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sweet_raabii
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An Article:
My mother has dementia. She unknowingly repeats herself every two minutes and asks the same questions one after another, thinking each time that she is asking them for the first time.
Her somewhat amnesic state exasperates me and my other family members. It sometimes leads us to lose our cool, and at other times makes us lose our minds. We feel convinced that we have exhausted our level of tolerance. We feel we have far precious undertakings to pursue than vainly answering the same questions countless times.
There are days when we shut our bedroom and smugly believe that we have won the battle for our tranquility and mental peace. In addition, my mother is hypochondriac. Each of her illnesses is lifethreatening. She is ever immersed in trepidation of mortality and seeks consolation from us (of late this lip-service has grown increasingly heartless). Her conversations are only about the welfare of her sons and daughters, grandchildren (about whom she worries all the time without reason) and her own health.
Like all mothers, she expects me to spend a while with her when I return jaded from my office. Her eyes whisper this request in my ears. I do not allow this plea to become too loud. I react by not registering it in my mind. Instead I try to play hide and seek with her. I feel mentally incapacitated to reply countless times to the questions, the answers to which she cannot, like an inept juggler, hold onto. The four hours that I have at my disposal between my return and my sleep is what I have earned to unwind, relax and spend as ‘quality time’. This I do by mostly surfing across 80odd channels on TV. When I reach the last of these visual stopovers, I start all over again in order to catch a glimpse of those programmes that were interrupted by ads on the previous run. Somewhere between this, I find time to plunge into a childlike state of mind along with m children.
By the time I finish watching several mites of programmes and my finger still on the remote’s button, the dinner is ready. At that point I retrieve some of my morality to request my mother to join me for dinner. I often find her preparing to sleep. But she gleefully joins me for her two morsels of food. She is getting weak by the day and I holler at her to eat more. It is all out of love but my voice betrays disgust. It seldom works and it all often ends in bitterness.
Finally, I administer her medicines, which enables me to feel that I have discharged a great obligation towards my only remaining parent. I feel I have earned the right for a contented sleep.
While my mother has lost her grasp of immediate memo ry, she still recollects the crumbs of older memories, for example our days in Lahore in the late ’70s, when I was a shy young boy who got his wishes without spelling them out. She would also remember the time when, in my early days of school, no amount of persuasions or enticement of gifts could remove the fear of school from my heart. That was one reason I started school late, only in the 2nd grade. It was only on the promise that she would stay around the school that I had reluctantly consented to study. They never permitted her to stay inside the school premises so she told me she would sit outside on the unkempt grass grown close to the boundary wall of the school from 8am to 1pm. Whatever doubt I had about the hollowness of her promise dissipated one day when I felt like crying in class and rushed out of the gate dodging everyone. She was there sitting for me on the grass outside, shade-less, all sweat under the sadistic May sun. She was reading some magazine, which also served as a handheld fan.
It is not that she ever forgot this memory or its finer details. I think even in her present state, it resides in her mind. The reason she never brought it up all her life was that in the relationship that ensues from motherhood, kindness could never become a bestowed favour. The return is neither expected nor desired.
Talking of old memories, I can recall that in times when I had fallen ill, one person that stood steadfast by my bedside was my mother. She would stay awake the whole night, carrying venom in her eyes that only her sleep could understand, just to watch over me and serve my needs. And on occasions when I had high fever or acute stomach ailments, I could always see my pain writing writhing stories on her face and her forehead filling with burrows of concern. I also faintly remember her once encircling my bed, doing her seven ‘Mughal’ rounds in a mythical attempt to acquire my fever, deciding arbitrarily and selflessly to pay the ultimate cost of my recovery.
These memories make me feel strange. Was it the same mother that now forgets even my name? The answer is in the affirmative. But serious doubt is cast about the person who is now dusting these memories up from his childhood’s musty wardrobe with the sole and mundane purpose of completing this article. What happened to the sense of helplessness that I felt in those tough days that only got mitigated by one person, sometimes in the shape of wet cloth on the forehead, at others through spoonful of fresh juices in my mouth?
Amongst many similar memories that lay strewn in my mind, one memory is surprisingly not there. It is so queer. It is not that I have lost it out of carelessness. This particular memory is not there because the actual event never occurred. I cannot recollect my mother ever asking me anything for her own self, even when I outgrew her little boy status and became a bread earner in my own right. It is such an incredulous and powerful truth that it almost appears a lie. In this world of give and take, this selflessness is unworldly and sublime. As I write these lines, it is now becoming exceedingly difficult to sustain a sense of well being about me. I feel I have been sick for a while and this time it is not my stomach.
In all those years, I have forgotten the trying times of my life when I did not even have the ability to bob on the surface, let alone swim. But I was able to row my ‘life-boat’ with the oars of motherhood. Since then I befriended selfishness, an old foe of humanity and there was no looking back. Today, suddenly this self-centredness feels a burden that has bent my back.
Now I lay in tatters, scattered all over the room where I write these lines. I want to unburden, undress my selfishness and wear something starch-less to stop this sweating. I need a refuge where I can hide and take all my shame, a hideous tail that I only noticed today, with me.
When we reach the desired shores in our journey of life, the usefulness of our parents diminishes significantly. Hereon meanness of man takes over which is the radar that keeps our focus on usefulness. People become objects, either useful or useless. Our mother (or father) begins to have the same worth as the old fridge or TV in the house.
Even if we consider our old parents as liabilities, the assets’ side of our today’s balance sheet could never have grown healthy without them. These long-term loans are self-self-liquidating, in banking parlance, on maturity and only require us to pay them nominal interest and attention in the currency of tenderness. To be honest the above features of this liability make them appear more as charity doled out to us than loans.
I realise I have defaulted on these small payments. I could not even pay a nominal sum towards my benefactor. The sad truth is that imprisonment for this high crime does not exist, at least in this world. They say writing brings clarity of thought. They do not say it makes writer change his behaviour. When I get up from my desk, I do not expect that I would be a changed, nobler, caring soul. Years of egoism have eaten away the goodness in me. Yet I feel germination of a resolve inside based on the stirring of these old memories that I do not want to let go.
And all this time I thought ‘she’ I was the one who had dementia.
..... O:)
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