The full circle of life

We don't know. We see people around us, people who are mischievous and evil, people who do bad things. But these people thrive all the time, building a long trail of success measured in acquisition. These people are corrupt and conniving, their souls sold to greed, yet they don't always atone for their sins. Or do they?

We are talking about two things here. One is punishment meted out by Providence. You are made to fess up to your own misdeeds in order to bring a closure on them. Your wife dies or children get spoiled. Somehow the circle closes as what you take from others is taken from you in one way or another. It's like a wash, a kind of natural adjustment of unnatural behaviours.

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Another is self-imposed, as if auto erasure of stains on the slate. This happens when conscience builds its campaign, which overcomes all resistance. People, who take other lives, often turn the gun on themselves because the burden of guilt becomes unbearable. It is for the same reason that King Henry donned a sackcloth walking barefoot through the streets of Canterbury to atone for the murder of his friend Thomas Becket. Marquis de Sade propounded the germ of this moral equilibrium: a man who kills must pay with his own life.

Must then every mean street end up on the moral high road? What about the long history of slavery in the United States, or killing of the Native Americans to take their lands so that the settlers from Europe could carve a homeland? Has there been any restitution for these sins? On the other hand, a defeated Germany accepted responsibility for the Holocaust, and consequently made restitution to its victims. On another instance, Soviet Union looted treasures from Germany. The Russian claim was that the death of millions of Russian people and the destruction of its patrimony justified their plunder of art from Germany.

This is what it is. Even nations have to come to terms with their own past, primarily responsibility for their victims. Queen Elizabeth of England sent her apologies to the Maoris and the Sikhs, the United States sent its apology to the people of Hawaii, and the Japanese have given both apology and reparation to its victims in the Far and South East Asia. Libya has recently offered one million US dollar each to victims of the downed American Airliner.

Likewise, individuals also need to come to terms with their past in a cleansing act of moral resurgence. Often it's the cruel hands of fate, which becomes the arbitrator. The rulers turn into subjects, the rich become poor, the tormentor becomes the victim, so forth and so on. And every time that happens, we tend to think that things came full circle for that particular situation, that a moral balance was restored through divine intervention.

But does it always happen? Does every thug get swindled in return, or every criminal get punished for his crime? Is the recompense always tantamount to harm? If what Proudhon said was true and property was indeed theft, do the affluent get to pay for their moral lapses at any point of time?

Needless to say, the answer is judgmental. When the son of a rich man is a dopey, his daughter runs away with another man, or there is death, accident or sickness in his family, we look for a rationale to relate the end to the beginning. We look for a moral underpinning that was missing in the life of that man to bring home our unde-rstanding of how he got what he deserved.

Hence, we blame all unnatural deaths to the individuals, our fundamental assumption being that the drastic effect was rooted in some devious cause. But then this line of argument takes an elusive turn when it comes to children. What is the crime of a child, who dies from snakebite or boat capsize? Where is the comeuppance for a child killed in genocide, ethnic cleansing or war? How could a circle close if it has never moved away from the centre?

So, do things always come full circle if people die or suffer? People who go to the gallows for idealism, people who give their lives to defend their honour, how does it come full circle for them? They choose pain over pleasure, death over life, sufferings over serenity, because injustice and oppression force them to do or die, because the only way to find a closure on the unacceptable terms of life is to give it up.

Religion, however, preaches that every individual will be reconciled to his deeds, if not before but on the Day of Judgement. He sits for the examination in this world, but the papers will be graded in the next. One has the freedom to do what one likes, but then everything he does is recorded as credits of good deeds and debits of misdeeds. The dead will rise on the Day of Judgement when his book will be balanced through reward and punishment.

But then does this book ever balance in this world, or does everything come full circle in this life? Pol Pot, the butcher of Cambodia, who is responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen, died in his hideout before he could be brought to trial. Hitler took the liberty of taking his own life, escaping justice for wreaking havoc in WWII. The bad guy in the movies always get jailed or killed after they have taken numerous lives, leaving one wonder how the calculus of justice ever worked on such disparate terms!

German poet Rilke lamented that "Nowhere does the circle close." One of the reigning discourses of life is whether that is true. Good and evil, vice and virtue, right and wrong, move in lock steps. Do they ever balance? No, not! Jesus Christ was crucified and Socrates was sentenced to death. Yet evil men ruled nations and acquired wealth! The son of a king became king and the peasant's son followed his destiny. The circle got wider but it never closed.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.