Poetry: Like salad for the soul

Poetry: Like salad for the soul: This term at school, my ten-year-old son is learning about similes, metaphors and poetry. “My eyes are dark like the night,” he wrote this week, as part of his language homework. I thought he had finished...
Salad for the soul




 The piece “Like salad for the soul” by Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta (The Hindu, November 6) itself flowed into one’s soul like a poetry. By the time one finished the quote in the penultimate paragraph which read: “…Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang…” thoughts had wandered elsewhere making tough to separate one’s own memories and those in the narrative. Reading the article was a profound experience.
The illustration brought back to mind a scaring personal experience of 1950’s. During my Class VII vacation, I was in my sister’s house in a remote village in Kannur (Kerala). The house had a big compound and my sister had some goats being reared for milk. By around 11 a m suddenly we heard the barking of a canine of dogs and when we came out of the house and saw, a young lamb was being bitten by several dogs.
After driving away the dogs, we started giving ‘first aid’ to the bleeding lamb. I still remember its pathetic look piercing into my eyes. It was one of the pet lambs for my sister. I was asked to accompany a helper from the neighborhood to carry the lamb to a Veterinary Hospital, some five kilometers away(In Mahe which was part of Pondicherry then where medical facilities were much better than those available in Malabar). The helper was another boy and we carried the lamb by turn. The Vet there, after dressing the wounds, suggested injections for rabies as an abundant precaution.
The helper and I commuted the 5 km route on alternate days, carrying the lamb, and once the wounds subsided, making it walk.  The lamb survived.
M G Warrier, Mumbai

Comments

Joseph Erathara said…
Very touching indeed.Pure compassion and love.
joseph
May 31, 2017 at 6:10 PM
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