Every time someone we cherish dies, a part of us also dies. I experienced that feeling this week when Sister Maria Dolores Tena who was ailing at 88, passed away. I had twice visited her in the last week of her life and the last time I saw her, I came away feeling sad that the life of a humanitarian was slowly ebbing away. And then, she was called…

Sister Dolores came from Spain and was head of a very fine institution, the Dilkhush school for children in need of special care, in Juhu, Mumbai. I met her in 1995 when, after recovering from a kind of facial paralysis and feeling a desire to connect with mentally-challenged children, I walked into Dilkhush and expressed a need to teach the children there. She agreed to my request and, strangely, as she did not know anything about our films, she did not recognise me as an actor.

My bonding with such children began with her and it continued since then. Over the years, when my links with Dilkhush got tenuous because of my professional commitments, I still kept in touch with her and she was present at all the important occasions in my life. Many people touch our lives, but their profound impact gets understood many years later. At the funeral services, many people paid tributes to Sister Dolores. And watching the serenity on her visage, I thought of all the things that this frail lady had embodied. She certainly exuded compassion. And she also taught me how important it was to believe and trust others.

Living as we do, in urban jungles, and in competitive times where everyone wants to get ahead and stay ahead, our survival instincts have been honed to begin almost every relationship on distrust. We are wary — at least initially — of everyone, from our colleagues, our neighbours, our help and our bosses.

Sister Dolores lived life from the other end of the telescope; she began every relationship by fully trusting the person, until she had been proven otherwise. And from what I understood, she had rarely been proven wrong. “Believe in people, because that is your greatest investment,” she would say. Another of her sayings was: “Doubt destroys”. As I sat in the pews, her words kept coming back to me.
Many people I know say that they find it difficult to trust other people. They feel that they are the smart folks and they pride themselves that no one can take them for a ride. They remain ever suspicious, ever questioning. But is that the way we want to live life? Do we want to nurture relationships on distrust and suspicion?

I know that I have been taken for a ride sometimes. But I’d rather still trust people than live life looking over my shoulders. There is an adage I believe in: Trust begets trust. So let us be the ones to put in the seed capital of trust; and the payback, I assure you, will be even more trust.