Remembering baba

Ashok Chatterjee. My father who is no more. What shall I write about him? I have been thinking all the time about it over the last twelve days, yet when I sit down to write it seems to me that I either have to write a whole book or it will be nothing at all that makes much sense. Maybe the dam will burst someday. Right now, I can only sigh that we did not get the time of life together. I hope my daughter would be able to say we did, she and I, when I am gone.

Meanwhile, a photograph of his when he was barely 36. Imagine, eighteen years younger than I am now! And one of me below, as I look now. Remembering my father.

He's gone.

It's 1:10 a.m. I have just returned from the cremation ground after setting my father's ashes adrift in the river.

He left us a little before six this evening. My mother saw him minutes before he stopped breathing. I broke up my class halfway and went off to say goodbye.

It was a long, difficult, complicated, and unnecessarily painful life. For both of us, for our sins. But he was at last quietly content after coming back to live with me.

I shall pray that after life's fitful fever he sleeps well.

Baba, farewell. We shall, I hope, meet again. In happier times and climes.

Lord, it hurts

I can see that a lot of people have been keeping an eye on this blog for an update, so thanks are due to them. I haven’t been writing for some time. It’s become tough enough to carry on maintaining a semblance of the ‘normal’ working life as it is.

‘There are,’ Professor Dumbledore said to Tom Riddle, echoing countless real-life sages of yore, ‘things far worse than death.’ I can see it happening to my father. It is not death itself that is horrid, but the dying – if the dying is so incredibly slow and painful and pathetic, for the person concerned as much as those around him who must tend and wait and beg for release.

For the last several years he has been much less than a whole man, and it’s been more than a year now that he has been bedridden off and on. But since mid-April he’s been a complete invalid, and that is going on five months now. Even with two nurses working alternately round the clock, it was becoming so awful a burden for my infinitely-suffering mother that both she and I, brooding aloud, have lamented that there is no law allowing for euthanasia yet: that such a law, at least benefiting the very old and terminally ill, should become one indispensable hallmark of any society that dares to call itself civilized. The least I can say for myself is that I would not want to hang on like this for my daughter to serve with sick and bone-weary despair, putting her entire life on hold. That is not love, that is socially-imposed torture of the cruelest sort upon the living.

Five days ago he began to choke, with fluid accumulating in the straining and failing lungs. We moved him into the ICU of a nearby hospital, where  they have been pumping out the fluid while keeping him under an oxygen mask and feeding him through intravenous drips. He is comatose most of the time, can hardly articulate his words when he is awake, and though there are short lucid intervals, what he says doesn’t make any sense at all most of the time. By some miracle he is not in any significant pain – probably thanks to the same brain tumour which has immobilized him – but what a ghastly way to hang on! What marvellous progress science has made, indeed, to be able to drag on a vegetative and deeply undignified existence for a few more days or weeks! Last night he was transferred to a general bed, but still in exactly the same condition, and all that the experts can tell us to do is to brace up and wait… as if that is not exactly what we have been doing for more days than we have kept count of.

I would not wish this upon my worst enemy, and this is my father I am talking about.

And all the time, day in and day out, I have to keep acting in the classroom and the neighbourhood as if it’s more or less just business as usual. Because I have to earn my daily bread, and I don’t do a salaried job or live on a pension or inheritance.

Dear God, have mercy.

P.S., September 11: He was back in the ICU yesterday after exactly one day in the general ward.