by The Stranger in My Home- Facets of a Life (retail) (epub)
My wife and I moved the baby to a central room and shuttered all the windows. We also packed two suitcases with essentials, in case there was an opportunity to get out. Then we did the most difficult thing of all: we waited.
Three hours later, as the guns rattled, the official word came that at dawn, US civilians were to form a convoy of cars near the school and drive to a hotel in a safe area near the port, so that if the situation turned worse, we could be evacuated to a navy vessel.
As the sun rose, we rushed to our car with our suitcases and drove to the hotel.
For a week we lived in a curious bubble: while violence raged elsewhere, we passed leisurely days in five-star comfort, at government expense, eating gourmet food in plush restaurants, our children entertained on the manicured hotel grounds by clowns and musicians. No work, all play. We drank coffee and bourbon, pored over newspapers for tidbits of news about the unfolding and then unravelling coup, chatted with colleagues, read books and just relaxed. Our daughter took it all as an extended picnic and revelled in the endless company of familiar kids.
After seven days, the coup ended as a futile adventure, and we returned home.
The house was the same as we had left it, with one exception. A bullet had penetrated a window on the first floor, traversed the length of the living room, and lodged itself neatly in a desk. On the desk stood a framed photograph of our baby, smiling without a concern in the world.
42
SING OF HUMAN UNSUCCESS
THERE IS A STORY IN YOUR LIFE
POET W.H. AUDEN WROTE three of his more stirring poems as W.B. Yeats was being interred. A phrase from one, ‘sing of human unsuccess’, stuck rooted in my heart.
Curiously, Auden was just thirty-two when he wrote the words. What does a young man know of failure, of its suffocating grip on our life and dreams? How could he discern its acrid taste for an older man, who has no more the time to try again? Little can compare with the sense of desolation of one who has struggled at something all his life, only to find at the end the effort wasn’t worth anything.
People have feared ageing because it brings increasing weakness and decreasing resistance to diseases. As better medicine and nutrition have countered these, other threats have gained ground. As you get older, relatives and friends die, people you know move elsewhere, children grow up and become strangers, and the world around you changes so much that you turn a virtual alien.
What do you hold on to then? Most hold on to fragments of tiny accomplishments: the medal you won in a school race, some inconsequential society that honoured you in an elocution contest, some student group you chaired in the university, the letter you published in the local newspaper and made your friends proud, the time your children thought you mattered because some politician publicly hugged you, and the very rare occasion your spouse thought you had achieved anything when you got a minor promotion in your office.
You walk, teetering, on the narrow ledge of your ostensible achievements most of the day. But, as you sit alone in the darkening shadows, a thought gnaws at your heels like a tenacious Rottweiler: you have seen little, done little, meant little. While huge tides of events and movements have tossed around you, you have spent your days earning your bread, saving some money, buying a house and just watching others living or dying meaningfully, doing interesting or heroic things, leaving a footprint small or large on the wet sands of the beach. The waves will wipe them out, we know, but for a while it is something to exult over.
Isn’t that the great unsuccess that most of us live with? If you identify with that, welcome! You belong to the Grand Army. You are one whom nobody will remember after a few years, just as nobody remembers after you have left a room after a few minutes. Nobody will write a book, or even a song or a blog, about you, because nobody will know what to put into it that will faintly interest others. Your friends will occasionally mention you, but they too will soon pass away or start losing their memories. Your neighbours have all moved to a larger house, a finer neighbourhood. Your children? They have their lives to live, their problems to solve, their careers to pursue and their own children to nurture and send out into a hostile world.
So here is a thought. Stop ferreting crumbs of meaning from the rest of your life by going back to your old office and doing petty stints that drench you with a reassuring spray of usefulness. Stop turning to a remote Almighty you have largely avoided as a pathetic crutch and find utility in a comfortable suspension of disbelief. Stop clutching at straws in a sad, strenuous effort to avert the reality of your undistinguished, unaccomplished life.
Instead, suggests Auden, you do what Yeats did:
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
Sing of your sorrow, write of your misery, but do it with verve and spirit, without shame and apology, knowing it to be a shared story of the human lot.
And let the others join in.
43
THE FENCE
PROTECT US OR SHUT OUT THE WORLD?
MY UNCLE WORKED FOR an elite club and moved into a large house in an elite area that he felt better matched his social status. Like other houses in the area, a tall fence ran all around his home.
Since his son was my closest school buddy, I goaded my parents to arrive early at the house-warming party. I loved the immaculate backyard lawn and played with my friend there while the adults chatted inside. But I soon got tired of the confined space, as our home had no fence of the kind. I wanted to venture out; it took all my cousin’s persuasive power to keep me inside. He had been warned not to step out of the fence, as traffic on the road beyond posed a hazard.
My uncle was proud of his new mansion and took his guests on a detailed tour. Over dinner everybody spoke of its spacious atrium, elegant design, chic furniture and opulent drapes. My parents politely added to the discussion and spoke of the well-lit rooms upstairs and the attractive view.
The last was an unfortunate trigger for my nagging thought from earlier. I turned to my uncle and said I loved his lawn, but it did not have the view our house had. In fact, I added, it had no view at all because of the unsightly high fence.
All conversation stopped. My uncle, who had looked pleased with the trend of discussion so far, suddenly had a crestfallen look. My parents were deeply embarrassed by my gaffe.
They told me a month later, however, that my uncle had had the fence taken down.
44
WAYWARD MINDS
THE BLIGHT THAT WAITS FOR MANY OF US
THE ELEGANT DINNER WAS interrupted by a piercing scream. Earlier in the evening I had asked about Uncle Deep, who liked me and was a live-wire conversationalist, and was told that he was unwell. My hosts ran to see the reason, and I came out on the corridor. A loud stream of obscenities followed screams. Before anyone could stop me, I advanced and had glimpse of an inconceivable scene: Uncle Deep, naked except for a diaper and chained to a bedpost, was foaming at the mouth as he yelled one foul word after another. Later the family apologetically explained to me that Uncle Deep would periodically ‘go off the handle’ and needed to be shackled for his own safety.
Barin was a college friend who had gone on to become a doctor and eventually the chief of a hospital’s pathology department. Whenever I visited the town where he lived with his wife Mila and two daughters, we had a drink together and a long conversation. A strange thing happened last year when Mila told me he wasn’t well and she would rather not have me come to meet him. When I asked what was wrong with him, she was evasive. When I asked other friends, I found Barin had stopped working and Mila had started barring all friends. Apparently, he acted strangely, talked incoherently and had difficulty recognizing some old friends.
The third experience was with my cousin, Ron, a capable journalist who enjoyed a good reputation both in his newspaper group and in professional circles. He covered business news and was as diligent as knowledgeable about emerging commercial trends. When I didn’t hear from him for two months, I thought it was un
usual and went to see him. A voluble man he had suddenly turned very taciturn, and he responded to all my overtures with monosyllables. His brother referred to it as ‘a streak of depression’, but after he was taken to a specialist at my insistence, it was diagnosed as the onset of dementia.
The toll of Alzheimer’s is extensive and, in the US, it claims a victim nearly one every minute. It is said that forty-seven million people worldwide have Alzheimer’s, the figure is expected to exceed 90 million in twenty years. After heart attack and cancer, it is the biggest killer. There is no cure; there is no prevention. There are a couple of expensive drugs that can marginally modify the havoc, but there is nothing to fight the disease.
Imagine this insidious blight attacking your father, mother, brother or sister (women seem statistically more vulnerable) or yourself. Day by painful day, it will shrink and atrophy your brain tissue. The first thing to go will be your memory: you will start by forgetting little things and end up by failing to recognize your wife and your own face. You will lose money and valuables; then you will get lost yourself, because you can’t find your own home. Then you will start losing your mental functions, those that make you human. You will lose your language, reasoning capacity, any kind of systematic thinking. You will forfeit the ability to do any step-by-step thing, like dressing or feeding yourself, and become fully dependent on others. Then will come hallucinations, delusions and paranoia, resulting in impulsive and offensive behaviour. The ultimate stage is when you are confined to bed as your body starts shutting down.
What makes it worse, as my three experiences will indicate, is that the whole phenomenon of dementia is wrapped in misunderstanding, shame and sheer ignorance. Few families have the vast coping skills, extensive support network and huge caregiving stamina and budget needed to deal with an Alzheimer’s patient. Even fewer have a basic knowledge of the way the disease can change a person’s behaviour and make him or her seem uncooperative, resistant, stubborn or just purely monstrous. Family members then try to isolate and hide the person, aggravating the victim’s physical and mental decline. Some even shackle and confine the patients like an animal, shorn of all dignity, ostensibly for their own safety.
Given the advancing and accelerating threat of dementia that hangs over us all, the initial step might be to first learn something about Alzheimer’s, its symptoms and consequences. We must learn to identify the signs, know when to consult a specialist, and develop a long-term strategy of coping and caregiving.
It may be a little better than chaining your mother or brother in a back room or adhere to the vulgar fiction that they are possessed by a malevolent devil.
45
REACHING HOME
WHAT YOUR HOME MEANS TO YOU
‘ONE NEVER REACHES HOME.’ Hermann Hesse
My great-grandfather, whom I never saw, died in the house in which he was born in India. My grandfather moved just once, when he changed his home from the village to the metropolis of Kolkata. My father moved nine times. The first when his uncles ejected his mother from the parental house, the second when he could not pay the rent, and the third when he could—by taking a job in another city. Then he found a good job in Kolkata and returned. But the job entailed moves, and so we lived in four more houses. When he retired, he chose to live in two smaller houses.
I heard about the first four moves, but the latter five I experienced as his young son. These were traumatic experiences for me. I was perfectly content in each house and did not want to move. Every time we moved, even if it was to a larger or better house, I longed for the earlier house and mourned its loss with endless nostalgia. Given the chance, I would have preferred to die in the house in which I was born, just like my great-grandfather.
That was not to be. I worked for international groups, a UN entity and the diplomatic service, and had a spouse who too did overseas work. It was a big deal if I lived in a house for more than three years. If the country had a coup d’état or a civil war, I moved much faster. I learned to accept the loss, not just of familiar bearings, but all that goes with them: neighbours, friends, grocers, barbers, even street vendors and known taxi drivers. I learned to live friendless and with strangers.
But, while my houses changed, so did the world around it. The Web grew; email became common; we all started sending photos to friends and calling them across continents. My children went to college in other countries, but they called and wrote often. I could enjoy new friends and colleagues without losing my link with other acquaintances.
When my daughter graduated and threw her cap in the air, I could see the pyramids at the back in a video. When I flew to Cuba I could Skype and tell her what I was seeing. The loss had become a little bearable.
Just the world? No, I have changed too. As I moved from house to house, city to city, and country to country, my food, my clothes, my habits, my whole point of view changed. I don’t think and feel the way I used to, just as I don’t eat what I once ate happily. Loves and hates, wars and riots, children and refugees, all have infinitely added and enriched my life.
I would have indeed liked, like my great-grandfather, to have died in the house where I was born, in a tiny brick cottage in central India on a cloudy autumn morning (said my mother), but I am not unhappy that my children seem destined to live in many more than the thirty houses I have lived in.
46
LIVING ON THE EDGE
PEOPLE WAITING AT OUR DOOR
FROM THE TAN SON Nhat airport she took a taxi and, bypassing Ho Chi Minh city, went straight to the Vung Tàu port area. The area had changed, and it took her time and much walking before she found the spot she was looking for. Yes, this was place where she caught a boat in the dead of night thirty years ago.
Linh was twenty-four then. But she had to take a decision that would have daunted someone double her age or experience. She had to decide whether to take the boat.
She was Vietnamese, but of ethnic Chinese origin, a Hoa. For centuries, turbulent changes in the regime in China had pushed thousands of migrants in Vietnam, and in the early twentieth century the exodus rose with the civil war in China. The Hoa community was diligent and enterprising, and in time prospered in trade and business. Both North and South Vietnam declared interest in integrating the community in Vietnamese society but at an onerous price: they had to adopt Vietnamese names and abandon their culture.
North Vietnam’s relations with China deteriorated with the Vietnam War of 1967-68. The Hoas’ position became untenable after the reunification of Vietnam. The authorities banned private trading, closed 30,000 businesses overnight, confiscated currencies, and forced owners to work as farmers or as soldiers. All resistance was met with violence. A mass exodus began.
Now, in the summer of 1979, Linh had nothing to keep her back in Vietnam. There was no future for her or her three-year-old son except dire poverty and social ostracism.
The only alternative was to flee the country illicitly, in an unsafe boat run by coyotes, and pay an extortionate price for a nightmare journey. Accidents and drownings were common; so were skirmishes and violence. Pirates robbed and raped migrants, regularly and mercilessly. And at the end waited an uncertain future: nobody knew which country would accept them, or even what shore they would be able to reach.
Linh gritted her teeth and made up her mind. She took every penny she had saved and sold everything she owned except the clothes on her back or on her son. With the money she bought a few small ingots of gold, the only payment the coyotes would accept. Then she negotiated the earliest possible day of escape: the following Saturday night, when the piers were quiet and the guards often drunk.
Linh knew night boarding was the safest in eluding the port police but, physically, the most dangerous. There were narrow planks one had to balance on to reach the cavern of the boat, and people had been known to fall and drown. With her delicate frame, Linh had to balance both her child and the bag that carried their clothes and food. She teetered cautiously along the plank and reached the boat.
It was already packed to the gills with fleeing men and women. Yet, the coyotes kept adding more passengers, until, in the corner she had found, her child had to crane his head to breathe.
The horrendous journey lasted three weeks; twenty-one days of heat, stench, parched lips and near starvation. Their boat was finally in Hong Kong. Half-dead with exhaustion, Lynh waited with her child, along with the others, for a word from the authorities. The good news was that they wouldn’t be sent out in the sea again; the bad news was that the refugee camps were full and they would have to wait for days.
The refugee camp run by the Red Cross in Hong Kong was a quickly assembled affair, inadequate both in resources and compared to the need. It was crowded, congested, one might say brutally basic. But Lynh was finally safe. Her child, though in tatters, gambolled gaily with the other children, also in tatters. Lynh started entertaining the dream that she will have a break and one day have a place of her own. She could then dress her child well and give him a good education. It wasn’t a unique dream among the skeletal men and women who had experienced the worst and survived.
Three months later, unlikely as it was, Lynh’s dream came true. A New York church group offered sanctuary and support for Lynh and her son. The Christmas of 1979 brought them the promise, not just of safety, but also of a different life.
The US shores awaited Lynh, doubtless with huge challenges, of learning a new language and adjusting to a different culture, but also with the assurance of security and freedom. She could choose her life. Her son could be the man he wanted.