Sentiment of Ruin
“It was my wining and dining with the rich and the powerful that had hastened my moral fall,” he said wryly after a while. “Didn’t Rousseau observe that ruthlessness is the common characteristic of the successful; maybe I insensibly turned insensitive in their infectious company. Whatever may be the rationale for my twisted vision of love, the reality of my life was that I allowed myself to slide into the abyss of immorality. What with the materialistic veil shrouding our love life, I tried to fill my emotional void in an extramarital affair without knowing that I became incapable of inspiring love. How shameful, but I’m not going to hide my ugly side to let you have a true picture of me and of those who came into my life.”
“Vices are the price that one pays for his virtues.”
“But it was as if I had sacrificed my virtues to propitiate the goddess of vices,” he continued. “I used to know an upright officer and that amounts to much in today’s world; maybe honesty had never been the dominant character of man, didn’t Shakespeare aver that to be honest is to be counted among one in a thousand; but these days the odds seem to be one in a hundred thousand. The good fellow had always been helpful to me within the rules that is but without any favors to return; once I told him to count on me just in case and he said that he hoped it would never be the case. When I came to know that he was caught red-handed, I knew it could be the handiwork of those who were irked by his honesty, and yet I was glad that the one who replaced him was corrupt to the core.”
“Often, it’s the marginal operators and not the hardcore corrupt that get caught and the big fish, if ever trapped, find their way out as they would’ve made enough dough to feed the small fish who net them.”
“It’s ironical but real, and that’s sad,” he said. “To go back to the tale of that small fish, given his thin resume and modest means, he had a windfall of a wife, who came to me to picture her helplessness. Qualified though and talented as well, she opted to remain a housewife to take care of his home, where his mother too felt at home; as that earned her his gratitude, she remained a fulfilled spouse. I think it was Bernard Shaw who said that any good natured fool would make a better husband than a Caesar, Shakespeare and Napoleon for great men are ill-equipped for domestic purposes, and as for me, I fell between two stools ending up an intellectual fool. As they were gloating over the flowering of their toddler son, throwing them into dilemma, the old woman’s kidneys had failed. While common sense suggested it was as well to let her ripe-old life end its course in the crematorium, the son’s sense of filial duty was for keeping his mother on dialysis as long as he could afford. But his wife thought it was an absurd proposition as she believed that the idea of medical science was to cure the curable, and not to cater to a gone case; remember that my father too saw it that way.”