A World Within

by Minakshi Chaudhry

I don’t know what to say, I keep quiet.

  A little later, I try to soothe him and tell him that his parents had done a good job by sending him out of the village because they wanted to educate him.

  He looks at me. His eyes full of tears, ‘You will not understand.’

  Something snaps in me and I blurt, ‘Dadoo, will you forget us?’

  He looks at me in shock, ‘It is not possible to forget your children, one cannot forget one’s children even if one forgets everything else.’

  I am deliriously happy.

  But this turns out to be an illusion.

  14

  This is what the experts have to say about Alzheimer’s, ‘This is a disease, an irreversible progressive brain disorder that occurs gradually resulting in memory loss and unusual behaviour, personality changes, and a decline in thinking abilities and these, above all, are all related to the death of cells in the brain and also to the breakdown of connection of these cells, the course of the disease varies from person to person as also does the rate of decline.’

  So one day he will forget me too. There is no escape from it. But may be science will find a cure. Recently they have found that it spreads through the brain from the first brain cell affected to the one next to it and then to the next. It damages each connected cell along a predictable path eventually destroying a person’s ability to think and remember.

  This disease is changing him everyday. He was so full of life and used to be such a happy person who laughed boisterously. He loved company but now he has restricted his company to his wife and children.

  He was always surrounded by friends. After retirement he lost touch with them. Did this hasten the onset of this disease? I wonder.

  He asks me innocently when I ask him about his friends, ‘If I do not call them, why do they not call me instead?’

  He replies to his own question, ‘May be it is not important for them.’

  Though in the last couple of years he has started to call up his long lost friends, tells them to recall old times and invites them to come to his house. But probably it had become too late, too large a gap to be filled.

  Dadoo was known for his sense of humour, the house was always filled with laughter, and his wit infected all others in the family. His colleagues, neighbours and friends would often say ‘yeh bahut mazakiya hain’ (he is so witty). He knew how to laugh at himself. But all this has now disappeared; now there is no laughter. We have to make an effort to make him laugh.

  Many times I feel as if this is a different person and not our Dadoo.

  When I plead ‘smile Dadoo’ he replies, ‘What for?’ He has stopped cracking jokes. Occasionally he makes fun of Mamma’s lack of education or her brother’s attitude.

  How we all long for such moments, even Mamma, who used to be so angry at him earlier, now wants him to tease her. We are afraid that this too will stop one day. Just to see him laugh, just to hear him joke is a pleasure but at the same time it is scary. We always feel that it is the last time.

  He is becoming oblivious of things around him and we are bystanders.

  15

  Loneliness is the dominant fear that he has, even though he is forgetting everything. The hopelessness that comes when he feels lonely and scared makes him look so pitiable and pathetic that I just want to close my eyes and shut my mind. It kills me.

  We often hear him say, ‘Everything is over. There is no one. What will happen?’ When he says this my heart goes out for him. Sometimes we ignore him, sometimes we lie and at times we snap at him, which is the worst.

  Vikram tells me that he sometimes pretends or fakes things just to get attention. I have lost count of how many times during recent months he has called me on the phone and pleaded, ‘Main udas hoon, dil nahin lag raha, tu aaa jaa. [I am sad, I am feeling bored, please come].’

  Is this the insecurity of childhood coming back or the trauma of being displaced by the dam that haunts him and makes him a nervous wreck, I do not know but it explains why he always wanted people around him. He has felt insecure since his childhood.

  I think that Dadoo created a surrogate family to kill his childhood fears and scare of being uprooted. He felt that he never got the love and affection that he should have received during childhood from his parents and near and dear ones. He was an outsider wherever he went and that weighed on him. Even his brother and sister considered him an outsider. This disconnect remained with him throughout and he tried to fill the void by having people around him.

  The lonely time that he spent in his formative years made him long for affection and so he started showering affection on others. When he grew up he started to help strangers and tried to win smiles whenever he could.

  He helped people financially and emotionally. Probably this was also the reason he helped the underprivileged – the beggars and coolies. He talked to them as if he was a close relation. In his job he was always willing to join hands with his colleagues.

  But everyone around him got busy with their own life including his children, who left for their education and then jobs and finally got busy in their own families. This increased his loneliness.

  I remember, he would stand in the balcony of our house in Solan and call out to people on the road to come and have a cup of tea. He would meet acquaintances in the market and complain to them that they had stopped coming to his house, he would invite them to have lunch and dinner. Whenever he met our friends he complained about their fathers having forgotten him. He would ask them to tell their parents that he was remembering them.

  He would visit all those shops where he used to go for years, and taunt the shopkeepers for not recognizing him. He would call his sister, old colleagues and other near and distant relatives and people from his native village and scold them for not being in touch.

  All this had started about six years back. He would sit and brood. Whenever I asked him what he was thinking he would say, ‘Look where I have made this house, so far away from my native place. I am a pardesi [foreigner] here.’ Then he would start remembering old friends, colleagues, acquaintances and relatives and wonder about their whereabouts. We did not see it coming nor did we understand what was happening to him. We either ignored this or snapped at him.

  He would call me everyday and say, ‘Keep coming every weekend to meet me, you must come. It gets chirpy when you come. Raunak ho jati hai, aa jaya karo. Why don’t you take leave? You must take long leave and stay with me.’ He called Vikram, Deepak and Mala didi too and repeated the same to them.

  And when we went to Solan he would ask us, ‘How many days’ leave have you taken? How long you will stay?’ His face fell when we said that we had come for two or three days! He was saddened and the joy of seeing his children just vanished. He was going into depression slowly and we failed to notice that!

  16

  Oh, Dadoo! How I want to assure you that we will be with you always. But will you understand now? The irony is that when you could have understood, we did not understand you! I tried to escape a visit to Solan, though I did not succeed often. I wanted to avoid travelling for hours to and fro in a day. The more you craved for my attention and sympathy and pleaded with me to come; the more irritated I got. It is only now I realize that your pleas were not yours, it was the illness making you behave like this. I am so ashamed of my behaviour towards you in the past: I ignored your requests and questions. So many times I would hurriedly put down the phone or ask you to act sensibly. And when I was with you in Solan, I escaped to my room so as not to listen to your endless banter.

  Now I know that he suffers from a mental disorder that is destroying him bit by bit. But a constant helplessness and anger at my failure to help him frustrates me. This disease has reduced a healthy, happy and intelligent individual into a vegetable.

  It is more painful when he does not understand that we have tried and we are trying all possible combinations of medicines and that we have taken him to so many specialist doctors at different places. He does not remember. I f
eel wretched when he says, ‘Do you know any good doctor, my mind is not right. Can you take me to a doctor? I want my full check-up done.’

  When we tell him not to worry, he says, ‘It is not in my hands. I worry because I think that I will forget. I will not remember to tell you that I need a doctor. This anxiety of losing my memory makes me restless and I am always exhausted.’

  It is a nightmare that does not end.

  17

  Imagination and memory go together. When memory fades and disappears, imagination goes too. And all that remains is ‘nothing’ – a gaping black hole.

  These days he spends his time searching for papers of the land that he thinks he bought, bank accounts that he thinks he opened and the important files that he has lost. His brain is working all the time, trying to find the things that never were but which are real for him. This search is futile as there is nothing to find. But that is what we think. He thinks totally differently. He stresses himself to remember things, but the more he puts himself under pressure the more these move away from him. It is a chase that is only in his mind.

  Only grace is, he forgets what he was searching for and we can divert his attention. But sometimes it continues for an entire day or night.

  So many things I understand now. He had stopped reading slowly and gradually. First he left the books, then magazines and then newspaper. He could not connect to things. He stopped watching TV. No films, no serials and finally no news. The last thing he stopped was gardening, nurturing his plants – the love of his life, his passion. Does he know that he loved to read books, the classics; that he could never miss daily news bulletin and that he could not live without spending hours with his plants every morning and evening.

  What should a person do when his memory does not hold even for a few minutes? When he does not remember the last sentence that he spoke? He is losing his vocabulary. He reads a word and then wonders what it means. Same is with the plants and gardens that he nurtured like babies. Now he does not recognize the plants, from where he brought them, when will they flower? It frustrates him to no end.

  Whenever I browse the Internet and look for the latest news on Alzheimer’s I get to read alarming stuff such as this, ‘Impairment of senses is common in Alzheimer’s. The ability of people with Alzheimer’s to interpret what they see, hear, taste, feel or smell declines or changes, even though the sense organs may still be intact. The Alzheimer’s patient needs periodic evaluation by a physician for any changes in the senses that may be correctable through glasses, dentures, hearing aids or other treatments. Patients may also experience a number of changes in visual abilities. Visual agnosia is a condition in which patients lose the ability to comprehend visual images. Although there is nothing wrong physically with the eyes, Alzheimer’s patients may no longer be able to accurately interpret what they see in the brain, also their sense of perception and death may be altered. These changes can cause safety concerns. … A loss or decrease in smell often accompanies Alzheimer’s. Patients may experience loss of sensation or may no longer be able to interpret feelings of heat, cold or discomfort. They may also lose their sense of taste as their judgment declines. They may also place dangerous or inappropriate things in their mouths. People with Alzheimer’s may have normal hearing but they may lose the ability to accurately interpret what they hear. This may result in confusion or over stimulation.’

  I sometimes wonder whether Dadoo knows how much we suffer! May be in a different way but we suffer many times more than him. Watching him helplessly lose his mind piece by piece is unbearable. When his child-like eyes look at me, I know he is seeking assurance and security that everything will be fine, my heart bleeds. We worry about his future and also about our future without him. In some moments of extreme agony I feel that the silence of death would be less painful, and definitely less torturous both for us and for him. Sometimes I feel guilty for this thought but sometimes I don’t. But then is death in our hands?

  All small things which were routine, and trivial but part of his normal life are disappearing one after the other, like asking the chartered accountant about his income tax returns; going to the college to enquire whether his medical reimbursement has come; going to the bank; trying to locate a gardener; buying vegetables; calling the plumber; rushing to bring bread; dhania; juice from the shop downstairs; and saying hello to acquaintances passing by on the road. The very essence of being useful, of doing something and the sense of being alive has vanished. How very important it is for a person to be of use in a family and how humiliated one feels when this ability is lost.

  He has stopped reading the post and stopped going to the post office. For years he, on his own without telling us, maintained small savings accounts of all of us in the post office. Now there are no more deposits. He has stopped following up the court cases involving land purchased by him which was encroached by others. These kept him engaged for years after his retirement.

  Dadoo, who would stomp forward with gusto and energy to do something new and exciting every now and then, is no more there. Oh, how I miss him: He is still here but I miss him so very much!

  18

  18 July 2010

  There are days when he is so different and we have delightful conversation, without anxiety and despondency.

  ‘Is there a destiny? Fate?’ I ask.

  ‘These terms are invented by humans. There is nothing. What is destiny? Look at this plant there it will prosper if it gets proper rain and sunshine and if there is no rain it will wither away. Where is destiny in this? What is the role of destiny in Nature?’

  ‘But humans have called this destiny,’ I say unsure.

  He shakes his head, ‘There is no such thing. It is Nature’s rhythm that makes the world move … world is … without destiny. People say meri kismat hi kharab hai [I have a rotten luck], what is kismat but a name given to what happens, the chances of life. It is all a chance … and we call this destiny. If something good happens we say we are lucky and if something bad happens we say we are unlucky. Lucky and unlucky are the words coined by us. Happening is independent of this. We forget that we did not create the world; it is Nature that has created us. We are not bigger than Nature.’

  ‘But still, Dadoo—’

  He interrupts me, ‘—Lord Rama died, Lord Krishna died. This is the fate of a human being! Everyone dies. People call their heroes God. Those who did something great were made into Gods. There is no God in physical form, God is matter of our thinking. Idea and thought of God gives you support. There is no God sitting somewhere waving his magic wand. Our thought has created God. It is a creation of mind.’

  I am quiet, trying to analyze, he goes on, ‘There is no God. Only Nature. Yes, there is our internal self, our conscience that tells us that we have done something wrong – that can be called God, but that too is not a separate entity; that is also us, if we listen to this inner voice. When you pray and say to yourself that I have to do good, that is God. God is not a physical form.’

  ‘Everyone has fears. It is this fear of punishment when we do wrong that scares us. Those who cannot think deep, and those who cannot realize the truth, believe in a punishing God. God is inside our soul, whatever we speak to our self, we speak to God. Remember our conscience is God. We must listen to our inner voice. Sense of good and bad is God.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘—We say it is God’s creation when kids are born. But look at the plants and trees, they too are born and then die. Humans are like them only. No difference. It is Nature. It is a cycle which has to be completed.’

  Dadoo sees God in a totally different way: Now as I write about his understanding of God, I realize that my inability to believe in a physical form of God comes from him. My idea of what religion is was shaped by him when I was a child, which I had not realized until now.

  I had never seen Dadoo pray; he was always busy, always on a mission and never had time for prayers. Mamma, however, would pray daily but I don’t think any of us took her prayers s
eriously. In fact, she too is a very liberal kind of believer. We children were never forced or taught to pray.

  I vividly remember when we came back to India from Nigeria in the mid-1980s, Mamma had become a devotee of a baba. She would always be attending kirtans and talking with her friends about chamatkaars (miracles). I don’t think that Dadoo ever paid heed to this and neither did we. And then on a holiday we travelled to the baba’s ashram in South India. It must be Mamma’s doing; Deepu was hardly ten-year-old, I was about sixteen, and Vikram chose to stay back at our grandparents’ house.

  I remember the huge temple complex. We stayed there for three days. Mamma and I slept in a hall meant only for ladies; and Dadoo and Deepak stayed in a separate hall for men. We used to meet in the morning in front of the small bakery where we had our breakfast. This was because Deepu and I had rebelled against the regular food; it was pizza and bread-jam for us.

  The three of us, Dadoo, Deepak and I, joked and talked lightly about the ‘owner’ of the ashram – the baba – while we munched our fast food. Dadoo laughed while Mamma was irritated. She ignored him but she was upset that Deepak and I were hand-in-glove with him. Mamma used to be in the temple the entire day waiting for baba’s darshan, while the three of us loitered in the complex and outside in the bazaar.

  Dadoo, a very gregarious person, was full of curiosity. He asked questions about the baba to everyone – other devotees, the staff at the ashram, the shopkeepers in the market and the local people – and tried to reason with them. Every evening we would happily tell Mamma all the negative things that we had discovered during the day. I remember that the locals did not believe in baba, some of them even proclaimed that he was a fake but they were happy with the business that baba was bringing to them. Mamma would be mad at us but we would always laugh it away.