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The Lion in Winter

SARBPREET SINGH

 

 

 

fareedhaa einee nikee ja(n)gheeai thhal ddoo(n)gar bhavioumih ||
aj fareedhai koojarraa sai kohaa(n) thheeoum
||20||

With legs so puny, O Farid! you've cross’d deserts, mountains scaled || But alas today, even the water bowl seems miles away [Bhagat Farid]

 

 

I sit in a lounge at the Munich airport, waiting for the flight that will carry me home to Boston.

I watch my father shuffle across the lounge, his gait unsteady and tentative, as he browses a magazine rack and then lurches back to the little corner of the lounge that we have claimed as our own, with a copy of Time clutched in his hand. He sinks into
the chair next to mine and slowly starts to turn the pages.

I am not sure if he comprehends anything as he flips the pages of the magazine. For a few years now, since maybe a year after the massive heart attack and stroke that almost felled him, I remember watching him solemnly turn the pages of a newspaper that he held upside down! This, the very man whose library boasted everything from the most impressive collection of P.G. Wodehouse that I have ever encountered anywhere, to Henry Miller, Steinbeck and Hemmingway, and gave birth to my
everlasting love of literature. This autodidact who could hold forth on almost any topic under the sun, and often did!

I look at him and the painful realization seeps in that his water bowl too, like Sheikh Farid’s, feels a million miles away.

Every son, as he is growing up, regards his father as a colossus. And I was no different. Even as I grew up and started to perceive the foibles and the frailties that are every man, I could not but help feel a sense of awe at the respect he received in every context, whether it be a family gathering or a charity event at the local Rotary Club meeting or a reception teeming with the wealthy and powerful elites of Gangtok (Sikkim) society, where he lived most of his life.

I remember the phone call vividly, five years ago, which I had as much trouble believing then as I do now, despite the evidence before my very eyes.

All of us are perceptive enough to realize that everything can change in an instant, but even so, nothing prepares us for that punch in the gut, which expels the last breath from our lungs, when it does arrive.

The mad rush to Mohali, where my father had been building his dream home when he was felled, a home that he was never really to live in; the surreal conversations with the young cardiologist whose aggressive treatment almost impossibly brought
him back from the brink; the visits to the little medical supply stores in Chandigarh ... all these memories are crystal clear in my mind and yet they paradoxically blend together into a haze as a patina of guilt settles on my recollections.

Guilt at being thousands of miles away. Guilt at not being around every day as he tried to struggle back into the insipid approximation of his being that is his new life.

Guilt at the interminable process of digging up birth records and other certificates that will allow him to travel and live with me and my family. Guilt at the falsely cheerful phone conversations that take on a life of their own and murmur that nothing is okay, even as I am reassuringly told otherwise.

A mix of emotions courses through me as I watch him stumble around the lounge.

There is relief. Great relief! For I am bringing him back with me to live with me.

There will be no more distance. There will be no more polite and ineffectual conversations in which nothing real is shared.

There is also trepidation, for my father is a shell of his former self. Broken in many profound ways. How will he adjust to the very isolated life that is the lot of he elderly in the US? How will he spend his time? For of late even the flickering and dancing images on the luminescent screen no longer enthrall him.

I would like to ask him to join me in my Nitnem every morning, but his attention span is shattered. The man, who I cannot remember ever having missed one day of reading from the Guru Granth Sahib in the morning when I was a child, no longer
evinces the slightest interest in Gurbani and Kirtan.

What demons invade his unquiet mind, I wonder? What will soothe them if even this cannot?

But as I turn over these fears in my mind and a thousand others that I dare not acknowledge, even to myself, I feel a sense of calm. As dire and difficult as things seem, a part of me reminds me that this too is an inalienable part of the journey that all of creation must go through.

We are never able to choose or influence what life has in store for us. We are, however, clearly and unequivocally empowered to respond with forbearance, compassion and grace.

And that is what I ask for, as I silently grapple with my thoughts.

For isn’t that what accepting His Will is all about?

 

August 5, 2014

Conversation about this article

1: Sangat Singh (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), August 06, 2014, 9:15 AM.

Sarbpreet Singh ji: What a heart-rending account of your respected father through your lambent eyes. Our whole existence remains in a state of flux. What comes must go one day. In its wake, one could be happy, sad, tragic, heart warming and heart rending. This state is found in Guru Nanak's graphically profound shabad: "ghatant rupan ghatant dipan ghatant rav sasi-ar nakh-yatar gagan" [GGS:1354.13] - "Beauty fades away, islands fade away, the sun, moon, stars and sky fade away ... one's spouse, children, siblings and loved friends, all fade away ... Only the Eternal, Unchanging Lord does not fade away." May you continue to serve him.

2: Parmjit Singh (Canada), August 07, 2014, 2:22 AM.

I hear your father's voice through you. He is beautifully clear and as strong as ever.

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