My father’s white hair frames his cocoa-coloured face. The rest of his frail body is hidden by the blankets except for the arm with the IV drip. The fluorescent lights in the hospital corridors seem softer now. A few night-duty nurses lurk around the monitoring station. I curl into a question mark on the floor besides my father to grab some sleep. The smell of bleach permeates. The rhythmic sounds of the machines in the room are broken by an occasional groan form an adjoining room, someone’s pain becoming too much to bear.
His third day in America, in Berkeley. Once he recovers from jet lag I will show him around, go up the Campanile Tower at the University of California Berkeley, to get a birds eye view of the University and the city. Till quite recently the only reserved parking on campus said NL meaning Nobel Laureate. We can walk by the swimming pool where many of the UC Berkeley swimmers who go on to medal in the Olympics practice.
When I return from working in the lab, we head for the Thai restaurant taking the longer route, circling the block for exercise. He, a fit sixty-seven and I, a thirty-six-year-old recovering from a stroke, so our walking pace matches. My father follows a strict vegetarian diet, but I feel a little excursion in cuisine wouldn’t hurt. I pick out two plump shrimp from my Pad Thai for him to taste.
I hear my father’s rhythmic snore. I continue retracing the evening’s events. After dinner, I took him to my prose writing workshop. The workshop is an Adult School class that meets at the Jewish community centre, an easy walk from the Thai restaurant. The class while multigenerational has most in their sixties and seventies.
As a child, I’d work on my Maths homework seated at the small wooden table and chair that were specially made for me. My father would prod me along when I got stuck on a problem and started chewing my pencil. Now, as he embarks on writing his memoir, moving from a boyhood without electricity and his aunt cooking on firewood to getting into the Indian Administrative Service and holding prestigious assignments to going back to anonymity in retirement, I feel I can be his guide, teach him about dialog and setting.
Fifteen minutes into the class I notice my father’s head drooping. Maybe he had fallen asleep, still jet lagged. I shake his shoulder. “Fa, wake up.” His head lifts almost involuntarily and falls back down. I panic. The thought bombards me, my mother died just a year ago, barely three months since I suffered my stroke, I cannot lose my Fa, I just cannot. I rush out of the room to the phone at the front desk. But my hands tremble and a woman at the front desk dials 911 to call for an ambulance.
Remembering that again makes my heart start beating faster, my hands grow cold. I gaze at my father’s slender arm, check the IV bag still has liquid.
In seven minutes, the red ambulance arrived at the Jewish community centre. I rode in the front while my father was put in a stretcher at the back and an EMT was making notes based on the answers my father volunteered in a half-awake state.
“Yes, he has insurance” I informed the EMT.
“His blood pressure is very low. We are taking him to the nearest hospital”
They take him to Alta Bates, also in Berkeley about a seven minutes’ drive by car from the UC Berkeley campus.
The doctor, a young Asian woman even younger than me, examines my father. “How are you feeling Mr. Rama…moorthi?” She struggles with his name.
“I am OK. My daughter here is just worried.” I remember my father’s voice when he says this. He patted my hand lightly. “You can go home; I will be OK. You should not strain for my sake.”
But I had insisted on staying and now my head rests on a pillow made of a few towels the nurse had given.
*****
The nurse pops in in the morning. With her black hair, slightly chubby face and big eyes, she looks Indian, but I cannot be sure. I hope she takes good care of my father. Maybe he will remind her of her own father.
*****
The nurse raises my father’s cot so he can manoeuvre the breakfast tray with ease.
He smiles weakly. “You should get ready, go to work. I am fine.”
I call work instead and explain that I will not be in.
My father strikes up a conversation with the nurse with the South Indian accent. He tells me, “She is also from Berkeley. Her father is visiting, and she has a young daughter.”
The nurse shuffles back in and gives me her address—just a few houses from mine—but I don’t remember seeing her before. “When your father is well both of you must come over.”
The day in the hospital passes with nurses and attendants coming in and out. I sit by my father’s side all day adjusting his blanket, making sure the bag attached to the IV has liquid. I hold his weak hand, on the arm not attached to the IV from time to time.
My father’s pinched face a stark contrast to the photo of him hoisting me up, with me clutching the big blue-eyed golden-haired Gita doll that he had brought for me from America. The year, 1972, just after the India Pakistan war leading to the creation of Bangladesh. Me, a four-year-old with fifty English words in my vocabulary.
The ultrasound of the carotid artery going to the brain comes out clear as does the echocardiogram of the heart. For the first time in the day, I exhale with ease and leave my father’s side to grab a coffee and some food.
My father tells the nurse proudly that his daughter is a biotech scientist. He is calm though weak. I wonder, does it remind him of my mother’s hospitalisation after her heart attack. Since her death he talks about my mother all the time, especially about her last days, wondering if anything could have been done differently.
The nurses and the doctor come to wave goodbye as my father puts on his socks gingerly. In the car I keep turning and speaking to him, just to check, to be sure he has not fainted again. My father dismisses my fears. “That was a unique experience being inside an American hospital. Everyone was efficient and the whole place was spic and span unlike in Bombay government hospitals.”
“Yes Fa, but in Bombay you know the doctors and so get more special treatment.”
Once we get back home my father calls his brother in India to narrate his hospital experience and waxes eloquently about the efficiency in the U.S. hospitals and quick response of the ambulance. “This 911 system really works.”
That is till we are blasted with the bills—hospital and ambulance bills, bill for doctors’ services, bill for the various tests—$20,000 for one day in the hospital. My father’s reaction was, “Ghosh—In Bombay even for a quadruple bypass in the best hospitals it only costs Rs. 10 lakhs or $20,000.” It was one day in the hospital, but what if it were a few more days and there were pre-existing conditions that the travellers insurance would not cover? Would I then have had to file for bankruptcy due to the mounting medical bills? I shudder to even think of that possibility.
I had had a stroke in early 2004, a year after my mother’s death which was also the year of the US invasion of Iraq. A fit thirty-six, the stroke appeared to arrive like a missile from nowhere, shredding my world. And now this hospital event with my father only three months after my own stroke. Luckily the only lasting damage from my stroke was lower right quadrant peripheral vision loss. However, I went through MRIs, angiography and a spinal tap to rule out thickening of the arteries going to the heart or some weird immune reaction. And I was in the hospital for two weeks, getting so many needle pricks for IVs that when I left my arms looked like a junkie’s and I wore full sleeve shirts for a while. But I had to be on blood thinners (Coumadin) for six months. So, when my father arrives three months after the stroke, I still must go to Kaiser Oakland for regular blood draws to check my blood clotting times. I the scientist, am now the experiment. The Kaiser hospital branch in Oakland is luckily not that far from Berkeley and I can take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transport) and then the shuttle to get to the hospital.
My father accompanies me each time. When I have all the sensors strapped on and step on the treadmill to monitor my fitness post-stroke, my father tells me that even at his age, he can go to level three on the treadmill. I must do at least as well as he.
My father accompanies me when I go for vision rehab. He sees me play with blocks like I had as a child, only this time it is to activate my peripheral vision. Dutifully, my father watches me at home while I move coloured pencils, working the vision that has been affected by the stroke.
I cannot show my father the waterfalls or granite cliffs of Yosemite in California’s most visited National Park or the Giant Redwood trees in Sequoia National Park south of Yosemite on this trip. “That’s all right, I had my hospital trip in and around Berkeley,” he says gamely.
*****
I take him to Macy’s, the big clothing store and insist he try on a pair of blue jeans. He has always worn pants to work and a white dhoti, a cloth tied around the waist like a sarong, at home. “Roopa, it is OK for here, but I will not wear jeans back in Bombay. People will say just because Daughter in America, Father is dressing too modly.” But I notice him glancing at the mirrors in the shop, observing himself in Levis.
*****
I Google, find out shrimp can lower blood pressure suddenly, if a person is allergic. I think that is what happened to my father, but again he grins sheepishly. “I can’t tell people in India that I ate non-vegetarian food. What will they think?”
“You can say I forced it on you.” Like he forced me to sit straight, take care of my posture when I was young.
As I am at work all day, my father explores by himself on Shattuck Avenue one of the main streets in Berkeley. Friday means he gets quarters from me for the Wall Street Journal. The Friday’s edition has the crossword. My father solves most of it but if it is American pop or rock music he turns to me for help. He does most of the work and gives me more credit than I deserve. I guess fathers are like that.
*****
It has been a year since my father returned to Bombay.
Even now as I take my walk and stop by the Produce Centre, the woman with the ponytail—wearing blue latex gloves to handle customers’ money—says, “Say Hi to your daddy from me. Are you buying the calling cards to call him?”
My father used to pick up cherries, other fruits, and milk while I was at work. Because of him, his kindness and politeness, the store people smile more at me now than they used to before his visit. Now I too have started talking to them, not just buying groceries and paying the bill. So now I know her not just as an Asian face but Cambodian, her relatives started the shop
At Andronicos, the community grocery chain, Mario, the guy at the express counter with grey hair, green apron, and kind face, exchanges the usual hellos, paper or plastic with the other customers, but when he sees me, he smiles. “When is your father coming back?” I now talk to him too. Know he is from Peru, not just “a check-out guy” anymore.
When I go to Bing Wong, the Dry Cleaners in my neighbourhood, the woman, middle aged, stout with glasses smiles warmly. She tells me, “Your father is just like my father, always doing things for his daughter.” When I was at work, he took my dry cleaning to her many times. And now I know she is Thai, not Chinese.
The list goes on. At the BART station when I catch a cab to go home on a rainy day, I take the same cab my father often took with the driver from Somalia. And I know his life—my father told me—he studied, went to college in Bombay, then from Somalia came as a refugee to the US and now drives the cab. He asks, “How is my friend doing?”
This striking up a conversation, this getting to know people, has rubbed off on me. The other day I went to Bazaar of India, which has everything from Indian groceries to puja items for prayers to even Indian pressure cookers, and henna to colour the hair. I had gone to pick up mustard seeds and garam masala, and instead of just paying the bill and running out of the store, I started chatting with the woman—middle-aged with slight white patches on her face. I found out she and her husband had both gone to UC Berkeley in the 1960’s. She had majored in English; he had his MBA. Her father had been in the Indian Foreign Service. There had been no Indian grocery store then, so they decided to open one. Both their store and their marriage are now more than thirty years fresh.
Suddenly the same place—the same stores, the same cab drivers—but I feel we know each other more. And in Berkeley going nowhere I have travelled to so many countries of the world. But my father had to show me the way.
Now when I walk to the Produce Centre to buy calling cards for phoning my father and pass by the house of the Indian nurse, I look to see if the lights are on and occasionally even ring the doorbell to say hello. And I wonder who else I should chat with—the garbage collector, the construction worker on the street, or the neighbour round the corner? What will I learn about their journeys?
