Some more memories of my parents and ageing, and the people around us. This blog entry is about how my father, once known for his sense of humor and cheer, was used by a famous writer to depict negativity in her novel, and how I feel that the writer projected on my father her own negativity about ageing and ignored her role in it.
Over these last two decades, I have begun suspecting that most people don’t know how to interact with peers who are unwell and disabled; they mess it up, their discomfort/ disapproval is obvious, and then they go away blaming the unwell/ disabled person implying that they would have coped better with the situation when in fact they were unable to cope with even ten minutes of an interaction.
Anyway, down memory lane…
We were living in Delhi, and one of our neighbors was a well-known writer and also an acquaintance of my parents. They shared some close common friends, and this lady would drop by sometimes for tea or for an informal chat. Then my father fractured his hip, and we went through two years of his being bedridden, improving, getting worse, and so on, till he finally passed away. This writer visited us a few times, and I would also meet her in the apartment complex sometimes, exchange a few words. Just social.
Sometime after my father’s death, a neighbor told me the writer had written a new book, allegedly fiction. Many of the characters in the book were from our apartment complex, and recognizable. She’d talked of the small things people consider private. She’d implied things. People were not happy about it. “You’re in it, too,” this man told me. “You and your husband and your mother and your father and his illness.”
I froze in shock. As an introvert who was (at that time) facing problems with my mother’s initial dementia symptoms (the neurologist had not yet given us a diagnosis in spite of repeated visits), the last thing I wanted was publicity. What would this writer have written about us? Why write about us? I had not harmed her in any way.
My mother was, at that time, coping with her confusion by projecting it on others, by blaming. She had started accusing me of being a murderer and of being evil. She was still active socially, and I feared that someone would mention the book to her and she’d want me to buy it and read it herself. Or maybe someone would lend her a copy. I needed to know what the book contained.
I could not ask around for a copy of the book, because people may tell my mother, and so I waited for a chance to buy the book (in a book exhibition, nestled with other award-winning literary books). I covered the book with newspaper and kept it hidden under the mattress except when I’d closed my room door to read it.
The book was on ageing, old people, and was a barely veiled autographical novel. I kept reading it, a few pages at a time, tense. The main story line was a bunch of incidents from the writer’s life, and the “world” the story was set in was our apartment complex, with incidents chosen from life and people there to supplement that aura of ageing and how it impacts people. Some included incidents depicted the neglect of the elderly by relatives, based on what these elders claimed, or depicted incidents that purportedly happened in homes, away from what the writer could have witnessed.
I wondered where the writer drew her data from. She may have been present at some incidents, but where did she get her “backstory” from, for surely no one had given her the full story?
I understood things better when I met my father in the book.
My father had been mentioned by name. The writer had described her visit to my father, the way she gave him a bouquet, his response. Some mistakes had been made in terms of facts, such as mentioning an operation that had not happened, and crunching the time between the writer’s visit and my father’s death to three days rather than three months or so–I call them mistakes because there was no attempt to mask my parents’ identity, or the identity of the alleged protagonists in the story.
My father was portrayed as this wimpy, defeated man, and the story implied that meeting him had depressed the writer.
The writing was good, of course. But I thought the writer had not gone into depth of character and used my father as a trope for badly-ageing negative persons. I resented it as a daughter, and as a story writer I felt it was unethical to use a shallow representation of a real and identifiable person to boost a story atmosphere. I also felt it was a wrong depiction of what had happened, and showed the bias society has against people who are facing problems…
I had been present for the incident the writer described. The bare facts were right, but a lot of the subtext and tone of the visitors was missing in the description.
Here is what happened, as I remember it.
We got a call from a family friend saying he wanted to visit my father. In the five minutes we had before the guests arrived, we cleared up the living room, located clean cups for tea, placed my father on his wheelchair and wheeled him to the living room. My father was happy that an old friend would be visiting, but also tense about the visit, because here he was, wheelchair-bound and inactive, while this friend was still active, driving a car, meeting people, doing things. In his last visit, this friend had lectured my father about willpower and being active.
I think people who are well do not understand that those not so well may be tense about being “less” in some ways.
The guests arrived. They were awkward, and obviously embarrassed at seeing my father in the wheelchair. The lady (the writer) had accompanied this friend; she gave my father a huge bouquet. We had no vase to place it in, so I lay it on the dining table. A few desultory exchanges ensued. We were asked for, and we gave an update on father’s health. The visitors remained uneasy; maybe they had expected my father to be up and about and chirpy and positive, not wheel-chair bound and quiet. The ex-colleague uttered a few sentences on how my father should stop using the wheelchair and start walking. He talked of how he felt bad seeing my father on a wheelchair. (Did he think my father felt great about it, I remember thinking). My father’s discomfort and disorientation increased; he switched off, then showed a flash of his past interest when the ex-colleague mentioned some book, and then, switched off again.
I remember, quite clearly even across the years, the lightness we felt when the visitors left and we were no longer pushed into a defensive stance by their implicit judgment. We had all felt the heaviness of the visitors’ comments, and my father, helpless as he was, must have particularly felt he had been judged and found wanting. He was a very sensitive man, though he often masked that under the garb of humor. The air was more free after the door closed behind the visitors.
When people who were once peers start moving towards different ends of the “active and independent” spectrum because of health and ageing problems, I think they need new modalities to accept these differences and continue to stay connected in ways that make these differences irrelevant, and builds, instead, on common concerns and interests.
But typically, interactions center on the differences, on the healthier egging the less-healthy to “fight” and “improve”, and the less-healthy justifying their inaction or explaining it. Instead of respecting and accepting the difference in state, and then moving to common areas and having pleasant times, the discrepancy with respect to health status becomes the ground for communication, and hurts and disappointments start floating and congealing. Friends move away, and with an edge of bitterness both ways.
My father had just emerged after being completely bedridden for months because of a hip fracture; he was terrified that he would fall again, fracture his hip again, and have to undergo that awful state of complete immobility for many more months. Yet no one who egged him to walk acknowledged how dark that fear could be, or helped him cope with it, and all people had to offer was “Be positive” and “You won’t fall”, as if they knew the future or could ensure it. In his fear, they saw the possibility that some day they, too, may be afraid, and they hated that. In pushing that thought away, they dismissed my father or scolded him.
All of us did that. I remember that I could imagine his fear, but I lacked ways to help him with that, and I had no idea what to say to him, so I said nothing. I could have at least said, I understand, and maybe he would have been less alone, but it never occurred to me. None of us knew how to provide the right degree of empathy and constructive support. None of us tried hard enough to learn.
Telling others to be positive is so much easier than holding their hands and helping them cross the chasm of their fears.
They teach us a lot of useless stuff in school, but not this. What a pity.
Anyway, back to the novel and its negative depiction of my father. I think the depiction ignored that interactions work both ways, and that the negativity experienced was a mutual one, not just his negativity.
Oh, and BTW, my husband and I merited one sentence in that novel, which reads, बेटी-दामाद इनकी अच्छी देखभाल कर रहे हैं । (The daughter and son-in-law are taking good care of him) Thank you, Ma’am. That’s all I needed in life: your approval, after your disapproval. Really.
I was also left wondering how that novel would have impacted people who were portrayed as persons neglecting parents, having affairs, and so on, because this (to quote the blurb) अनूठा उपन्यास (unusual novel) had so many traceable facts and recognizable characters that whatever story-telling license the writer took (showing people in poor light) may also be seen as fact. What a misuse of the pen! Yet who would dare speak up, for that would be like admitting that you were the person being shown in a poor light, and people would say, there’s no smoke without fire. Does a writer’s right to write an autobiographical novel override her duty to respect the privacy of others?
To look at it another way, the stories we make are the stories of what we think and what we want to think and what we are limited to think about by our own scared natures. The writer used my father to depict her own fears of ageing; I just wish she had been brave enough to see her negativity in that interaction rather than make my father a well-depicted yet cardboard trope. The novel would have been a better one then, perhaps.
(Above: indicative pictures of some activities on which I waste the time I should have spent watching TV). 
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