1 April 2011
Is the medicine working? I have doubts. He has become hyper since we changed the medicines again two months back. Now he instantly gets angry and agitated. He keeps on asking questions. We all try to divert his attention to something else like reading a paper, reading a book, or watching news on TV but in vain. He senses what we are trying to do and snubs us, ‘I don’t want to read, I don’t want to watch TV.’ He has become so weak and his voice is hardly audible but he keeps on talking from five in the morning till nine at night continuously.
He speaks his mind without inhibition. Recently he told me that he would give me a piece of land to build a house and when I said jokingly, ‘Dadoo, Mamma will not allow.’ He got so angry with Mamma shouting at her, ‘Have you forgotten she is your daughter? Aren’t you ashamed that you are not giving her the land?’ Poor Mamma, she just didn’t know what struck her.
He keeps asking us as to who bought this land, who gave the money, who decided to build the house and then he says, ‘Was I consulted?’ and we murmur ‘Dadoo, you were,’ but there is a defeated aura around him, he doesn’t believe us.
Once, he made a cross and said, ‘I am out, I am bye-passed, you build houses, you do money interactions, but you don’t ask me.’
From his viewpoint I understand how very difficult it must be for him to accept that his children are taking decisions all alone without consulting him. And here it is not a question of the parent telling what to do, it’s more a question of sharing any major event or a decision with the family. I remember from the very beginning when we were children many major issues were discussed with us even what kind of a house was to be built, what careers to be taken, which country should we go to for our next vacation, where we should spend our holidays in India, which books we should read. So naturally he must be feeling awful that we don’t discuss anything with him now.
Another change that has taken place is that he has started disliking food, it is so difficult to feed him. Every time he says, ‘I am full. My stomach is full with gas, I don’t want to eat now.’ Everyone in the family concentrates on how to make tasty and creative dishes for him. Sometimes we cajole him, shower kisses on him, sometimes we threaten him and sometime we blackmail him – all this to make him eat.
Could it be that he has got bored with food – eating for so many years, the same dal-chapatti-sabzi, the same taste of spices, the same smell of food. The very mention of food brings visible shudders from him, he does not even want to look at it and pushes the plate away. Is it depression that makes him react like this? In fact for the last couple of years, he has been shirking from food often leading to both physical and emotional weakness.
Long back when he was totally fine or you may say on the border line, my father-in-law once asked him, ‘Verma sahib why do you eat so little?’ He replied, ‘We should take only that much food which our body can burn. I do not work and if I eat more food where will the excess energy go? It will disturb the whole equilibrium.’ How clear he was in deliberately balancing his diet with physical work but now …