The Stranger in My Home
Page 9
I never visited Dan again. The following week the headmaster announced that Dan had passed away in his sleep.
I went home and looked at the elegant pen and wished I had openly acknowledged him as a friend.
38
A DOCTOR TO REMEMBER
WHEN A RETICENT MAN SPOKE
MY DISGRACE WAS COMPLETE. I was an experienced oarsman, had captained the company team in several regattas and had gone out this crisp early-fall dawn in my favourite scull. As I reached the end of the lake and veered to turn, an excruciating pain, surging through my back, literally paralysed me. The oars fell from my hands and, still strapped in seat, I collapsed sideways at an awkward angle.
Serendipitously, an early-hour rower in another boat saw me, raised an alarm and got a number of rowers to turn up. With great difficulty they lugged me to a heavier boat, rowed me ashore, and lifted and laid me in my car. Then they drove me to a doctor.
That was my first encounter with Dr Gupta. He was a man in his sixties, with a round face and a large shock of jet-black hair, surprisingly nimble despite his middle-age spread. Swiftly he gave me a shot of a potent painkiller, then sat down to hear an account from me and my rescuers. He was an intent listener, who gave you unwavering attention and left you in no doubt that he wanted to hear it all. He probed in depth my earlier history of a car accident, and then, as my spasms subsided, examined my back from every angle. He recommended rest, abstention from rowing for days and some pills.
When I returned for a review a week later, he again examined me punctiliously and suggested a series of preventive exercises. He made me do each of the exercises to make sure they were correctly done and suggested another review three weeks later.
In every review, I found that, even in those pre-electronic days, he maintained scrupulous records of a patient, and made it the basis of an exhaustive check on actual and potential problems. A patient to him was not just a case, but a commitment. He felt he was responsible for the entire well-being of the person and would not let go of a single clue that bode future trouble. Like all doctors he relied on equipment, but depended far more on acute clinical judgement than on a plethora of tests.
In short order Dr Gupta became my primary care physician, but soon also the principal wellness consultant. I persuaded several friends and relations to turn to him for help. If he felt another physician would be better able to help in a particular case, he not only called the other specialist but arranged an early appointment. I could not help noticing that anybody I referred to him stuck to him and insisted on bringing their family members to Dr Gupta for consultation.
I found the reason for that. He clearly believed health was an integral thing and medicines were not the only means of sustaining it. He made no excuses for asking about one’s diet or living style. Faced by his interrogation others were taken aback as much as I was, but realized soon that he operated as an advisor as well as a clinician. His concern for a patient was total, and that gave me a sense of trust and relief I have seldom experienced since.
Waiting in the doctor’s chamber, I always carried a book to read. When he noticed that, Dr Gupta eagerly asked about my interests and we found we had a common interest in literature. More surprisingly, I discovered that, while he practised as a traditional family physician, he had wide-ranging knowledge of other systems of medicine. He explained that, though he had started like his fellow doctors, with deep-seated scepticism of homeopathy, he had read Samuel Hahnemann, the German homeopath, and believed implicitly in the capability of other esoteric systems.
A bunch of handmade birds adorned different corners of his chamber, and it took me time to find that he crafted them in his spare time as a hobby. He loved birds, had extensive knowledge of ornithology and used it to create remarkable life-like models. He told me how he collected the materials painstakingly, coloured them and put them together at late hours after his work was over for the day.
Our friendship continued until the day I emigrated.
After thirty years, spent on work assignments in three continents, I was on a nostalgic visit to India, and I paused briefly in front of the neat little house where Dr Gupta lived in the back and had his office and examination room on the front. I was told the house would soon be demolished and replaced by a tall apartment building, indistinguishable from a dozen other nondescript buildings around it. I tried to banish the thought and recall the sunny, cheerful office where I had spent hours with a doctor who always seemed to have time to listen and explain.
His daughter told me that he had lost nearly all his sight in the last three years. I tried even harder to forget that and imagined him sitting at his desk at the end of a long day of exhausting but dedicated work, his large shock of hair drooping over his forehead, enjoying a leisurely hour of dusk with a cup of tea, and lovingly caressing a handcrafted babble or tailorbird and dreaming of his next creation.
39
TWO PERSONS, THREE DAYS
A LOSS THAT DEFIES OBLIVION
I HAVE NEVER WRITTEN to you. I don’t know what possesses me to write to you now. I only know that I want to write to you, perhaps as a matter of closure. Having said that, I realize that I don’t even want such closure.
I met you briefly in the university. We took the same course and were in the same class a few times. We spoke inconsequentially a couple of times. Then you left. I heard you were taking another course elsewhere, in another city. I did not see you for a long time.
Until two years later.
You called and reminded me that we had met in a classroom. I told you the reminder was not necessary. You had a distinctive way of talking and I remembered it. I also said I was happy to hear from you.
You asked if we could meet. I said that I lived right next to the university and you were welcome to visit me. I gave you directions and because I lived in a gated community, instructed the guards to guide you when you came.
When I opened the door to you the next day, I was speechless for a moment. You looked different; compared to the woman I had met earlier, you looked more grown-up and self-possessed. You looked beautiful and I felt breathless.
You smiled and I took your hand.
You mentioned a conflict with your family and said that you were now on your own. You had taken a job and intended to stay in town and finish the course. I was happy to hear it and said so. We had tea and talked for a long time.
When you left, I said I hoped to see you again soon. You promised me I would.
You called two days later and said that you had several questions about the course and would appreciate it if we could talk.
You came early and again, we talked for a long time. The talk was not all about the course. You told me about your life with your family and how sad it was that it had ended the way it had. You spoke of your dreams and the independent life you had always wanted to achieve.
In turn I told you of the kind of life I dreamed of as my university days were about to end. I wanted a life of action, but I also wanted a life of ideas. I knew the two were not easy to reconcile. I also said I have had a loving family. Going forward, I could not think of a life without some measure of love and friendship.
I remember my mother returned early that day and she invited you to stay back and have an early dinner with us. She sat you next to my father, facing me, and I sat transfixed watching you as you smiled and talked, mostly to my mother who was, I could guess, a little concerned about a young woman living alone for the first time in a big city. When you left, my mother said to me that you were a pleasant person and I should help in whatever way I could. I said I would like to.
You had said that you might get in touch with me the following week. So I was surprised to get a call from you the very next day. You said you were at the university to see a professor and he wasn’t there, and wondered if I had some time to see you.
When I saw you at the door, I was about to say how delighted I was to see you unexpectedly, when I suddenly found you in my arms. My pulse ra
ced as I held you, your breath on my neck. I kissed your hand and asked you if you had to go back to see the professor.
‘I don’t have to see anybody,’ she said. ‘I fibbed. I came to see you.’
I scarcely believed my ears. We had a whole day and an empty apartment to ourselves. I looked at you, your glistening forehead, your quivering nose, your full lips, and my heart was in my mouth. I could not speak.
Here was the person of my dreams standing with her arms around my neck, my body sensing her uneven breathing, her fragrance enveloping, almost obliterating my whole existence. There was nothing I could have said. For a second I thought you were crying. Then you smiled, and I held your hands and kissed you.
Time must have stopped. I seemed to be holding you for a long time.
Then we stepped out on the large terrace next to the apartment. We walked aimlessly, we talked endlessly. Nothing else mattered as long as I had you next to me. I had never been happier.
I had paid no attention to the darkening clouds. When the rain started, we could have stepped back into the apartment. The drizzle seemed like a benediction. So, we just stood there. We stood as the rain poured, drenching us literally to the skin. It seemed the most natural thing to cling to one another, and I kissed you again and again.
When we returned to the apartment, I got you my tracksuit to wear and put up your clothes for drying.
I ordered some food from the restaurant downstairs, and we sat down to eat. You looked splendidly incongruous but radiant in my tracksuit. Just facing you made me lose my appetite. I can still see you sitting in our sun-drenched dining room, smiling and asking why I wasn’t eating, touching my hand in a reassuring gesture, and, finally, leaving the table to turn off the music and say to me, ‘Just sit with me, please.’
I had three full days with you. Three days of rapture and peace. I was desperately, irrecoverably in love with you.
At the end of the third day, you told me that you were betrothed to a person I knew. You were committed to marry him in six weeks.
I never saw you again.
Except twelve years later, while I was changing planes at Heathrow, I saw you, with your husband, moving towards another boarding area. Years had passed, but you looked no different to me. No different either was my reaction: I felt breathless and had to clutch my briefcase as I sat down in the first seat I could find.
The news reached me last week that cancer had claimed you as its latest victim. Those three days somehow endure in my mind as an indelible, inscrutable memory. I remain the willing victim of its tenacious grasp.
40
GIFTS THAT SPARKLE
LOVE WAS LAVISH, CARE UNQUESTIONED
I GREW UP IN a four-parent family. It sounds strange, but I really had three mothers.
My father had two sisters who developed a fast friendship in college with a round-faced, soft-spoken woman. The friendship went further than college bonds usually go. She ended up as their sister-in-law, my mother.
Amazingly, the friendship went further. They remained close friends until the day they died. This was particularly amazing because all three pursued individual careers, with notable success, in different cities.
Father had inordinate affection for his sisters. I suspect he also had an acute sense of responsibility towards them, because they did not marry and start families of their own.
The result was I grew up with four parents, each a powerful influence in my life.
Father was dispossessed by his family and had to work in a printing shop, to put bread on the table and pay for his lessons. He taught for years, then changed to an administrative job that fetched a modest pay but unusual benefits. He oversaw a library where I had access to books and journals, a gymnasium where a Mr Universe taught me body-building, and playgrounds, where the captain of an Olympic team gave me football lessons and a world champion offered me tips on improving my table tennis.
More important, he had an extraordinary capacity for camaraderie. He made friends with authors and actors, politicians and professors, doctors and lawyers, musicians and journalists. People of all ages and all professions marched through our living room, provided tea and cookies by my ever-obliging mother.
Undoubtedly, he left some impression on me. I remember my first girlfriend, who came from an aristocratic family, once asked me, ‘Do you have to start a conversation with every waiter and janitor in town?’
My aunts were a study in contrast. Aunt Senior was the maternal, nurturing kind, a true pushover. If I wanted an expensive toy and knew that Mother, let alone Father, would never approve, I astutely went to her and got her on my side. Once I persuaded her to order a large almond cake I had set my heart on, and later I heard mother tell her it was insane to order something so expensive frivolously, but my aunt never blamed me. She was the most generous person, both with her money and her heart. She gave immoderately, unreservedly, and sometimes unwisely, even to the undeserving. There was no question, however, that her life became a simple song of benediction, ever gracious and peaceful.
She once said of two virtual strangers, ‘They are good people. I want to be good to them.’ That was her dogma for all people. I thought it naïve then; now I think it wise.
Aunt Junior was quite different. She was sharp-witted and could be hard-hitting. Working hard and full-time, she still learned languages, did courses and built gardens. Ingenious and indefatigable, she would run with me, do jigsaw puzzles, play games and even invent new ones. From a school principal she became a state education administrator, yet always found time to read books to me after breakfast and dinner. In an indiscernible, playful way she passed on to me her extraordinary zest for life, an astonishing appetite for the concrete. When she visited me in the Philippines and we strolled, she told me the names of the trees and plants we passed. The ones she couldn’t, she found out the names the next day and told me on our next walk.
Whenever I hesitated, afraid to venture in a new direction, she would say, ‘You haven’t done it; try it. You may like it. If you don’t like it, try a different thing.’
Both the aunts painted, one in water colour and the other in oil. I learned to sketch from them. More important, I developed a taste for art and an eye for design: I learned to distinguish fonts, separate a Bodoni from a Garamond, recognize painters, know why Monet looks quite different from Matisse, and even enjoy seeing a Renzo Piano building as much as a Philip Johnson house.
I have never quite met anyone like my mother, with her quixotic melange of the tender and the tough, and her infinite capacity to sit back, reflect and understand. Living a hectic life overseas, I once told her, ‘I make it a point to write to my aunts every week. If I have more time, I write to you.’ Astoundingly, though I was telling her of a higher priority for the aunts compared to her, she replied, ‘You do the right thing. They need a letter from you more than I do.’
She was gentle and soft-spoken. When she made a point, it seemed like a thought casually dropped for others’ benefit. She wrote affectionately; all her letters drip of motherly concern and a carefully honed let-go philosophy. When I was twenty and she sounded perturbed about an office event, I quoted a Captain Dreyfus letter from Devil’s Island saying, ‘Of all losses, the loss of reason was the most appalling.’ When I was fifty and mentioned a trouble brewing in my office, she sent me back the same quotation, adding she trusted my ability to stay steady and rational.
The greatest gift she gave me was the equanimity that Indian seers have talked about. I learned to see both sides of a question and be ready to accept both sides of a person. I will never match her, but I began the journey of seeing more than what is apparent, finding a place in the heart for others’ foibles and one’s own drawbacks. I knew she was a beloved teacher in her school, but it has taken me years to realize she taught even better at home.
I am cynical enough to believe that all families have dysfunctional elements, often covert. Chance had me reared in a four-parent family, where love was lavish, care was unque
stioned, and where for fortunate me, all the four, imperceptibly but extravagantly, stacked up gifts that sparkle forever.
Experiences
Memories to Last a Lifetime
A Bullet through the Window
Sing of Human Unsuccess
The Fence
Wayward Minds
Reaching Home
Will You Marry a Robot?
Living on the Edge
Smile, Please!
A Story of Love and Pastries
An Unruly Horse
He Loved to Fly
A Jewel in Kathmandu
The Golden One
Tea and Me
41
A BULLET THROUGH THE WINDOW
CRISIS AND BEYOND
ON A WARM SUMMER night I had put my baby daughter to sleep in the bedroom upstairs when a muffled sound like firecrackers made me look out the window. I saw tracer bullets criss-crossing the night sky. A civil war had begun.
It was August 1987, and some military officers were staging a coup d’état in the Philippines to topple the new government of President Corazon Aquino, who had deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The dissident officers’ strategy was to attack downtown Manila, the capital, and cripple the financial district. Expatriates like me were particularly vulnerable, for our countries were believed to be supportive of Aquino’s rise to power.
Our official walkie-talkie crackled with news of violence and advice to stay indoors. Several civilians had died in the initial firefight, and nobody expected the inexperienced new government to be able to end the insurgency anytime soon. There was no television news; the station was reportedly under siege. No use calling the embassy for help, for it had already announced that it could do little to assist anyone till morning. I called neighbours, who said insurgents had commandeered some people’s homes to better target key street corners. It was hazardous to stay put, but with the sound of gunfire from three sides, it was just as hazardous to leave.