Truly a life-changing experience
SHALINI UMACHANDRAN
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My Temporary Son: An Orphan's Journey, Timeri N. Murari, Penguin, Rs. 250.
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EXPERIENCES are so often described as "life-changing" that the adjective seems clichéd, almost valueless. But Timeri N. Murari's book My Temporary Son: An Orphan's Journey is about a truly life-changing experience — the story of a child bringing magic into two lives and teaching lessons of resilience and love.
It is a warm story of a little boy, an orphan with a fairly serious health problem, who takes over the lives of an elderly, childless couple who believe they have seen, done and experienced pretty much everything.
Tim and Maureen Murari are well settled into their respective routines; he a writer of fixed, rather reclusive habits, and she working with various charitable institutions and voluntary organisations. On a trip to an orphanage, Maureen chances upon one-year-old Bhima, a baby with impossibly large, expressive eyes, lying in an iron cot banging his head against the bars to distract himself from the pain in the raw, red mass of flesh on his lower belly. And she decides, as she has with other destitute children before, to raise funds for his operation and help place him with adoptive parents abroad.
For the first few months, Tim is just an observer of sorts, listening and providing emotional support to Maureen as she gets into endless rounds of consultations and tests with doctors and raises funds to correct Bhima's vesical exstrophy, a condition in which the bladder is outside the body.
Transformation
Maureen brings Bhima home "for a few days" after surgery; to recuperate till he is strong enough to resist the infections he could catch in the orphanage. The few days turn into 11 months as the Muraris wait for Bhima's adoptive parents from Europe to plough through the paperwork demanded by the Indian adoption system.
And during that time, Bhima transforms Tim's life, drawing him out, teaching him to be a father. Tim and Maureen do as much for Bhima — sitting up through the night to comfort him when he experiences night terrors, being attuned to his every need, being there for him — as he does for them.
Though his early development was delayed because of his medical condition, Bhima proves to be an exceptionally intelligent and resilient child, capturing Tim and Maureen's hearts with his simple faith, intense curiosity, mischievous ways and tiny but tremendous, spirit for survival.
Tim also uses the book to provide insights into Indian society; he brings up ideas of karma and destiny, and the traditions, superstitions and beliefs that are so much part of Indian life.
Child labour, exploitation and discrimination, bureaucracy, the education system, the almost-hopelessly convoluted adoption process... simple statements, made almost in passing, reveal social attitudes to all of these and more.
Finally though, the mammoth Indian bureaucracy begins to move and Tim and Maureen find themselves facing the idea of life without Bhima. There is heartbreak, but they have to confront the reality of their age, Bhima's future and what is best for him.
Clear language
A story like this — with so much of the writer in it — could so easily slip into the mawkish and the maudlin but Tim maintains dignity in his prose while infusing it with a certain enchantment that comes from his clear and beautiful language.
It is also, without explicitly being so, a story of the many in India and around the world who find it in themselves to open up their lives and hearts to abandoned children, and are willing to move systems across continents in their willingness to love.
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