Unspoken
Vinod Busjeet
Honorable Mention
As they carried me, strapped to the gurney, out of the refitted SUV, I discerned our brownstone on the banks of the Charles River. I could see, dimly, the stained glass plaque above the front door, City of Lucknow, which I had built in to the annoyance of some of my Boston neighbors. I had told them Lucknow was the cultural capital of Muslim India, and that it was a pity it was now part of India, not Pakistan, my birthplace. Lucknow, the city of chess players and kite flyers on the banks of the Gomti River, the ancestral home my parents left at the partition of India.
Am I imagining all this or am I slowly waking up from sedation? Am I really home, in my City of Lucknow? Do I know the guy who drove us here? I thought I spotted his accent—Indian. Not the heavy vindaloo-scented enunciation of immigrant taxi drivers, but the refined kind, the accent of someone educated in an English-medium boarding school, who then went on to a Jesuit college like St. Xavier's.
I don't trust him.
Someone switches on the light. Everything is fuzzy. After a few minutes I recognize parts of my study. A team I can't identify moves me from the gurney to a hospital bed. Me and my hospital bed; no, my hospital bed and I, we occupy the centre of my study. My books line the walls. But some areas have been revamped. As they adjust the bed to a sitting position and put pillows behind me, I see that some of my bookshelves are stocked with vials, medicines, syringes, disposable adult underwear. I notice bottles holding liquids; these look like the stuff my patients had to ingest through tubes when they couldn't swallow food.
My study turns fuzzy again. I close my tired eyes for a few seconds, then open them. I squint through the haze. A weary-looking yet attractive blonde is settling me in. Is she Rita, my wife? I hear remnants of a Tennessee drawl followed by the Boston accent picked up during a decade of nursing at Mass General Hospital. "It's dahk in here," she had said when we got in. On the day I first met Rita, she was connecting tubes to the patient on whom I performed a craniotomy.
They connect, disconnect and reconnect me to various tubes. I try to move my arms and legs; I struggle to lift my buttocks. These body parts don't respond. I strain to wiggle my toes. To no avail. I'm paralyzed. I'm a functioning brain trapped in a body that doesn't move. I am locked-in.
Helping Rita is a man whose voice reminds me of something, but I'm not sure of what. Is he the SUV driver? He is fair-skinned, not light brown like me. An Indian with Bollywood star looks. Is he a Bombaywallah or a Kashmiri? I don't like him.
I hear conversation around me, muffled at times, clear at others. The team leaves. Rita and the Indian stay. He presses the TV/DVD remote control. Until now, I never had a TV in my study.
"Rita, can he see?" says the Indian, as a prancing teenage Mozart bursts on the screen in the film Amadeus. He presses again on the remote and the volume increases. "Will he hear The Magic Flute?" he asks.
"We've talked about this before. The neurologist was categorical: he's been comatose for too long."
The Indian shakes his head. "Doctors misdiagnose. He may not see and hear now but maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, he will. Got to be patient." He opens my bottom and upper eyelids. "Dr. Ahmed, I see long life in your eyes. We'll take good care of you."
The wife who divorced me and that eye-reading healer from India will take good care of me. Really? Should I hope or should I despair?
Rita touches my arm, holds my hand.
* * *
I fell asleep. Maybe I just drifted in and out of consciousness.
My eyes move but I can't turn my head left to right. I see Nadia holding my hands. "Papa," she says.
My fingers, my palm, don't feel anything. The sense of touch is gone. Will it ever come back? I want to say "I love you" but the vocal cords don't cooperate.
Nadia, our five-year-old daughter, with olive skin and my brown eyes. Rita and I chose that name because it is both a Muslim and a Christian name. I thought my parents in Pakistan would be happy with the choice. But they never responded to my emails or letters. I don't remember when I last spoke to them on the phone. On my last visit home, three or four years ago, they disowned me because of that gora, that white woman I had the temerity to marry. "She is the one who turned you into an atheist!" said Papa, a devout clerk at the Taxila Museum. Fathering Nadia must have been the ultimate blasphemy for them.
How my father managed to spend his day among the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain relics at the museum and not tolerate my marriage to a non-Muslim, I could never understand. There was a time when he was proud of me, of the American scholarship I had won. "Harvard Medical School," he boasted to his colleagues and boss. And when he learned that the New England Journal of Medicine had published the results of my research, he bragged to the whole village, "He'll win the Nobel Prize in Medicine for Pakistan." Mama, a secondary school teacher, was more modest: "He'll come back to work at the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases."
My needs and dreams are not important now. I'm worried about Nadia. Rita will always love her, but how will she be raised? Who will be her father figure? The Indian fellow?
* * *
I feel a warm, moist towel wiping my face. My eyes open and a shadow appears. It smells like Rita after her morning shower; I try to retain the perfume, cling to it but it evaporates instantly. I don't have the faintest recollection of the scented soap that used to caress her body. It must be a new one.
"Mom, can you part the curtains?" Rita says as she cleans my IV device.
Sunlight fills the study. Our summer brunches in the back garden flash on my mind: Nadia and I enjoying the cornbread Rita baked on Sundays; Nadia chasing butterflies while Rita and I chatted.
"Oh, he'll love that sun. Papa, can you please open the window?"
The spring breeze caresses my face but the rest of my body is numb. Rita's parents walk to my side and drag their eyes from my head to the toes under the blanket.
"He's a vegetable," says Rita's father. "You must pray. Come back to God."
"You've flown all the way from Memphis to give me a fucking sermon!"
"That Indian fellow, whatever his name is..." says her father.
"Prakash," Rita interjects.
"I don't trust him a bit."
"You never trusted your son-in-law either."
"When did you meet Prakash?" Rita's mother says.
Rita does not answer.
Her father knits his brow. "Don't tell me it started before you filed for divorce?"
Her mother takes Rita's hands in hers. "We're here to help you. Why don't you put him in a nursing home? You're coping now but what if it's for the long haul?"
Her father yanks Rita's hands away from his wife's. "It's great to be so devoted to Dr. Ahmed now. Had you listened to the Lord's Commandments, you would have been more devoted to him before this calamity struck."
Devoted to me? Rita had said the coma lasted a long time. Was it long enough for them to have met while I was at Mass General? Is her new scented soap a gift from Prakash?
I make an effort to remember what happened. Do I really hear all that I claim I hear? How much is blank and how much of the blank do I fill in with imaginings?
The Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston, not far from City Hall, the one where The Verdict took place and Paul Newman played the lawyer devoted to getting justice for his comatose patient. That's where I had given testimony on strokes in a malpractice suit, soon after I joined the Medical School faculty. The defense lawyer had seen my article in the New England Journal of Medicine—"Peripheral Neurological Injury during Craniotomy". Is that courthouse the place where, years later, I saw Prakash for the first time? On the day the divorce decree was issued, was he loitering in the hallways? I must be hallucinating. Rita is classier than that; she would not have allowed him there even if he were her lover.
The settlement called for Rita to keep the house. I cried when I lost City of Lucknow. I rented an apartment in Cambridge overlooking the Charles. When I returned from court, I craved a good wine but the vintage bottles were still in the brownstone cellar, back in what I still considered home. I reached for a Châteauneuf-du-Pape—my evening escape for much of the preceding six months. Or was it nine months? That evening of the final decree, I found myself struggling with the corkscrew—I like the traditional ones with the worm screw; the wine tastes better that way. I had driven the screw deep into the cork but after I pulled the cork out, I felt numbness in my arm and dizziness.
I didn't call 911 or the hospital. Why was I so careless, you may ask. As a doctor, I should have known what was coming. It tires me to dredge up an answer.
I poured myself the deep red wine and reread Keats' "Ode on Melancholy" over the aromas and flavors of blackberry, jam, and pepper:
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
I reread all the Odes. When I got to the second stanza of the "Ode to the Nightingale"
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth
I thought of my father and mother. Drinking wine was one more thing they could not forgive me for.
By the time I reached the last stanza, the bottle was empty and I saw Keats' nightingale flying off in the moonlight to seek help for me.
I suppose that, not much later in the evening, the concierge or a colleague or friend found me sprawled on the floor and called an ambulance.
* * *
My notion of time has gotten rather imprecise. How long has it been since Rita's parents visited? A year maybe?
Rita, Prakash and Nadia come in with an older couple from the Subcontinent. Their clothes are stylish: the saree is Varanasi silk; the wool jacket has side vents, very British; there's a red rose in the lapel's buttonhole. The couple says, "Good morning."
Nadia kisses me on both cheeks and leaves with her mother. "I'll be back after I drop her at school," says Rita to the couple.
While Prakash opens the window, the couple inspect me closely—like a microbiologist studying bacteria. The man on the right side of the bed, the woman on the left. Prakash starts the routine of cleaning the saliva off my mouth and checking the IV pole and various tubes. He has taken over the morning shift from the live-in nurse's aide. Rita has trained him well and he's become quite dexterous. Why he chooses to do this I can only speculate. "To assuage his guilt," would be too easy for me to say. "Pity for me"? I resent that. Hard as it is for me, I must entertain the thought that he does it out of love for Rita. Nothing prevents him from walking away from her.
"Beta, I never imagined you doing this. My son, a nurse's aide!" says the lady.
Prakash smiles. It's a sweet smile that says, "I don't mind it."
The older man ignores the smile. "Son, what happened to the heartthrob of Xavier's? You could have your pick of women in Mumbai—the beautiful, the rich, from the best families. And you end up with a woman with all this baggage? This vegetable?"
Vegetable. What a painful word to hear again! And what a painful sight it must be to behold.
Prakash doesn't respond to his father. A sign of good breeding in the East: one does not argue with one's parents; one does not confront elders. Not the way Rita does.
His father continues: "A man of your intellect? Top of your class in Mumbai and almost done with your Harvard PhD. All that Shakespeare and Chaucer and Frost for what? To clean Dr. Ahmed's chamber pot?"
He scans the floor with a face so sour that I think he's searching for a chamber pot into which he can spit his disgust.
"Papa, calm down. There's nothing wrong in being a caregiver."
"Playboy turned caregiver! Beta, we are Kshatriyas, the race of warriors, not low-caste sudras. Here you are, a menial worker cleaning people," the father says.
"Dr. Ahmed is family now. I'm taking care of family."
"There's a family business back home, you fool. You want your sister to inherit it?"
Family! Caregiver! My foot! How noble of Prakash. The man who screwed my wife and stole her from me.
Maybe I'm judging him too harshly. He does clean me up and does so gently.
And Prakash's parents! I wish I could smash a chamber pot on their faces.
* * *
I have good days when I feel clean. Prakash and Rita take turns giving me a sponge bath, but sometimes I wonder if I have body odor. A sponge bath can't beat a shower or a plunge in the river. Prakash shaves me almost daily; I must admit he has better technique than I ever did. His shaves are smoother, almost balmy.
Prakash reads to me. His tastes are eclectic: the poetry of Robert Frost, Walter Scott's historical romances, and writers with some connection to the Subcontinent—Kipling, Naipaul and Rushdie. He has a warm, modulated voice that comforts me, especially when he has the fire burning in the brick fireplace. Sometimes Prakash gets Rita to join him in reading to me, but she does so reluctantly, sitting down by the bed with a sigh. She doesn't believe I hear anything. Prakash, however, insists on playing Pakistani and Indian DVD movies for me. He means well but I prefer art-house movies from Europe. Maybe he was genuine when he told Rita to be patient, that I would slowly regain my hearing and sight.
* * *
I hear footsteps from the cellar. Wine being taken upstairs? Prakash and Rita talking. Earlier that day, I heard her tell him that Nadia is spending the night at a friend's house—a pyjama party. I imagine Prakash uncorking my Château Petrus for a candlelit dinner with the tableware laid out in full splendor. Eating on the Limoges dinnerware Rita and I purchased in France on our honeymoon.
What will happen next? Sex on our bed? Have they reconfigured the bedroom? Maybe Rita has donated the American bedding to the Salvation Army and replaced it with comforters and covers Prakash ordered from India?
I must admit Prakash has good taste. Though my field of vision has narrowed, I do see that he wears tailored suits, and he ornaments his shirts with silver and gold cufflinks. With my doctor's gown, how could I compete? I worked too hard, treating patients during the day, teaching at the Medical School and working in the lab at night. Poring over the results and writing at home. Prakash had time: he could entertain; he could make Rita laugh. I must face facts.
* * *
The study door is always open since they need to keep an eye on me, and when voices are raised, I can hear. Rita is outside the door.
"Why the fuck did you give this to Nadia?" she says, flinging a book on the floor.
"She needs to know about her father's country and culture," Prakash responds.
"His parents have rejected him; his country means nothing to him," Rita says.
"Your evangelical parents have rejected you. Does your country mean nothing to you then?"
"I'm not teaching Nadia any Bible crap. And her father certainly wouldn't teach her the Koran," Rita says.
"That book has nothing to do with the Koran. It's just a history of Pakistan."
Raising a child is not easy. Prakash is right: Nadia should know her roots. So is Rita: no Bible or Koran for my daughter. But an opinion that can't be heard doesn't count.
Nadia is growing up faster than I expected. She is stubborn like her mother. She comes by my bedside every day before and after school, wipes the saliva off my mouth, sings to me and reads from her storybooks. I hear her playing Für Elise on the piano that Rita gave her for her sixth birthday. I want to hold her, hug her, tell her how much I love her. As she grows into an American teenager, I ask myself if she'll display her mother's rebellious streak. Prakash, with his calm demeanour, should be able to channel that rebellious energy in the right direction. Or is this the wishful thinking of a brain that's going the way of my body, moving inexorably towards atrophy?
* * *
I hear, faintly, birds singing in the garden. I assume it's morning and I want to see Nadia and Prakash. A few minutes later, he breezes into the study, throws open the curtains, and tells me that Rita has received a letter from my parents. With a flourish he shows me the Registered Airmail sticker on the envelope. I reckon more than two years have elapsed since Rita informed them of my massive stroke.
"They're asking for money to rebuild their home. You've seen the recent floods on the TV," Prakash says. "Should we send the money?"
Does he suspect I can see and hear the TV?
He looks at me. "I want a reaction. I think we should send some money. Any signal from you, Dr. Ahmed?"
He shakes my limp body; he caresses my face; he blows air over my eyes. I strain to open my eyes wider to indicate yes, we should send the money. I'm no believer in God, but I take the Biblical injunction to heart: Honor thy father and mother. But I fail to express these thoughts. There's no machine that can read my mind.
Rita walks in. "Prakash, stop this clowning. He can't tell you anything. He can't even think. His parents write only when they want money. And he always gave it. To them; to uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews. We have Nadia's college to think about."
Nadia's college? I have set up a trust fund for her. Besides, how can I forget my parents' sacrifices? Papa and Mama working in their fields on the weekends to supplement their salaries.
I doubt if they received or heard anything from Rita. Maybe Prakash sent them money from his own funds.
* * *
Someone wheels the bed by the window. It must be Prakash. He pulls out my gown and the sun shines on my skin. If only I could stretch my neck and look out into the garden! Nadia approaches.
"The sun should warm him up," Prakash says.
But I feel neither warm nor cold.
"Pass me that bottle," he continues.
I see, dimly, liquid dripping on my chest. Prakash rubs it in with circular hand motions, clockwise and anti-clockwise.
"It smells of eucalyptus oil," says Nadia.
I don't smell anything. I've regressed.
I see Prakash's arm muscles contract and relax as he presses and releases his hands on the flesh still left on my bones. "This should help his blood circulation," he tells Nadia.
She asks if she too can massage me. They move their hands in tandem, but the flesh does not respond.
* * *
This Saturday, Prakash has driven the refitted SUV to the Charles River Esplanade. A crowd is here to enjoy the Head of the Charles Regatta. Colleagues from Mass General and the Medical School come to say, "Hello." They don't linger. Some kids are flying kites. My mind wanders: I wish to fly out of my body and soar above the sailboats, past the posh condos on Memorial Drive, above Weeks Bridge, above Harvard Bridge, above Baker Library on the Business School campus, and on skyward. I'll be Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini's 8 ½, flying like a vertiginous kite above the beach.
Rita adjusts the cushion behind my lower back. I had forgotten: I am locked-in.
On such days, I reminisce about our love and feel that Rita still cares. She seems to have put on some weight. As the sun shines on her and enhances the radiance of her blond hair, I think of the first time we made love. Her cleavage, the sexuality she exuded, emboldened me to do it in the open air, on the grassy river bank, within earshot of passersby.
* * *
The warm, moist towel on my face—it has become part of my morning wake-up ritual for the last three or so years. Today, however, the ritual feels different. Rita's cheeks have a glow. Her belly is rounder. She is pregnant. I want to cry. I long for the night.
* * *
My body is wasting away, I'm just skin over bones. They weigh me at Mass General; the nurse says, "Seventy pounds." I'm like the Knight in Bergman's Seventh Seal. I have kept Death at bay by challenging him to a mean game of chess. But now he's checkmated me. The death knell is loud. When your favorite medical school professor bends over you, shines that flashlight into your eyes, opens your mouth which wants to stay shut, takes your weakening pulse, and then tells Rita and Prakash, "It is a matter of days," you hear that; it is resounding. It is resounding also because Nadia hears it. She is now nine or ten and has a half-sister who will blossom into a beauty like her—no surprise since Prakash is handsome and Rita still dazzles.
I don't believe I'm embarking on another journey. Prakash whispers in my ear that I'll be reincarnated. A comforting thought but a preposterous one nonetheless. Rita does not utter any such hopeful notions. Not because she's unkind; she just agrees with me and hates New Age drivel. That's what brought us together to begin with—our agnosticism. Our rebellion. The fact that Nadia looks happy makes it easier for me to depart. She and her half-sister laughing, playing and teasing each other—it is a pleasant image to imprint on the mind.
