We humans are so strange. We think that everything bad like a disease and death will strike not us but others. Or is this Nature’s mechanism to make us escape the agony before something actually becomes a reality.
Off and on I had read about Alzheimer’s but it never occurred to me that this harrowing disease would strike my father. My grandmother too had suffered memory loss. No one took her to the hospital. That time everyone in the family thought that it was the side-effect of some medicine given to her by a quack when she had gone into a deep shock following a robbery in our house. However, she lived in a joint family and it was easier to manage her.
Dadi was always so much fun; she was both an adult and a child at the same time and was more of a friend to us than a grandmother. We would share our secrets with her; and often ask for her advice. But dementia was slowly spreading its roots in her brain; she would often forget what we were discussing. But all this did not trouble us, may be because we had not seen her transformation from her earlier self to this individual who would say, ‘I want to go home. Why am I staying with these people, who are these people?’
She had forgotten who her sons, daughters, grandchildren were. But she had not forgotten her husband whom she respectfully called Lala-ji. Oh how much fun we used to have with her. We would always make up imaginary wishes and seek our Dadi’s help – from seeking permission to marry to fulfilling little desires like eating out in a restaurant, buying new pair of shoes and going for a holiday. We would ask her to go and say to our grandfather ‘I love you’, we had become bolder, knowing that by the time she reached him she would forget what she was to say. Amidst giggles and guffaws we would all watch her going to him and then just saying, ‘Aur theek ho? Maine kuch kehna tha par bhool gayi [Are you all right? I wanted to say something but I forgot].’
Frankly for us children this was not a disease and neither did it appear to be something as heart wrenching, as it is now. The reasons could be multiple. Now it is a relationship of a parent and an adult child. Dadi lived inside the house surrounded by people in a joint family and she was not the bread winner of the family. Hers was a secure world where she did not have to take major decisions herself. With Dadoo it is different, being head of the family and the eldest male in the extended family he has always been the main force. And losing control of his thoughts and actions is more devastating for him.