THE DRAGON SLAYER

TUSHAR Vyas others

When the doctor first told me about this thing I tried to argue with him, ended up being quite offensive. I phoned him up afterwards and apologized of course. It was a ridiculous attitude to adopt, as if it were his fault.I tried to force him to tell me how long I had left. You hear all these stories about people who were given three months and are still there years later. It's almost a cliché. But he wouldn't give me a figure like that. All he would say was months rather than years. And that I would probably continue to feel reasonably well until close to the end. Not an exact science, he said.He and I were the only ones who knew about it for the first few weeks. Unless some of my friends guessed. There was one time when I caught myself telling someone that I live on a slope leading down to a cemetery. Such a powerful image, but I said it completely unconsciously. It stopped me in my tracks, reduced me to total silence.The first few days were the worst, as you might expect. I didn’t sleep very much at the beginning. But in fairness to myself I don't think that I coped with it too badly. I didn't c***k up. I didn't break down and cry or rush off to find a counsellor. I didn't run amok and smash everything. I just sat very quietly in my darkened room and did a great deal of thinking.The Company owed me quite a bit of annual leave so I took it, stayed at home in the cottage. I lay there when I couldn't sleep and fantasized about what I should do with those remaining months, however long it was going to be.My ideas became very grandiose. I thought about what might have happened if someone had walked up to Adolph Hitler in 1935 or 1936 and blown his brains out. Would the world have been a better place? Would that have been the best thing anyone could have done with an expendable life? Who knows? Hitler wasn't the only Nazi. Somebody else would have come to power. But it's hard to believe that whoever it was could have been quite such a monster. Maybe there are turning points like that in human history where one man can make a difference. Before I knew about my condition, such thoughts would have seemed like madness. But now they seemed to make sense. I had been given a kind of gift, a chance to do something worthwhile with the time left to me. It didn't have to be dramatic, but there had to be something that would give meaning to it all - to all those pointless years of sucking up to the boss and people being promoted over my head, trying to be the perfect husband and the perfect father and ending up alone in that little cottage with a rotten divorce settlement and children I never saw, who didn’t want to talk to me any more - never getting anything in return but kicks in the teeth. I suppose it hadn’t struck me so powerfully before because I had always told myself that things would get better, that there was time to change it all. Now I knew that there wasn’t.But maybe I wasn’t destined to be a nonentity after all. Maybe there was something I could do in the world, some mighty task that would make them all turn around and say, “You know, we misjudged him. There was more to him than we ever knew…”I started to buy four morning newspapers and to subscribe to all the news channels on satellite TV. I bought lots of writing paper and a few big loose-leaf binders and I started to take notes on what was going on in all the trouble spots of the world. Tin-pot dictators manufacturing biological weapons and hydrogen bombs. Arab suicide bombers blowing themselves up in crowded restaurants. South American d**g barons with private armies and more income than the annual budgets of the countries they lived in. White slave traders smuggling women and young girls out of central Europe and the Far East to live lives of misery and exploitation in the hidden brothels of the rich West. African villagers cutting one another to pieces with machetes and burning each other alive in locked churches. Women and children starving to death because some war lord wanted to use their destruction as a weapon in his fight for power.I began to wonder which of us was ill, me or the world out there. The trouble was there was only one of me. It wasn't enough. There seemed to be so little that I could actually do. In the fairytale world there was always just one dragon to slay and one knight to do the slaying; in the real world there were a million dragons but the knight was still on his own. I would have to change the scale of my operation.I started subscribing to the local newspapers covering the villages within about twenty miles of where I lived. Stories about agricultural shows and new supermarkets and young girls competing for the title of Queen of the May. I seemed to have gone from one extreme to the other. That wasn't where I was going to find my dragon.I had become a bit fixated on the idea that there had to be a dragon, an enemy of some kind to slay. Maybe that was the wrong model. Who had really made a difference ---

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