DIED 2003
IF A PARENT’S NUMBER one worry is that something will happen to her child, number two is: something will happen to me. I will have to leave them when they still need me. Before my work is done. Before I see how they turn out. But of course we are not in charge.
The first time I met the big, gruff American man with the turban and the bushy beard, he was working alongside my sister in a small appliance repair shop in the 1970s. Ten years later, I ran into him again, working alongside my friend in the natural foods business. Another few years, and I met his amazing ninety-pound wife: my yoga teacher, then my midwife. By then I had gotten over the fact that they wore those funny outfits and were both called Gurubachan. I was in love with their four children, two sons and two daughters who had Indian names (not, thankfully, Gurubachan). But it took some time to find out their story.
At nineteen, the girl who would become Mrs. G. B. had fled a bad scene in Chicago with her newborn daughter. She wound up in an ashram in Tucson where she found Mr. G. B., a recent college dropout from Baltimore, teaching yoga. By the time her baby turned one they were Sikhs, and they were married. They moved to Topeka, Kansas City, Dallas, and finally to Austin with their growing brood. He was a roofer, a cook, a salesman; she taught knitting and delivered babies; they believed in a life of the spirit and tried to live it every day.
He got a perfect math score on his SAT, their oldest daughter recently wrote me. He got up every morning at 4 a.m. to meditate and then work on his list, one long, perpetual list of things to do, in a ratty spiral notebook. He once put a down payment on a car with change he had snagged from all of our pockets doing laundry over the course of a year. He didn’t cut his hair for 30 years except for the part they had to shave for his brain surgery. The last thing he said to me was, I wish I got there in time to be your birth father.
She was in her twenties, a mother herself, when multiple sclerosis took his mobility, his serenity, his math skills, his breadwinning, his fatherhood. The ratty notebook was abandoned, empty pages curled, fading items unchecked. Yet he had done what he set out to do.