New England Journal

A Triumph of Family Ties

Providence’s T F Green Airport bills itself as an international airport because it has flights to Canada. Stripped of its pretensions, it is really small and nice regional terminal that serves southern New England and is an alternative to Boston’s chaotic Logan airport. It is in Rhode Island, America’s smallest state, many of whose politicians are serving penal sentences. Despite its corrupt politics, the “Ocean State” is a laid back place, focused historically on fishing and sailing. So much like Goa.

Providence is one of the earliest cities settled in the United States, in 1636. It is a pretty little city settled on the banks of the river of the same name. To live in the city is to have the best of the both worlds: you have all the urban conveniences in a small town environment. Also, as one of the first industrialized cities, Providence boasts of old wealth as well as old immigrant cultures.

Its old wealth is well represented, not least by the Ivy League Brown University but also its playground for the wealthy, Newport, where the truly rich come out to cavort. Two years ago, I went boating in Narragansett Bay, which shelters the Rhode Island coastline from the vagaries of the Atlantic Ocean. Sailing in the bay, I realized that recreation is more fun than mere leisure.

Last month, I arrived there to spend the weekend with my nephew Nikhil, who lives in a Boston suburb, less than an hour from Providence. He met me in the terminal and helped me lug my bags to his car in the parking lot. The pleasant transfer experience stood out in sharp contrast to the chaos at Dabholim airport in Goa, which is India’s Ocean State. The chaos and discomfort of Dabholim is self inflicted. Apart from the inept and corrupt Airports Authority of India that “runs” the airport, there are dyspeptic security staff, officious airline staffers, touts and sloppy, uncaring passengers who pay no need to the demands of civil behavior.

At the T F Green Airport, the experience was as smooth as silk. It was all very civilized. In just a few minutes, we were buckled up in Nikhil’s car and soon, after a pleasant drive, we arrived at his place.

It was my last weekend stateside. And what better way to spend it than with Nikhil and my younger daughter who arrived the same day from New York City. Mind you, there is a significant difference in the years we’ve spent on this planet. Yet we had fun together. The question is: were they just being dutiful? In my own mind, the answer is a resounding no. My nephew and my daughter took the time from their relentlessly busy professional and social lives to spend the time with me.

For all the years I lived in America: making it to the office by eight in the morning and slaving until five pm, I valued my weekends; they were private. It took, as it still does, a superhuman effort to do much more than wake up late, watch television or throw (in those days) a video into the machine and vegetate. Given my near neurotic weekend mindset, I admired the fact that my hardworking daughter, who made the trip from Manhattan, and my equally busy nephew, graciously gave up a lot of much-needed downtime to spend the weekend with me. I loved every minute of it.

Most important, they made me feel warm and fuzzy. Amazingly, we did not go out to any of Boston’s great restaurants but spent the time together at my nephew’s house. When we went out, we went to Boston’s Fan Pier, to savor the flavor of the Volvo Ocean Race. It was breezy and cold but all kinds of fun. We spent a wonderful afternoon at the pier, listening to music, turning up our collar to what Simon and Garfunkel called “the cold and damp.” It was still daylight so our eyes were not stabbed by the flash of any light, neon or otherwise.

The weekend was a revelation. This next generation seems to have the same hunger as I had when I arrived in the US in the early 1970s. Difference is they have several things going for them: they demand things where we took what we got and made the best of it. More important, they feel they belong; no supplication. They lived through the George W Bush era but are really Obama’s children. We were the Woodstock generation with long hair and rock music, full of antipathy to the mainstream. They are the mainstream.

It ended all too soon. Sunday morning, we found ourselves at Boston’s Logan Airport; not to fly but to rent a car. We were heading to JFK, from where I was booked to fly to Delhi. Since 1999, I’ve been doing the road trip between Boston and New York. I know the route well. Plus my daughter, who was the navigator, had her Blackberry that told us instantly the smoothest way. We talked up a storm. She told me about her life in Manhattan and I asked questions, not as a stentorian father but as a curious George. All fathers should have the opportunity.

Eventually, we made it to JFK and took a train from the Hertz parking lot to my terminal. I still had an hour to kill. My plan was to go the lounge and have a glass of wine. But the daughter said she’d hang with me. So we stuck around the concourse until she said she had to leave. As I watched her disappear into the crowd, I sighed and walked into the lounge; there to have the wine.

What a cocktail: full-bodied red wine, rich memories of the weekend, a lump in my throat and misty eyes!

Copyright Rajiv Desai 2009

The Karmayogi Hall of Fame

An Obituary for My Mother

It is four months to the day my mother died. I miss her comforting presence. What strikes me is life goes on as if nothing happened. Hello World, I often say to myself, my Mom’s gone; show a little concern, some respect, and some grief. Relentlessly though, things grind on and she is consigned to be a fading memory in the minds of those who knew and loved her. How easily we are reconciled to the passing of a loved one!

My Mom was difficult to love; she had a way with guilt. Whenever she came with my Dad to visit us in Chicago or in Delhi, she always made me feel I did not spend enough time with her. In some way, her complaint was legitimate because we lead busy lives: long hours at work, many social engagements and many friends to visit and to entertain. I refused to take her guilt trip, which made her angry. Within days of landing in our house, she would start up about going back to her home in Ahmedabad. My Dad was always the fall guy, coming into my study with wads of banknotes, asking me to book their tickets back.

Four months ago, when she died holding hands with me, I felt bereft. I didn’t cry or anything but just felt a deep gash in my heart. For some reason, we believe mothers are immortal and they will always be there to remind you of your checkered youth and then, after they have layered you with guilt, to comfort you. When you come to think of it, they are immortal because everyday of your life something happens to remind you of your mother. In many ways, grief is important; it helps you come to terms with the loss.

My problem is my 88-year old Dad, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. A few days after my Mom’s death, he came to me, looking distraught. “You know, I feel helpless. My mother just died and I did not have enough money to give her the best medical care,” he said to me. It is true that his mother also died of cancer in 1966 and he may have felt as an upright government official that he could not provide the care she needed. I was devastated. I realized then that the major outlet of my grief, to share the loss with my father, was denied to me.

Sadly thus, my grief has remained bottled up in some obscure corner of my mind. I could become a psycho like Anthony Perkins in the Hitchcock movie of the same name and end up as a mass murderer or a suicide bomber. No, let me hasten to add, it’s not about to happen. The point is it’s important to express grief and while I have a hugely supportive family, I have no way to commiserate with my Dad. As such, we are the principals and yet we can’t share the emotions of the loss.

Apart from the dementia, my Dad is a fairly healthy fellow with no aches and pains and a zest for life. When he turned 75, he told my daughters he still had at least 25 years to go. Amazingly, he’s more than half the way there. He just needs 12 more for his century. Even today, in a state of dementia, he tells us he did well at school, was highly respected in his job and exercised relentlessly, so there’s no reason why he should not live to be a hundred.

Though it is difficult to get through to his Alzheimer’s blocked mind, I can say with pride and confidence that he is the progenitor of my sunny worldview. Many friends say that I am wildly optimistic in a righteous sort of way. I consider it a compliment and have only now learned to attribute it to my father. His memory is compromised but he has the heart and soul of a 40-year old; he frequently says that. And he will live to be a hundred or even more.

He now lives with us. He is doubly troubled: dementia as well as a the dysfunction of a displaced person. We brought him with my mother from their home in Ahmedabad in March this year. My mother died and he has no way to go back to his comfortable life in the house he's lived in since the 1960s. He is unsettled and still lives out of a suitcase. We just have to deal with it and can only hope he stays independently fit.

I’ve never been big on yoga and Hinduism. But if ever there was a Karmayogi contest, please welcome my Dad to the Hall of Fame.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

Pater Noster

Coping with Alzheimer’s

It’s been less than a fortnight since my mother died. In the interim, my 87-year old father has spent an unsettled time. In the pink of health, he nevertheless suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. His brain cannot deal with current affairs and causes him to go rambling into the past. He remembers things from the 1950s and 1960s and earlier but when it comes to the present, he is all at sea.

For partly selfish reasons, we brought him to our house in Goa against the advice of a psychiatrist. We had things to do and we needed to escape from the aura of death in our Delhi home. One airplane trip, a tour of the house and fruit-filled garden, a simple home-cooked meal, an ice cream on Baga beach and my dad seemed to perk up. He was excited by the old-style doors and windows and the antique furniture in our house; he marveled at the wells, the trees laden with guava, chickoo, mango and coconut…drinking it all in, wonderstruck.

“Very nice…just like the old days,” he kept repeating. He was struck by the waves breaking on the beach, the lights, and the music. “This is wonderful,” he said over and over again as we finally dragged ourselves away from St Anthony’s Bar and Restaurant at 10 pm. I was beside myself with joy. In the days after my mother’s death, he had drifted, anchorless without his constant companion; like Keats' knight: “alone and palely loitering.”

Now that he lives with us, I think we can light up his life with experiences he has never had in his austere existence. His only interest was travel and so the Goa sojourn opened up a corner of clarity in his Alzheimer-jumbled mind. It was a gamble to whisk him away to Goa. We were worried he might fall apart in the strange new environment. But he seems to have flowered; giving me hope that I could, in the remainder of his life, shower him with care and comfort.

The next day we took him to a supermarket to buy him toiletries. I have always known him to be a frugal, even parsimonious man. He saves things rather than use them. A few months ago at his house in Ahmedabad, I found in his closet unused bottles of after shave lotion and several shirts I had presented him nearly 15 years ago. After we reached our home in Goa, I saw his toiletry kit, which was indescribably modest including two throwaway shaving razors that were past their prime at least five years ago. That’s when we went to the store to buy him new supplies.

He was delighted to receive them and kept rummaging in the bag and looking at his new things through the car journey back home. Promptly, he squirreled them away into his suitcase. Knowing his abstemious mindset, I threw away all his past due date toiletries. The next morning and I don't know how, he retrieved his old shaving razor from the waste basket. However, my hope stayed kindled in that he has started using his new stuff; it is a minor victory in my battle to change his ways.

I am no psychiatrist but I feel that as a man alone now, he has a chance to experience new things, especially ease and choice that he long denied himself. My belief is that the new lifestyle might slow down his steady and inevitable mental decline. Nobody really understands Alzheimer’s. There have been many attempts to research and explain the disease in genetic and medical terms. In my layman’s view, it is about individuals, who have been misfits and therefore turned to simplistic views about life: their definitions of success and their existential happenstance.

The late Ronald Reagan is a classic example. He started out as an actor, never succeeded, got into screen politics, waltzed into the position of the governor of America’s golden state, California and went on to become a two-term occupant of the White House. For all the mythmaking, Reagan was never really cut out for the job and only acted the part…and that too in a B-grade performance. On his watch, certain earth-shaking events took place, primarily the implosion of the Soviet Union. He is revered today for starting a conservative revolution in the United States; his acolytes claim the credit for re-ordering the world.

Whatever Reagan did, he slipped into the personal hell of Alzheimer’s. My view is that his simplistic, black-and-white view of the world left no room for critical assessments. I can see the same happening to my father. He told my wife, “I don’t read because I did all the reading that was needed to top all my exams. Why should I clutter up my mind with useless things?” To add to that, he had no friends, no interests: literature or music or art or theater or even television, cricket and cinema. Alzheimer’s came later; his blankness dates back nearly 40 years, which is 10 years before he retired from his job as a senior government official.

The biggest tragedy in dealing with my father is we have to forget my mother. Already, he is certain that the fuss and the funeral had to do with his mother, who died 42 years ago, when he was just 45. He has no remembrance; at least not that is publicly expressed that his wife is gone, just 20 days short of their 60^th wedding anniversary.

In the 12 days since my mother went away, I have grown to be the 59 years that I am. Until April 21, I felt I was just 19.

copyright rajiv desai 2008