Collin Major rode his two-wheeler on the east-coast highway
that connects the filthy metropolis of Madras to the insular territory,
Pondicherry when he was hit by a passing truck. One day after the accident I
heard about it. It was gruesome just to hear; it must have been terrible!
They said, Ines found him lying by the side of the road in
blood, unconscious, looking quite dead, his hand tossed somewhere in the middle
of the busy road. People saw him, they saw his hand and his body and all that
blood but not one came to help. They left this foreigner to die for all they
cared, willing not to get involved (but I imagine most of them prayed in their
minds and pitied without actually helping.) They said his right hand was severed
from the joint at the elbow. Then Ines was passing by, going to the petrol
pump, next to which there is a wine shop, three kilometers from the scene where
Collin Major met with the accident. Collin did not die; I wish he had…but
please, do not get me wrong.
I knew him briefly before he wrote a review about the
Tempest – Shakespeare’s Tempest – that we produced. I had played Caliban and
Collin had written quite an insightful review about the play in general but he
had praised Caliban quite above the rest of the cast.
They said that Ines stopped and called for help after
collecting herself and Collin’s arm. She called a taxi and rushed Collin to a
hospital. The specialist was in and he was confident that the hand could be
reattached. He was hopeful that it might even function again, slowly and after
lengthy physiotherapy. The need of the moment was to open Collin up, and all
agreed, for his head too had received much impact from the truck’s massive
velocity. The doc was hoping that his patient would come to after the surgery.
Only then could he determine whether there was any memory loss and brain damage.
Collin was in coma for some days.
The operation conducted, the severed arm reattached, yet
Collin was not the Collin people knew. That, even as he lay in the hospital
bed, comatose, with eyes closed like an unwrapped mummy. Much blood-loss had
made him pallid; he looked rain- soaked thin and white.
Eventually he came round and they let him come home. The
prognosis was that he had lost much of his memory. T o me the real loss was
that Collin lost his hand. He was a writer. He wrote books and he wrote poems
and he drank whiskey with that hand. Mr. Major was a major maverick, a bohemian to
boot who wanted to see a better society. He wrote in order to influence a
change and to me losing a hand for a writer was like losing the gun in the face
of artillery from the other side. To an unflattering writer everything is the
other side.
After almost one year Collin Major was seen going for walks,
always aided by a team that was formed to look after him. He had decided to
stay. He had decided neither to go back to France where he had an apartment,
nor return to the USA , his home country.
I noticed the effort he had to make in order to drag his
inert side as he walked. He lugged his whole right side to make a step and then
putting the weight on the damaged limbs as the good side helped to drag him
forward, one step at a time, and his hand hung almost unnecessarily. It is quite
painful to see him so. He seems cheerful though, as if nothing had happened to
him and that too hurts a bit. The boys who help him about joke with him, rather
amused that his conversations are incongruous or even silly. He seems amused
that they are amused and his face crinkles. With time Collin has lost his tone,
the tone of his muscle and he speaks as if his tongue ran amok in his mouth,
often dashing quite visibly on his teeth and lips. What he says is unclear but
you let it pass because it is painful to make him repeat it. The accident has
made him gregarious. While he was whole he was a loner, perhaps more shy than a
loner, for he did enjoy talking quietly. I sit with him by the road-side tea
shack and we converse and smoke. Collin talks and I listen. He was a big smoker
then; now he seems only to smoke. A living man must do something to ward off
boredom which looks to eat him up.
On the first couple of occasions Collin seemed to have
difficulty registering me but now he greets me. Then invariably our one way
conversation broaches on Shakespeare and Collin quotes his sonnets and mentions
their numbers (!) or lines from many of his plays and says which play it is in.
Wow! The man must have read Shakespeare so avidly that although very often he
seems quite forgetful of himself, although the accident wiped away much of his
memory, Shakespeare is saved indelibly on his chip and I wonder whether it is
the power of the bard’s language or the power of Collin’s love for the bard
that, after a major, almost fatal accident, this man remembers William Shakespeare.
