On Care

edit: After further tests, it was determined that I had ligament injury, and not a fracture.

K and I walked towards the gate of Trendset Mall. I checked my phone, and realising my mistake in booking an Uber, I informed him that the Uber auto had arrived at the other gate of the mall. I started walking towards it and K tried to accompany me, as good friends often do, even though he had to head towards the basement of the mall. I said, “You needn’t come with me.” He said okay and we said bye to each other and headed our separate ways. Through the slush left behind by an unlikely Vijayawada rain, I trudged towards my Uber.

This happened on Saturday. When K called me today, on a Sunday, he said, “If only you’d let me accompany you, perhaps your fracture wouldn’t have happened.” I replied, “But I thought why bother you with myself.” He retorted, “But people don’t think its a bother.”

Now, I will never know if letting K accompany would have prevented me from getting a fracture, but I will think about this a lot: People don’t think its a bother. Especially as I lie in bed, resting for the next one month.

On 29th June 2024, the aforementioned Saturday, I was stepping down from the footpath to step into the rickshaw. I didn’t gauge the height of the footpath correctly, twisted my ankle as I stepped onto the road and fell on my twisted ankle. I screamed in pain, a flurry of swear words. The auto-rickshaw driver immediately bent down to help a swearing and bawling me into the vehicle. He started the ride, confused as to what next. Should he drive on to the destination? Should he pull over and ask me to call someone? Of course, this is pure conjecture. He spoke to me in Telugu, and I, not understanding a word, kept crying and babbling like a baby. I felt a terrible weight of crushing loneliness envelop me. What will happen now?

Through the tears, I heard him say the word “hospital”. I said yes and he drove to an orthopaedic centre. The pain and homesickness reached a crescendo as we reached the centre. He helped me get into the hospital and offered to stay with me till I got my treatment. I was touched, but politely refused and thanked him.

As I got wheeled towards the X-ray machine, I sent a message to my office WhatsApp group. Immediately, L replied with a, “Where are you?”. I sent her my location pin and she set off to be with me. I texted my PG roommate to come as well. I had spent some part of the auto ride contemplating whether asking them to come would be the right thing to do. What if they’d rather not? What if they have other plans? But I knew that I needed someone to be with me, so I sent the messages despite the anxiety.

I got an X-ray done, informed my parents and got a shot of painkiller. L arrived soon and she looked relieved. My inhibitions slowly dissolved and we started chatting as we waited for the doctor - me on the hospital bed, and her in a chair, next to me. My feelings of homesickness had long subsided and were now replaced by a heart brimming with gratitude. My roommate, M arrived soon after, as did the doctor. He announced that I had a minor fracture and would require a month of bed rest.

I half-joked saying how glad I was that it was indeed a fracture and I hadn’t just inconvenienced everyone for nothing. Context: it was almost 12 in the night. L responded kindly that it was okay, and it would have been okay even if it would have turned out to not be a fracture.

It was okay.

A mixed bag of childhood/adolescent experiences led to the formation of this belief that we are all alone. We come alone, and we die alone, everything else is temporary relief. Consequently, I used to think that being indebted was absolutely bad. I lived my life ensuring I’d never have to ask for help. I told myself that I had to be self-sufficient. A part of me believed it was because I was unworthy of help, and the other part distrusted people. I didn’t want to be thought of as a freeloader or a burden.

But now I quite literally can’t walk without leaning on somebody. Somehow life thrust me into a place where I had to ask for support and when I did, an abundance of care showed up.

The next day, on Sunday, my parents booked a flight to get me back home so I could be properly taken care of. The only problem was that I had to move out from my PG to an apartment on Sunday. Talk about bad timing! Once again, my friends showed up, and how! My friend T asked her friend G, with family in Vijayawada, to help me transport my luggage. G asked his mother, and she kindly helped me move my stuff, while G coordinated the entire thing from a different city.¹

It quite literally takes a village to survive, nay, thrive. Capitalist logic forces us to isolate and live in alienated spaces where every need is a potential for transactions. We refuse to ask for favours because favours have to be returned, resources must be shared. Our scarcity mindset leads us to believe that if we give, we’ll have less for ourselves, or that we’ll keep on giving and others will keep on taking. Some of us, like myself, might also have chronically low self-esteem and feel like a burden when asking for help. Or that feeling, perhaps, also stems from conceptualising care as a transaction. Will we adequately be able to repay care?

Side note: I’m not about to be naive and say exploitation doesn’t exist. In our world, many times (or most times, depending on your level of cynicism) you’ll be fucked over and taken advantage if you display kindness.

Then there is the dimension of care where it is mostly feminised, and care-labour is an undervalued, underpaid, exploitative commodity almost always performed by marginalised classes. In our world, care is snatched, transacted, or squeezed out.

In Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, she shares a wealth of her knowledge from a harmonious marriage of Indigenious and scientific wisdom. She speaks of how care is reciprocal. The dynamic of sharing and receiving in the natural world enables it to thrive. Like the Three Sisters:

“At the height of the summer, when the days are long and bright, and the thunderers come to soak the ground, the lessons of reciprocity are written clearly in a Three Sisters garden. Together their stems inscribe what looks to me like a blueprint for the world, a map of balance and harmony. The corn stands eight feet tall; rippling green ribbons of leaf curl away from the stem in every direction to catch the sun. No leaf sits directly over the next, so that each can gather light without shading the others. The bean twines around the corn stalk, weaving itself between the leaves of corn, never interfering with their work. In the spaces where corn leaves are not, buds appear on the vining bean and expand into outstretched leaves and clusters of fragrant flowers. The bean leaves droop and are held close to the stem of the corn. Spread around the feet of the corn and beans is a carpet of big broad squash leaves that intercept the light that falls among the pillars of corn. Their layered spacing uses the light, a gift from the sun, efficiently, with no waste. The organic symmetry of forms belongs together; the placement of every leaf, the harmony of shapes speak their message. Respect one another, support one another, bring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all.”

Although the purview of Braiding Sweetgrass is too wide and diverse for me to talk about, I will take this one strand from the brilliant weaving: that of reciprocal care. A care that is given freely, according to one’s ability, shared with love as a gift. A care in which your resources/abilities complement mine, and where I falter, you shine. A symbiosis, just like the Three Sisters.

Because, I will never be able to repay the care that my friends bestowed me with. Or even the autorickshaw driver. Or my parents. My siblings. My teachers. My dog. How can I? What does it even mean to repay in this context? It would certainly be wicked for me to wait for them to get into a similar accident, help them and be like, “Aha! Consider our my debt repaid!”

Maybe I shall forever be indebted to each one of them for their acts of kindness and warmth. And them to me. All we can do is receive this care, and when we have the opportunity, share what we can from our end.

I want to reiterate: it is not easy to love and share in this world. A world where sharing is seen as “giving handouts”, a rat race where artificial scarcity forces us to compete and even sabotage, where kindness can be perceived as an invitation to brutalisation… where care is a commodity to be transacted, demanded or taken by force.

But we cannot accept this. There has to be more.

A part of our radical work must be to build a world that entitles each one of us, human and non-human, the gift of community and the abundance of care. A place where we give and receive, not take. A place where we share. I know, it seems like a fantasy.

But having tasted a fruit of this world, I know that this is a fantasy worth fighting for.