Inevitably, however, the tumor caused terrible losses in his well-being. He lost much of his mobility. And then, week after week, the tumor shut down his ability to speak. It was heartbreaking to see him go mute, knowing that his mind worked as sharply as always, knowing that he was aware that he couldn’t speak despite every effort. Whenever he summoned up a sentence or word, I hung on to them, knowing that they were the last things he would ever tell me.
One night, as I was helping the nurses change him into his pajamas, his arms propped up stiffly on my shoulders, he looked straight into my eyes and said, speaking unusually in Hindi, “Bacche, maaf karna mujhe, is bimari ka koi thikana nahin hain.” (“Child, forgive me, it’s not possible for me to win against this disease.”)
One morning, one of the nurses rushed down the stairs to say my father was calling me. Seeing my disbelieving look, he said, “Sahib is saying ‘WanaPana, WanaPana.’ ” WanaPana was what my father had called me most times since my childhood, a play on my nickname, Rana. I rushed up, and there was my father propped up in bed, beaming at me, repeating softly, “WanaPana, WanaPana, WanaPana!” He looked like a toddler astonished at his ability to speak.
My brother Bharat, on one of his vists, decided to read out Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” our father’s favorite poem. It was afternoon and we were sitting out in the sun, my father immobile in his wheelchair. Bharat read out those wise sentences, sentences that, like our father, each of us brothers knew by heart: “ ‘If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . . If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same. . .’ ” He read beautifully and slowly. “ ‘Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, / And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools . . .’ ”
My father sat there, his face looking stony, almost as if he had lost his hearing. But then, a minute after Bharat had ended, his face lit up and he said simply, “Vah!” (the Hindi equivalent of “Wow!” or “Encore!”).
There came a time, eventually, when there were no more sentences, not even after weeks. His expression became unchanging, brought on by his waning muscular control. I knew he still understood everything perfectly. I could see his body relax every morning when I played his favorite bhajans. At sunset, when I knew he began to crave a drink, I would play Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawaalis or Begum Akhtar’s ghazals and his face would light up soundlessly. His face glowed on the night I showed him the old male leopard sitting quietly outside the gate, its dappled coat ethereal in the yellow lamplight. It shone every time I pointed out the gaur herd or the solitary bull foraging on the vines on the fence. It was imperceptible, but I could see it.
He began to waste away. He lost weight rapidly, even though we tempted him with all his favorite things—mutton curry, kaali daal, saag paneer, allo ka paratha, kheer, and caramel custard. Yet, like the cadaverous, fasting Buddha, an image of serenity in suffering that had moved me so profoundly ever since I was a child, he lost more and more weight till he was reduced to skin and bones.
I suffered to see all that, even as I knew that I was being given gifts that I would treasure forever, that would be more precious to me than any other memories. One gift, of course, was to know that I could look back with a clear conscience, knowing that I had cared for my father with something approaching the selfless love he had always bestowed on me.
There was another, less obvious gift. I saw that as my father lost his capacities, his external personality was falling away, too, the personality spun together by class and upbringing as well as self-preservation. What was left was his essence, the real, true him, and it filled my heart with joy to see what a shining goodness, kindness, and sweetness there was to that essential him. Perhaps nothing gave me so much joy as to have the privilege of seeing my father as the person he truly was, and to know that I was so fortunate as to be the child of that lovely person.
A time came, five long months later, when I began to realize that I would have to live up to my promise to my father that I would help him pass away if he became bedridden. I told my brothers. I called a beloved friend of mine, a doctor, to ask for advice. I began to plan to arrange for a large supply of morphine.
Not more than a few days had passed when, one morning, with Pratap back for another visit, my father seemed to practically light up, his face incandescent and beaming. Sitting in his wheelchair on the patio in his favorite spot, overlooking the valley below, Pana Para’s peak on the left and the other wild peak on the right, he ate an entire small bowl of caramel custard, fed slowly by the nurse. When the nurse bent to wipe his mouth, he said softly, “Thank you. God bless you, son.”
Those were his last meal and his last words.
When Pratap accompanied him upstairs to his bedroom for his prayers, he took one shuffling step forward toward his gods, smiled with bliss as if he were with a great love, and died.
TWENTY-FIVE
AN INDEFINITE SENTENCE
I desperately wanted to make sense of my life. In less than a year, I would turn fifty. Since I had encountered Jiddu Krishnamurti’s philosophical works back in my undergraduate years, I had never consciously shied away from confronting my inner struggles. But now my struggles had intensified in a way that I couldn’t make sense of—the one person who had cared constantly and watchfully and lovingly for me was gone, and I felt orphaned. All of my life seemed full of failure and impermanence—with no children, no lasting relationship, no place or cause where I was desperately needed, not even a conventional steady job. For all that I had convinced myself along the way that I was brave and principled and successful, I now felt I had been fooling myself. I had failed to overcome my handicaps, failed to make the right decisions. Whatever the truth or balance, I wanted to make clear sense of my life now, without flinching. For that, I needed to be utterly alone and to have no crutches and no support.
There was no other place that I could imagine myself in at that point, while dealing with those struggles, but Pana Para. Just as that sign on the mountaintop, that anagram of Pana Para—“Papa Rana”—had promised, it was a place of destiny for my father and me. It had given us incomparable treasures—even if they were not the treasures we had hoped for, even if it took all our wisdom to realize that they were treasures, not tragedies. Pana Para had given my father glorious last years and a blessedly peaceful death. It had given me what I wanted most deeply: a gift with which to honor him, a place in which to care for him, a mountaintop to cremate him, a place to give him a samadhi in the untamed wilderness that he loved so deeply.
It was our Ithaka. Cavafy, my beloved poet, was right about Ithakas—“And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. / Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, / you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.” Pana Para was my home—and so I stayed put.
The years that followed were by far the most difficult of my adult life. Yet, paradoxically, they were also critical, changing me in lasting, positive ways. Every one of my experiences in Pana Para invariably had that dichotomous quality of pain and glory.
One cause of anguish was my father’s absence. Virtually everything in the house was his—from the furniture and the books down to the photographs of our ancestors and love letters between my mother and him. And then, at the foot of the garden, right by the second set of gates leading into the forest, was his samadhi—the flat rocks on which his funeral pyre had been placed, the flowering shrubs and ground creepers that I had planted only now beginning to cover the ashes and other remains—to which I was drawn constantly to talk to him or to just stand there sobbing.
Now, routinely a full week or even a fortnight or more would go past without my seeing or speaking to anyone but the staff who remained to manage the house as well as the land under tea. The only other people I saw occasionally were the workers on the neighboring tea plantations—I would call out “Vannakam,” a respectful Tamil greeting, to them, met by a chorus of greetings and smile
s. The home was so isolated that if a vehicle passed anywhere nearby, it came as a surprise. I rarely even spotted planes.
I had never been one for chatting on the phone, and though I tried to make an effort to speak to my siblings and close friends regularly, I found that the prolonged silence had a snowballing effect, making me ever less comfortable with phone conversations. Year in and year out, for an eternity, every day stretched ahead just like the ones that had passed.
It required all my resourcefulness, built up over my life and learned from my father, not to be overcome by loneliness and instead to maintain an equilibrium and work productively. The discipline of work itself provided solace. Half the day went in my writing hours, from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., to which I kept religiously. I typically put in another two hours before dinner. By my desk in my home office, I kept a printout in thirty-six-point type of what one sex worker had told me many years back: “I was arrested in a raid on the brothel . . . Earlier, many times these same policemen would come to the brothel and have sex with us for free. In the lockup that night the policemen beat me on my genitals with sticks. I was naked. They said it was for talking back to them!” If my concentration flagged or I felt sorry for myself, I reread those piercing words, which never failed to goad me back to work with the knowledge that I owed it to her and to the countless impoverished and outlawed people who had spent hours confiding in me to do whatever I could to improve things.
Lorca was my greatest solace. His need to be with me every minute of the day, from waking to sleeping, and his depth of love made me feel privileged. I felt as though I had a child as well as the most constant and loving of friends. And it was impossible not to feel cheered up by that furry face, with those surprisingly steady, thoughtful eyes, looking like some daemon conjured up by J. K. Rowling’s wondrous imagination. I realized how lucky I had been to have him as a companion across three continents and through all the dislocations of these strange years. I also came to realize that I was perhaps more suited to this particular kind of relationship than to being in a romantic relationship with all its potential for trauma.
I found consolation, too, in the incredible natural beauty of Pana Para. Late in life, I had found the refuge of forests and wild animals I had constantly dreamed of as a child. On my long daily hikes, which typically began at 3:00 p.m. and ended at dusk, it was a certainty that I would see barking deer, wild boar, and gaur—and, less frequently, leopard, sloth bear, huge sambar deer, and Chihuahua-sized chevrotain. Because I was virtually the only person living there—especially paying such rapt attention to them—I felt I had a personal relationship with each of those wild animals.
The gaur were one of my favorite animals there. Even though I saw them every day, I was freshly enchanted. They were stunningly beautiful—the bulls the glistening black of wet rock, the females a velvety chocolate. And despite their forbidding size—the males stood nearly seven feet at their humped shoulders—they were unaggressive. The matriarchs that led the nearby herds soon became used to me, setting the tone for the others by continuing their foraging or napping unafraid, so that I could stand or sit close by and watch them for as long as I wanted. Only the youngsters—as slim and doe-eyed as deer—playfully pretended that I was some exciting creature that they had to keep an eye on.
My other favorites were the leopards. I saw them often, even as often as six times in one special month. Yet each encounter was indelible. There was the late afternoon that Lorca barked in the most fearsome tone I had ever heard him produce and I realized it was directed at a leopard that was staring up at him hungrily from the path outside the fence. There was the day when a pair of near adults played with each other in the tea bushes outside the fence. There was the day when I watched a pair mating, irritably trying to fend off the two female gaur who kept mischievously attacking them. And then, most precious of all, there was the series of late afternoons when the old male would wait for me at the same spot near the rock where he lived as I wound my way back home, both of us sitting down to stare at each other, less than a hundred yards separating us, building that inexplicable, indescribable bond that can be struck up between wild things and humans.
My solace in the evenings was to whirl. I had learned that form of meditation from an extraordinarily perceptive Sufi teacher I had met in Goa, talking to whom had helped me grapple with the loss of my father as well as my old traumas. At the end of a visit to her, no doubt sensing my dread of returning to the loneliness of Pana Para, she had told me simply, “I envy you your whirling alone on your mountainside, under the stars,” and then walked away without a word of explanation or comfort.
She was, of course, unerringly correct. The whirling in the infinite solitude of Pana Para was what I desperately needed.
I would turn off every light, open the living room to the outside, put a Maria Farantouri or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan disc on repeat play, and whirl endlessly, beginning on the living room carpet and then out onto the patio. Every emotion that was coursing through me emerged in full force. There was endless grief at having lost my father. There was rage at the meaningless course of my life, which had left me here utterly alone on an isolated mountainside. There was self-pity. But I noticed that each of them alternated, almost automatically, with feelings of joy, of gratitude, of bliss, of laughter. And, strangely, not only did the whirling make me feel my emotions more clearly and strongly than ever, it also let me think more clearly than I ever had otherwise, as if I could study everything with distance. It was strange to find acuity and mental balance while whirling off balance!
Though I don’t know exactly when or how, those many nights of whirling gave me psychological breakthroughs. I realized I could endure anything, even the worst losses and the worst grief. I realized, too, that grief was vital, that it tempered me in ways that no other emotion could—made me, oddly, more capable of living. I realized just how deeply I loved solitude. And seeing the pleasant and unpleasant emotions come and go naturally in turn, their power over me began to lessen, in that my longing to be “happy” rather than “troubled” diminished. The perpetual sense of apprehension and anxiety I had felt as long as I could remember, certainly since my school days, began to fall away. Gradually I felt that all my fractured pieces had fallen into place.
I was in Pana Para when, in early 2012, India’s Supreme Court began hearing the challenges to the 2009 ruling of the Delhi High Court decriminalizing same-sex relations.
For every reason, it was certain that the Supreme Court would speedily uphold the high court decision. Even more consistently than the state high courts, the Supreme Court was known for progressive judgments that defended the rights of the poor, disadvantaged, and marginalized. Moreover, it was rare for the apex court to overturn a rigorously argued ruling by any of the major state high courts. The Delhi court’s ruling had subsequently also been embraced by other courts when faced with cases relating to same-sex matters. In early 2010, in response to the brutal victimization of an academic, S. R. Siras, who had been covertly videotaped in his bedroom while having sex with another man and then forced to quit his post by the university administration for “gross misconduct,” the high court of Uttar Pradesh had cited the Delhi court’s ruling to rebuke the university administration and reinstate Siras. (Tragically, Siras was found dead in his apartment just days after he won the case, the cause of death remaining unclear.)
Moreover, the Congress-led government was not a party to the challenge. In its written submission to the court the government had unequivocally said that it found no fault with the judgment. The law and justice minister, Veerappa Moily, a well-regarded lawyer himself, had publicly praised the judgment for being “well-researched, well-documented, well-argued . . . [T]his is one judgment which has really stood out in the judicial annals of this country.” (I felt enormous relief that the extreme-right BJP was not in power—its track record of bigotry and its angry criticism of the high court’s ruling meant that it would unfailingly have sought to overturn it.)
And not only did none of the fifteen petitioners have any standing in a constitutional matter, but—and the justices of the Supreme Court could not but be appalled by this—they were an embarrassment of cranks and nuts. The first petitioner in Suresh Kumar Koushal v. Naz Foundation was Suresh Kumar Koushal, an obscure astrologer who maintained that the decriminalization of homosexuality threatened India’s national security because officers in the armed forces would now be emboldened to sexually abuse their troops. From the original Delhi High Court case, there was the fulminant BJP strongman B. P. Singhal as well as the fringe AIDS-denial group JACK. There was Baba Ramdev, a popular yoga teacher known for his bizarre views—in this case, he feared that India’s population growth would be harmed by the spread of homosexuality. There were obscurantist faith organizations, including the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and the Apostolic Churches Alliance. I felt sympathy for the Supreme Court justices who would be subjected to their drivel.
In contrast, the individuals and groups defending the high court’s decision were highly respected. In addition to the Naz Foundation, which had filed the original public interest challenge in the Delhi High Court and the activist coalition Voices Against 377, there were affidavits from leading mental health experts, legal scholars, prominent academics, and parents of gay, lesbian, or transgender children. Arguing pro bono on their behalf were some of India’s most celebrated constitutional lawyers.
And, by now, global thinking about same-sex rights had advanced so much that if the justices looked abroad—at UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and US president Barack Obama emphasizing that sexual and gender orientation were basic human rights matters or at the hundred-plus countries where same-sex relations were now legal and the dozen that recognized same-sex marriage—they would only find support for the Delhi court’s ruling that twenty-first-century India had to be a part of this march of progress.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 36
