Pauses

I can hear Kuru, the sparrow, from my balcony as I get done brushing my teeth. But I notice, even Kuru’s song doesn’t wake him up nowadays. I go to his room to check on him. A few years ago he used to wake me up, yet I have no memory of how he used to do it. What were the words he used to wake me up? Every day, before he wakes up, I arrange his prescription doses in order and I keep a reminder note next to them. It will have a specific task that he’s supposed to do that day. It was something that his doctor asked me to do – I still wonder what use can come out of giving such menial tasks to someone as old as him.

I close the drapes of the east-facing window and I sit near him. He prefers to keep the window curtains open at nights. I think stargazing helps him sleep better. My dad used to stargaze as well, and maybe this is where he got the habit from.

Just a split second before I sit on the chair next to Kani, I remember that it creaks, but by then it’s too late and I am already halfway there. I need to fix this chair someday but of late he seems to sleep deeper and better, and even if a rooster enters the place and crows, he will remain untroubled. Oh yeah, that happened a few weeks back. It was a strange morning. Anyway, I always forget to fix that chair. Maybe I’ll do it today.

I sit here and I wait for him to wake up on his own. I have stopped waking him up, even as the doctor amma advised me to wake him up early so that he takes his tablets on time. But I never seem to have the heart to do it. I just sit here and I observe him sleeping. His breathing is more rattled than ever, even as his big belly seems to rise up and down at regular intervals. Kani’s face bears an expression of unease when he’s asleep. After all these years, his eyes still look as if there is something left for him to do. Like he is constantly unsatisfied with something. I asked doctor amma about it and she said that sometimes the human mind is capable enough to realise that it is deteriorating, and all that growing spaces in his memories might disturb him. Kani has gone through a lot recently and I am now going to wake him up.

He wakes up around 7AM and he smiles at me, and I smile back. Every year, during the summer vacations, my dad used to bring me here to meet my grandparents and my grandpa’s smile would be the first welcome I get. I believe that in his own sweet world, every morning when he wakes up and looks at me, it feels as if a long time went by and that I am back for my vacation.

He asks the routine questions about my well-being and he starts reciting a story from his early 20s. It’s always the same story of a love relationship he had before meeting my grandma. However, the versions have changed over time. Earliest of the versions were about how chivalrous he was in wooing a girl from his neighbourhood and how he faced all the troubles. But nowadays, the story has gotten very crisp, as if it lost all the flesh and only the bare bones remain. The latest versions however, include all the mistakes he made and why she had to leave him. It’s as if he has begun to shed away all the lies that he once told himself to convince why something was how it was. My grandpa has seen a lot more things in his time than this one love relationship, and yet he chooses to tell me this particular story every single day me and I wonder why. He tells a different story to doctor amma whenever she visits but she refuses to tell me about it. “I understand he’s your grandpa. But that story is between him and myself.”

Today’s Wednesday, which means that doctor amma will be visiting us in the afternoon along with her nurse, Tara, and I get to go out and meet my friends in the city. Tara will take care of Kani till I return late evening, listening to whatever story he always tells her. I pay extra money to doctor amma for this break.

I prepare lunch separately for Kani and for doctor amma and Tara. Since they have to travel from the city, I always ask them to have lunch here.

Every time a car enters the yard, Kani gets excited wondering who is visiting him, even if I had just told him that Tara is on her way and it’s the same red Swift that Tara drives.

After lunch, doctor amma chats with her patient for a few minutes and after her routine tests, we get ready to leave. Since Tara is staying back, I drop doctor amma at her house. Like always, we chat for a while and like always, the conversation turns into an argument. Don’t get me wrong, Doctor amma and Tara have done a lot to my family, especially after my dad’s untimely death, but I am sometimes skeptical of her methods. I am not a doctor but it never appeals to me why certain things are that way. This time, the argument was about the everyday tasks that we give to Kani.

“I don’t know how this all seems to you, but he has progressed a lot. He is a bit more energetic than before, but his age and time are not on his side da, kanna”

“Sure, from having to walk and sit at the lawn, we’ve progressed to asking him to draw shapes on a piece of paper, without even having to get up from his bed. Why? Because he can’t, even if he wants to. What good is giving him such hopeless, false purposes?”

She sighs and looks away, as if she’s done explaining to me.

After a few seconds, I feel sorry. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep giving him these tasks every single day, till the day he dies. Because, every single night, I come up with some creative task based on whatever you say. In fact, this has become the highlight of my life nowadays.”

“Then you surely do understand what good a purpose is for. We all need purpose, my friend. Young or old.”

“Amma, I told you this before. But sometimes I feel as if we’re being too cruel to not let him just die. I don’t know if I should feel this way. But I do. It hurts a lot to see life strangling itself and holding onto him on the edge every single day. Kani deserves to go in a better way.”

Her silence isn’t the silence that a doctor would sing. Her silence sings more tales. She knows the pain with which I just said that, but what can she say?

We don’t speak for the next few minutes and as I give her statement about purpose a few minutes to think about, her house appears around the corner. Doctor amma and I are way past the days of apologising to each other over arguments that relate to Kani. We have that rapport and we know that next week, there will be another topic to fight about. Doctor amma has been our family doctor for a while now. I remember my mother telling me about how she became closer to our family after the death of her husband. Now, Kani and I are the only link she has with my family. I am sure these weekly conversations, even if we fight, are still very memorable to her, as they are to me.

I wave her goodbye and I leave to meet my friends. Usually, it is Mouli and Keerthana. Mouli is working for a medical company – you know, the ones who research and come up with medicines to sell regardless they’re any new or effective at all? Keerthana is more like me – a free bird. Just a fancy word for freelancing. She’s a freelancing interior decorator who earns well enough to treat Mouli and me, and Mouli doesn’t lose that opportunity to drown himself in alcohol. Imagine this – he drinks on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and by drinking I mean heavy drinking. Some 10 shots of a hard drink and a jar full of draught beer. Question him about it and he’d say he’ll invent a medicine to fix his livers.

We go to this bar-slash-restaurant near Mouli’s place. It’s just a local place that Keerthana found and it’s pretty good. They have these green and kingfisher blue lights and it is soothing in the evenings.

I’ve known these two buffoons since school and these are the only ones with whom I have stayed in touch regularly. Usually, the conversation starts with Mouli telling us some scary, sci-fi shit that went down in his workplace and we’d pick on something from that and our minds meander over all kinds of crap. This time, he goes on about how there was a tax fraud involving one of the employees and I liked this change in genre. After a few minutes we realised that Keerthana was just sitting dumb and not even paying attention to Mouli’s yakking.

“Drunk already?” I initiate.

“You see that sticker of a bird on that window? I’ve been looking at that since before you two arrived and a thought struck me”

“Dho, here we go. Wouldn’t we love to hear that” sighs Mouli

“Shut up. Just listen to me okay?”

“Actually I do want to listen to your bullshit today. I’ll tell you why? Every week you say some random thing, and no matter how bullshit-y it was, I always find myself giving it a thought. So go on, Keerthi!” I am being honest. Sometimes she says some really interesting things to ponder about.

“I am just going to say it. So, I think that every delay in time in this universe is well measured”

Being hit with such a straightforward sentence, Mouli and I are intrigued already.

She continues, “Have you wondered why birds quite often sit at a branch or a slab and turn their heads here and there looking at god-knows-what? It makes me wonder if all those are measured. Of course, it is different for every bird species, but does that particular bird turn its head in measured intervals… or… in a measured time delay?”

This is why you don’t mix your drinks. “I am no ornithologist but I don’t think that’s true.” All these talks take me back to a few months back, when grandpa spotted a sparrow that used to frequent the tree near his window. He named it Kuru. A very lazy name if you think about it. Kuru comes from Kuruvi – the tamizh word for sparrow. I wonder why sparrows have become so rare here.

“It’s simple, without those gaps in time, there is no movement. There is no life” Keerthi goes on, calling the normal linear course of time as “time delays” and she eventually bores herself. I begin to wonder if one of the underlying thoughts behind what she’s talking about is fate, but the thought wanders away as I don’t like to think about all that.

Like, every other meet, the conversation somehow finds itself back to how Kani is. I think it is ‘my thing’. For Mouli, it is his job, for Keerthana, it’s her relationship and for me, it’s Kani.

As I tell them about why I think doctor amma is wrong, Keerthana interjects her mind with yet another baffling question.

“Wait, I always wanted to ask you this. What’s his full name, though?”

And before I could even comprehend as to why she’s asking me this after all these years, Mouli replies with “Kanikachalam”

“What? No, that’s not his name. I am very impressed with both of you. First of all, only I call him Kani and yes, it’s the tamizh word for fruit, but that’s not why. It comes from Kaani. You pronounce it like Kah-nee. So, my grandpa used to work in a government office near Udumalaipet. He was assigned to do some work that involved all the tribal villages in that belt. Something which’d benefit those villagers. So, in some tribes there, the head of a tribal village is called ‘Kaani’. Since my grandpa was the senior-most individual in his office, he was asked to speak to the Kaanis of the villages. Somehow the word got around, and his colleagues started calling him Kaani, because he was an influential man himself. I couldn’t pronounce Kaani when I was a child and so it became Kani”

Mouli intervenes on my throwback trip and says something about a new drug they’re going to sell. “It got the relevant approvals and we’ll be selling them soon. Someday, do come to my office and bring Kani’s doctor as well”

“He’s 93 years old. Let’s say your medicine grants him 93 more years to live. But what good does it do to him? He’ll live those years without any awareness or memory”

The rest of the evening went quiet and I returned home. Tara informs me that she has prepared some dinner for me, before leaving in her red Swift.

Days go by, and one day I wake up to a sight I never thought was even remotely possible. I walk down the hall to find Kani sitting in his armchair in the hall. How did he even get up so early, stand up, walk and sit in this chair without any help? I panic and rush towards him. He doesn’t reply to my questions and I can sense that he has no idea what happened. He just keeps looking out the window from the armchair. He’s looking at Kuru, the sparrow.

After a few minutes, I collect myself and I ask him how he is. He murmurs that he’s fine and proceeds to haphazardly sing an old Ilayaraja song. He doesn’t look at me like I was back for my vacations. Something within me breaks and I feel paralysed. As if there was an old beaker full of toxins inside me and it broke and took control over me. My legs feel heavier and I feel a lump in my throat. I keep swallowing it, but it doesn’t go away.

Why do I feel so crippled with fear? I don’t know, should I feel happy for him? People quite often have said that right before the end, people become better and show signs of improvement. In fact, I remember doctor amma mentioning how one of her patients started to walk after almost 20 years. They all thought it was a miracle, but the happiness was short-lived and he died a few days later. I didn’t think that would happen here. But when he was sitting in the hall, looking at the sunrise, recollecting old memories and singing songs, I felt paralysed.

Why do I feel this way? One moment I wish he would rather die than suffer on and on, and at the first hint of the eminent, I can’t even imagine something like this. Every day from that day, I find Kani in his armchair. His everyday tasks are becoming more difficult nowadays.

Kuru never missed a single day to visit us, until one cold winter’s morning when I found Kani lifeless in his armchair. I had just called doctor amma to tell her that Kani drew a small bird as the task. She was very happy to hear that. I had just fixed the creaking chair in his room and when I returned back to the hall, Kani left me.

A few months later, Mouli’s company did come out with a medication that would have helped Kani. Mouli said that it’d have been nice if grandpa was still around as it’d have helped us buy some more time. I don’t agree with him. Any more delay and it’d have been the most inhumane thing to do. Death had no time delay with Kani. I don’t close the window drapes in my room at night anymore. It remains open and I wake up only when the sun burns my eyelids. I don’t find any sparrows now.