No.7G, Rainbow Colony,
MG Road, Dharavi,
Mumbai – 17.
23/07/2000.
My dear Ayaz,
I was
very happy to learn that you are recovered from typhoid which had confined you
to bed for some weeks. I congratulate you on your return to health, in spite of
the fact that you have lost the prerogatives of a sick man of which Charles
Lamb speaks .Did you feel the truth of what Lamb says in ‘the Convalescent . which
we studied last year? Lamb ,of course, writes from one point of view ,and that
too in a vein of humour, and ,really speaking, recovery from illness is a
‘fall’ that one should rejoice over.
If I
write in this literary manner about your
illness, it is because I know that illness, once it is past ,is usually
regarded as something's trivial and unimportant .don’t you now dismiss your
illness as a petty thing, thought, when it lasted, you were obsessed with it
and thought of nothing else?
Health
is one of the greatest blessing of life. I hope that you will pay more
attention to it, so that you may never fall a victim to illness again .Except
for this lesson to be learnt, you should forget all about your illness.
Now that
you that are well, you have no excuse for not writing,
Yours ever,
Haneef
