Going Home

In the last six months, Nana’s incoherent rambling has been punctuated by a new and seemingly acute yearning for ‘home’. In the middle of the day or night, he will suddenly start struggling; he will try to get up from his bed, wear his chappals and impatiently, frantically say that he wants to go home. Sometimes, I try to reason with him and show him the pictures on his walls, the relics of the life that he lived. I tell him that he is in fact home, surrounded by his closest family. Other times, when his frenzy refuses to subside, we convince him that it is too late to depart at the moment and we will set off for home at first light.

He is never clearly able to articulate what or where this home is. Sometimes it stands for Jabalpur, the city that he was born in but one that gave him as much grief as it gave him solace. Sometimes it is Bombay, the city that somewhat stabilized his restless wandering and where he saw his children grow into their own persons and set out on their individual journeys. But mostly, he doesn’t have a name for this home. It remains an abstract figment of his confused reality. He just knows that he isn’t there; that he has somewhere else to go.

These days, as I watch him eat, stare blankly at the television, nod his head in rhythm at an old song that he still recognizes, I wonder how his brain processes the world around him; how the chains of command function and where the missing links are. There was a time when I thought that I could read him like a book. He would tell me exactly what he felt and helped me understand his train of thought, his basis of reasoning, almost like giving me a brain map to decode his mind. Now most days are spent in elaborate exercises of guesswork. Day by day he loses more words. He looks at me hopefully, impatiently, and will try to gesture when his utterances fail him. Often it is like playing a game of taboo: he can give us many related words, but in the jumbled drawer of his mind where language was safely tucked away, the word that he is actually looking for is tabooed, lost. I see the clouds of confusion hover around him and then the relief and joy that dispels them when our guesswork is successful.

From our side we also keep trying to encode the new language that he seems to be speaking. We have learnt to understand that when he hurriedly starts and says that he has a train or a plane to catch, he actually means to signify urgency. Urgency not of missing a mode of transport, but of realizing the delayed nature of his own bodily functions. When he touches his face and looks annoyed, it usually means that he wants a shave. During mealtimes, he looks around and asks us to tell ‘her’ to come and eat. He asks, no one in particular, or perhaps the air, “Where is Ratna?” It has become another abstract, unanswerable question. She died nine months ago right next to him, but the fogginess of his mind has prevented it from sinking into his consciousness. It is as if his brain knew that obfuscation would protect him from a truth that his body physically couldn’t take.

Perhaps both his quests have the same answer: if we put them in a basic syllogism, rudimentary deduction might suggest that Ratna in fact signifies home. After all for nearly sixty years, she was the only element of certainty and fixity in his life. Perhaps it is all just a game of neurons and nerves; there is no quest or explanation except for the gradual degeneration of his physical mind.

6th June 1964

6th June 2020

Over the last five years, Nana has experienced varying stages of decline. Initially it was mere disorientation. Gradually, he lost his sense of physical space followed by names and recognition of people. Now there are few things that he remembers for more than ten minutes and moments of lucidity are increasingly few and far between. In the last six months, maybe it seems so to me because I have had the chance to observe him most closely, the deterioration has been at its most rapid. It is as if his body is finally giving up, taking longer to reboot at each temporary shutdown.

In 2018, in an essay about his father and homeostasis, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote, “There’s a glassy transparency to things around us that work, made visible only when the glass is cracked and fissured. Look, it’s nothing. To dwell inside a well-functioning machine is to be largely unaware of its functioning. That’s its gift, and we accept it thoughtlessly, ungratefully, unknowingly.”

He reaffirms that homeostasis is not coincidental, but a necessary purpose for the body to function. In losing his wife of 58 years, Nana lost a key element of the precarious stasis of his life. She was the linchpin that held his disintegrating mind’s many fragments together, who held daily vigil and hawk-eyed vigilance to ensure and fuel his body’s homeostatic resilience. In her absence, the fissures become more apparent, the cracking more frequent. The spectres of age and decay that she fiercely guarded him against seem to be inching closer and however much we try, there is little that we can do to avoid this cascade of unravelling.

February 1997

My Nana was the first person to show me the magic of language. When I was 3 years old, he would play word games with me, giving me the tools of expression and illuminating little light bulbs in my mind. When I was 6, to keep me occupied and engaged, he taught me how to play rummy with 6 cards because my small hands couldn’t hold 13. When I was 12, he told me that knowledge is power and that we should read all his meticulously curated books to understand that. Now when I am 23 and finally feel equipped to read them and agree and mostly disagree with him, I can only stand by and watch the little light bulbs of his mind slowly switch off. We can only try to postpone the inevitable, ward off the darkness until it engulfs him and enables his final departure for 'home'.

More often that not acceptance is hard to come by; sometimes however, its acquisition feels even more enfeebling than denial.