It is only difficult people that can bring out the real being of a person. It is beyond the Saints to do this nor is it within the power of Mystics and Monks. They could be the jewel in the crown of the Messiahs but what turns a stone into a gem are difficult men. It is in the nature of things, real men are shaped at the hands of hard men. It is they who help evolve the original thing of a man hidden beneath layers of illusions that he takes for real and live it. Example galore in the pages of history.

It is ironic that we expect people other than ourselves to be easy-going, humble, decent, polite, pliant, nice, ever-grinning, sympathetic, compassionate, and good-naturedly. We enjoy company of such people who don’t get on our nerves, don’t jump down our throat, don’t pick on us, don’t bully us, don’t give us stress, don’t give anxiety, don’t do the dirty on us, don’t eat us alive, don’t become a pain in our ass, don’t rub salt into our wound, don’t touch on our raw nerve, and so on.

We love roses, hate thorns. We know it nonetheless that the maker makes bed of thorns for roses to sleep on, force them to endure elements, and yet they bloom and spread fragrance. It is irony that we wish to bloom like a rose and spread our fragrance far and wide, but want to escape from elements and are averse to the idea of lying on the bed of thorns.

I remember four people in particular, (have been several others, though), who have been difficult to the point of driving my literally out of my wit in my (spiritual!) journey from despair to happiness. They were like you are stuck between a rock and a hard place and there’s nothing else for it but to bang your head against them and die. Two of them are dead, the other two continues to be around. These four played god (above mystics and monks, sacred men and saints) in helping me dig deep into the thing hidden beneath layers of illusions and find a way out of fog to keep going.

The first one is the woman (my mother) who they said I was born to. I say this coz I have no way to know who I was born to until I am told. A very difficult woman indeed to please! Fussy, picky, stubborn, hard-nosed, self-righteous and all that jazz! A cantankerous woman who’d turn her nose up at anything no matter which corner of the earth you bring it to her and what price you paid for it, a word of appreciation hard to come from her mouth, who’d pick holes in everything and freak out at things like size of a potato or someone sucking juice from a mango in a ‘wrong’ way. I’d think that she’d been condemned neck-deep to a pool of anger and discontent deep inside her for all eternity. Hardly a day goes by without her giving me and others a mouthful for reasons I often racked my brain about. She’d shoot the messenger and raise the roof if and when we got into trouble with a boy next door and you goanna get the rod no matter you are in the wrong or the right. You are hit or given angry shouts for the crime of walking into it. I have no memory of her and the man who they say fathered me ever being pleasant to each other or doing the decent talks. What put the family afloat in spite of a difficult creature under roof was their unique ways, I suppose. One was fire, the other water.

She’d send you on an errand. You get things for her. She’d angrily mouth off at you for not having the wisdom and picking up the wrong thing, wrong size, shape or type. If you try to dodge it, you stir up trouble. If you obey her, she’d go hard on you for doing it ‘wrong’. If you stay at home, and she’d take it out on you ‘shame on you for staying at home all day like a woman!’ If you go off, and she’d scream at you ‘can’t you stay home instead of roaming around the street like a mutt?’ Either way you are in for it. When I’d get at the end of the tether, I’d mouth resentment at her and move off leaving her gnashing her teeth or clamping her jaw in red-hot anger. A thing that flew out of her difficult ways into my psyche was that I can’t afford to go wrong and I should strive to be always right no matter what. It was a totally unnatural cognition, a horribly wrong element went in shaping my personality. I was constantly haunted by fear of going wrong and it still has residual effects on me.

The second one was this English language teacher who’d find one thousand and one ways to pick holes in my work. Don’t know if he had a thing about me or he was built that way, he never ever had good words for my work or nor did he ever give a pat on my shoulder no matter how hard I put my mind and body into it. He’d find fault with grammar, or spelling, or structure, or choice of words, or handwriting and get my head down under disappointments in spite of me honestly putting shoulder to the wheel in doing it. At that age and time, it was unthinkable to score off a teacher or talk back to him. A teacher was always right and you are always wrong by virtue of him being a teacher and you being a pupil. This teacher gave private tuition at home after school and some of the boys went to him. I too wanted to be one of them, but my father put his feet down on it.

Many a times, he gave cross for wrong to spellings of words that couldn’t be more right which I found later having it verified in a dictionary. He’d task us with translation exercises – English to vernacular and vice versa. His corrections in red ink would dominate my translations in ruthless disregard to my sweating over the exercise. I’d get lot of crosses. He’d call my work ‘sloppy’ and ‘slapdash’. Those that went to him for private tuition would get a huge tick of ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ and swell with pride.

At times I’d feel very depressed about this ancient Celtic language which the Briton brought to this part of world and it was killing me. I would get this crippling thought that I must stop going to school, for I was born with low intelligence and it takes boys with high intelligence to learn foreign language skills. And then, one day he gave us the task of translating a paragraph from vernacular into English. It was excerpted from a book that lay open on his table. Just about the time he had finished reading out the paragraph to be done into English, the peon came to him with a message from the headmaster. He hastened to the headmaster’s cabin. Taking advantage of his quick exit, I quietly stretched across the table for the book. The book carried the answer, I mean, English translation of the vernacular paragraph on the side of page. I quickly copied it and put the book back on the table. In anticipation of a huge tick of excellence, running end to end of the page, I took my work to show it to the teacher. But it was not to be. On contrary, he filled my copy with corrections in red ink as a matter of routine. It didn’t take long for his ways to sink in. A little wisdom dawned on me that said he was a rock and I can’t get blood out of it.

The third and the fourth ones that I was thrust on by a quirk of fate have been people with poor mental health. There’s nothing else to it but to live with them under the same roof and help them through it as care-giver. One of them was the narcissist woman, an autistic child grown into schizophrenic, suffered severe anxiety disorder leading to chronic bouts of palpitations, panic attacks and auditory hallucinations. The other was a young man got into drugs at early age, suffered delusions, depressions, on and off, pulled off it and then relapsed, and now fully recovered. The woman is still on low dose of psychotropic drug, on and off, the young man is off it and doing well for himself.  These two introverts have been rock and hard place, really difficult people to get round.

They stretched my patience to the limit. There have been times when I almost ran out of it, fucked myself up, left to cope with my own dreadful stress feeling as though my head would explode anytime. I felt like screaming and tearing my hair out. It called for tremendous amount of patience and tolerance with no end in sight. You can’t afford to displease them given their mental health condition, nor can you put any hazardous strain on them, for that might cost their lives. There’s no way you can bring them to senses nor can you knock sense into them. They stick to their guns and you have the bite the bullet. You have to piss things like reason, logic and sense down the drain and humor them no matter how loony their ideas and how crazy and stupid their behaviors are.

Although, I came across hundreds of difficult people, men and women, who did their share in my journey from despair to happiness, these four have been incredibly great people, who contributed immensely in my quest of my own true being. I am deeply indebted to them.