“I do not want my name or photograph to appear in the paper. I have strong reservations about it,” said Mathew (name changed) over the telephone. For him giving away his name and identity to a public domain was betraying a pact made with his inner self. A selfless act loses its sanctity once it leaves his personal realm.
For Mathew, a software engineer, it began when a stranger, old and sick, sauntered into his compound a couple of years ago. The hunt for a shelter for him took Mathew to a home for the abandoned in the outskirts of the city. Mathew reluctantly talks about his morning routine on Mondays and Tuesdays. “I am usually there around 7.45 a.m., and it takes me over an hour to bathe and clean eight to ten inmates,” he says. “There” is the Home of Love, an institution for the destitute in Kottooli, and Mathew is among the few outsiders who pitch in regularly.
Mathew's duty is charted out. Realising that cleaning the bedridden and the aged is among the onerous tasks at the institution, he volunteered to do it twice a week. “On Saturdays, I go to Karuna Bhavan (another home) and bathe the inmates. I help in cleaning their rooms, as Saturdays are more leisurely,” says the 42-year-old.
Family support
“My wife and kids are very supportive,” says Mathew about his absence from home at crucial morning hours. “If there is something I am supposed to do, my kids cover for me,” adds the father of five.
If giving a wash to about 10 inmates on an average was tough initially, Mathew now looks forward to Mondays. “That one hour is sacred to me. When you are doing this to people who are helpless, know no shame and cannot even say thank you, it is like taking care of a child. You learn patience, you may be irritated, but you learn to overcome it. The exercise is a training in handling real-life situations,” he says.
The act has helped him as much as it has the needy, he adds. “Life takes on a different meaning. It is the satisfaction of doing something for someone who is a stranger to you. Most of the aged have been abandoned by their children. I talk to them when I am giving them a bath and they usually open up. They realise the comfort of being talked and listened to. There have been instances when I have had meaningful conversations with very sick people,” he says.
These stories are familiar to M.P. George too, who works with a private firm in the city, and who, like Mathew, is involved with the inmates of Home of Love and Karuna Bhavan. It began for George when as part of his job he had to deal with an accident victim. His search for a home for the old man who had no one led him to Karuna Bhavan and a 12-year-old relationship.
Offering help
“After the accident victim was taken in, I visited the institution and asked the Mother if I could do anything to help,” remembers George. He decided to take on the task of giving the inmates a shower. Over the years, he has seen death close up. “There have been instances when the person has died soon after the shower,” says George, who doggedly tried to evade the camera.
“Now, I am not disappointed by anything, I have no tension and I sleep well at night,” says George, who goes to the institutions early in the morning.
At Maithri, a transit home for elders in Chalapuram, 53-year-old Radha quietly goes about chores. Sweeping the floor one moment, she is in the kitchen the next, making tea and serving snacks to the new guest to the home. “Radha often does things which even the trained staff shies away from,” says P.C.C. Raja, founder of Maithri. “I remember her once telling the staff when she was cleaning an old inmate, ‘Don't handle her like how you would handle your mother, but like how you would clean your child if it has soiled,'” he says.
Radha is in Maithri often, travelling close to one and a half hours from her home near Balussery. “The inmates often don't thank her, but talk about her in her absence. They want to be bathed the way Radha bathes them,” says Raja.
What Radha gets from Maithri is often the bus fare. “If I don't have the money for the bus back I ask. I am okay if the inmates thank me or don't. If I am given money from Maithri I don't say no, if I am not, I am okay then too,” she says. Sharada Gopinath, the headmistress at a nursery school, listens when Radha talks. Sharada rents the building from which Maithri is run, and her evenings are spent here with the inmates. “I just come and talk to the inmates. We don't talk about their children. Often they just wanted to be talked to,” says Sharada.
