Appa and his Son

The loud clang startled me and I jumped out of the bed. It was pitch dark.  For a moment I forgot where I was. In time, the recollection came. ‘What am I doing here?’ I asked myself.  The radium of the wall clock showed that it was ten. I do not usually fall into a deep sleep at this time of the night. But this night was an aberration. Maybe because of the tiresome five hour bus journey from Chennai to this town in the morning. Maybe because of the spate of late night meetings in the office over the last one week. A helpless feeling of lethargy engulfed my body and mind.

Slowly the eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could make out the silhouette of my father leaning down from his cot and struggling with something. For a moment it appeared he would fall down.   He was desperately trying to pick up something from the floor with his shaking hands. I could spot him furtively stealing a glance at me sideways to check if he had woken me up.  I jumped off from my bed and went close to him to inspect.  The water jug that was placed on the table had fallen down. Water was splayed everywhere on the floor. I quickly picked up the jar. There was still some water left inside. I held my father’s frail body by his armpit, gently laid him down on the cot and slowly poured water into his half open mouth. He drank gleefully.  A lump started to form inside my heart and climbed its way up but got stuck in the throat. I could manage to smother the sob but failed with the tears welling in my eyes.

“You could have woken me up, appa”

He wanted to say something but it was too much of an effort. He drank the water some of which spilled all over his face and dripped onto the pillow. He closed his eyes gently and let out a sigh. A low moan emanated from his mouth.

‘This is not the appa I know. This is not the appa I wish to be with, after all these years,’ I cried softly. ‘Is this the form I was longing to see after five years?’ I cursed myself for not being by his side during the last few years. The five years sacrificed at the altar of the US dream.  For five years I pretended to myself that I was taking good care of my father, by sending him forty thousand rupees every month. Yes, you heard me right – forty thousand.

The wife was not particularly humored by this extravagance of mine but she did not press this except for the occasional bouts of zero conversation. After all, she too realized that the alternative is my father coming over to live permanently with us in the States. Her spells of silence were good in one way, in fact, blissful for me.  Would she understand if I told her that I had a conscience to answer?

 When I left for the US five years back, I had put my father and mother in a good ‘retirement community’. Now, this was not an old age home (I am not cruel, you know), it is a senior citizens community of ‘assisted living’, with all facilities available twenty four-seven.  I thought I had done the best for him. Only much later, the conscience beast began to openly question me. It asked me as to whether money thrown about was what filial duty was all about? I knew it was not, I knew my father yearned to have me visit him more often, but I was too busy living the American dream that I managed to smother the conscience beast every time it reared its ugly head.

I should have at least listened to it when my mother passed away last year. I did not. The wife would not let me. ‘See, Mohan, what will he do here in this strange place with no friends to chat with, no temple to go and nothing to do?’ she would wax sweetly. ‘He would be much better off there where he would be engaged’.

I should have said no. I should have, for a change, either visited him more often or brought him along to the States to live with me.

I did neither.

Until I received the phone call from my father’s neighbor one Friday evening informing that my appa was seriously ill and had been admitted to a hospital. And then I rushed. Eighteen hours of flight. Every passing minute seemed an eon to me on the flight.  We do not value time. Rather, we have no clue on how to view time in the right perspective. The last fifty years when my father was hale and hearty meant nothing to me. Right now, each moment counted as if it were my last.  Too late.  And too little.  I once again cried.

I had asked the doctor about my father’s condition. “Pulmonary edema and Pleurisy”, he replied without any dramatics. It seemed he wanted to show off the names of some of the diseases he had memorized while doing his medicine degree.

“And what does that do? In simple terms, how quickly my father could return home?”  I asked.

“Mr. Mohan, let me be candid. This condition is pretty serious.  Not necessarily fatal but given your father’s age, it would be a task for him to recover completely before three months. Till that time, he needs complete care. I can discharge him in a week but after that it is in your hands.”

‘My hands’, I thought bitterly. What would I do? Three months on leave? Certainly not possible. Or maybe I can arrange for a caretaker? Or maybe, just may be……

I quickly banished the thought. The conscience beast was having a field day. Again it reared its grotesque face.  ‘Should you not be taking him with you to the US?’ it mocked.   I should. There is no other solution more apt.  But would I? Can I?

It is not until it is too late does one realize what the bundle of flesh and bones that goes by the name father means in one’s life. In most cases the realization comes a bit too late, at a stage when any course-correction becomes impossible. It has, perhaps, come to me now.

And when it is too late, only the memories remain.  From the montage of memories that formed my childhood, three distinctly stand out. The incidents by themselves do not have any significance. But the memories stand rock solid. Despite the passing of time and best of efforts to shake them off, they continue to haunt.

Memory one - When I was being sent away to Kolkata with a pack of relatives in a train to spend my summer holidays. I was about nine then. That was my first trip alone, without father and mother, to anywhere. I was to spend a month in Kolkata.  The blurred memories of my father coming to the station to send me off and just when the train was about to move, tears in his eyes. I could not believe it. I too nearly cried, even though I and my father were not the best of pals, if you know what I mean. We always maintained a distance between us, a distance fed by mutual respect, admiration and love.  We exchanged few words. And here he is, crying!  As the train moved away from the station, my aunt with whom I was travelling was quick to point this out to me. “I did not know your father loved you so much,” she said. I nearly died of embarrassment.

Memory two – When we (me, my mother and father) were out shopping.  Not the kind of mall hopping we do nowadays. There were no malls then. Our shopping usually began with a visit to the provision store and ended with the vegetable shop.  That particular evening, I vaguely remember that we walked a lot and that I was kind of ill that day, running a temperature. At some point, I stopped walking. I could not take another step. My legs were giving away. The fever was burning. I unclasped my father’s hand and sat down on the platform. My father was worried; I could see it in his face. He did not foresee that my condition was bad; else he would not have taken me for such a long walk.  He came to me and asked, “Mohan, what happened ma? Are you alright?” I don’t remember what I replied. We were about a kilometer from our home. He then gave the shopping bags to my mother and then just lifted me and carried me on his shoulder like he would a baby and walked all the way home! Despite my fever, I was acutely aware of what was happening. It was a heady mix of delirium caused by fever and the warmth of my father’s arms.  That was another instance of a mix of affection and embarrassment for me.

Memory three -   the Three Musketeers!  When I was about seven or eight, it was a daily ritual for me to run to the neighbour’s house every day and rummage through the Cinemas section of the English Newspaper. We had only the vernacular newspaper delivered to our home those days. It was not until I went to Class VIII did my father had it changed to English. I had in my school syllabus, two classics for non-detailed study.  One was ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and the other, ‘The Three musketeers’.  I came to know that these two were also made into films. I desperately wanted to watch these two movies. That was the purpose of my daily dash to the neighbor. To check daily if any theatre was showing it. This went on for about a year. I could not shake off my obsession with these two stories.  And one fine morning, I could not believe myself. The Elphinstone theater was releasing The Three Musketeers the next day, a Friday. I could not conceal my glee. I immediately ran back to my father and informed him this news.  Right from that moment, I started pestering him to take me to the film that week end. He neither said yes, nor no. 

Only years later I came to realize that he never had the heart to negate any of my demands, only he had to necessarily worry about the economics of every demand. At this point, I have to explain that our financial situation was not something to write home about those days. My father was working in a private firm as a clerk. Whatever he brought home was just barely enough to feed our family of five. Anything beyond the basic essentials was an effort for him to fulfill. Not that we made many demands on him but this Three Musketeers demand had immediately set him thinking. The ticket price per head was three rupees. Of course, the theatre was only a fifteen minute walk, so we would walk both ways. The interval popcorn or cool drink would set him back by another say two rupees, so it was a question of affording about eight bucks in the last week of the month.  That was what sent him on a worrying spree, but finally he said yes.  My joy knew no bounds.

 I wish I could turn back the clock and bring the wheels of time to a stop. To halt exactly at that point of time in my life when I watched the film with my father.  Athos, Porthos & Aramis were daring and dashing on the screen alright but quite different from the image I had formed of them, from the reading of the book.  That came as a bit of a disappointment. But D’Artagnan did not disappoint one bit. I did not allow myself to realize that this was a film and the actors were just playing their parts. For me, the characters from the novel just leapt out of the book and were coming alive on the big screen. Oh, my, how I relished those ninety minutes! Of what purpose is walking a hundred years on this planet, if for only ninety minutes of it you relish life! Even as I was thoroughly immersed in the gripping duels between the musketeers and Cardinal Richelieu’s men, the film suddenly ended! I was waiting hungrily for a feast but the show ended with just crumbs.

What a disappointment! What happened to all the scenes post the fight, Milady, the Queen, Madame Bonacieux and all the other things?  I felt completely let-down and nearly cried that the film had to end this fast.  My father could sense this, as I had immediately started bombarding him with questions on what happened to the rest of the story and why they were not shown in the film. “The story is too long to be captured fully in one film version”, he consoled me. ‘There are other versions which are better ones. Perhaps we might one day see the Gene Kelly version of the film. That came long back and was very good.”

We never got to see the Gene Kelly version but that does not matter. What matters now is the memory. Of the musketeers, of my father, of the film, the milk ice-cream he bought me in the intermission……….. Why life has to be so sweet only in memories of the distant past and so harsh in the present? Why one has to live life only in memories, when the present is a near-death experience?

No, I did not have the courage to take my father with me to the US after his release from the hospital. I put him back in the senior citizen community. This time, I arranged for a full time help to be with him all day. That was my way of answering my conscience. As I took leave, my father asked me feebly, when he could see me and my two daughters again. ‘Very soon, father” I lied. Maybe next summer, I will bring them along,” I lied smoothly. I knew that was not going to happen. I have a wife to manouevre around, which looked an uphill task.

My father nodded in satisfaction.  He came up to the door to see me off. He seemed quite happy and content. Frail, but happy. Or at least that is what I thought. As I got into the cab, he again called me by name. The cab had already started moving by that time and I had to stop it.

“Yes, father?”

“Mohan, I just wanted to say that I am happy here. The community is nice, I go to the temple daily, take my morning walk in the terrace, and the food is good. The doctor also takes care of us when there is need. You need not feel bad that I am alone here. I am happy. In fact, I do not even miss your mother now. Just that I thought it would be nice to see your daughters. I am quite happy, Mohan, quite happy”

I absent mindedly nodded. I could not bear to look at his face again. I badly wanted to burst out crying, but did not want to, before the cab driver. I cursed life. I cursed my wife. I cursed the whole universe. I cursed myself. That was all my impotence would allow me. To curse. It would not even let me cry.

I am now back in the US. The routine has once again submerged me. For the first one week, I used to make daily calls to my father. The frequency started dropping off gradually. It is now once a week.

Inexplicably, I now vicariously await that single call from the caretaker of the community. That single call which would inform me that everything is over, so that I can spare myself the agony. That single call which would take me to India one final time.

That call has so far not come. I should be happy that it has not.  But am I?