The Chord Untouched

The Chord Untouched

On 11 May 1996, Rob Hall, an ace mountaineer, trapped in a severe snow storm atop Everest, with no other soul alive for hundreds of miles around, spoke with his wife from just below the South Summit as a connection was established via satellite phone. ‘sleep well sweet heart. Please don’t worry too much,’ he muttered. He was probably suffering from brain dysfunction due to prolonged stay in the extremely low-oxygen atmosphere at an altitude of more than twenty-five thousand feet. He died shortly thereafter.

I read about this first in Jon Krakauer’s gripping story of the 1996 Everest disaster, Into Thin Air. Image of Rob Hall and the deep agony of his wife as she heard Hall’s voice proclaiming the imminent disaster thousands of miles away, stuck in a remote, unimaginably desolate and abjectly inhospitable wilderness, haunted my thoughts for days. His anguish, his loneliness, and the knowledge that he would soon perish all alone, was a misery, I could not even begin to fathom. 

Bodies of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his two colleagues were found on 12 November 1912 near a camp site in Antarctica. Scott had led the expedition to South Pole and his team was on way back, when inclement weather and lack of food did them in. His diaries are one of the most poignant testaments of a dying man, who knows he is never going to see his loved ones again. ‘Dear darling, we are in a very tight corner and I have doubts of pulling through… if anything happens to me I shall like you to know how much you have meant to me…I think the best chance has gone, we have decided not to kill ourselves but to fight it to the last…’ Scott wrote to his wife. His journals were an instant bestseller, when published as Scott’s Last Expedition.

The agony of these men, stuck in a desolate corner of earth, and in full knowledge of their impending death, breaks our heart. In the moments of deepest suffering that can befall a person, their thoughts turned to the greatest source of solace which they knew they would never ever obtain. 

Human craving for society is ubiquitous. Company of fellow human beings is our inalienable need. We are a gregarious species. Camaraderie is essential for complete expression of our selves under every hue of our mood: happiness, sorrow, love, hatred, hopefulness, dejection, fear, anxiety and even in indifference. Solitary confinement is the most torturous punishment a person can be condemned to. 

From our fellow beings- a parent, a friend, a lover, a colleague or even a stranger on occasion- we seek empathy in different forms: acceptance, sympathy, encouragement, consolation, compassion, pity, commiseration, warmth, care, tenderness, affection, or love. Our mind constantly looks for these. In times of stress we need them desperately. If deprived of them, soul wriggles with an indescribable agony.

These life-giving emotions are most expeditiously and effectively expressed through touch. Touch has a universal language which human beings decipher unconsciously. It expresses a plethora of emotions in varied fashions: A pat on the back, holding of hands, a friendly hug, a warm handshake, a passionate embrace, stroking of hair, a lustful caress, a peck on the cheeks, play with fingers, squeeze of hand, maternal cuddle, the list is endless. 

Need of touch is seen widely in animal world too. Most animals spend greater part of their day grooming each other. Experiments in rats have shown that babies that were licked more by their mothers, grew into adults who were better adapted to stress.

 

Nothing lifts a sagging spirit like human touch. Touch of care providers and near ones, affords succour to a person in the grip of an incurable sickness that makes every breath an effort. We hold hands of our parents on their deathbed- even though, they may have slipped behind the oblivion of coma- in a hope that our touch will ease the pain of their end moments, and perhaps more to derive solace from the touch that had been cornerstone of security in our childhood and an inexhaustible storehouse of strength in our adult lives. A toddler constantly needs to be cuddled, smooched, held in arms, to be assured that the world is a safe place. In distressful situations, caring touch of even a stranger brings in hope that the anguish one suffers will pass away soon. These constant interactions with companions, friends, parents, colleagues assure us of stability, however chimerical and transient, in an uncertain world. 

A tiny blob of genetic material, the lowliest of life forms- for that matter, not even capable of living independently, i.e., always dithering on the brink of life and death- has robbed us of this most vital source of contentment in our lives and we seethe in agony. We have not evolved for this sanitised world which smells of antiseptics and spirit. We long for the familiar smells and sounds of the throng of humanity to fill the air once again. We are the species of animals which sees many universes bubble and perish instantly in our hearts, with the changing expressions on the face of our interlocutors. We have memory for thousands of faces and can recognize one seen fleetingly in a crowd of hundreds. We even see faces in the clouds, on the damp patches on a wall. We are fearful of a world where every face looks remote and alike, behind the insensate mask. 

And we wait impatiently, with a sense of growing foreboding, for the old comforts to surround us again: the comfort of safety in numbers, the joys of unhindered bonhomie, sweet-nothings whispered in each other’s ears, the inane fooling around, warmth of company and the welcome touch doled out liberally. We want to be reassured that the world in which we grew up has not changed overnight. We want to regain the confidence that behaviour which came to us as instinct will not have to be unlearnt. We want to reclaim the touch that underpins our existence.