Daktar Sahab
A short story
I Nana Abbu's funeral was something everyone in the family had mutedly wished for at least once. Even his daughters, my aunts silent in rooms robbed of light, would whisper hints that many things would turn easier if he were dead: Allah Ab Aasani Karey Unpar. They never spoke of it directly; after all, however he was— he was still their father, but in leaky conversations about his nature, something sour would always perforate out.
Sometimes even the houseworkers—Lajwanti, the maid who washed the dishes, would take on the sceptre when she noticed something new had happened. Mimicking the way he had approached her in the kitchen a few summers ago to find him a young maiden to marry, she would always cackle with laughter, clasping her palms together repeatedly to create a spectacle for all. Earlier, nobody would dare speak of him in such a manner, but in his case, it slowly burned out to every kind of person who was connected to our family. Everyone wished him peace. Everyone wished themselves peace.
When Nana Abbu fell off the stairs and snapped his pelvis in two, everyone’s prediction had come true. I remember rushing him to the hospital, his painful screams echoing in every alley of the building. And then watching him from the edges of an outdated Reader’s Digest, sleeping the most peaceful sleep of his life, knowing for certain that he won't ever be able to come out of bed again.
For a few days, everyone had pointed fingers at each other to be the one taking care of him in the apartment, but for long it brought no conclusion. Somehow, I knew by the trajectory of conversations where I was hinted to be his favourite that it would all get embossed upon me. Sometimes it infuriated me how nobody ever pointed to Hafiz, the youngest son of Badi Khala. He was of my age, of the same color, and if anything, I could speak better English than he. But it was woven so intricately in the Lawh Al Mahfuz for me to be the chosen one that even the university in Delhi, where I was trying to escape for a law degree, rejected me, leaving no option but to pull my cots to the city’s very own Law College. So the day Hafiz took a flight to Kentucky for his engineering, I took a rickshaw with twenty rupees extra for the luggage towards Nana Abbu’s apartment.
When I was younger, I associated Nana Abbu only with the Big Babol chewing gum he brought for us. It was his woven trademark; he even smelled like those. His small decoloured cloth bag would spring open the minute he would sit on the couch to hand us infinite stocks of those fruit-inhabited blue wrappers. Amma hated chewing gums. You are too small for those. She'd say, Do you know you'd have to get your stomach pierced if you accidentally swallowed these filthy gums? But their numbers were so large that even after hunting them down from us, we were always left with a few more.
One day, she started a tirade on him. Papa, you happened to be a government food officer; you should know better. These were invented by the Americans to intoxicate our children. Nana would nod but would always end it by saying, Everything I bring is inferior to you sisters. Fine! I won't bring anything from now. Except he would never come empty-handed, so before he left that day, he asked me about the chocolate I had enjoyed eating. Milky Bar, I whispered. He must have roamed the entire town looking for the chocolate because the next day he handed over an inferior, thin rip-off with a badly drawn Eiffel Tower on the wrapper, 'Mylko Baro.' Its only achievement was that it was two rupees cheaper. When I'd tell him he bought the wrong ones, he would never accept the fact and keep on saying, It’s all the same, and then would start shifting the blame to his eyesight, turning it all about descending into old age.
But you are already old Nana Abbu, look at all those white hair.
He would laugh and say, Ah yes, then I am if you say so, would you want your old Nana to tussle around shops to get you the perfect item? It was one of his old tricks to always go on blaming his eyesight, sometimes even humorously. Like on Eid, he always did the same: when I would ask him for five hundred rupees, he would give me a hundred rupees, patting his forehead repeatedly, acting as if a miracle had happened and that it had been his error to hand me one zero extra on the note when it should have been only ten Rupees. To make me believe, he would call out the house workers’ children and hand them all ten rupees each. See, that is the rate of Eidi these days. Look how gratefully they take the money. And I would start rolling on the floor, Nana Abbu! You can easily give five hundred to your doctor but are so hesitant to give it to your own grandson!
IILiving with Nana Abbu was the hardest thing I had ever experienced. It had only been a week since I resided at his apartment when he started falling sicker and vomiting in his sleep. After waking, I would empty his urine can and clean all the dried mess with a wet towel. Then I would change his clothing and sleep again for an hour until his medications were due. At around 10 am, he would doze off, and I would go to the market to dodge out of hundreds of his miserly inquiries. When I would return, I would always find the room stinking of indescribable odours, which would settle normally once I had been around for a while. His mattress smelled like a rotten fish kept wet in a tub of steamed water. Sometimes it would be such because of his soiled sheets. Nana Abbu! How many times have I told you to tell me if you feel like dumping? See, now I will have to clean this again, it was only last night that I had replaced it! His face would overpour with guilt, but he would always excuse himself through his words. I had called you Bhaiya Bhaiya! But you were filling the bottles. I won't do it again; this time, I really wasn't able to control it.
I had almost given up after two weeks, especially because it prickled me when he would shout at me loudly each day for forgetting to switch the lights out in rooms even if it had been on, only for a moment; He would have no control over his volume. I bet everyone in the apartment had learned the rage-filled phrases that he hurled at me. Ullu ka Patha, look! Look! How he has forgotten to turn the electricity off again. When will you learn the value of money?! Never I say, never!
★
Nana Abbu was only eleven when his father disowned him. His family was of Zamindaars who would bind their slaves to trees, lashing them with whips if their Hookah wasn't set right. When Nana Abbu was born, he already had eleven dead siblings, all of whom perished due to unknown illnesses while they were infants. His birth was an auspicious one, for which many credited the chadars offered for the newborn at the shrine of Shah Muhibullah.
★
When his mother drank cattle poison in the barnyard, Nana Abbu was beside her trying to find his marble ball that had gone rolling amidst the hay. He was a frail child with light scales of contrast running in rings over his trunk. He told this by closing his eyes and trying to search for words and his memory, and perhaps even her flesh, the way his hands would move the air. How, when they took her blue, lifeless, swollen body from the fodder, for long he had thought she was pretending to be Krishna, soft and static from the folksongs she hummed for him to sleep.
Straight after, his father sent for a proposal to remarry a prettier woman. He would sit on his cot with his baradari coiling in heat.
The earlier one was a sag bundle of dust, couldn't bring sons and besides a lunatic even, I only called her a pimp's lifeless whore!
The new wife brought him three sons after the marriage took place on the condition that Nana Abbu would never step into the house again.
★
In a black and white photograph that he kept on his cement shelf, Nana had gotten married to Nani, silent in his gaze, smiling with his woodpecker perched out lips with her eyes tilted down, staging an asymmetric wave of dark kohl. It was striking how in those photographs I kept on tracing features of my cousins and aunts; everything resembled everyone. It was like a minefield buried differently in all their skins, and that which made hearing them talk about him even funnier.
My mother along with her four sisters were brought up in Allahabad. There was never enough in the house, and sometimes food wouldn't be stored even for the next day, but Nana Abbu never lent any money. I think raising his five children despite such a shortage permanently altered his demeanor to always involve cutting costs and honoring only needy requirements. Baba would often use it to tease Amma, he would recall how on the day of his marriage, Nana Abbu had tried unsparingly to not let there be a wastage of anything that there happened an actual shortage of food in those cauldrons that were to be served to the groom’s side of the family. Baba, hanging his rose garlands around a clothed chair, had Zeera rice with only a dry gravy of chicken poured over it.
IIIA lot changed over the past five years. I barely passed school because of low attendance and had started listening to ‘satanic music’ as my Nani would call when she would watch me listen to Kurt Cobain for days on end. Nani was a soft woman. She had sacrificed a lot in her life. Sometimes when you crossed by her, you could feel her grace spreading out the world just by the detuned shades of her kurti. For the past few years, there have been acute rifts between her and Nana Abbu. He had turned way too restrictive of her; everything he expected of her was too idealistic considering that she was aging and would very often fall sick. The sisters accustomed to Nana Abbu’s nature, found it way too simple to sympathise with Nani. It was decided that she would come out of that house and live with one of the sisters, and for Nana, a maid was to be kept for food and cleaning. I couldn’t even recall the names they had because most of them would run away from work within weeks. Looking for a new maid for him was like finding him a bride; you had to ask them all sorts of questions and explain to them his chaos-indulgent nature. At Dawn, keep the tea on his table before he prays. Don't make too much noise in the kitchen, he might think you are stealing. Never, never leave a light bulb open or praise the neighbors too much. Ask him for pieces of wisdom. Never stroll near his books. Hear him quote Allama Iqbal, always bring home receipts.
The only ones left in the city then were us and Badi Khala, but her family lived in a far, posh locality where Nana had once been stopped by the guard who took him for a beggar. This had embarrassed Khala so much that she told him to not come again, and would pay for his long calling charges every month, asking him to only call her through the phone.
Nana Abbu has been a regular at ours since, he would come at least thrice a week to our archaic house. Beaming bright and spine inclined at the stairs, with his cloth bag in tatters stitched hanging around his shoulders. He did not bring us chewing gum anymore, and because I had grown old enough, he would secretly whisper in my ears to bring him Royal Tobacco. With exact secrecy, I would go to the farthest shop from the house to get them so those daily shopkeepers wouldn't consider that I was the one chewing them, and also because he would create a ruckus if they did not hand me a rupee more or gave a complimentary packet less.
★
The doctor had now started visiting every week, and every time he would leave, Nana Abbu would comment on something about his being. Daktar Sahab and you! Sometimes it’s uncanny how you both sound the same! You two can easily pretend to be brothers, and nobody would even deny it. Even his face confuses me!
One thing that the doctor mentioned was Nana’s weakening eyesight. He would repeatedly take off his glasses, bring them back and forth toward the air, and then put them back on his nose. It had become his ritual every time it seemed difficult for him to read the daily newspaper. But it was not the first time he faced such a problem. In fact, years back, when he faced issues related to his sight, it was also the first time I actually did sneak one of his Royal in my mouth.
Nana had returned after eye surgery to our house. In those days, you would always find him scribbling in his diaries and annotating his books in shivering Urdu; the underlines like a wavy tide learning to stiffen. You would feel the line like his vibrating old hand holding your finger and taking you places with it.
In the evenings, he would discuss theology with a friend he made at the mosque. Shafii Sahab, we are real Syeds, our lineage comes straight from Bukhara. See, look at my eyes, it still hold a tinge of green from the waters of Samarkand. Sometimes, the conversations would turn too heated, and his friend would angrily get up and storm out, leaving even the tea, but Nana Abbu never seemed to regret any of it.
At night, I would play him his favorite naat on my phone and bring tears to his eyes. I would sleep next to him, talk about his eyes, and update him on what was going on in the family. The eyes don't cause discomfort anymore. These days the doctors charge like they have investments made inside your body and are just excavating their profits! But it's in my blood, look I can read this complete paragraph! Who even reads after surgery? And I would laugh and repeat the same, Yes Nana Abbu, that is the entire question! Who even reads after surgery?!
He would never laugh, I did not see him smile for months. It was only his eyes that performed the hack. They would pull on one side and form a joyous arch of skin below his brows. That way you could tell if he liked something. Everything about him brought you back to his eyes.
At dawn again, he would wake before the rest of us, dance the phlegm out of his throat, and start reading his Quran loudly, his voice echoing out like a bulbul stuck between thorns;
Nana Abbu, do I look blurry to you?
And he would answer like he had answered before. Mian, you don't worry either way. Such an old man needs no world to see. I would see his eyes smiling and smile back and tell him how until I wore my first pair of glasses, I thought that was how the world was, like a blurring smudge of oil print on a camera, only expanses of light shrinking and growing.
I do not seem to ever know such an experience. He replied, and then after a pause: It’s your father. If only he did not feed you the market’s filth.
IVHere in the apartment, I would get intensely tired of being around him; tired of that yellow blooming room, of the Corex bottles, dried soaps, soiled towels, and his antiseptic-painted limbs. Sometimes, I wished he called out another name so I didn't have to be responsible. I would recall my life back in my house, where there would be something new happening every day. Where I would slide out of bed to the verandah at midnight and stroll around the roof’s stairway, and often catch my mother also being unable to sleep. She always looked older than yesterday; the incense sticks would play fencing with the wind, just to fade like they were never there.
I couldn’t see Amma’s face for years. It came to me in a very late realization that perhaps that’s why I found it too easy to offer my heart to people I hadn’t even seen. I learned verbs before nouns and bones before eyes. All the colours mimicked gradients, and the birds in the sky were just lines winking.
At eight finally, when the optician wrote for me on prescription a cursive '-6 myopia' and I first saw my mother through a concave glass, she was like a midnight pool sinking all the moonlight. Tinges of coal craters spread across her face; it was her set of mines that she got from Nana, except when she smiled, the joy invaded every muscle of her face like a herd let loose down the hill. I shivered. To see and to be seen was a wreckage that I did not know. Everything changed. I had to relearn who I was in every shade of light.
The first thing I remember learning was to hide a broken vase from her sight. And then it became a habit. What was it, if not survival, to keep the things I damaged hidden from her? Even if sometimes it meant I did not show her my face for days.
But I could see the world now, so sharp and heartbreaking. And I could see her wrinkles. How under the moonlight, it kept loosening out on her skin.
VI calculated Nana Abbu to be eighty-four years old. Everyone around his age was mentioned to him only when they passed away. He wouldn’t even say anything if he heard the news, it was as if it held no meaning to him and he could already see a boat rowing towards him from the waters of Styx, pushing closer and closer to the port. Nana Abbu, you are still young. Look at those eleven strands of black hair you are hiding at the back of your head. I knew he couldn't verify it himself through the mirror. Once after hearing a similar assurance, he started asking me about Nani and asked me to announce to her that he had forgiven her and that now she could return. The way he put it out to me with a silent grin, it was like he had just passed the most merciful decree to humanity. Deep down, I would question my memory: Wasn’t it Nana Abbu's fault in the first place? How can he then be involved with forgiving? He took out his diary and asked me to send a voice recording to Nani, who was living in Lucknow. He then flipped those yellow pages, embossing their edges with his saliva, and started reciting a poem, which I caught in the first verse was written by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. And in his raspy, and downtrodden voice:
Waasla, come to Allahabad soon. Bhaiya is taping this to send you. Go, I absolve you of the worries. I forgive you.
Coughing a little, he went on:
Kar raha tha gham-e-jahan ka hisab Aaj tum yaad be-hisab aae
When I ended the recording, he motioned his fingers at me and whispered softly.
Tell her I had written this for her.
I smiled.
Sent.
VIIt was while I was sitting beside his bed, fining rayon with my lips for a needle, when he said to me that he could no longer see through his glasses.
Bhaiya, these glasses are better disposed of. I cannot see anything through them; everything is turning blurrier than it used to be. Can you go to the market and tell the person to increase the power of its lenses by 1 or 2 points? I would look at his off-colored brown glasses taped and glued into an ugly state. Nana Abbu, don’t worry, we will get you a new pair in that case. You are right, it really is better in the bin.
No! This frame is fine! Don't change this! Fine, I will ask someone else to do it. It was maddening to see him acting so frugal in this state, but I had learned the only way to deal with him on such matters was by agreeing. The next day I went to the optician, filled with embarrassment at the state of his glasses, and asked him to increase it by 2 powers. The shopkeeper, weirded out by such a strange request, kept asking me if I needed those glasses on the same frame. I reassured him that it had to be this way.
After the work was done, I brought home the upgraded pair for Nana. But I still cannot see through them! Are you sure he made it two points stronger?
Nana Abbu, he made it right in front of me; trust me, there must be something else in your eyes that needs treatment. You cannot just pick out random numbers for your eyes. You need to understand.
Hush! You know nothing! I have lifelong experience with these things. I am not denying he never did anything, it's close enough. Go back to him and tell him to fix it with one more power. Did you pay him yet?
Yes.
Then tell him to do it for free.
To keep his heart, I went out to the same keeper again and was relieved to see the man was not there. I could get away without having to explain to him the mysterious business I kept bringing him. I gave the glasses to one of his associates sitting at the counter with instructions and left.
The next time I brought back his glasses, I kept the red velvet box beside his table and hurried out to meet my friend who was waiting downstairs with whom I had promised to shop for Eid, which was now in about a week. While I was at a shop browsing colors and patterns of cotton, my phone kept ringing. It was Nana. I kept canceling those calls, but they kept coming like a domino falling over another. When I picked up, I could hear his almost breathless voice: Bhaiya! He looted us, that son of a thief! I know better of my glasses, I cannot see anything from this. Please come soon and return this, if I could walk I would smack his face myself. Just come soon. This one is even blurrier!
I lost it completely. Nana Abbu enough is enough! Stop this nonsense, and quietly wear those spectacles. Only God knows the kind of insect you have birthed in your brain! You cannot see because you don't want to see, and no glass can ever fix that! It's all in your head! Stop bothering me, I won't return now. Allah Hafiz! I ended the call without hearing his response. A sudden wave of guilt ran over me, but I felt he needed to hear that.
I did not return to him afterward and went home. Baba appointed a boy from his village to live with him. For two days straight, I declined Nana Abbu’s phone calls religiously, and then on the third day they stopped coming.
A couple more days passed, and it was brought to us as an update that Nana Abbu’s condition had turned grievously different from how I had left him days back. His speech had started to wane, his breaths had turned heavier. He has abandoned his newspapers and books, abandoned shifting in his sleep, and drank water only through a spoon. I overheard that all his daughters were called by Baba to gather in the city, It seems serious now. I tried ignoring all that I had heard about him.
A day before Eid everyone gathered in his apartment, but Baba did not tell me.
It was on the day of Eid that I went to that apartment again. On the edge of his bed, an ant was creeping inside the well of the fruit basket, while the fans swiveled air on his bare skeletal body, arching like a chalk pillar. I felt awkward at first, I hadn’t seen this many people in the room before. Badi Khala holding his hand, was trying to make him drink. You haven’t drank water for a day. If not for yourself, please for our sake. On his table, I could see that box of glasses kept silently. Nani was in another room down the hall holding a Quran and weeping quietly, Amma was boiling tea in the kitchen. I went up and without making a single sound, sat next to his waist hoping he would say something to me. Nana Abbu… Assalamualaikum but his eyelids did not arch up the way I expected. His eyes were like a compass needle whirling on a merry-go-round, his mouth wide open, it was as though the gravity was too strong for him to close it. Sitting with him was a dice game with no sound of dice on the board. When he didn’t say a word, it made me uneasy as though he had forgotten me. He hadn’t spoken for days, his tongue is starting to dry, said a voice from behind the back. That must be the only explanation because, by his face, he still despised cricket and Rushdie. So I named all the bones he broke in the staircase hoping he could recognize me even if it was just a nod. That’s when his hands reached into his leather purse, and opening up the chain, he handed me five hundred rupees. This surprised everyone but not me. I thought he had forgotten himself, but not what his hands did, for it was the day of Eid. And then slowly moving his mouth, he spoke a soft word that turned the room silent. Nobody had heard him say anything for days. Everyone made a passing note questioning why he said that. Aren’t you doing law? Asked someone. I did not know if I should have corrected Nana Abbu or quietly kept the money. In my head, his face started to wash over into the pigment of salt earth. Amma had brought tea to the table. I pressed his money into my pocket, his foggy lips echoed into my head again.
Daktar Sahab, he had said.
After an hour, messages were already being forwarded in WhatsApp groups in fine dining of tears and Arabic. When he closed his eyes, his hands were still holding the metal bar of the bed. His chest was pressed multiple times to check the sounds, but it was as though the marching band inside it had run away with a year’s salary. And then like a fuse going off, his breaths whistled for the final time. We gave him a grave where there would be no lights for him to turn off.
VII
It had only been a week since the funeral, and I was still not over him when I received a phone call. It was a person whose stammering voice I had never heard on a phone.
Salamlaikum brother …… I know it is too late to call ….. but we are really sorry for what…. happened. I figured it must be someone from Kanpur because Nana Abbu had used my phone innumerable times to contact the relatives from his diary. In my head, I could see all of Nana Abbu’s links with that city vanish into history as clean as its merciless slate.
Walaikumassalam. Oh, I am sorry as well that you weren’t informed, it is improper how the news never reached you but the funeral took place a week ago .......... Would you like to speak to Amma?
No, no, brother, he said. Somewhere outside a car was passing with the latest hits blasting out from the stereo. I am calling from Mak Eye Clinic, but I am sorry to hear that as well.
I was more than confused. What’s the issue?
Brother… The glasses you took approximately ten days back… were of a different client. We were trying to search for them for days until… a worker said they had accidentally given them to you. We have fixed your glasses, they’re still with us. Can we get the other pair back? I am sorry that it happened. Didn’t you notice from the frame you received?
★
At that moment, I was seven again, back in my hazy world with only him in it, dying while I was just born. I thought of those false glasses kept beside him, closed in their box. Of how Nana Abbu had been alone in the crowded room the entire time. Of those spoons of water he didn’t see. Nothing ever made sense to me. Nothing mattered. What could even matter?
I had shouldered him to the grave with a five-hundred-note pressed in my pocket that I had taken as his doctor—when I had wished only to be his grandson.
Deeply profound
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