Dr Ketaki shares her Ph.D. struggles with despair, disillusionment, and existential angst, using introspection, Eliot’s works, and a metaphorical “court of justice,” exclusively for Different Truths.

I am being reminded of those days of restlessness and inordinate ambition to touch the sky, the days of my Ph.D. studentship. Let me reminisce about those days in a bit of detail. Let me take a journey down memory lane…

While the antics of the junior brothers and sisters kept me in good humour for some days, I knew not why abruptly I fell in an inextricable clutch of dumps. I looked before and after and pined for what was not! I began to shuttle between Calcutta and Hyderabad, Calcutta and Siliguri, either on the job or sometimes without it.

Strangely enough, the constant companion seemed to be a sense of despair, strangling me out of breath. I wanted to be left to myself desperately. The last vestige of skimpy dinner left me on the verge of an imminent coma! I kept fighting with the insuperable foe within, incessantly. At long last, I thought of having recourse to the celebrity writers and their books, which I thought would do a world of good to me. But this practice also failed to erase the ever-pestering insipidity. What to do?

Detestable Remark

I was browsing through TS Eliot’s The Family Reunion the other day in the library. Shailaja, a blowsy literary researcher from Hyderabad, commented upon it, “Huh! A blasted embryo that idiot, priggish Eliot conceived, and none was there to abort it. So, it saw the light of day. Damn it, Kate!” I could not be at one with Shailaja. I kept simpering only. Usually, when some detestable remarks threw me off my balance, I used to keep mum.

Now, I find some words (I should say, ‘invaluable’), which TS Eliot ‘conceived’ (according to Shailaja’s diction) quite apt to refresh me, or at least, help me free myself of the anguish of day-of-day abrasion with the world I live in. In The Family Reunion again, Agatha is saying somewhere, “The young feel tired at the end of an action/The old at the beginning.” I was taken aback. What an emphatic expression to draw a line of differentiation in between the ‘young’ and the ‘old’?!

Are we, actually, inching towards that helpless ‘time’ when’second childishness’ and’mere oblivion’ will be our sole characteristics? May be, maybe not. Why not summon up the ‘unending energy’ that once had befriended me and is now threatening me all the time to leave me in the lurch to this Court of Justice?

Chutzpah: I am at a loss! There was a time when ‘Son of Man’ could say or guess something substantial. But now ‘Son of Man’ knows only “a heap of broken images.” Their existence is no better than “a tattered coat upon a stick.” So what is the use of befriending such a ‘Son of Man’?

Kate: Nay! Oh no! I am at your mercy; I seek your help. I am being drowned in the nadir of despair. Help me, whisper “Awake and arise” into my ears!

Chutzpah: This is too late! Or this is too early! Yes, “what we call the beginning is often the end/ And to make an end is to make a beginning/ The end is where we start from.”

Kate (with tears in her eyes): Then, why do you say that you want to leave my hands for good? “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/will be to arrive where to started/And know the place for the first time.”

(The Judge, though unseen, strikes the gavel, and the court of justice disappears. The Judge remains quiet. Who will deliver justice then?)

Evil Forces

What to deliberate more, dear friends? We are all trying to fight off Eumenides (evil forces) that strive to shove us to the verge of extinction; we are all rushing towards some inevitable end, “where angels fear to tread” (though we are not ‘fools’ to rush there). We wait for a welcome change, which may illuminate the dark nooks with the dazzling light of the flambeaux. Why do we forget the lines from TS Eliot’s piece-de-resistance, The Waste Land:

   “Datta Dayadhvam Damyata 
    Shantih Shantih Shantih"?

The Court of Justice cannot settle anything unless we change into better leaves and help bring a total overhauling of the laws of the universe to kickstart a Golden Era, here on earth!

Picture design by Anumita Roy

Dr Ketaki Datta

Dr Ketaki Datta (Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor with Goenka College (Govt), Kolkata. She is a novelist, columnist, poet, reviewer, translator, editor with several books to her credit. At present, she is a book reviewer with Muse India, Hyderabad and Compulsive Reader, Australia. She is a columnist with Different Truths, a noted weekly online journal of contemporary times.

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