Ace actor Irrfan Khan is battling through Cancer and our thought is grappling with intense worries about his well-being. He expressed his agony to the world in beautiful words. He said: “The cork doesn’t need to control the current it’s floating in.” What he also reiterated is the fact that ‘Uncertainty is the only certainty’.
This is what Irrfan Khan wrote in a letter and shared it with the world from London. “It’s been quite some time now since I have been diagnosed with a high-grade neuroendocrine cancer. This new name in my vocabulary, I got to know, was rare, and due to fewer study cases, and less information comparatively, the unpredictability of the treatment was more. I was part of a trial-and-error game. I had been in a different game, I was travelling on a speedy train ride, had dreams, plans, aspirations, goals, was fully engaged in them. And suddenly someone taps on my shoulder and I turn to see. It’s the TC: “Your destination is about to come. Please get down.” I am confused: “No, no. My destination hasn’t come.” “No, this is it. This is how it is sometimes.” The note can make anybody numb, thinking about the adversities and uncertainties of life.
“In this chaos, shocked, afraid and in panic, while on one of the terrifying hospital visits, I blabber to my son, “The only thing I expect from ME is not to face this crisis in this present state. I desperately need my feet. Fear and panic should not overrule me and make me miserable,” he added in the letter.
Irrfan became more intense with his expression. He touched different zones of the trauma life has brought unto his body. Perhaps not having balmy days, perhaps feeling unbearable pains all day, every day, Irrfan is exuding a feeling of hollowness, which he feels in the pain. “That was my INTENTION. AND THEN PAIN HIT. As if all this while, you were just getting to know pain, and now you know his nature and his intensity. Nothing was working; NO consolation, no motivation. The entire cosmos becomes one at that moment – just PAIN, and pain felt more enormous than GOD,” he said.
Striking a contrast between his early days and the life he is currently mad to deal with, he said, “As I was entering the hospital, drained, exhausted, listless, I hardly realised my hospital was on the opposite side of Lord’s, the stadium. The Mecca of my childhood dream. Amidst the pain, I saw a poster of a smiling Vivian Richards. Nothing happened, as if that world didn’t ever belong to me. This hospital also had a coma ward right above me. Once, while standing on the balcony of my hospital room, the peculiarity jolted me. Between the game of life and the game of death, there is just a road. On one side, a hospital, on the other, a stadium. As if one isn’t part of anything which might claim certainty – neither the hospital, nor the stadium. That hit me hard.”
“This realisation made me submit, surrender and trust, irrespective of the outcome, irrespective of where this takes me, eight months from now, or four months from now, or two years. The concerns took a back seat and started to fade and kind of went out of my mindspace. For the first time, I felt what ‘freedom’ truly means. It felt like an accomplishment. As if I was tasting life for the first time, the magical side of it. My confidence in the intelligence of the cosmos became absolute. I feel as if it has entered every cell of mine. Time will tell if it stays, but that is how I feel as of now,” he added on a positive note.
