THE BIRTHDAY HE WILL NOT REMEMBER

Sridharan Narayan
Nov 7 · 3 min read

Dad will not remember his 85th birthday. When we wished him this evening, he smiled and said “wonderful, who’s birthday is it?” When we told him it was his, he smiled ruefully and stated, “everyone knows it is my birthday, except me.”

So, we cut an eggless cake. He enjoyed it and asked us what the occasion was. You see, dad suffers from Alzheimer’s. Actually, he doesn’t suffer, the rest of us do.

It wasn’t always like this. He was sharp of mind and intellect, a chess champion who represented Alagappan Chettiar College and gave some of the more accomplished Russians a run for their money and Vodka at Bokaro Steel City.

Dad was a champion for the underdog and the underprivileged classes, vociferously defending their right to use a community well to access drinking water, setting up a teacher training programme for government-run schools and enthusiastically participating in community welfare activities through the Rotary Club — until such time as his memory started playing tricks on him.

Even now, while he stares at nothing in the distance, seated on a bench by the children’s play area in his apartment complex, dad puts up a tough fight with me on the Chess game I have downloaded on my smartphone and set at intermediate level. This is a come down from the time he bought a Kasparov computer chess board that learnt (perhaps the first use case of AI) your progress and made it really impossible to ever win, going progressively up to level 8. Intermediary level, as you might have guessed, is level 4.

As people age, I assume everyone does, financial security becomes a priority and a source of anxiety. For dad, it is my state of finance that he is bothered about. “How are you earning money?” he asks every time we are at that bench by the park. “Where is your son? His education must be expensive!” says dad, although he does not remember if my son is in the 10th grade or in undergraduate school.

While his concern is for my financial stability, his obsession is checking the mail box for letters. Several times he has sneaked out with the key to the letter box, taken the lift (elevator for some) to the parking lot and promptly lost his way. Like Aaron in the desert, he wandered amidst the vehicular flock and pillars of concrete until he was shown the way by his attendant who would appear flushed from a tongue lashing from my mother and breathless from the sprint down several flights of stairs.

From a man who had strong opinions about everything in life, he is now reduced to having no opinions about anything in life. His universal answer to any query “Are you feeling hot or cold or hungry or thirsty…” is a simple “Yes”.

In a way, it is pleasant. We now converse. I speak, he says “Yes”. I watch the Indian women provide a sound drubbing to the physically stronger US women at the Olympic Hockey Qualifiers, he reads or pretends to read a newspaper — it does not matter what date it is, all the news is the same, one way or another.

And so, life progresses, one day at a time. Some days are better than the rest. Other days are pretty uncertain where none of us are sure if dad will wake up from his slumber.

We inexorably creep towards one more birthday. Will we celebrate it? Who knows.

It wouldn’t matter to dad. He won’t remember. We certainly will.

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