by Vani Viswanathan
A group of cousins recollect the number of times their grandfather ‘let go’, wondering at his resilience and resolution to carry on despite setbacks. Vani’s story questions people’s ideas of when one is supposed to have ‘let go’.
‘Occupied your usual corner, have you?’ asked an annoying neighbour, and a few of us smiled as was mandated on such occasions. We were five cousins, all three or four years apart, gathered at an uncle’s house to celebrate our grandfather’s eightieth birthday in Coimbatore. We’d come to attend this leaving behind important demands of our lives: board exam preps, college internal assessments, and for one of us, her boyfriend’s birthday. We watched the ongoing hullaballoo from the vantage point of our corner in the living room; the walls had ugly coloured crepe paper streamers, someone had hastily cut up coloured chart paper and pasted a ‘Happy Birthday Nagan Thatha’, and people were streaming in and out, filling the house with loud chatter, laughs, the aroma of coffee and the occasional attempts to make conversations with Thatha.
Thatha, on the other hand, was sitting unperturbed in the middle of all this commotion, vacantly staring into space or at others around him, as if wondering what on earth the commotion was all about. When someone walked up to him, he would talk, alright, but as soon as they left, almost as if robotically controlled, the smile would vanish off his face and he would become straight-faced once again. ‘We should make a video of Thatha doing that,’ the youngest cousin said, pulling out his phone and getting ready for the next visitor to wish Thatha.
We did get our video when Shanthi aunty came to meet Thatha; he looked up at her from his seat, talked, kept smiling until she left him and immediately turned his head to stare ahead, straight-faced. The video was one of those short-and-fast ones, so Thatha became an animated gif.
It was when we were laughing at the gif that we heard Shanthi aunty tell someone else, ‘Paavam, he has really let go of himself now,’ and Prema aunty told her, ‘No, no, it all ended for him a few years ago after that Coimbatore incident…’ All five of us looked at each other, amused. Clearly, Shanthi aunty and Prema aunty didn’t know; Shanthi aunty had just joined back the family melodrama after five years in Oman and Prema aunty didn’t know much about Thatha’s everyday life as she was a distant relative we only met at functions and never spoke to otherwise. We’d heard such pronouncements of Thatha’s letting go many times already. Thatha hadn’t et go only recently, or even five years ago – if we took parameters such as Perma aunty’s or Shanthi aunty’s, he’d ‘let go’ a few times already.
***
The first time Thatha had ‘let go’, some of us weren’t born and the others were too young to know what was going on. Paati had passed away suddenly – she woke up fine and bathed and had her coffee and was chanting her prayers when she choked on a sentence – ‘it was all over in a matter of a few seconds’, we’d hear from Thatha over and over as we grew up.
The sudden demise was too much for Thatha to bear, apparently; he just let go by sitting through the next few days of rituals in a daze, blankly answering questions and refusing to go back to work until his manager at the bank came home and told him in the nicest way possible that any more leave would be without pay. The next day, Thatha put on his safari suit and headed to the bank with his briefcase.
By the time he ‘let go’ the next time, around two years later, some of us could understand what was happening. Thatha had retired from the bank and didn’t know what to do the day after they’d given him, as a farewell gift, a diary for the upcoming year, 1996, and he was sitting at home without anywhere to go in the morning. The aunt that he was staying with recollected that morning thus: ‘He woke up and bathed and did his prayers and wore his safari suit and was using his shoehorn to wear his shoes when he realised the bank wasn’t expecting him.’ He switched to his Hawaii chappals and walked the streets of Puthur in Tiruchirapalli until he was hungry and had to come home for lunch. He did this for the next four days until it was Sunday and his son-in-law made him confront the fact that he didn’t have to go to office that Monday, or any Monday thereafter. Thatha accepted this fact with a magnanimity that would make our aunt tear up every time she narrated the story to us. Within a month of his retirement, she said, Thatha had figured out a new weekly schedule that included walking trips to Srirangam temple, Mukkombu and Rock Fort, all at least ten kilometres away.
As he grew older, Thatha shunted between the houses of all his sons and daughter, three in all, so we all got a piece of him. And that’s why we cousins grew up with a Thatha for whom we’d give up college internals and boyfriend birthdays – Thatha had secret sweets and candy for us; for the younger cousins he would dance and give them weird nicknames like Bubuto and Hakita; and the older ones he riddled on idioms and phrases in British English that to us sounded archaic and foreign. We showed him our report cards, our new books, our certificates and college applications.
The most recent time he let go was, again, not of his volition. It was a good ten years after Paati died, when he was staying with the uncle in Coimbatore, that he forgot, abruptly one morning, the way from the Sai Baba temple to home, a distance of two kilometres that he walked nearly every day. A panicked aunt called uncle at his office when Thatha didn’t return four hours after he’d left. They found him sitting at a teashop with a strained look. The teashop owner had made sure he sat there, knowing it was likely someone would try to find him.
Over the next couple of years, as Thatha shuttled between Coimbatore and Chennai and Trichy, the Alzheimer’s progressed. The former bank clerk couldn’t tell if he got correct change for a hundred rupees, or remember his wife’s name. Slowly, slowly but surely, he forgot others too – the names of his sons and daughter, their spouses, and their offspring – us, whom he’d brought up on Melody chocolate and ‘Righto!’s and Bubuto-Hakita.
By the time he was seventy three, we cousins were old enough to realise that Thatha remembered nothing of us. We continued to talk to him nevertheless, sharing somethings and nothings; he responded to us respectfully like we were customers at the bank where he’d worked. It hit us particularly hard when those of us who started earning handed to him our first salary and he didn’t know what to do with the currency notes. ‘What is this?’ he’d asked.
Over the years, our response to the situation changed. We – Thatha’s children and their spouses and us, his grandchildren – accepted it as a way of our lives. We stopped agonising over it and took each new development as the next step in his dementia journey. We exchanged notes over calls and SMSes. ‘Thatha couldn’t wear his veshti today.’ ‘Thatha left the house today and we spent over an hour trying to find him…’
Celebrating his eightieth birthday was fraught with doubts from the aunts and uncles on whether they should ‘expose’ him to relatives and friends with his full vulnerabilities. They reached a compromise by avoiding any rituals and settling on an ‘English’ style birthday party with a cake and a ‘Happy Birthday’ song. Thatha went through the party like it had nothing to do with him; he cut the cake as instructed and spoke with relatives and friends with a cool distance that only a few could tell anything was ‘wrong’ with him.
And that’s why we cousins disagreed with Shanthi aunty and Prema aunty when they discussed when Thatha had let go; he was still sticking to his life like nothing had gone wrong, and his physical body cooperated. At eighty, the man boasted of a diabetes-free-hypertension-free-arthritis-free life that was the envy of even his children.
***
But this morning, seven months after Thatha’s eightieth birthday, was a different scenario. The Nagan family members had got a call between eight and nine in the morning that informed us of his demise – he’d passed on while waiting for a cup of coffee. Through the day, we all gathered at the home in Tiruchi, coming in from offices and colleges in Bangalore and Chennai and Vellore. We occupied another corner watching some of our parents cry and others put on a stoic face to greet those who’d come to mourn. We were confused about how we felt; Thatha had gone through such a change in most of our living memory that we weren’t sure of how to associate with him. The oldest cousin among us had got married the last month and was now here with her husband, and we found it hard to deal with the bright yellow thaali on her neck. When did we all grow up? What were we to make of this life where a disengaged Thatha wasn’t around to meet every vacation, no matter whether he recognised us, or understood us, or not? Grief was strange; did we have to mourn Thatha’s passing or celebrate the end of the difficult times he put all our parents through? What did it mean to remember a man who didn’t remember himself?
The youngest cousin pulled up that gif he created of Thatha from his eightieth birthday. We played it a few times and laughed and looked awkwardly at the body of Thatha lying in the middle of the living room. That face wouldn’t twitch again, ever. When the youngest cousin said ‘This time he really did let go,’ the rest of us did feel our eyes sting.
Vani Viswanathan writes fiction and non-fiction, and works on gender, sexuality and development communications in New Delhi. Her first dedicated foray into writing for the world was when she started a blog in 2005. Her writing typically focuses on the marvellous intricacies and laughable ironies in lives around her. She draws inspiration from cities she’s lived in or visited. Her writing can be accessed on www.vaniviswanathan.com.
