A World Within

by Minakshi Chaudhry

  ‘How are you, Dadoo?’

  ‘I am not fine, everything is wrong.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know it is your memory.’

  ‘No, it is not only my memory, everything is going wrong, I am seriously unwell. You must show me to a doctor.’

  ‘Definitely, Dadoo.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Don’t make it too late,’ he says scaring me, ‘if there is an alternative, if I can get one or two year of sanity, why not take the opportunity.’ He begs.

  ‘Yes, Dadoo, tomorrow.’

  ‘Why not today? Can’t you send someone to pick me up?’

  ‘Okay, Daddo, I will talk to Rohit, but what do you feel is wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Everything.There is nothing inside me, I go to a room and I don’t know where I am. I try to find the bathroom but I go to the drawing room. I want to say something but I forget the very next moment what I want to say.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘My body and mind both are no help to me. Sometimes many hours later my mind flashes a message but my body is too dull to respond. I go to the kitchen when I am thirsty but then I forget that I am thirsty, I come back.’

  In a sadistic way I am delighted he remembers, he remembers so many things and I say, ‘Dadoo, you remember so many things.’

  ‘What?’ he mumbles.

  ‘All the things that you told me.’

  ‘What have I told you?’ he says confused, ‘Help me, take me to a doctor.’ I placate him and put the phone down, confused just like him whether I should be happy or sad.

  When I was a child I often used to think that I don’t want to go through life – get up in the morning, go to school, eat lunch, meet your soulmate and produce children. I would fantasize that if I closed my eyes for some time and open them again, decades would have passed. I had done what I was supposed to do during this time and I am living a normal life where there is no change, where there is no struggle, a life where I have to take no decisions as if in that blink of a moment everything had happened. Now too, I just want to close my eyes and when I open them I want everything in place: Either my father has forgotten every single detail or he is no more carrying this burden of a useless life. However in reality this will not happen and like him we will all have to go through it. Buddha says life is suffering. So be it!

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  In the beginning we thought that if we solved the problems such as sorting out his papers; dealing with the correspondence with the Reader’s Digest; or updating the bank passbooks, the situation will improve. We failed to understand that the more we tried to take care of him in this way, the more depressed he became.

  We forced him to go to parks, meetings of age care and social gatherings like weddings. He always came back angry and depressed. He just saw faces there, unable to relate and recognize anyone. Whenever he was greeted by someone, he tried to smile but his pain and suffering increased as he did not relate with the person at all. Slowly we let go.

  I realized that when people get to know that someone is having problems with memory, they either back off or make fun of him; they rarely come forward to help. I think even they cannot be blamed; they have their own problems and stressful lives to deal with. I feel my heart wrench when I see him silent and alone. All his life he had been a boisterous, happy-go-lucky man, always surrounded by people but now he has withdrawn into a shell.

  Sometimes, I try to understand when did all this start. When did he notice that his memory was failing him and did this make him uncomfortable or filled him with the fear of the unknown? What did he feel when he was losing the ability to remember names of his friends, fruits and vegetables? When he was forgetting his bank passbooks, forgetting to make payments after buying things in the market? How did he see all this, did it occur to him that his mind had started not to respond? And how did he hide this from us?

  Frankly all of us in the family never took it seriously whenever he said, ‘I am having trouble remembering things, basic things that I have known all my life.’

  Sometimes I feel lucky that he got this disease at such a later stage. Dementia can strike a person as early as thirty, though in rare cases, and a fraction also gets it before the age of sixty. Unlike an accident, a brain haemorrhage or a heart attack dementia does not hit us instantly, it is a long and lengthy process. We mostly keep it hidden, to avoid social embarrassment but it does not help.

  In the past the disease of the mind was considered to be a result of black magic but now we know that this is a disease which erodes the brain. It strikes quietly, slowly and continuously. As the memory is damaged a black void fills you. In the beginning there are some specks of colour, then specks of grey and then nothingness. Past may visit once in a while before disappearing altogether but there is no future. The brain at one stage stops giving commands, and the hands of others take charge. By the end you are a different entity and your family members also forget bit by bit what and who you really were.

  EPILOGUE

  3 March 2012

  It was just another morning. Everything seemed normal. We were all sitting in the living room. Dadoo was sipping tea. Vikram and Mala didi were reading the newspaper hoping that Dadoo too would become interested and pick it up. I was engrossed in reading a memoir I had picked up a couple of weeks ago. Mamma was trying, unsuccessfully, to engage Dadoo in a conversation. Later she left to attend a kirtan in the neighbourhood.

  The four of us – Dadoo, Vikram, Mala didi and I – were sitting in the lawn when Mamma returned after two hours.

  Dadoo looked at Mamma blankly and then politely asked, ‘Whom do you want to meet?’

  Mamma stared at Dadoo unable to comprehend what he was saying. Before she could respond he repeated, ‘Do you want to meet someone here?’

  We were stunned into silence, and looked towards Dadoo. He was still looking at Mamma. Expressionless. Not even confused.

  ‘What are you saying? I am Asha,’ she said with pain and started whimpering.

  ‘Asha?’ he muttered as if trying to remember something. Trying to connect. But his face was wooden.

  ‘I am Asha, your wife!’ Mamma was crying by now.

  ‘Daddy, don’t you remember Mamma? It’s Mamma,’ said Mala didi.

  But Dadoo was blank. He then got up from his chair, looked at Mamma again and then at us. He slowly went inside the house, lay down on the bed and covered his head with a bedsheet …

  ‘What is he saying? I am Asha … fifty-two years of marriage …’ Both Vikram and Mala didi got up and ran to console her. She looked at them wildly and wailed slipping down, ‘Oh God, what has it come to now. I had never, ever expected this. It is all over!’

  Vikram ran to the kitchen and brought water for her. Mala didi held her close and tried to comfort her but she too couldn’t stop herself from crying, she too was broken and helpless.

  Suddenly Dadoo shouted, ‘What is all this, where am I, what is happening, whose house is this?’

  Mamma got up and ran into the room wailing and shook him saying, ‘I am Asha, Asha, your Asha.’

  He looked at her wildly, there was a deadly silence and then he asked, ‘Asha? Who Asha? You know me?’

  One more year has passed.

  He looks at his face in the mirror and says, ‘Namaste-ji, bahut dinon ke baad mile [namaste-ji, we are meeting after many days]. Is everything fine at home? What about my father and mother? How are they doing? They must be thinking what a callous son I am, I haven’t gone to visit them for many years.

  To Mamma he says, ‘My wife lives in a foreign country. Please call her. I am missing her.’ And when Mamma retorts, ‘I am your wife’, he exclaims in surprise, ‘What has happened to your face, you look so old! No, you can’t be. My wife is very young and beautiful.’

  A framed photo of his along with his four children and wife opposite the bed on the wall is of unknown people, which brings fear and dread in his heart because he believes that everything – the house, food, money – b
elongs to these people and they will turn him out of the house anytime.

  When he saw a car on the road, he innocently asked, ‘What does it eat? Plants? Must be eating a lot. That is why it is running so fast.’

  He is hospitalized now and then. He forgets how to urinate, he has no control on his bowel movements.

  Even now there are rare moments when he connects and there is a flash of light in his eyes and he says with conviction, ‘Mauj karo [enjoy yourself]!’

  What he has and is not aware of is that he is surrounded by his family who loves him, pampers him, cleans him, laughs with him and shares his world of hallucinations, day-dreams and head trips. Here yesterdays, todays and tomorrows have all merged weaving fantasies of a new world. They have accepted what he has become and are at peace with it.

  He lives in his own world – a world within.