By: Heisnam Lakeshwar Singh
“With endless time, nothing is special. With no lose or sacrifice, we can’t appreciate what we have”.
This quote is taken from the novel “the time keeper” written by Mitch Albom. As like his other books, this is also about dying and lessons of life from dying. He possesses the arts of turning the scariest part of our life, i.e. death, to an important and beautiful (that I should not say) part. Tuesday’s with Morrie, the five people you meet in Heaven, For One More Day and Have a Little Faith all are related to death, after death and dying men or women. But it is wrong to say that he writes about death. Actually he writes about living, the importance of living and life that usually we forget and which we realize only at the moment of dying. It is the human nature, not giving importance to those things we have, but to those we do not have. It applies in both things and relationship. This book is about three people, the guy who invented world’s first clock, a teenage girl who is in love but does not get love in return, and a millionaire who is about to die because of his illness. I like the way the author presented the story, he has a unique style.
Dora, the inventor of clock, the guy who first started keeping time in the history of mankind, known as the father of time, was blessed by God, which he thought as punishment. He was kept inside a cave and forced to listen the voice of millions of people who ask for more time in their life. He was never aging, and when he was freed from that cave he found two people, Sarah, a teenage girl and Victor, a business man. Sarah loves a guy, but that guy doesn’t love her back. Obviously that makes her sad, every human being feel sad in such situation, but the most disturbing thing to her is losing her self esteem. Thinking she is not worthy, she is ugly, fat and not beautiful. Victor is a rich business man, he is suffering from an illness, and he is about to die soon. But he wants to live forever, he spends lots of money to keep his body alive by freezing his body for many years (cryonic practice), so that when medical science can cure that disease he will live again.Dora, father of time has been watching their life and the struggle they are facing. He finally took them to the middle of a moment (it is kind of magical moment, where time stops running, you can relate it with some cartoon or science fiction movie where everything stops moving, only the hero can moves). First he takes Shara to her future, she is shown the people who remember her, she never thought of those people and recognize their presence in her life, she also found the guy to whom she used to love and think 24 hours about him, but he don’t even bother to remember her. She found how much her mother loves her, which she used to ignore all the time. She regretted why she tried to kill herself because of one individual who don’t even bother to remember her. I wished if this is possible in real life, I could have shown like this to those people who want to commit suicide, who feels lonely, live in depression and who indulges in some kind of drugs by thinking their life is useless and not love by anybody. And also to those sons and daughters who thought their world is over when somebody rejected their proposal, I want to show them that there are also people in their life who love them more than they love him/her. Most often we forget about the people who love us unconditionally, but we run after those who don’t love us back.Victor’s case is different. He is very rich and successful, but he doesn’t have more time to live. He wants to challenge the death. He is also taken to his future, and found that how difficult it will be for him, the paper works, the caretaker to whom he paid the money all gone. And what he found is his body crying alone. He found how much his wife loves her, to whom he didn’t even share about his plan of freezing his body, to challenge the death. He remembered how much he used to love her, the shyness he had when he met her first time, the care and love they had while they were young, and he regrets why he didn’t show how much he loves her while he was dying/living.
It was predictable theme from Mitch Albom, i.e. about death, about life and about importance of small things like love, care and relationship in our life. I have not completely narrated the story; the story is a happy ending story. Happy ending doesn’t mean the dying man starts living again. This is the art, and way he convince the people that dying is not enemy to us, it is just a beautiful part of our life, which if it comes at the right time. The importance is not how we die; the importance is how we live. People mostly realize about how they live only when they are going to die.
The writer is Head( Academic & Admin), JCRE Global College ,Babupara, Imphal. He can be reached at:[email protected]
