Skip to main content

Connecting

I read news about Natasha Tretheway being named poet laureate this morning. The name was unfamiliar until then but it was not too hard to find some of her poems to read. The Elegy dedicated to her father took on a very personal meaning for me today. My father was in an accident earlier this morning and now recovering in a hospital. It has been a few years since I saw him last. The picture of him laying unconscious and covered in mud in the middle of a busy market place kept coming back to me as I tried to carry on with a lunch meeting. The realities of his life could not be more starkly different than mine. Yet, there was a time when our lives were one, I lived in his world and in his protection. It is hard to fathom that my biggest source of strength may now be vulnerable.
Along with physical distance and time there has come a certain inability to traverse each others' realities. Then there was another picture of an old man bandaged and sedated alone in a hospital bed, the steady stream of relatives coming in and out to check on him. He is surrounded by people who care for him, those who are there to fill my void. I found myself wondering if I should go to India right away or wait until he was back home so I could actually spend time with him. Finally, after several hours I felt a deep sense of gratitude. He is still alive - I still have a chance to be with him. Today may have been the day, when I received much worse news. I felt blessed that the elegy will wait for another day.

Comments

ggop said…
Whoa HC, this post of yours hit home. I'm glad your father is in the hospital making a recovery.

My father had a couple of falls this year. I do not know if it is something neurological. Nothing came up in the checkups...

I know how you feel about the dilema - should I go right away? Should I wait?

I hope you can take a week off in summer when J's school is out and see him. All the best!
Hope said…
I wish your father a speedy recovery. Take Care.
Bryan D said…
It's good to hear that he will be okay. I hope you get a chance to visit him with J one of these days. I bet he has loads of stories to tell her. Some of which you may not want him to recount! Here's to good tidings.
Heartcrossings said…
ggop, hope, bryan - thanks so much for your good wishes. my father is doing a lot better now.and yes, a trip to india with J has been long overdue and will need to happen soon :)

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Reading Shantaram

I finished listening to Shantaram on audiobook after several weekends of being absorbed in the story. This book had been on my to-read list for a long time and I am glad I chose the audio version of it. It is an extraordinary story teeming with colorful characters and rich detail. As an Indian who is a stranger to Mumbai and Maharashtra in that I have never spent years of my life there. I have to rely on what I know second hand. As a fan Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, where in my mind I imagined the action taking place in Mumbai, this book was a chance for me to know the city through another author even if an Australian.  The author,  Gregory David Roberts comes across as someone who is able to see the soul of India through all that ails it. And in connecting with that soul, he finds some answers to his life's hard questions. India does not save him but it keeps his soul alive and striving. Most of his experiences would be unrelatable to the average person who lives a far m...