what i didn't do

I didn't use the photo of you, my footprints and the camera. It was to be the centre-piece of the exhibition, a very small print, almost missable. In the end, I didn't use it.

I didn't think of you for three or four days in a row. Only now that Amma is away and I think of how her not being around is exactly like your not being around - one day both of you will return.

It's been a year and five months: I didn't count. (Though on the 3rd I did, realising also that it was a Thursday).

Nothing feels as acute anymore; only, perhaps, the betrayal of such a moving on.

avoid!

A drawer-full of his handwriting that I can't bear to throw out or read over.

And then, because it was time to file IT returns, I open the relevant files. And I see a form he signed some time in March last year, for this year's returns.

Provident and far-seeing but not far-seeing enough, Appa. What returns will I file on your behalf for three months' worth of pension?

Talking to myself, really

Where are you when I need you, Appa?

I could use your good sense and calm, and ability to meet every situation head-on no matter how unfamiliar, overwhelming or strange. Whatever happens we will face.

I guess. But I could use the talking to you. I could do with your reassurance. I need your ability to break it down into manageable little parts, one baby step at a time.

Your absence is bitterly ironic. You knew this would happen, didn't you? You knew and yet you left. Of course, if you had stayed, beyond all ability, the only thing I would have learnt is that you could no longer help. So of course, I'm glad you didn't stay to see your helpnessness reflected in my face.

Whatever happens we will face.

But. It's no manner of use expecting me to step into your shoes, you know. I can't do it.

So I'm panicking and I'm ready to give up. I'm about to throw the towel in and say, it's all too much, find someone else to do all this.

And you're not here to talk me out of it. Or to encourage me and list out what the worst is that could happen (which is nothing much at all. Rationally I know this).

Whatever happens we will face.

Damn it, Appa, I'm not grown up enough for this. Please come back and tell me what's best to do.

Signs of Aging

Signs of aging: when you don't want the year to end, no matter what it brings.

N.V.Swami

N.V.Swami: 4th July 1937-3rd July 2008

Last Legs

The last consultation.
The last ride home.
The last look at the outside.
The last laugh.
The last injection.
The last long look at the panchangam.
The last injection.
The last meal.
The last fight.
The last good night.
The last long conversation.
The last blessing.
The last walk to the bathroom.
The last breath.

Nearly Home

On the 1st, the doctor discharged Appa. We waited for the bill while Appa ate lunch and watched a little TV. Someone in the bowels of the hospital was typing up the Discharge Summary. One bottle of Albumin remained to be given via drip.

As soon as all these things were done, we were free to leave.

Sometime in the afternoon, while Appa slept, a nurse came in, saw that he was asleep and left. A little while later, after their shift change, another one came in. 'Discharge over, no, madam?' she asked. Yes, I said, but we have to wait for the papers and for the IV to get over.

She went up to the drip and tapped at the tube, checked the flow and twiddled something before leaving.

It was 4pm. I had to give Appa his evening snack. I dithered, wondering whether to wake him up or not, but he had been sleeping for more than three hours and since he'd eaten so little at lunch, I really had to make sure he got something now.

I touched him to wake him up and found he had a high fever. In a few minutes, he was shivering but not in some delicate, refined way: these were hard, convulsive shivers.

I rang for the nurse. As usual, no one came when they were called.

I called the doctor on his cellphone and another doctor soon gave instructions. Appa was delirious and I had no idea what was happening or why this had suddenly happened.

A nurse finally came and disconnected the drip even though it was not finished. Another nurse came in and checked his temperature. She started to swab him with ice. The shivers became shudders.

I held his hand and chafed at it. His palms were bright - I mean bright - red.

I called the doctor and said I was not going to leave and that even if the discharge summary had been written up it was to wait.

The temperature came down but he was clearly not in his senses. I looked at the soya milk I was supposed to give him and wondered what to do. I gave him some, against my better judgement, but he could neither be propped up nor was he able to have any of it. Remembering all those who had choked to death because of someone's stupidity, I wiped his mouth and left the soya milk on the table.

I called home to say we were staying. Since Amma hadn't planned on coming to hospital, expecting us back home, I stayed on. Appa was semi-conscious.

I am convinced now that only my holding on to his hand for the next hour or two, muttering frantic prayers under my breath, kept him back. I turned his palm over and looked at the colour of his palms and knew he was failing and slipping away. I held on to him.

At some point the doctor on rounds visited. 'What Sir, you don't want to leave us or what?' she said.

Even now I can't be sure it was an act, because his replies were so lucid, so clear. Later that night, he would tell me that he had no memory of the doctor visiting or anything that happened after lunch. What had happened, he wanted to know.

What happened, the doctor thought, was that he was reacting to the albumin. She gave him a shot and left, issuing instructions to everybody about us staying one more night.

The fever subsided. Slowly he returned to the other state, the one before. I stayed awake through the night watching him, wondering if I was going to watch him die in this hospital, with no one else around, with his pink robes that didn't even tie properly across the back, and drips and needles in his hand and the oxygen bubbling above the bed and the night light near the floor and dinner drying on the table because the ward boy didn't know we hadn't left.

Did we talk before he slept? I'm sure we did but if it occured to me to make my farewells, to say all the things I ought to say so that I had a clear conscience for the rest of my life, I had no idea how to say it.

If you keep up the fiction of eternal life maybe those whom you love will live despite themselves. We slept after a normal 'good night'. Appa may even have told me not worry:

'Don't worry. Whatever it is we will face.'

Yes, Appa. Good night.

Birthday gifts

A year ago tomorrow Appa's birthday according to the Tamil calendar. Let's pretend this is 28 June 2008, evening.

I'm not sure how they have allowed my son - because children below 12 are not allowed in the hospital - but security is notoriously lax; on doctor's orders, I have smuggled in parathas and paneer and all kinds of home-made food for Appa for the last three days and no one has objected - but they have let him in during visiting hours, and when we leave, Nani, my son and I decide to stop over at Abids to buy Appa a walking stick for his birthday tomorrow.

Three days in hospital and I feel lightheaded. My days have been spent on the overstuffed sofa reading sci-fi/fantasy I would not otherwise have touched. Appa sleeps all the time. The room is always semi-dark but I cannot leave to read outside because he now needs help to walk to the bathroom. The tree outside the window makes me queasy because it feels like the building is swaying. Outside it must be nearly-monsoon.

I park in an inside lane because as usual there is no parking anywhere on the main road; though rumour has it that Abids is not as crowded as it used to be I see no evidence of a migration to malls in other places.

Appa needs a walking stick. Rationally, I know this. Buying him a walking stick is my son's idea but the thought makes me bitter. A practical, useful gift at this point sucks what little joy a celebration might have held. As well buy him a pillbox or a bed-tray (I have considered buying him these things).

Birthday gifts should be frivolous. They should demonstrate how little we care for the time we have because we have so much of it.

The walking sticks are upstairs. Lepakshi must think that only those who don't need them will buy them; why else would they make them so hard to get to? They are stuck in a bin at the end of an obstacle course. We pick each one out. They are all hideous but we detect even amidst this poor selection, ones that are worse than others: some are chipped, others are painted an ugly shit-brown. Finally we select one with a twirling body and a sturdy handle. As I pay for it (on behlaf of my son) I wonder how an already shaky man will be supported by this thin, crooked piece of wood.

Later we stop to buy him some track pants. These are another one of those things he needs urgently.

At night, Nani, with her failing eyes, gets things together for the akkaravadusal she will make for Appa tomorrow, that I will smuggle into the room and which he will at first refuse but when the doctors come to wish him, cheery and loud, asking him how he plans to celebrate and urging him to eat whatever he likes that day, he will manage one spoon of before he sets down the half-katori to go to the bathroom.

I lie in bed telling myself that if he makes it past his real birthday, I will think of a good gift for him. Until then, in whoseever's dispensation such things are, his life is a sufficient gift for me.

But it's not my birthday we're talking about here, is it?

A month of years

What was I thinking a year ago? What did I mean by 'in good time' when it was clear that nothing about the present time was good? Was I waiting for the wheel to turn and for what passes for 'good' to return? Would I recognise it when I saw it? (and did I, in August?)

In other words, why this blog?

I stopped posting on Spaniard shortly before I began this and then I stayed silent for a few weeks until everything was over. When I did start to post here, this blog was open. After all, if I was going to air the most painful thoughts on a blog at all, it ought, by rights, be available to everyone: the more people there are the more anonymous you become.

In time that did not feel right any more. And so I restricted readers to a couple of dozen, some of whom I still had never met except online. Was that more right? Are there degrees of rightness with the opening of wounds in public?

Now there are six of you. For all practical purposes, we might be a bunch of people at a coffee shop or - God forbid! - at an AA meeting, swapping therapeutic stories. I'm Space Bar and it's been five weeks since my last sob story.

This was meant to be therapy, wasn't it? A place where I could say things I might not even have allowed myself to say in front of my own family, fresh with their own grief. A place where the sum of all your other experiences would help to drain away the charge of my excess. This was the hole in the wall where I could whisper my unspeakable secrets and no one would know though everyone was watching.

Then, when it became more particular, in the days when you had faces, I lost my voice. Why? Why did I allow you your separateness and me my silence? What were we doing still sitting around this cold hearth?

What am I doing now, already looking back on the not-yet-a-year as if it had the didactic weight of a lifetime? What am I meant to learn?

A year ago, when I wrote that first post, I didn't know that I would wake up the next day to find my father crying with exhaustion, his eyes too dry to make tears. I didn't know that I would begin to take decisions on his behalf and take him to the hospital despite his wishes. I also didn't think they would keep him, that I would break my promise to him that this would only be a consultation and not admission.

I didn't know any of it but I knew why I needed this space.

(interval: part 2)

My grandmother is visiting. This time it will be different. For one thing, she is one year older, more frail and for the first time probably the one in need of looking after. She has been suffering from vertigo and it doesn't seem possible that her trip alone by train can be incident-free though we will be thankful if it is.

It is. She has avoided eating or drinking and therefore the need to go to the bathroom. She is not noticeably less able than last year but that is probably a lifetime of taking her energy for granted. I have never seen my grandmother ill.

Amma says different. She has recently talked about Nani's nervous breakdown back when Amma was in her teens. She can't remember much about it. Only that Nani used to shiver in the Mettur night and need blankets. Everything else about this time is a blur in Amma's mind, either because she was in college at the time or because she has the blessed ability to foget many, many things. At any rate, it seems to have followed a time when my mama - my mother's brother - was il with several dificult diseases and needed constant nursing. Nani must have been a taut string stretched beyond bearing at the time. I want to know what her 'breakdown' amounted to, beyond the shivering and the blankets.

Should I ask? I want to know, not out of some vulgar curiosity - well, not entirely - but because this is probably the last time she will make the trip to Hyderabad. She is 84. How many things will go unsaid and unremembered when she does? How much can I ask and how much does she want aired at this point in her life?

And what would be the point?

But I want to know what a woman roughly the age I am now, felt after severe stress. What was it like then, when people in general and women in particular did not acknowledge that the mind could only take so much? How did this entity we can find no place for in the body but which cannot exist without it - how was this thing healed and how did people know it was sick?

*

Yesterday at the station, Amma was restless, waiting for the train to arrive. Though the display told us what platform and what time, she still prowled and looked for someone who would tell her with some more authority, the trains' coordinates.

Later, she moved downstairs for the next few weeks and I could hear them talk - mother and daughter - far into the night. Lying there, listening to the murmur of voices coming through my windown, I was conscious of feeling a little desolate though I couldnt say why.

The Home Stretch [A Year Ago]

Last year, today, also the first day of school. That time a Monday, this time a Tuesday. S and I leave early so we can leave some mangoes with security for the doctors before school. I don't go up to see Appa because of S, who is not allowed to visit.

Once I've seen the kid into class and paid the fees, I come back to the hospital to wait for Dr. K who will discharge him today. Appa is supposed to have oxygen arranged at home before he's allowed to leave but he leaves by car, with no oxygen until he's home. The doctors have discussed this and Appa feels he can make it without.

I stay behind to settle bills. Do I go back to school to pick up S and the books? Did he come back home by bus? With the books? Appa covers some of them until he tires. Those covers are the only ones that survive the year intact. All other covers come off in a couple of months.

Earlier.

Six days in hospital. Appa waited for S's birthday before getting tests. On the day he went to see the doctor - for once with Amma, because she wants to see him - the doctor tells them he needs to be admitted immediately. Later, I see in his file that Dr. K has written: Breathless. Cannot even complete one sentence.

Amma stays on. I call everyone. Two of my uncles arrange to leave immediately, one of them with my grandmother and her younger sister.

My prayers are fervent and continuous. This was not expected. Later that night, after S is asleep, I scribble on my post-it and get online to look for crematoria and mortuary numbers. Why mortuary? Who lived so far away we would have to wait for them? Everyone was coming anyway, right now.

The next morning in the hospital, Appa is cheerful as only great adversity can make him. "Whatever happens we will face it," he says. I have heard and will continue to hear this many times in the days to come. I'm not sure how it makes me feel.

He has to have something called a guided aspiration. There's some fluid in his pleural cavity (cavity? is that right?). There will be a local anaesthesia given. While he prepares for it, Amma leaves for home. I'm told Dr. K wants to meet me and I should go see him whenever I come in.

He is with a patient but he nods and says to please wait for a few minutes. When he's ready, I sit.

"It doesn't look good," he says. "His lungs are in a very bad shape."

I reply with a variation of Appa's whatever it is we will face line. "You can tell me the worst, doctor. We're prepared for anything."

He wasn't prepared to hear that, however. Doctors want hope to spring eternal. He says we need to wait to see how the U/S guided aspiration goes.

In the days to come, the doctor notches up his cheeriness as Appa finds the pain unbearable. Eat more! You're looking good! How are you, sir?

I massage Appa's shoulders which hurt him all the time. The doctor on rounds says I shouldn't because of possible haematoma. We have to consider his liver condition as well. The balance is precarious. I try to be cheerful but find it harder each day. There's a second-hand bookshop down the road. I walk down one evening I'm in hospital and find a Le Carre, and something else I can't remember. I have the library's David Sedaris. How unrelated all writing is.

People come to see Appa. There are relatives at home. I remember nothing of their presence. There's the early morning trip to the hospital, the parking lot attendants, the security, the nurses - I know them all by name now.

Nurses. That head nurse who did not come even when Dr. K rang for her. He yelled at her, she was defiant but later apologetic. But they were all lackadaisical. Wrong dosages, wrong inhalers. Not even Amma knows what has to be given when. I have to keep an eagle eye on them because Appa is not always able to speak.

This is my preparation: this daily knowledge of decline in ability. In this I am better prepared than Amma. It wasn't prescience that made me look for the crematorium numbers; just preparedness.

If Appa had known, he would have been proud.

(interval: part 1)

Why is it harder than I thought? It's not what it looks like.

I feel at peace.
Reasonably happy.
I look forward to the day and the people it will bring.

This means I find it hard to remember.

(There are days when remembering is not a choice I have to make: such as when it was S's birthday and I thought of last year when we took the last photographs of Appa. Later that evening, when S, his father and I drove back my car from the service station, I cried all the way back because this was what Appa used to do with me - bring his car so I didn't have to take an auto or walk, wait until I got my car and drive back behind me.)

How does it matter? Forgetting is good, right? If the details are getting blurred it means that time is doing its famous healing job (why does time not heal the old when they are still alive?) and I have nothing to do but wait.

I don't see it like that. I see this one year as the last time it will ever be the first time without Appa. Once we've crossed this line, what else is there but repetition and the boredom of it? If there is an edge left, it is now and if I don't keep it next to my skin I must be doing Appa a disservice.

I feel pulled apart in several different directions. There's no time left. At least, not much of it.

Catching my breath

This is more difficult that I thought it would be.

The Bogey Men

The One in the Photograph

That you could use up
someone's life
by sucking it out
through the lens.

they may live forever
on your film,
which might be just as well

because soon you'll need
something to remember them by.


The One on the Page

Who absorbs with the ink
every characteristic of your loved one
until a point when both
are equally corporeal.

This is where you should stop
recording a life
if you want it to continue.


The One Who Walks Always Beside You

You can do nothing about.

The breath of life

Between 19th May 2008 and 3rd June 2008.

There was an oxygen cylinder. I am almost certain there was. I remember because on S's birthday on the 2nd, Appa said he felt better after an hour of oxygen.

But these last few days, I haven't been sure because, if he was already on oxygen in late-May/early-June, why did the doctor not discharge him the second time until we had the oxygen sorted out at home? I've looked through medical records but I can't find the receipts from the oxygen supplier. I realise that while I've made and kept copies of discharge summaries and prescriptions, I haven't kept copies of any receipts. The first time I realised I ought to have was after I sent off the insurance claims and saw someone else at the xerox shop making assiduous copies of every bill and scribble.

I can't know for certain but I know for sure - to borrow Paromita's phrase - that there was oxygen. There was also, and about this I am certain, the antibiotic respules he had to take. Two years ago Dr. S had said that was the last resort. If I knew last year, as he prescribed it, that we had arrived at the last resort before the final long-haul of the desert, I had pushed the knowledge back behind hope.

Appa's cupboard tells me what he did those last two weeks but not how much time it took to do it:

An hour of oxygen in the morning and an hour in the evening and as required.
Two puffs of two inhalers twice a day (one of these three times a day).
Nebuliser twice a day. Each nebulisation for 15 minutes
followed by the antibiotic through the nebuliser for half and hour each time twice a day.

For the last time in those weeks, Appa went upstairs. He cleared out his cupboard, rearranged his papers (tore bitter letters and kept one photograph of his parents) and came down for the last time. Did he look a farewell out the window by his side of the bed? At the photographs, the terrace, my room and the view outside it that they wanted me to have when they built the house? Did he, in fact, know it was the last time?

Frankly, I don't think he cared. Not about these things.

The photograph on S's birthday has us sitting on the front door steps, Appa on the right of frame, Amma on the right and S and I in the middle. Appa has deep circles under his eyes. There are two white spots pinching at the side his nose as if he wore wireframed spectacles in the heat (but he didn't; this must have been something else). His smile is the kind some people have ready for photographs that other people take: a tentative stretch of the lips unmatched by the wathfulness of the eyes. As has become usual, one shoulder is higher than the other. This is the last photograph.

I am not and never was a diagnostician. But now, even I can see things that were there.

A Year Ago: Part I

Using Google, i find that the 17th of May 2008 was a Saturday. Is that possible? I suppose it is, because only the second Saturday of the month is a government holiday. I need to know this to remember last year because I was speaking to several govt. officials this day last year.

Last year, the mango tree in our garden had an unusually large number of fruits. The photos are up on my blog; people had groaned at the temptation they were unable to act upon. Udit was there. The kid, Satyanarayana, Udit and I filled up two huge cane baskets - the kind in which mangoes are transported - and there were still more we hadn't plucked. I think we plucked 300 or more mangoes. This year, we had four to begin with and then one fell, half-eaten or rotten; I can't remember which. 'And then there were three', I say to myself, every time I go out the gate and glance at the tree.

There was also the smell of burning leaves. We had fought logn and hard, and constantly to get our neighbours to stop burning the leaves that dropped from the trees on the road or in their houses. Why wouldn't they use it for mulch? But the street sweepers that day had piled up the lot (we hadn't paid them their tea money) under an almost-dry tree and burnt the leaves. The smoke drifted into my room. From the next one, I heard Appa coughing. It might not have been because of the burning leaves, but it certainly aggravated his cough.

I called the Municipal Commissioner. He said to send him a mail. I was mailing govt. officials, making lunch and plucking mangoes. Amma was in Chennai.

Nearing lunch, Appa - who had spent the morning opening the water valve, watering the garden, making coffee and doing what amounted to endless paperwork - went for his bath. In minutes he came out saying he had passed black stools (a sign of internal bleeding).

I don't know that I had a first thought followed by a second then a third. There were things to be done and I did them: did Appa have money? Had we taken the files? Insurance papers? I told Sayanarayana we had to leave. And the maid. I was thankful that Udit was there to be with the kid. How would I have taken a seven year old to the hospital?

I always drive recklessly in such an emergency. I think of the time saved, the bleeding stopped the life held.

Playing it back, I notice Appa had stopped pressing an imaginary clutch or brake. He didn't even clutch his hands. It was I mouthing prayers. We didn't speak.

The Emergency Room is called Casualty. I had already called Dr. DK. He said he'd be there and to let him know when we arrive.

Outside the Endoscopy room, I sign the release forms. Appa lies down, is able to talk, explain. Dr. DK, with the mask around his face, listens. I sit outside with the files, the water bottle and his footwear under my chair. I watch the monitor anxiously. If there's bleeding I can't see it but even after all this time, what do I know?

Dr. DK comes out. He says we have to admit Appa for observation; that though there was no obvious blleding from the oesophagus, if there were black stools, we need to find out where it came from. He says Appa will be taken back to Casualty until I complete admission formalities.

Ten minutes later, I notice a lot of nurses in the Endoscopy room. Appa seems reluctant or unable to get up. I worry. I find out he's been sedated because the doc thought he could do without the pain. But the nurse is shaking him awake, saying, 'Swamiji! Get up!"

I am furious. Now it seems to me it is the Head Nurse on the Fourth Floor with whom we will have so much trouble, but of course that is not possible. I have cut and pasted a different face on this nurse because of how she behaved.

Instead of having him get up, they wheel him out into Casualty. I get him admitted, asking for a single room but being told I should take what I can get (he gets a single room). We have to wait for him to come out of sedation, get an X-Ray before we go up. I wait. I call. In a few minutes when consciousness returns, Appa's speech is blurred. This makes me want to cry. He has never been less than fully conscious. I stroke his hand wishing Amma were here.

X-Ray done, we're in the room. Amma flew in from Chennai, went home for a few things and came to the hospital to stay for the night. Appa was there for three days. They never found out what caused th ebleeding but the did a CT Scan which told the doctors more than they told us that time.

Nobody else came. As we went back home with the discharge summary and a review in two weeks after tests, we assumed it was a false alarm like so many others in the last few years. I recalled that it was in alternate years that Appa landed in hospital; that he had escaped a hospitalisation in 2007 and so this was just a delayed, unspotted bleeder from the varices.

Nothing to worry, Appa said. We repeated this to family and ourselves. I didn't even begin writing out the insurance claim for a week. We had the kid's upcoming birthday to think about. I was thankful that Udit seemed like family enough that he could stay with us, hold the fort in emergencies. I even looked forward to him returning in early June. Appa said to him, you are the child's father. He needs you. Please come often. Did he cry that time or later?

We packed the mangoes in cartons in layers, with newspapers. Appa could not sit and get up like he used to be able to. I did it all and listened to him being annoyed when I was too tired to check every day and rearrange them so the ripening ones were on top. The downstairs room reeked of raw mangoes.

The Beginning of the End

Quicksand: this is what memory amounts to.

I thought the 14th of this month was the day the end began but I was wrong. I see now that it is the 17th.

How much do I really remember of what happened? How much does one re-form while piecing together? What falls between the unmending cracks?

I'm going to try and find out.

third quarter

it's a relief to find everyone has gone and i am talking to myself. perhaps this was how it should have been from the very first.

the year was drawn and has been quartered. we find ourselves entering the last one. there are too many rooms. we who are left could have one each could pass our days never seeing each other. we are already like that: hardly talking, each in our own time perilin and the many-coloured death, needing the other but surviving alone.

there are scabs in my memory. did my grandparents leave, never to return, after my wedding? why does my father's cupboard have a photo album of my grandparents at my taladeepavali? did they come back? was everything forgiven? who here is still lying? what is the objective measure of memory?

i have lost the will to pick at these wounds. i know i should because the illness has only retreated temporarily. i need to dig deeper search harder look inside but i am afraid i won't recognise it when i find it will move on and i will become incomplete.

Dream (2)

Early this morning. Just before waking, I dreamt of a stool propped up against a number of heavy, blue-gray fuse boxes. My father was opening each box and checking the fuses. I watched from below, anxious about how rickety the stool was, worried he would fall. He found one that he didn't put back immediately. "This is the one," he said and half-turned. I held on to the stool that swayed. Lights came on in all the fuse boxes that now somehow stood open, making a line of orange-yellow. And beyond - by which I mean to the right of- the one in his hand, all was dark.

"This is the one that changed everything," he said.

The boxes were propped against the gate. Beyond that lay a pile of stones and rubble. He was no longer on the stool and we could no longer leave.

Only, of course, it wasn't all clear like that because I woke up.