barely managed to keep her alive by tube feeds and IV drip, her wasted muscles failed to help her breathe to wash out Carbon dioxide. This blunted her consciousness. Her blood turned acidic.  Her breathing was assisted by what is called Non-Invasive Ventilation, in which breaths are delivered by a tight-fitting mask, instead of through a tube inserted into the trachea, which will then be connected to the ventilator. The organization which admitted her to the hospital did not have money to fund the latter costly treatment.

As I left the ICU that evening, the din of tug-of-war competition between the hospital staff arose from within the hospital premises. I wondered what Onam, which was being celebrated with fun and gaiety in Kerala meant anything, if at all to the hapless woman who was a wreckage of society, she and I were part of.

Orphaned, abandoned by her husband, and separated from her daughter due to squalor and poverty, wasn’t she indeed a wreckage of an insensitive and indifferent society?

On returning to work in the ICU after Onam break, I found the cot on which the unfortunate woman was being treated, neatly done to receive the next patient. Expectedly. Would Mahabali, whose reign of Kerala saw the state in best of times, have been able to do something to make life better for the woman subsisting in inhuman circumstances. Sick, lonely, poor and famished?