All that I once held as true

Three years to the day, I almost died. That's what I looked like on the day. My friend Amar Mudliar, aka Black Dog to a few of us, clicked this image because he knew I wouldn't know what a mess I was. After getting back on my feet, I wrote a piece, first published in ForbesLife India. Reproducing it below.

In his award-winning book, The Making of Memory, a copy of which sits on my desk right now, Steven Rose writes, “We know who we are and who other people are in terms of memory. Lose your memory and you as you cease to exist.”  

If Rose is right, and I suspect he is, I’ve been dead for over four months now. I say dead because as I begin to write this, we are in the middle of May 2011. I don’t remember a thing of what’s gone on around me over the last… four months. I don’t remember people I’ve met, things I’ve done or places I’ve been to. 

It was awfully tough to walk into office last week and not know the names of at least half the people I’ve worked with to launch this publication. Pictures from the launch event that feature me seem surreal; I don’t remember the party. I thought I’d died and didn’t remember the funeral. 

Then maybe, I told myself, this is what they call an out-of-body experience. Or maybe it’s just a nightmare that hasn’t ended yet. But my name appears on the imprint line as editor, and there’s a signed note from me in the launch issue, so I guess I’ve played a part in putting this title together. (I must confess I like most of what I see. Do you like it? The nude angel on the cover: Painfully beautiful, isn’t she?)

Truth is, each time my phone rings, more often than not, I can’t put a face to the name flashing on my screen; when I can, I’ve forgotten what my relationship with the person is and I don’t know what I am supposed to talk about. I’m better off not taking the call. 

Truth is, my world has shrunk hopelessly. The newspapers I used to devour so voraciously every morning seem intimidating because context has been stripped from everything I read. I feel helpless standing by the side of the road because I’ve forgotten how to cross it on the face of oncoming traffic. My neighbourhood, where I’m reasonably sure I’ve lived for 21 years now, looks alien. This city, that I love so much and where I’ve lived all my life, seems like a foreign country.

Truth is, I, Charles Assisi, adult, journalist, editor, father, perfectionist, can’t get around without help. I guess this is what it must feel like to be dead. 

My brother, a neurobiologist, tells me it’s okay, that it’s only a matter of time before my memory begins to come back. Another three, maybe six months and I’ll be ‘me’ again.

Until then though, I will have to make do with props, with notes to myself, with a little help from friends and simply accept that I’ve lost my memory. 

It would only be fair if you stopped me right here and asked me, How can you write about what is it like to lose your memory when you have no memory? Sounds a bit illogical, doesn’t it? Brings to mind those lovely lines from ‘Kathy’s Song’ by Simon & Garfunkel:
And a song I was writing is left undone
I don’t know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can’t believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme

How do I begin to explain all of this? How do I remember ‘Kathy’s Song’ when I have no memory of so many other things that have passed? Ought I not to have forgotten the English language I write these words in? How do I remember Nayantara, my five-year-old daughter, for whom I write this? Dammit, how can I remember to write when, as Rose says, I’ve ceased to exist, when I am dead?

I’m not qualified to answer these questions because I’m neither a neurologist nor a philosopher.

I’m just a regular guy who had a seizure in the office. (They tell me I was reading the first cut of a mind-bending piece that’s in the issue you’re reading right now. I can only say, smiling, Mr Sinha, I look forward to reading your story for the first time. But I need to unbend my mind first.) I was taken to the hospital by friends at my workplace. There I had several more seizures, so my friends tell me. Doctors diagnosed me with encephalitis — “brain fever” we laypeople call it — which scarred my temporal lobe.

I refuse to get into the minutiae of what all this is about because I’ve figured it doesn’t matter. What matters to me right now is that I don’t know if I’m dead or alive; if I’m awake or dreaming; if I’m in my body or outside it; if I’m writing this or imagining these words. I know…I think I know…that I’m doing this because my friend Peter Griffin asked me to. He tells me I’m not dead; instead, that I’m in a unique place where few people will ever go to.

And that if I don’t write about it while I am here, I won’t remember it later, and I’ll never be able to tell Nayantara what the place is like. Manipulative b*****d.

Truth is, I so wish I didn’t have to write this. 

But here I am, in my room, my familiar, well-loved space, enveloped in a fog. Nothing is what it seems.

A few weeks ago…or was it a few hours ago — my sense of time is all distorted — I took a long walk in a park with my dad’s older brother. For as long as I remember, I’ve worshipped him for his intellectual bandwidth. And I’ve loved him because he possesses that rarest of human virtues, compassion, in abundance. We cracked some awfully stupid jokes only the both of us could laugh at. And when it was evening, he insisted on going back to Cochin, because he doesn’t like to stay away from home for too long. 

Soon after he left I picked up the phone and called my cousin to tell her how good it was to see Cliffy Uncle after such a long time. She paused, and then quietly told me that Cliffy Uncle died three years ago. I’m not entirely sure now, but I think I went to a corner and cried a while. 

I’m not sure now why I cried. Maybe, it was because Cliffy Uncle died. Or maybe it was because that was the time I started to figure not everybody could see the people I could see. 

I was seeing ghosts, you might say. I tell you they’re real to me. 

In that one moment I knew I was so hopelessly lonely, so full of despair, that even ‘Kathy’s Song’, where I’ve sought refuge so often in the past, felt inadequate. As the song goes:
And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you.

As beautiful as those lines are, my truth is more mundane.

It lies in what Dr. P.P. Ashok tells me on my weekly visits to his clinic. The lanky neurologist, who I distinctly remember training with when I was a long distance runner, didn’t frown even once when he was told of the smells I smell that no one around me can detect. He told my dad and Anna, my wife (they’re both with me on every visit), “The perverted sense of smell is a phenomenon commonly associated with damage to the temporal lobe.”  He also insists he isn’t a distance runner. I’ll give him this: With the kilos I’ve piled on, nobody, not even me, can imagine I once ran at all. But I have pictures and a bloody certificate to prove I did the Mumbai half-marathon.

The truth I now know is that the good Dr. Ashok looks at me in much the same way I used to look at specimens stored in formaldehyde jars in the zoology labs of St Xavier’s College, where I graduated from. My unreliable memory makes me an interesting object of study. He asks a few quick questions each time we meet: You feel okay today? How did you get here? What did you eat this morning? What about last night? Whom did you last make a phone call to? What did you talk about? And then he turns to Anna and asks her to corroborate my answers. He asks her more questions about how I’ve been. I am but a listener in this conversation about the me-ness of me. I wait with bated breath until he pronounces judgement: Am-I-okay?-will-this-end-now?

The last time we met, he told my wife I’ve gotten much better — that the corners of my mouth don’t droop any more, that my gait seems steadier, that I sounded much surer of myself, that he was comfortable reducing the potency of the drugs he’d put me on and that I’d recover in the timeline he expected. He said all of this without looking me in the eye. It was my dad and Anna he was talking to. They, after all, are the ones with memory. They are the ones who exist. I just listen in from the envelope that now accompanies me everywhere, my personal portable fog, my formaldehyde jar. 

It is easy to feel terribly angry. I’ll tell you why. 

I’ve lived a full life, I’ve read widely and well, absorbing, learning every day. I’ve made a living thinking on my feet, pulling things out of my memory and synthesising them on the fly. 

Now, thanks to a virus that could infect anybody whose immune system is compromised by something as trivial as a common cold, because a few damn neurons are misfiring in my head, because of a bloody seizure that lasted a few seconds, I have lost all that it took me all these years to build. 

Add this. I’m an alpha male, and I’m proud of it. I’m in control of myself and my environment. But, in the last few months, Anna tells me, there were times I couldn’t so much as go to the loo without help because I didn’t know how to untie my pyjamas. You want to talk to me about humiliation? 

Truth is, I now know intimately that nothing is what it seems it is. I’ve seen people you can’t see, heard sounds you can’t hear and smelt things you can’t smell. I’ve seen a world few of you ever will. And it is terrifying. 

As I crawl out, slowly, trying not to lose my footing, all I know is I don’t ever want to go back.

But no, I don’t feel angry. What I feel, instead, is overwhelming gratitude. Walking out of Dr. Ashok’s clinic, my eyes fall on this beautiful, beautiful child. He couldn’t be a day older than five. He’s going through much the same thing that I did in March, only worse. He’s seeing more ghosts than I did and feeling as terrified as I was. Except that unlike me, he doesn’t stand a chance. When I see such heart-breaking beauty, I’m grateful for having another chance at life. Surely, surely, he deserves better.

The nurse told me he’d had four seizures in the one hour he was there. Now he can’t move his limbs, and he doesn’t know where he is. The young couple that cradle him in their arms look exhausted. I guess it’s only a matter of time before he dies. 

I don’t know how else to say this, but he is better off dead. I should know.

I don’t know what his name is. But in my head, I call him Aayushman, which means long life. The irony isn’t lost on me. I came awfully close to ending up like he is. I didn’t. I live to tell the tale.

Whom do I thank for that? I don’t know who I owe my life to. ‘Kathy’s Song’ — how do I remember ‘Kathy’s Song’? — continues to play in my head 
And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I.

An Equal Music

And because I am in one of those rare moods when I appreciate poetry, allow me to share one of my favorite Vikram Seth poem that appears as an epigraph in this book An Equal Music

Perhaps this could have stayed unstated.

Had our words turned to other things

In the grey park, the rain abated,

Life would have quickened other strings.

I list your gifts in this creation:

Pen, paper, ink and inspiration,

Peace to the heart with touch or word,

Ease to the soul with note and chord.

How did that walk, those winter hours,

Occasion this? No lightning came;

Nor did I sense, when touched by flame,

Our story lit with borrowed powers –

Rather, by what our spirits burned,

Embered in words, to us returned

AR Rahman & the Art of Focus

Sitting here end of the day and listening to an all time favorite song Munbe Vaa, originally composed by AR Rahaman. The link embedded here points to a version by the Iyer sisters that features Shanker Tucker. That said, even as the song keeps playing, my mind goes back to the first time I got to spend some quality time with Rahman, how happy I came out of the meeting with him, and the story I wrote around him.

Soon after I got out of AR Rahman’s North Mumbai home (which also doubles up as his studio), I went online. To look up ‘Munbe Vaa, ’ a song in the Tamil movie, Sillunu Oru Kaadhal, for which Rahman had composed the music.

Now, I don’t understand a word of Tamil. And I can confidently say—without fear of contradiction from my wife—that I’m rarely ‘mushy.’  But the moment the song started to play, I was lost. Lost in words I didn’t understand, and—I hate to say it—falling in love with love all over again.

We had visited Rahman with a clear brief in mind. There’s a section in ForbesLife India , ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’ where we talk to people who are perceptibly happy and ask them one central question: How do they achieve happiness? In earlier issues, as part of this series of dialogues, we’d spoken to people like the absolutely lovely Asha Bhosle, Bollywood’s original charmer Shammi Kapoor, and the redoubtable Leander Paes who’s known to play his tennis with his heart worn loud on his sleeve.

When my colleague Jarshad NK, who has known Rahman now for many years, asked him if he’d spend time with us, I was pleasantly surprised when he agreed; Rahman, to my mind, projected reticence, a deep regard for his privacy, so I’d pretty much taken it for granted he’d politely decline to let us into his head. I was wrong.

And he continued to confound my expectations. There was no name-dropping; he didn’t carry the gravitas of somebody who’s worked with some of the biggest names in the world; there wasn’t the sense of self-importance you’d expect in someone who has won practically every award in the business, including two Oscars and two Grammys.

On the contrary, he made me feel at ease—almost like I was with an old friend, with whom I could share a couple of boy jokes, laugh at a few silly unprintable things, and ponder the world and its machinations. I found myself doing fanboy stuff like telling him how crazy my dad is about his music and he smiled and asked me to thank him for listening to what he composes.

To read the full story, click on this link

A matter of time

Qutubbudinn Ansari pleading for his life in 2002

Twelve years later, the both of them together at Kannur in Kerala

The Mumbai Mirror carried a brilliant story today on how they got together in Kerala.

One is the face of Gujarat riots, the other the defining image of its perpetrators. They met on Monday at the unlikeliest of places – a CPI (M) seminar in Kannur in Kerala and did something implausible – joining in a duet of peace and brotherhood.

    While Qutubuddin Ansari’s face – caked with dust, tears and dried blood as he pleaded with security forces to save him from rampaging rioters – had become the image of 2002 riots; Ashok Mochi’s picture, a saffron band around his head, a rod in one hand and the other clinched into a fist, represented the blood-thirst of the aggressors. 

They would have never met in Gujarat, where almost all cities and towns are now neatly divided into Muslim ghettos and Hindu enclaves. But here they were in Kannur, sharing the stage at a seminar titled ‘A Decade of Genocide’. They sang, shook hands, and Ansari accepted a rose from Mochi. Behind them were posters carrying the pictures that had made them famous

While the political overtone of the event was hard to ignore in an election year, one did feel like buying into the imagery – the dream of ‘and they lived happily ever after.

A book based on Ansari’s experience of riots and post-riots Gujarat--‘NjanQutubuddinAnsari’ (I am Qutubuddin Ansari)--was released at the event, marveled at the fact that he was seated next to Mochi. “Even though we are both Gujaratis, we could not have met in Gujarat like this. This is a new experience for me,” he said.

Ansari said that Mochi, who was charged under sections 435 and 436 (arson and causing destruction by fire) and spent nearly two weeks in prison, wasn’t the first Hindu to apologise to him for the riots. “A retired army officer named Anand Shroff, a resident of Pune, had apologised to me on behalf of the Hindu community some years back. Today, my brother Ashok Mochi has asked for forgiveness. It means a lot to me. Let this be the beginning of a new chapter in humanity,” he said.

Mochi,who looked nothing like his famous picture -- now clean shaven and the middle parting giving way to a neater side parting – called the riots a mistake. “It was a huge blunder. I do not know what to say, I have never addressed so many people in my life. But I cannot leave without talking about insaaniyat (humanity) -- that is what I have learnt over these years,” he said.

They sang the famous song from Manoj Kumar-starrer Purab Paschim ‘Hai preet jahan ki eet sada…’ completely out of tune. For sure, the crowd comprising mostly of Malayalees did not get a word of it. But the message somehow must have reached, because the applause was loud.

Both Mochi and Ansari were critical of Modi and his development model. “Where is development in Gujarat? Any talk of development is just a sham. I still live on a footpath in LalDarwaza. I am still single. Ican’t afford to get married because of my financial status,” said Mochi, 39.

Ansari said Modi by posing with Muslim leaders is trying to cultivate the impression that the community is now with him. “The truth is that the BJP has done nothing for Muslims. People living in other states should know this truth. That is the reason I have come up with the book,” said Ansari. The event was organised by the Co -ordination Committee of Minority Organisations, an arm of CPI (M).

Does anybody believe this?

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Earlier in the day today, I saw a man, child in arm, talking to a friend, outside church, where I was minding my daughter. A quick disclaimer: I'm not the church going kinds. I baby sit while my devout wife attends to her Sunday rituals. There was a Bloomberg logo as well on the side. Does anybody have a clue what this is all about?

As for whether or not honest businesses exist in India, that is a contentious subject. I don't think any black or white answers exist.

On the back of my various conversations with various entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and some very idealistic young people in politics over the last week,  I can assure you there is room for honesty. And yes, people are giving it a bloody hard shot. I intend to chronicle some of their stories in the weeks and months to come. Until then, if there is an interesting idea or person you come across, do drop me a line with a pointer. I'm keen to hear of them and follow it up with stories on what makes them tick.

To eat or not to eat meat?

I never thought a day would come when I'd be conflicted about consuming meat. I must confess I can't stand vegetables either. So when my friend S Srinivasan this piece that appeared in The Independent, it triggered off more guilt. "In a recent blog post called "It might be wrong to eat meat", Bob Comis summarised his ethical dilemma in a sentence: "This morning, as I look out the window at a pasture quickly growing full of frolicking lambs, I am feeling very much that it might be wrong to eat meat, and that I might indeed be a very bad person for killing animals for a living." Here, he talks about the self-doubt he feels while raising animals for slaughter and his desire to see humanity evolve into a species that does not kill to eat..."

Click here for the full piece

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