Reading Father: The Roof is Gone, the House Uncovered

Five years ago, while I was walking back from work, from my new job that my father approved of because it covered some health insurance, my phone rang. It was my uncle, my father’s twin brother, five minutes younger than my own, I am told. He asked me where I was, and then said, “Zamir has met with a fatal accident.” 

My first reaction was that of a copy editor, an irritation with how loosely Indians seem to use the word “fatal”, “fatal” means deadly, as in a killing accident, and of course my father could not be dead. There was no world, no universe where that statement could make sense. I started to correct my uncle, who had been my father’s companion for almost seventy years, to tell him that English was not to be trifled with like that, that people would misunderstand, and an accident was only an accident, and it could not be fatal.

We are all so used to correcting our elders, especially in the manipulation of this foreign tongue, that it made sense to tell him he had made a mistake. 

Except, of course, he had not. He was a careful man, not given to stray comments of little merit. The mistake had been mine, thinking my father would be there, that I was promised time with him, that he would see me achieve the things we had talked about. I went home. I washed my father’s body, and buried it. I did a few things, and then, turning in heartbreak to my father’s twin brother, I asked him to help me wrap up things that I did not have the heart to attend to. 

I  fled back to Delhi, buried myself in work, took my grief and pounded it into all I worked upon. I did not look back. The world felt overexposed, as if somebody had ripped the roof off of my house, as if there was no shelter. Things reached me too fast. I did not have time to throw up my guard. With my sister, my only sibling, in the United States, I became my father’s heir in India. It was not something I was ready for. His friendships, his vast contact of friends, all he had been, I could not absorb. Nor did I try. Instead, I curled up into myself and grieved. I took that grief and made it into a weapon. Success, in little things and big, came my way easily. But somehow I had lost my taste for it. I am an Indian middle class man. It is hard to reach for something for myself. Shame inhibits me. I could have broken the world open for my parents, but for myself, it did not really matter. To a degree, it was embarrassing. If I could not share it, I did not want it.

Two years later, I married. My uncle, my father’s twin, acted in place of my father. He had lost a little weight in the months preceding the wedding, and was looking tired and ill at ease. We did a few tests just before the wedding, and it was a day or so after the wedding reception that we were told that he had cancer. And that it was in an advanced stage. 

There were more tests. The initial ones seemed to indicate kidney cancer, common enough, and with a standard procedure of treatment, but there were anomalies. It should not have spread so quickly, and so far. Secondary testing revealed a type of cancer called Bellini Duct cancer, or “Collecting Duct Carcinoma”. This is the age of the internet, and after an aunt of mine, an eminent doctor in her own right, had confirmed it to me, I searched and searched. 

It is a rare cancer. Less than fifty had been treated then, in 2011, or less than fifty patients had been diagnosed with it. Very few had survived. It was fast, aggressive, and treatment was by guesswork as much as anything else. I read the biopsy results, and wept for my father and his twin. 

My uncle’s son, the cousin who is the closest person to me after my sister, who has been kinder to me than most brothers ever are to their own blood, gave up his high-paying job in California, his career that he had spent two decades building, gave up everything to come back home with his family, to take care of his father. 

It took six months. Too long with all that pain, too bloody long, and oh so very swift, as I lost my father again in caring for his twin.

They had been born in war, my father and his twin brother, born of war. In 1940, my grandfather was called up to the Burma front, a doctor and soldier, a Major in the Royal Medical Corps in one of the bloodiest warfronts in the history of battle. My grandmother went into shock induced labour at the deployment, delivering twin sons born two months too early, their doctor father far away on the battlefield as they struggled to live and become. 

My grandfather used to shake his head at us, the grandchildren of his twins. “God’s mercy, to think that Zamir and Mushir lived to have children of their own.”

God’s mercy. Is it ungrateful of me to complain that God took it away after seventy years, so swiftly, so violently, with nothing to leave to us children, no shelter from the storm?

So many people have so much less. No families. Abusive parents. Broken families. We, my cousin and I, we had been blessed with fathers, fathers that we wished to live up to. Fathers that we never really had enough time with. Such things make the regret seem only sharper in retrospect, a barb in the flesh that will not come out, that grinds and cuts into the muscles, whose sharp edges do not dull with time. 

A month ago, my cousin’s wife called. He was feeling unwell, and the doctor had advised a blood test. The results were a little alarming, with so many indicators critically low. My wife and I reached the hospital as soon as we could. We did what was needed, got him admitted. The aunt of mine, the doctor who had cared for my uncle, came to spread her cloak of gentle care upon us. It was well she came. I would not have known what to do when the results came back from the more elaborate tests which revealed, unambiguously, that it was leukaemia, Acute Lymphocytic Leukaemia, to be precise. 

Who are we, that God plays such games with us? 

But then there is hope. As a friend who works on cancer drugs said, “In our profession the joke is that if you must have cancer, pray that it is leukaemia or prostate cancer, the only ones where the majority of them are curable.”

I, who have no brother, and now no father, sit these days with my father’s twin brother’s son, who has no brother either, no father anymore as well. The roofs have been removed from above our heads, and the storm is upon us. But we will fight this one out. A roofless house is not a broken house. The walls still stand. We can give shelter to somebody, we can lean on each other for support. 

The treatment has been gruelling, but my cousin fights well, with a laugh and a grin. The chemotherapy has not weakened him, has not made him bend. He is still the man I know, one of the ones I most admire in the whole world. He will go home, inshallah, in a few days to his lovely daughters, give them a hug, a kiss, and whole the roof above their heads. His father, my father, would have been proud of him.