Authors: Kishore Modak
David called his
office, explaining that he would have to be away for the day, before
re-joining work on the following day. It gave us time to talk, try
and make plans for the future.
Plan
s
, we
have to make them, knowing well that they will push us into unknown,
unforeseeable waters; yet plans are better than simply meandering,
floating about life.
‘We should head
back, I don’t think we should live here anymore, after all that
has happened,’ I told him, wanting to move back to London.
‘Why?’ he
simply asked, a question meant to spawn a mild disagreement, healthy
for a domestic debate.
‘Well, for one, I
feel suffocated in this city, after all that has happened. For
another, I don’t think anyone of us is happy here. Are you
happy, after all that has happened?’ The happenings had all
happene
d
to me; David and Jay stood on the side of
doers, doing what they did in whichever frame of mind they did it in
and for whatever period of time it takes for men to do what they do
to women.
‘You know I will
play along with whatever it is that will make you happy, just that
our income back home is not guaranteed. It will be back to square
one, looking for work, reconnecting with friends, asking for
favours,’ he was stating facts. It would be like that. It would
be better that way; he needed the process of rebuilding before we
settled down again.
‘Yes, I agree.
You are absolutely right. But, we will be happy. It is not like we
have not made any savings, or planned for rainy days. In time, all
will be well,’ I convinced him, not really going anywhere near
my real fears.
In Singapore, Mary was
too close for comfort, physically too close, just four hours away,
maybe pregnant with our stuff, with the very real possibility of
turning up at our doorstep once she was able to, rekindling the past,
ruining our mending lives, sucking us into her poverty of refinement.
In London, we were
safer, though only relatively. I made a mental note—get on top
of all our security settings on Facebook, blocking us from snoopy
Asians, if the site allowed settings by region, else I would simply
block everyone out, at least for now. In London, we would be ten
hours away from her, with our address untraceable without significant
effort. We would feel secure in the false security of home turf, with
new mobile numbers and new emails ids.
‘I do understand,
but what am I supposed to tell the folks at work?’ he fell back
to the realm of the mundane, easily tackled by conversation and
logic.
‘I am sure they
have guessed you are having issues at home, with the newspaper
articles and all. They will understand when you say it is on personal
grounds. Just ask for the separation package that they offered you
earlier and wait to hear what they have to say,’ I answered,
confidently, pushing him along to where we were heading.
On the following
morning, I got the
me
n
out of the house, neat, with
packed sandwiches, and then waited for the phone to ring, cradling
the instruments in their respective chargers, the mobile and the home
phone, ensuring they were charged when the clinic called. Housework,
it is a burden that is easy to give up, tough to pick up, building
back the habits of domestic labour.
I had the urge to call
the clinic, asking for the good Doctor, but sense prevailed and I
settled in front of the tele, after many days, bridging gaps, picking
up where I had left the soaps off. He had said one or two days, best
to wait while we took the medication. Sometimes, it is best when you
don’t hear back from the doctor’s office.
The phone rang soon
enough, but like it is in most cases, the news that it carried was
not definite. The receptionist at the clinic simply asked me to come
when I was free, since the Doctor wanted to speak to me.
I did so at once,
simply shutting the burners off, closing the windows, and rushing to
the clinic.
The waiting at the
clinic was agonizing, with all nature of possibilities dancing in
front of me. Medical matters, which we usually don’t
understand, are like that, simply playing with our imagination,
forcing us to panic with the half information that is available on
the Internet.
When I finally saw him,
he was calm, asking me to sit down, telling me not to worry. ‘It
is your husband, and it is not what you think,’ he said,
interrupted by me before he could finish his sentence.
‘Does he have
it?’ my voice carried the tremble of panic and anxiety, my eyes
wide with fear.
‘No, he does not
have it, and all the tests have come up negative,’ he told me.
I sighed in relief, too
soon, because he was not done yet.
‘It is his blood
counts. They are elevated, particularly the leukocyte count, which is
abnormally high. I would not worry; it could be a mild infection that
is causing it. But I will strongly recommend a few more tests, just
to be cautious, that is all,’ he added.
‘I am a grown-up
adult, Doctor. Please tell me what you suspect. Are you looking for
something in particular?’ I had put on my brave face by now.
‘Like I said,
there is absolutely no need to panic. Not yet, at least, since there
could be a host of reasons for elevated blood counts. But, I strongly
recommend that you bring him in again, after he has finished the
course of antibiotics that I prescribed. It could be a simple
infection that goes away in a week. Why don’t we check in a
week’s time?’ he sounded reassuring.
‘I will do that,
Doctor, and what about the rest of us?’ I asked.
‘All seems fine.
Just finish the course of medication since you have started it, but I
would not think about it anymore,’ he touched his stethoscope,
growing impatient, wanting to work through the patients waiting
outside, before heading home.
At home, my predominant
state was one of relief. There was housework to be done, but with
Mary gone, there was calm and peace again. I remained private, alone
at home all day. Also, with the medical reports coming through well,
at least as regards the events of the recent months, I felt a door
shutting, a chapter closing.
It was only by evening
that I bothered getting an appointment for David to meet Dr Paul,
that too, only after a week. Till then, I would personally administer
the useless medication that had been prescribed, on all three of us.
A week down the road, a
new door opened.
Mum’s Journal, Part Two:
Acceptance
T
ime, it simply moves away from us,
leaving us in a rut of petty personal tangles, forcing us to look
down, down where there is
nothing but the mundane
to toy with, while on top, things move steadily away on the waves of
time, reaching the horizon before moving out of sight, forever, never
once waiting for us to look up. For many years, my rut of worthless
entanglement imprisoned me in the shallow triviality of infidelity,
shame and sexual perversity; I was uplifted to much deeper mysteries
by the process of
cell-division
. Everything simply paled in
comparison.
Yes,
cell-divisio
n
,
something you may not have stopped to think about when you read your
level six textbook; it became the instrument that awakened me to the
meaning and passage of time. It simply made important things urgent,
relegating everything else to the ordinary.
In the end, isn’t
every story the same, built around being lost and in the search of
meaning, before finding answers to all our childish doubts?
Cell-divisio
n
,
when controlled, is life-giving, kicking in at conception and working
through the growth of the foetus in the womb, till organs
differentiate, leading to a fully formed infant. In life, the process
of division repairs and runs the body efficiently, when and where
physical repair and mending is required.
However, in the lives
of cells, every once in a while,
on
e
cell decides to
divide and pass on its quality of divisibility to its progeny,
setting in motion an uncontrollable army of dividing cells, leading
to incommodious cancers, growing in progression, just like the one
that killed David. His pertained to skin and finally blood cells,
though a cancer can appear in practically any part of the body.
An exponential
progression of rice grains, laid on the squares of a chessboard, left
kings paupers; David and I did not stand a chance.
David’s diagnosis
and treatment stretched over a few years, starting in Singapore and
ending in London, where I currently reside. He got better, before he
got worse. The fact remains that most people diagnosed with cancer
eventually die of cancer; the question is one of average lifespan
from diagnosis. In David’s case, it was less than three years.
He was brave, when he
could be, but mostly he was despondent, asking questions that have no
meaningful or pointed answers.
Why
me
?
Because, me, you and anyone else are insignificant in the scheme of
life. Time, it simply moves away from us, at best forcing us to swim
with it, for a while.
Wha
t
now
? At best, a normal lifespan of sixty- seventy years
and at worst, a greatly diminished one, or maybe something in
between, attributable to that what we as yet do not know. Promise, in
either case, it will be a flash.
Wha
t
abou
t
m
y
unfulfille
d
duties
? You have done well, leaving enough for your family
after you are gone.
The toughest
question—
I
s
thi
s
punishment
,
fo
r
the
deed
s
tha
t
I
hav
e
done
?
No, your illness is not
divine justice meted out against your misdeeds, because what you
consider misdeeds are trivial when one considers time, and how it
simply keeps moving away. You yourself said it, ‘All of our
misdeeds are natural acts,’ acceptable, if one believes in a
natural order. I, for one, do not.
However, in one final
act of redemption, before leaving Singapore, David handed over the
gun to Inspector Tan. He headed to the Kallang River and hurled the
bag of toys into its waters. A commuter train thundered past on the
narrow river ’s rail bridge, its passengers ensconced in
air-conditioned tubes, peering at screens and listening through
headphones. No one noticed a broken man weeping on the pedestrian
bridge and a lady standing by him, a lady with a resolute exterior
and a well-concealed but fragile, helpless, crumbling interior.
He was ecstatic, when
the remission briefly led to complete symptom-less recovery, needing
no more of the poisonous medication that was killing the cancer along
with my husband. David, in some sense, resisted the poison, while the
cancer succumbed to it, like a race of survival to the finish,
between the cancer and him, both fighting a common enemy, the drugs.
The disease reappeared within months, fulminant and deadly as if with
a vengeance, at which point he gave up.
During that brief
period of wellness, there was wine and joy, including pleasures of
marital life, without the aid of any mental or physical contortions.
David could love me normally, if I may say so, though the word is
misplaced in the context of copulation.
Jay and David spoke,
quite a bit through their period of brief wellness, of what I know
not, but it seemed like a conversation of some substance, like the
ones we carry for a lifetime, for Jay stopped being melancholy and
simply grew up.
Further on down the
line, when he got really sick, I cared for him when everyone else
gave up, sending him back home to me, back home to die. Each time I
left home, for unavoidable tasks that demanded my presence away from
him, he asked ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ when all
he could physically do was lie down and wait for me to return, after
I had run my chores. I loved the man, to his bitter end.
He died in unimaginable
pain, the medication unable to counteract or even mitigate the
effects of malignancy. The pain made his demise acceptable; at least
there was relief from it, for everyone.
In the first few days
of aftermath, visits from people filled with gratitude and concern
made his loss seem far less vacuous than it actually was. The church
service and the mass, sepulchre and the stream of visitors gave way
in just over a week’s time, leaving an empty space at dinner,
and a stillness all about the household. It was like removing the
words sung in a song, leaving tunes bland and dull with only the
chime of hollow wordless music. Jay fared better than me, with school
and a steady ring from friends for him to fall back upon, well beyond
that first one week. The young move on, with life to look forward to;
it was I who was continuously pulled backwards into the past. It was
I who was left all alone, still sleeping on my side of our bed, as if
he were still there on his side, when I could have easily moved
towards the middle, spreading out in comfort, knowing he was gone.
In the beginning, when
I was still young and sexually active—at least
biologically—invitations from married friends dried up. After
all, who wants a sexually starved widow in the vicinity of their
menfolk. They needn’t have worried, not on that count; I had
learnt to tackle the problems posed by sex quite well, that too
without the need of a partner.
Seeking out married
men, the thought repulsed me, after what I had suffered at the hands
of a married man, my husband. For some reason, the alternative of
seeking gigolos is not mainstream; if it was, I may have considered
it, but it isn’t like female prostitution, which is accessible
and almost acceptable, at least in certain situations. Male
situations, like when you are travelling alone, or when your family
is away and you are by yourself.