The Stranger in My Home

by The Stranger in My Home- Facets of a Life (retail) (epub)

  Olga could see her uncle’s face freeze into an expression of staunch resolve. Yes, he said firmly after a pause, Edilma could see her daughter. That was all. She could not take her daughter. She had long forfeited that privilege. He did not want to see Edilma but would allow Olga to visit her aunt’s home briefly to meet her mother.

  It was the longest night for Olga. She could not fall asleep. She felt excited to think of the morning when her aunt would come to fetch her. When she finally slept, it was a fitful sleep. Yet she woke up early, feeling restless. She had been to a few big events in her small town, some weddings, three christenings and two funerals, but this was too prodigious an event for her mind to grasp easily. All her life she wanted to see her mother, and now she was going to see her. To talk to her. To ask her the question that had forever nagged her mind.

  When her aunt came to fetch her, she was long dressed and ready. There were some people sitting in the living room of her aunt’s home. She ignored them and started going in.

  She heard an unknown voice call out her name, ‘Olga!’

  She turned and saw a middle-aged woman coming towards her, her arms outstretched, her face streaked with tears. ‘Olga!’ The woman cried out again.

  This then was her mother. She looked older than what Olga knew to be her age. A hard life must have done that to her. Olga stood petrified.

  The woman came and put her arms around her. She was now crying almost hysterically and saying, ‘Olga. Olga.’

  This was the moment Olga had waited for all her life, the mother she had longed for. But it was not happiness she felt, not satisfaction, but a kind of relief. A dam burst. She found herself sobbing uncontrollably.

  She cried for a long time. The woman who held her cried too and kept looking at her. It seemed to Olga a look of expectation. Perhaps for Olga to say the one word her mother wanted to hear, a word she had waited to hear for seventeen years. Mother.

  But the word never to came to Olga’s lips. What she felt surging was a sense of deep resentment. Why did she leave me behind?

  ‘Why did you leave me?’ she said finally.

  ‘I didn’t want to leave you,’ said Edilma. ‘Please, please understand. I had no other way. I was an unwed mother. I couldn’t live in this town any more, submit to a life of shame. I had to run away, as far as I could.’

  She cried. ‘I had no alternative. I thought and thought, and could think of nothing, except to leave. Without even my daughter.’

  She continued, ‘I had no place. I had no way to feed you, look after you. I thought you would be safe here. I had to go and find a way to live.’

  ‘For seventeen years? You didn’t come once to see me?’

  ‘I couldn’t. Believe me, I couldn’t,’ Edilma said, ‘I lived a life I couldn’t tell you about. I just survived. I couldn’t make you a part of it. I wanted you to have a decent life, with my brother and sister. I knew they would look after you well. I longed to see you, but I couldn’t.’

  ‘I missed you,’ she added, ‘perhaps more than even you missed me.’ They just held each other.

  Olga is my friend. She was telling me the story some thirty years later. Yet her eyes sparkled and moistened as she recounted the seventeen-year-old’s story. She never went with her wandering mother. She already had a mother-like figure in her young life, her aunt, whom she loved like a mother. She had a father-like uncle too, who, she knew, loved her and protected her as one of his own. Her grandmother, now dead, a paragon of affection, had shown what unstinting love could be.

  Olga stayed with her uncle and aunt, but her mother kept in touch with her. When years later, she married and had children, her mother came and stayed with her periodically and showered on the grandchildren the affection she had missed extending to her daughter. The grandchildren loved her in return and filled some void.

  Olga lives her life, with its sharp turns, joys and miseries. Her mother, who had stayed away seventeen years, can no longer let seventeen days pass without touching base with her daughter or her grandchildren.

  67

  PAIN

  WHAT YOU CANNOT ESCAPE

  ‘Suffering passes, but the fact of having suffered never passes.’ – Léon Bloy

  PAIN IS THE ULTIMATE truth.

  One moment you are thinking about God and poetry and picturesque sunsets. You are talking eloquently about Thomas Mann and Manny Pacquiao. The next moment somebody delivers a Pacquiao-sized punch to your stomach. Art, nature and providence disappear instantly from your universe.

  It doesn’t have to be violence. You could fall from your bar stool and break your wrist. You might receive a text message that your favourite child has lost a limb in a car accident. Your doctor could look up from a clinical report and tell you gloomily that you have three months, no more, to put your affairs in order.

  Oh, sure, you have your moments of ecstasy. Your team wins the soccer tournament. You finally get the promotion you have been waiting for years. Your child tops the class and all the parents seem to think you are the architect of his success. But you know that your team was universally predicted to win. You got your promotion after many more years than unworthy colleagues. Your kid never accepted any of your suggestions and, who knows, maybe even scoffed at them with his buddies.

  In any case the joy lasts for a few hours, perhaps a few days. After a week or two, what lingers at best is a vague sense of satisfaction. That seems the painful truth. Happiness seems slow to come and swift to evaporate. In retrospect, it looks fleeting if not trivial. On the other hand, misery seems eternal, at the least, intermittent and enduring. How do you forget your gorgeous dream-house that a cloudburst destroyed in an hour? Or get over the slip of tongue that wrecked your splendid twenty-year career? How will you ever uproot the ‘rooted sorrow’ of the beautiful child you lost to a bungled surgery? Such pains persist for ever, cloud your brightest days and haunt your ill-slept nights.

  I did an exercise with my friends. I asked them to tell me of something joyful that happened in their life ten years ago. They had great difficulty recalling an event. When I reduced the period to five years, they recalled an event or two, but cited them hesitantly, as if they were embarrassed to cite something so trivial. In sharp contrast, when I asked them to tell me something tragic or disastrous that happened to them ten years ago, they instantly told me of an accident, a business reverse or a death in the family. Shortening the time range brought a flood of painful recollections. I don’t think of my friends as a mournful lot, yet the range of their memories and the speed of their recall left me in little doubt about what weighs more on their mind.

  If this is our lot, what should we do when we suffer?

  You have no doubt heard of the stoic response. Suffer in silence, bear your pain with fortitude. What does not kill you, they say, makes you stronger. Be brave and endure is the motto of all military training and the theme of many a popular movie. But we know that soldiers don’t return from wars quite intact.

  What does not kill you can still kill your finer side and bury your compassionate instinct. My friend Vinay in California told me of a ghastly car accident: he survived and is perhaps a more cautious driver now, but it has forever robbed him of the pristine joy of driving on the highway without a care in the world.

  Nietzsche spoke of pain as a liberator of the spirit, but doubted that it made us better, adding that it made us ‘profounder’. I don’t know if pain has liberated my spirit, but it has certainly let me see things in a new light, even let me see new things. When my father passed away, the growing hurt made me realize how much of his breadth of spirit – different people, varied ideas – I had both imbibed and taken for granted. When, more recently, my colleague and friend Dilip closed his flagging eyes, how much his quiet guidance had supported me in my darkest days.

  I have come to love Léon Bloy’s remarkable words, ‘Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.’ If you love and lose
your love, you will know right away what the French gadfly meant about discovering new spaces in your heart.

  Then there is the other way of looking at pain. When the Italian coastal town of Herculaneum was excavated in 1765 from the ashes of Vesuvius nearly 1,700 years after its interment, the Villa of Papyruses yielded the most eloquent statement of the utilitarian view that happiness or pleasure is the purpose of life, pleasure minus pain being the best measure of its quality. Epicurus, who lived three centuries before Christ, thought that lasting happiness can only come from a peaceful mind, free of pain and fear. They suggested friendship, knowledge and a temperate life as the keys to such peace. The golden rule is: To live a pleasant life you have to live wisely and fairly – neither harm nor be harmed – and to live wisely and fairly you have to live a pleasant life.

  I think of all this with a sense of shock. All the things we now think of, individually and socially, have little capacity to bring us reduced pain or greater happiness: better health, greater wealth, faster learning, higher intelligence, superior technology. None of these, alas, has the capability to make us happier and more tranquil than our Neanderthal ancestors.

  Our pain might continue a while longer.

  Engagements

  Exchanges Unforgettable

  Brighter Than a Thousand Suns

  Sit With Me

  After Forty Years

  The Mother of Feasts

  The Little Girl

  The Lost Companion

  The Bad Boy Lark

  Chopsticks

  Tale of My Two Cities

  A Recalcitrant Rower

  Rain

  Moving In – and Out

  She Could Jump

  68

  BRIGHTER THAN A THOUSAND SUNS

  A VERY SPECIAL NEIGHBOUR

  I AM FORTUNATE. I have a very good friend right next door.

  I am a pre-baby boomer: in common parlance, as old as the hills. She is not Generation X, not even a millennial, but Generation Z – she is just eight, yet to join school.

  She does home studies and reads quite well now, though words of multiple syllables are a challenge for her. She does additions and multiplications too, but I am not sure she is enamoured of doing them. What is no challenge for her are the iPad and iPhone, which she manipulates like a pro and has no compunction pointing out my ineptitude. She uses drawing programmes to sketch animals and angels, and plays an array of video games, from sprinters that race winding castle alleys to choleric birds that fight and shoot and play havoc in pig fortresses.

  To keep company I have occasionally tried to learn these games, but my skill level hardly rises after abundant instruction and diligent practice. My scores leave my young teacher disgusted and in despair. ‘You have to practise more,’ she advises.

  She has a pixie face, crystal-bright eyes and long hair, usually in a braid, but sometimes bound in a bun to let her do gymnastics. Oh, yes, gymnastic skill is another of her many accomplishments, in dramatic contrast to my gauche ways. She underlines the contrast by cartwheeling effortlessly in the living room and sitting on the kitchen floor to display nimble contortions.

  The more important skill is the readiness with which she proceeds to prepare tea for me the moment I tread into their home. She will get on a stool to reach the water heater on the counter and then stir the tea vigorously and serve in exactly the china I prefer. Most of the time she even remembers to retrieve the empty cup from my hand.

  As if this were not enough, she runs to open the door for me and switches on a radiant smile before her parents have had a chance to say, ‘Come in, please’. That smile is, as the ancient Indian texts say, brighter than a thousand suns, and enough to keep me warm on the coldest fall day.

  I am really a fortunate neighbour.

  69

  SIT WITH ME

  TIME MUST HAVE A STOP

  TIP WAS IN COLLEGE with me in India and he turned up in the US five years after me. He was to teach in a university in the west but landed in New York to meet an uncle. He chose to spend a week with me in Washington. It was a delightful week, full of trips, walks and reminiscences, and I was sorry to see him leave.

  He visited me a couple of times after that, accompanied by his wife Maureen. Maureen was polite and pleasant, but I never struck a chord with her. Overall we had a good time together, but I could not resist a sliver of resentment that I did not retrieve the euphoric time I had earlier with Tip.

  Twelve years later I had a frantic call from Maureen. Tip had long suffered from muscular dystrophy and had started relying on a cane to walk. Apparently his infirmity had taken a sudden turn for the worse; doctors feared the worst. Maureen had nobody to turn to and wanted me to come.

  It took me a day to free myself from commitments and take the first available flight for San Diego. Tip was in the last stage and passed away two days later. I stayed behind a few days more to help Maureen.

  She needed help because Tip was a singularly disorderly person. He had done nothing to prepare for the eventuality. Maureen ran the house but knew very little of Tip’s work at the university and nothing of their accounts. Without a power of attorney it was difficult to sort out his affairs at the university. It was no easier to break into his computer and uncover the financial problems and resolve them one by one.

  Maureen was grief-stricken and helpless. I felt it my duty to tell her what I was doing and explain what she needed to pursue after I had left. She listened well and asked pertinent questions. I found her attentive and bright, though understandably distracted at times. She said she felt a little overwhelmed. I could understand her discomfort in an unaccustomed role and felt sorry for her.

  I realized she was a retiring, off-stage person who was ill at ease interacting with strangers. She took time to connect with people, but she was neither asocial nor charmless. She let me make the coffee in the morning, but insisted on making breakfast – a changing one every day – and serving it with reticent grace. Her computer skills were modest, but she proved herself an uncannily fast learner, who swiftly mastered the financial details of her home, mortgage, utilities and insurance and stumped me with her intricate questions.

  Our relationship thawed, my misgivings dissolved. My original resentment ceded to a grudging admiration and, when the time came to leave, I found to my surprise that helping her had come to mean a pleasant chore for me.

  The last day we returned from a long day at the bank, where we sorted out the last vexing issues that Tip had left a mystery for both of us. Maureen settled down to preparing our last dinner. We chatted amiably during dinner and then, as I started packing my things afterward, she said, with what in retrospect seems an uncharacteristic forthrightness, ‘Please sit with me and talk to me a little.’

  ‘In a little while,’ I said, ‘after I have finished packing.’

  She passed me by half an hour later, and I added, ‘Just a while longer.’

  By the time I finished packing, a call came from an office colleague and it took a while to explain what had to be done in my absence. From a corner of the eye, I could see Maureen waiting patiently at the other end of the room.

  When I finished talking, I turned and could not see Maureen. Guiltily, I presumed she had retired for the night.

  A taxi came for me early the next morning. Maureen came sleepy-eyed to the door to say goodbye. This was no time to talk, I thought, I would call her later.

  I was quite busy when I returned to Washington, not the least because of a week’s absence. One thing or another took my time. Three weeks later I had a call from a San Diego hospital: Maureen was admitted with a cardiac infarction. No, I could not talk to her in her present state.

  I never had the chance to sit down and talk with her.

  70

  AFTER FORTY YEARS

  WE STILL REMEMBERED

  I DROVE SIX HOURS, knocked on the door and a young girl opened the door. Behind her stood a middle-aged woman with short hair and a smiling face. I would not have recogn
ized her on the street, for I was seeing her after forty years. But I knew she was Cathy. Cathy was unforgettable.

  Forty years earlier, I was a sophomore student in Kolkata, India, when Dick Johnson, my father’s new colleague from New York, moved into the apartment next door. With him came his wife Esther and daughter, Catherine Isabella. Cathy could not bear the burden of her polysyllabic name and promptly reduced it to a short, spiffy Cathy. It fitted her better, for she was lively, brisk and direct. Meeting me for the first time, she smiled shyly, but then quickly took my hand and said, ‘I’ll be your friend.’

  I was her friend if only because I was the only one around of her age who spoke English. She did not speak a word of the local language and needed someone to explain the strange new world around her. I felt important showing her around, walking crowded streets and narrow lanes through throngs who marvelled at the odd pair of a gangly youth and a pretty foreigner with flowing tresses. She wore madras shirts and denim pants and explored with me noisy bazaars, smelly fish markets, decaying old palaces and, when our joint resources permitted, cheap cheap roadside tea shops. We took long walks in the dusk on the crumbling boardwalk on the Hooghly river, and flouted, with unspeakable joy, our parents’ firm instruction not to go anywhere near unhygienic street snacks.

  We had our parents’ liberal permission to go to the libraries – they believed it would broaden our mind – and we took full advantage of it, sitting for hours with open books, our fingers discreetly interwoven under the desk, conveying messages our intermittent whispers could not. On rare occasions, we were permitted the other mind-broadening luxury of going to selected plays in local theatres. We dressed specially, which meant I wore cologne and a decent pair of trousers, while Cathy looked resplendent in a cardigan and her mother’s lipstick. We could stay out later than usual, and on the way back we huddled close on the backseat of a taxi.