27

Dementia is a death sentence in its worst form. Once the verdict is announced, there is no appeal. Does it just happen or is it God’s doing? Is it His punishment? But then what has my Dadoo done to deserve this? He has harmed no one, he is not a corrupt person, he is a good husband and a good father.

Then, why?

I could never gauge the depth of destruction caused by dementia: it has no cure and this brings about endless hopelessness. Moreover, it also shows how selfish and cynical one becomes.

It makes you lose your cool: You are filled with guilt, remorse and loathe; and questions arise about your own integrity towards your loved ones.

My father is my hero, he made me what I am today. I could not have started writing without his support and encouragement. I have been showered with love, affection, security and freedom – both of expression and otherwise – and I have always felt proud of my dad. A father who was my friend, with whom I could go for picnics, shopping, do cooking, talk politics and even philosophy. I would sit for hours with him discussing worldly affairs, and exchanging novels and their stories.

But now things have changed, we do not discuss much. He can’t because of his disease, I can’t because of my limitations. I always thought that I would love Dadoo till death and nothing would ever change that. But it does. I get a headache if I sit with him for long and it really fills me with guilt that I am helpless and can do nothing for the man who has done everything for me.

I think the disease had already started to take him in its fold about five or six years back. He succeeded in not showing what was happening to him, but more than that we failed to notice that he was becoming sick. We termed it as mere memory loss. But it is not just a simple memory failure. You lose your ability to differentiate between things, making up your mind becomes a stressful exercise. You can no longer co-relate and organize and gradually stop comprehending things altogether. A couple of years back Dadoo was obsessed with a few things which, every time when we went to meet him, he would stress upon. We thought he was becoming cynical or he was bored, or it had become a habit of his to feed on stress. May be, if we had started the treatment then, its growth could have been arrested.

One of the topics that he used to talk about was his papers and files. All his life being meticulous, organized and planned, he had kept every paper: income tax; his retirement papers; his property details, even those which were sold some twenty years back; his children’s PAN numbers; PPF accounts; FDs; bills; house taxes; and court cases. But then this beast attacked and he started getting insecure that either his papers had got lost or somebody had misplaced them. He would sit for hours with his files writing things in his diary – duplicating financial stuff – but I just concluded that it was boredom and stress that made him do this. Recently I came across three or four such diaries, in which he had written account numbers, date of maturity and the PPF account details and so many other details of numbers and folios; but now they lay abandoned as there is no one to look at them.

The second thing he concentrated on was Reader’s Digest subscription. He kept on writing to them regularly, buying books because one day he thought Vikram would win a prize. For nearly two years, it became an obsession with him and sometimes a matter of life and death if we did not read the letter from Reader’s Digest immediately. He must have spent more than forty thousand rupees on these books, and everyone in the family felt that they were cheating him and making him buy books so that he could move to the next stage of the lottery and the next and the next. Thankfully a year back Dadoo lost all interest and forgot all about it.

The third thing that he paid attention to was property. From his initial days Dadoo had a knack of buying and selling land. This is how he made money, he was a financial wizard. Whatever little money he saved in Nigeria some thirty years ago was wisely invested into property. He would sell the property at the right time and buy more in return and this game of buying and selling would go on. Presently, he has become fanatic about these lands, their cost price, their market value, money invested by selling them, prospective buyers, their safety with regards to documentation, demarcation and subsequently fencing, barbing and caretaking.

We had ignored these signals. In fact we had started getting irritated with him and counselled him to have a more positive outlook and lead a stress-free life. Several times he said that he forgets names, and people but we pooh-poohed him, insisting that we too would sometimes forget things. He would throw tantrums quite often and slowly I started noticing that he would call up and repeat things; but this too I ignored.

For months he was paranoid about his throat. He went to numerous doctors for diagnosis. He took an avid interest in all the medicines related to throat and cough – on TV, in newspapers and on billboards. It was a chronic problem for Dadoo with no cure. We did not know then that having imaginary ailments is a symptom of dementia.

Some four years back I had called up both my brothers and told them that there was something seriously wrong with Dadoo and that we had to take him to the doctor. He had told me that he had forgotten the name of sweets and vegetables like onions, ginger and potatoes. He said that when he went to shops his mind became blank and he could not remember the names of the things he wanted to buy, so he ended up pointing towards the things he could recognize.

Both of them said that he was just depressed and had become an old cynical person, but of course that was not the case. And when I did take it seriously I could do nothing about it, because I had fallen ill and it took me two years to get cured.

However, Vikram seriously contemplated quitting his job and coming back to take care of him since his condition was deteriorating. Whenever this was discussed before Dadoo, his reasonability would return with full force and he would say, ‘You don’t have to come, I will come and stay with you. This is not the right decision. You have a job to do.’ But whenever he did go to stay with Vikram for a month or so, it became torturous for Mamma since Dadoo could not go out because he wasn’t familiar with the ways in Chandigarh; and inside the house he would do nothing – no TV, no books, and after a few days he would start pestering Mamma to return. Thankfully Vikram got a sabbatical for two years to compile a coffee table book on culinary traditions in the Himalayas and came to stay with them in Solan.

I vividly remember during this time his overwhelmingly affectionate greetings whenever any of us visited him. He would be so excited just like a child hugging and kissing us when we arrived; and would become extremely depressed and sad when we left. It burdened us with remorse. He had started getting obsessed with his children, their phone calls, their visits, their jobs. No one else mattered to him.

I feel miserable when I recall that I failed to empathize with him. When he went into his spells of depression, instead of understanding him, I got angry and snapped at him. I asked him to stop being irrational and illogical and when I could not succeed I simply escaped. I just did not have the patience and energy.

And then slowly he started saying, ‘Do not believe in me, I may be wrong, do not take me seriously.’ There was so much suffering when he said this. My Dadoo whom I loved the most had started withdrawing himself. He was always there for me but when he needed me to guide him in this chaos, I was not there mostly.

He badly wanted to call up his lost friends. The more he called and talked about old times and invited them over, the more irritated Mamma got. She would say, ‘They have never called us, so why do you?’ The disease was urging him to link with his past. Perhaps he wanted to remind them that he was still alive. He wanted to connect, to get some assurance that he still knew some people who knew who he was. It was so important for him but we thought it was one of his idiosyncrasies.

Will Dadoo become like Dadi, the cutie pie that she was but also the angry lady she would turn into on rare occasions. Chachi-ji took care of her day in and day out but she hated her the most. Of course, everyone knew that she was a helpless woman nevertheless I used to think many times why her hatred was focused only on chachi-ji. Now I have come to know that it was also the doing of this dreadful disease.

Yes, Dadoo too is changing, his suspicious mind has started weaving stories against all of us. When he is pally with Vikram he talks against us, ‘Rohit and Rewa are very clever; they have left us. They will not do any of our work. We will have to do it ourselves, so let us forget them. You and I will join hands to finish the work.’ When I got to know this, I was disturbed but then I told myself that he was not well and his suspicions would increase many fold in the future.

You don’t know how to react when he says, ‘Because I don’t remember now, you can make a fool of me. I am an old helpless man. Mera mazak udao, kuch bhi bolo, main kya kar sakta hoon [make fun of me or be mean to me, I can’t do anything]. Now I am no more the head of the family, so you can take decisions between yourselves. There is no need to ask me anything.’