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Thursday, August 15, 2002Death makes a house callby Raza Syed I hate phone calls. On a gray afternoon in early November, I returned to my apartment to find my caller ID box flashing its hazard light. SIX NEW CALLS, numbers UNAVAILABLE. Expletive expletive expletive. I cast off the trappings of obligation—hat, coat, wallet, keys—and retrieved my voicemail. The first two messages were protracted hang-ups—background noise, fumbling with the receiver. The next three were from my mother, imploring me to return her call “immediately, immediately.” What a nag. The last call was from one of my father’s secretaries. Pause. Since when did my dad’s peons call me from work? In a Midwestern drawl, a nameless female urged me to speak to my mother “immediately.” There was that word again. My heart was beginning to palpitate. I assumed I was being held liable for some dim transgression. Speed-dial to Mother, pick-up on the third ring. “You called?” I asked, trying to sound casual. “Yes I did…. Are you sitting down?” I felt my blood growing thick and slow, sweet with self-pity. “What’s going on?” Exhaling loudly: “Did you know I’ve been getting calls from Dad’s office?” She sliced into my speech calmly: “Did they tell you what’s happened?” She was measuring her words. “What’s this about? My transcript? Did Dad see it? What have I done now?” Damn, I was in trouble. I mean, sure, my grades had always been “variable,” and my parents had given me intermittent grief for that, but my mother was acting like I was a lab monkey with a scalpel. Where was she coming from? What was the angle? She knew I didn’t do drugs, didn’t she? Maybe— “No, this isn’t about you. You haven’t done anything wrong.” Puzzled and annoyed: “Then who did?” “Your father—he’s dead.” And her voice broke. A death in the family. An opening. An invitation. A crack. The day after it happened, the phone began to ring, and it did not stop. The University chaplain called, acting as if he were the first person to tell me what had happened. He offered his various services and attempted to inveigle me meet him in his office. I declined. He tried to introduce God into the proceedings. I was generally unreceptive. Taking leave of me, he wanted to know if I had any questions for him. I asked him, “What’s a chaplain?” Within two days, I stopped answering the phone altogether. The steady pile-up of names meaningless to me, of five-minute emotional fender-benders, was more than I cared to accommodate. There was the expectation, perhaps subconscious, that I would confide, console, be consoled, cry. I did not put on a good show. I’ve always been leery of easy confidences, and I did not feel obligated to clarify my behavior to strangers. I had not invited this. If I could have made them understand, perhaps I would have explained that my father and I were never particularly close. Boarding schools, travel, ambition, intellectual abstraction—all these things had conspired during the course of twenty-one years to achieve a peculiar and alchemic ambivalence. There was no rift or feud to speak of; rather, there wasn’t very much of anything at all. When our paths infrequently crossed, we were chummy, engaging. But otherwise, life went on. Two weeks before he died, he called to wish me a happy birthday. I was out, and I never returned his call. Had I known that that would be the last time I would ever hear his voice, perhaps I would have saved the message. A few days later, I came across an obituary in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “K.M. SYED: M.D., M.B.A., passed away suddenly November 9, 1998.” Passed away. Such a curious term. It makes me think of spectral anomalies and dreams that are hard to recall. Weeks later, a friend, only recently enlightened of the circumstances, would ask me haltingly, “How did he… pass away?” “How did he die?” I gently corrected, maybe a little too blithely. I described the scene as it had been recounted to me: fact fact fact—like so many teeth. My father, the cardiologist, would have been more qualified than I to masticate these minutiae into something digestible, but he was unavailable. Immediate cause of death: heart failure. As it stands, the only mental picture I had for several days was a tableaux in which my father lay sprawled in the very static, proverbial “thick” of his busy life: a freeze-frame of him, impeccably groomed, his heart exploded, a stain on his Italian suit, eyes closed for the sake of my sanity. One night I dreamed of Pierre and Marie Curie. I recalled from some distant history lesson that Monsieur met his maker beneath the errant wheels of a horse-drawn carriage, his brain case smashed across the cobblestones. In my version, he wore spats and a nice suit, with a gold watch in his vest pocket. Somewhere, his wife waited for him. News traveled slowly in those days, in my dream. Over time details would emerge. On the day he died, my father had seemed “under the weather,” according to nameless observers. Events locked into their fateful choreography around lunch, in a courtroom, during a deposition. I know nothing about depositions in general, and even less about this one in particular, save that it involved a wrongful termination suit against my father and some of his colleagues, who had driven up with him. At some point during the proceedings, my father slumped over in his chair. Attempts to revive him onsite were unsuccessful, and he was dead within the hour. The lawyer for the other party reportedly recused himself immediately. The weeks following the funeral passed indistinctly. There were meetings with lawyers, accountants, professors. I caught movies with friends, told jokes, and generally fell back into habit. I find that when I now attempt to address what happened, I am at a loss. This is not a stammering, fist-clenching, teeth-gnashing paralysis. Rather, I am faced with something I cannot entirely grasp. I become tired, I need a nap, I don’t dream. So I don’t think about it. I like to tell people that I will consider it with more “depth and clarity” in about ten years, hopefully while on sabbatical from a successful stint at Disney or Apple. Knock on wood. No, I have not cried. I’m not immune to sentimentality, but weeping has always struck me as an exercise in self-pity—a necessary activity, perhaps, but ultimately a recursive one. In contemplating my father’s death, I have been forced to contemplate a life in all its absoluteness and finality—a life completely removed from my own, completely removed from possibility, completely non-negotiable. Self-pity is about finding nooks and crannies, little places to hide. I have been presented with a sheer cliff front, a flat rock face with no handholds. All I can do is stare up at it and acknowledge its enormity. Sometimes I feel that it is better to accept my own ignorance than it is to risk contaminating the truth with delusions of duty and protocol. For all that there is in this life of ephemera and esoterica—and, in my ponderousness, I am the last to denounce their fleeting, soul-seducing charms—there is something to be said for maintaining a certain perspective on things, a perspective that is grounded. My father is dead. There are coincidences and parallels and literary eddies in the circumstances surrounding what happened, but the truth is that, on a day like any other, his heart stopped and the world did not. And that’s the heart of the matter: very little has changed in my life. For now. Knock on wood.... posted by CoolSoulSmith a.k.a Rinci|ak --------------------------- Wednesday, August 14, 2002Love That Changed His Lifeby Shyamala Sathiaseelan "You've got mail" - the little pop up box came up. I was too busy doing nothing so I decided to check out who on earth thought of me at this unearthly hour. It was Adri. How many years is it since I heard from him? May be five may be ten. I was happy that he had written to me. From reading Adri's mail all I could gather was that he was happily married and had changed quite a bit. Adri was my classmate and my best chum in school. But like all parents do, my parents were not happy that I got such a "bad guy" as a friend. I was strictly told not to talk to him! Adri sat next to me in class and I could not avoid talking to him. He was a very rough guy and was generally a loner. Everybody kept away from him and he kept away from everyone. He was very intelligent and would score good marks but he used very bad language and did not have any great habits to speak of. Adri came from a good family. His sisters also studied in the same school as us and they were also brilliant in school but they did not behave like him. He was the odd one out in both school and home. He was a rebel. His Dad was proud of him and his Mom feared him. I liked him for some reason. No, don't mistake me I did not love him, I could never fall in love with such a character but I liked him. There was something in him that made me talk to him against my parent's wishes. It was not his brilliance in studies, not his sense of humor, not his looks but something incomprehensible. He was a very friendly guy though he could never talk in a gentle manner. He was always there to help everyone as long as they did not hurt him in anyway. But still something kept him aloof from the rest of the crowd. As years went by we moved to different colleges but still we hadn't stopped communicating with each other. All my female friends wondered how I could be friendly with a guy like him. They all felt sorry for the girl who would get married to him. At some stage I myself had given up hope that he would change for the better. He had finished his post graduation; found himself a great job but hadn't changed a bit. If anything he was drinking more and smoking more. The only person who touched his heart at that time was his little niece. She was always with him whenever he was at home. He would take her out all the time. That is when I thought that he would change for the better someday soon. And that is exactly when I lost touch with him. And now after years I had got a mail from him. When I read the mail I knew that he had changed and he had changed for the better. I called him up immediately and he told me how he was sure that I would notice the number in the signature and call him back. According to him I had not changed a single bit. After talking to him and his wife I realised what was the reason for the change. It was his loving wife Nisha. She seemed to be a real patient woman. She had been very loving and understanding and patient with him that made him slowly decide that he did not need any nasha other than Nisha anymore. He had even stopped drinking and smoking, though he accepted that it was very difficult initially but Nisha was very supportive all along. How did none of us think that all this guy needed was love? Instead of showering him with love all of kept away and felt sorry, irritated and what not. Today he stands as an excellent example of what wonders love can do. I've read many stories like this, but none touched my heart so much, probably because Adri himself was so close to my heart. We read stories, sometimes shed tears, but how many times have we put it into practice? Adri's case taught me that stories do have a base in them somewhere. From now on I've promised get out the best in whatever I read and put them into practice whenever I can posted by CoolSoulSmith a.k.a Rinci|ak ---------------------------
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