THE drive again house from Sunday Mass. Jokes within the automobile over the “trendy girl” strolling down the rain-dappled highway. Screeching of tyres. Males bursting out of a Maruti van. Their swinging axe. His mom’s helpless, hopeless whimper as she crouched within the passenger seat. Him being dragged on to the highway. After which, repeated blows of the axe — again and again. His wrist severed.
During the last decade and extra, T J Joseph has relived these moments endlessly. On July 4, 2010, Joseph, an Affiliate Professor and Head of Division of Malayalam at Newman School in Idukki, Kerala, was the goal of one of the crucial vicious assaults by members of the Standard Entrance of India (PFI) — 13 of them had been convicted by a court docket. The PFI alleged {that a} query he had set in an examination was derogatory to Islam.
With the Centre banning the PFI, for Joseph, it’s as if these limitless reels are slowing down.
Talking to The Indian Specific from his house in Ernakulam, he says: “I’ve sought a ban on the PFI a number of instances. There’s little doubt that it is a terrorist organisation that kills, terrorises, that goals to determine an Islamic reign. For me, personally, it’s like if you end up watching or enjoying a sport. The fervour is just whereas the sport is on. Now it’s over. That battle is over.”
It has been a protracted combat for Joseph, one which started with a query on punctuation marks, for which Joseph used an excerpt from an essay by P T Kunju Muhammed. Because the row over the query deepened, Joseph went into hiding, his son spent three harrowing days in police custody, indignant mobs got here after him, and the faculty administration, the Catholic Diocese of Kothamangalam, caved in to strain and suspended Joseph from service.
Then got here the assault. On July 4, whereas driving house along with his sister and mom from the native church, Joseph’s automobile was waylaid by a gang metres away from his home. After bursting a crude bomb, they pulled Joseph out of the automobile and hacked repeatedly at him – his leg, his left palm, and as one of many attackers identified that it was the “mistaken hand”, they turned to the correct palm. After a sequence of blows, his proper palm lay severed.
In his autobiography, ‘Attupokatha Ormakal (Unsevered Recollections)’, which gained him the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award this yr, Joseph recollects the assault in chilling element.
“The axe-wielder lifted my lifeless left hand, and… introduced down the axe on it with brute power. It struck my wrist at an angle, slid in direction of my palm and practically took off my final three fingers — they hung from my hand as if held by some invisible strings… In the mean time, the second chopper-wielder took my proper forearm — coated in gashes — by the elbow and positioned it flat on the highway. The axe-man swung the axe twice at an angle, hacking my forearm in two locations… Then they rained a sequence of blows at my wrist and severed my palm completely from my arm,” reads the English translation of his e-book, “A Thousand Cuts,” printed by Penguin Random Home India in September 2021.
The severed palm was later recovered from a neighbour’s yard, the place his attackers had flung it, and reattached to his wrist in a long-drawn surgical process at a Kochi hospital.
Whereas Joseph was recovering from the extreme bodily and emotional trauma, the faculty administration dismissed the professor. “We had been shattered. I used to be the one incomes member then. My youngsters had been nonetheless finding out – my son for his MBA and my daughter was doing her BSc in Nursing. We went by means of some horrible instances,” he says.
However extra tragedy was to observe. After a protracted hospital keep and a number of surgical procedures, adopted by a painstaking restoration course of, simply as Joseph was steadily placing his life collectively, got here the harshest of blows.
On March 19, 2014, Joseph’s spouse Salomi, who had nursed him after the assault, killed herself – pushed to deep melancholy following the sudden flip of their lives.
“I used to be the saddest then. I wasn’t unhappy when my hand was chopped off. That was like a yuddham (battle). However my spouse’s loss of life and the lack of my job… these had been the saddest moments of my life,” says Joseph.
Ultimately, the faculty administration, which till then had steadfastly refused to revoke the suspension, reappointed Joseph following a public outcry – a day earlier than his retirement.
For the battle-weary professor, the scars run deep. The fingers on his proper palm don’t transfer past a slight curl. “I can’t do a lot with it. I can’t elevate small issues, although I can transfer among the greater ones round. As an illustration, I can elevate a chair, I can’t maintain a pen. On my left hand, I can solely transfer my thumb and index finger. That’s how I began writing with my left hand — I wrote complete books that approach,” he says.
Joseph, now the writer of three books, together with Branthanu Stuti (Salutations to the Madman) that was printed earlier this yr, says that it was all of the writing and studying that he did within the years that adopted the assault and his spouse’s loss of life that stored his afloat. “I must learn and write to maintain my thoughts busy,” he says.
In the meantime, the assault case towards him drags on. Of the 31 accused who stood trial, 13 had been convicted by an NIA particular court docket and sentenced to eight years of rigorous imprisonment. The trial is on within the case of some others who surrendered later. The primary accused within the case, Savad, continues to be at massive.
Is he scared? “Even when all the things was going mistaken for me, I wasn’t scared. Now, I’ve nothing left to lose, nothing to be petrified of.”