A strong man an addict a weak man

I got up late last Friday morning. On Thursday night the woman who sits under a tarp near my house and sells eggs tomatoes ginger eggplant okra cucumbers potatoes melons greenbeans peppers carrots and onions didn’t have any eggs so I decided to watch a DVD instead of making myself an omlette for dinner. I didn’t feel like cooking anyway. I watched the movie Traffic, which was focused on the illegal drug trade between Mexico and the United States.

Even though I went to bed late that night and slept late the next morning, I didn’t rush to work. It was raining – as it had been for days – and I was still sleepy, so I stretched for twenty minutes, meditated, and then sat on my bed and ate a bowl of crunchy Swiss muesli with honey and sliced bananas and soymilk.

After the rain stopped and after I finally groggily left my house, I rode to the train station in an autorickshaw decorated with looped and crossed marigold strands and big green banana leaves. When I arrived at Prem Dan I discovered that the back gate was locked, so I walked the long way around the slum to the front gate. A fat woman in a blue sari yelled at me; she called out “Hello! Hello!” so persistently that I turned to face her; she pointed to a man bent forward with both hands on a huge drainage pipe, said “patient”, and then pointed at Prem Dan. I approached the man where he stood wincing in pain, learned through his gestures that he had injured his hip, and told him and the big blue woman that I would ask inside if he could be admitted.

Joan, the dedicated skilled cynical elderly New Zealand nurse and Prem Dan veteran, who has russety-brown-over-grey dyed hair and wears stylish rectangular glasses and big white billowy Indian shirts, told me that “the Sisters” make all decisions regarding admissions, and that I ought to let the man come to them on his own. Because Joan is always in action and because she is so experienced, her perspective often seems cold or excessively callous; so even though Joan was probably right, I sought out Sister Romaric myself and asked if a new patient could be admitted; with a reluctant and non-committal smile she told me to bring him to the gate.

The man with the injured hip and his big blue spokesperson seemed surprised to see me return. I explained – incomprehensibly, I’m sure – that the man could come to the front gate with me but that it wasn’t my decision whether or not he would be brought inside. They seemed satisfied, and I asked the man if he could walk; he could not; he could barely stand. Seeing the difficulty, the woman looked at me, nodded to the man, and put out her arms with palms facing upward, as if she were hefting a big invisible weight. I had to carry him.

I lifted the man and held him in my arms and started walking with tentative heaving steps through the slum. Meeting the unfriendly but deferential faces of the people I passed, I felt a combination of pride and shame. I felt the shame of my own obvious strength in contrast to the man’s obvious weakness.

At last I arrived at the gate and set the man on his feet. He whimpered in pain when I told him to wait; I went inside and after I found Sister Romaric and brought her to the gate, she spoke with the man briefly. Then she told me his hip was broken and that he was a “hospital case”; she said he needed treatment that he couldn’t get at Prem Dan; but after regarding the man’s desperate face again she allowed him to come inside anyway. I ran to find a wheelchair for him and when he finally sat down, he looked terrified. I told him my name and asked him his; it was Saleem.

That day, Saleem was admitted to Prem Dan so he could comfortably await treatment for his broken hip. He was wheeled to the dirty rear courtyard which smelled like rotten bananas and garbage (and which always reminds me of Goya’s nightmarish Caprichos); he was given water and mouri; his body was washed and his head was shaved; he was assigned to bed F6.

(The man who had formerly occupied Saleem’s new bed had died at 9AM the day before. I never knew his name but I’d shaved his face before and each time he’d scowled in unhappy noiseless toothless pain; in the days before he died he’d started refusing food and appearing more and more horrifically thin, and his eyes sockets were dark and wet; two days before he died he asked me to shave his thick beard, and I did.)

Because I’d arrived late that morning and because I’d spent time helping Saleem, I didn’t hang laundry and shaved only a few men’s faces. During my break I drank chai with a group of pretty Spanish women and girls and then prepared to help with lunch.

I ladled food for only a few minutes; the sweet smell of steamed rice and the spiced smell of hot lentils and potatoes mingled unpleasantly with the stink of chopped-up-and-boiled fish, so I was relieved when Joan called for my help in the wound-dressing room. (I have been in the wound-dressing room only very rarely since I began working at Prem Dan, and never for longer than a minute; Joan and the few other volunteers with medical training do not invite many people to join them, and they always seem busy and preoccupied as they work.)

Joan had called for my help not because I was experienced in wound-dressing, but because the patient whose wound she intended to dress, and also – I soon realized – swab with betadine and inject with numbing solution and re-stitch with black thread, was Paul Mondle, the man who I’d visited daily for two weeks at Mercy Hospital.

By the time I got to the room, Paul was lying on a metal table and crying hysterically and babbling and pleading with Joan to stop what she was doing. Sympathetic to Paul but also respectful of Joan, I asked what she had done. She said she hadn’t started yet; Paul’s hysteria was not a result of pain, but of fear.

And I was also afraid. The old bandage had been removed from Paul’s thigh, and I saw bright red flesh with brown skin-edges on either side pulled rudely together by black stitches. Joan was of course unmoved by the minor gore of the wound; she simply smiled in the broad and genuine and mildly frightening way that older women who still wear heavy makeup sometimes smile; the original stitches were her own work, and although she admitted they were not “plastic surgery”, she seemed proud of the job she’d done and pleased with Paul’s progress. But perhaps because she noticed my fearful response to the exposed flesh and to Paul’s melodramatic lamentations, she assured me that Paul was overreacting; she said she was almost certain now that Paul was a drug addict, and that he – like all addicts – had a very low threshold for pain.

(Joan and I had talked before about the possible cause of Paul’s abscessed leg, and after hearing that he often asked for sweets at the hospital, and after seeing his response to painful treatments, and after talking to Paul’s doctor, Joan concluded that he’d been “mainlining” into his thigh. Because I’d both prayed with Paul and bought him a Bible at his request, I had assumed – naively or irrationally – that Paul was not using drugs; when I said so to Joan, she replied without hesitation that he would probably use the Bible’s pages to roll joints or try to sell it when he left Prem Dan. It was then that I remembered Paul innocently asking me the name of the bookstore where I’d bought the Bible and asking me how much I’d paid.)

I stood next to Paul where he lay and tried to speak soothing words to him. We’d never learned to communicate in a very substantial way, and that day was no different; I earnestly wanted to help him calm down, but I couldn’t. And then Paul saw Joan approach with a syringe.

He sat up fast and pushed Joan’s hands away and tried to swing his legs off the metal table and began shrieking and begging Joan to stop; Joan told me to hold him so I held him and he kicked and swatted at her hands until I pinned his arms behind his back and pushed him down; Joan pinned his legs and Paul stopped moving but kept crying “Auntie, please no!” in English and screaming in Bengali that he wanted to go home. And he said he was dying.

Joan injected Paul’s wound five or six times with the numbing solution, and each time a big bump full of fluid formed beneath the stretched skin. Paul whimpered and shook uncontrollably and started hyperventilating; I put my hand on his chest and tried to breathe slowly and steadily but soon I too felt myself becoming anxious; my vision tunneled and I felt impossibly exhausted and lightheaded; my breaths shortened; I looked outside and the clouds were twisting and moving and turning black; I looked back into the wound-dressing room and saw a man with an strangely elongated diamond-shaped face sitting in a chair and smiling; I stepped dizzily away from Paul and toward the man in the chair; both of the man’s wrists were raw and bloody and the bones in his right forearm were exposed and chipped and yellow and his right hand was enormously swollen and round. When he saw me approach he smiled more broadly and reached down to touch my feet and he did and then he touched his lips and reached for my feet again and then I stepped away and told Joan I needed to go outside and I did.

Paul’s dressing was finished in my absence without any problems, and after a quick but intense rainstorm, and after checking with Joan and sitting briefly with Paul on his bed in the men’s dormitory, I left Prem Dan through the front gate.

I was still dazed, but as I passed the slum I saw and recognized the fat woman in the blue sari and managed to communicate that Saleem was resting comfortably inside. She spoke rapidly and pointed to a child standing in the doorway of a shack nearby. I think she tried to tell me that Saleem was the child’s father or grandfather, but I couldn’t understand; the woman became disinterested and dismissively flipped her hand in the air and pushed me away; the conversation was over.

As I rode home from the train station soon afterward, I felt mentally and emotionally lost. I accidentally stayed in the autorickshaw beyond my stop and had to walk an extra mile back. I stopped at a restaurant called “Hatari” on the way and drank fresh lime soda and ate potato-stuffed parathas and brown curry. The food helped calm my mind and body, but I still didn’t know why I’d reacted the way I did; maybe I was too emotionally invested or maybe my blood sugar was low; maybe I was still thinking about Traffic.

Regardless of cause, I remained confused and unconsciously upset. And when I returned to Prem Dan the next day and saw Saleem, I asked him how he felt. He gestured that he was still in severe pain and asked for “tablets”; I saw him again later that day and he said in Bengali that he wanted to leave; he pantomimed smoking a cigarette and pointed to the gate.

My confusion started to fade, and I started to feel angry.

I was angry with Saleem and I was angry with Paul. I started to return in my imagination to the slum and to the wound-dressing room; I started to think of Saleem’s desperation and of Paul’s agony and fear, and I created scenarios in my mind that I’m ashamed and embarrassed to admit: I imagined myself telling Saleem that I wouldn’t carry him inside if he was going to choose cigarettes over treatment and that I wasn’t going to help him get painkillers, and I imagined myself grabbing Paul by the collar and saying “You brought this on yourself, now stop being such a pussy!” and slapping his ugly mouth.

I’d lost respect for both men and couldn’t quiet my emotions; I’d failed to sympathize; I’d stopped believing that “real strength” was admitting fear or seeking help or showing weakness; I’d started to hate Paul and Saleem because they were weak and pathetic and because they were addicts.

…Some of my family members and close friends call themselves addicts, and I too have indulged in most of the compulsive behaviors and addictive chemicals I know about. In varying degrees, I’ve felt addicted many times in my life. I’ve heard addiction called a disease, but in my experience it has not felt that way; honestly, it has felt like a weakness of the will. 

And for some reason it feels natural to hate that weakness in myself and others; it feels natural to judge it. But even though it feels natural, I don’t think it’s right. I don’t think I really understand addiction… But maybe I don’t need to.

In part, this year has become an experiment with self-denial, and I’ve learned deep lessons about my ability to resist temptation; I’ve considered and observed and possibly overcome some addictions in my own life, but that doesn’t make me qualified to speculate on what addiction really is. And regardless of what it is – if addiction is weakness or disease – I should remember something that seemed true to me once, and still does: that societies – and perhaps also the people in those societies – can be measured by how the strong treat the weak, by how the healthy treat the sick, and by how the powerful treat the powerless.

I was embarrassed when Sister Romaric eventually told me that Saleem had left Prem Dan only two days after I’d brought him in, and I still feel off-put by Paul’s hysteria and betrayed by his schemes; truly I may have been taken advantage of, but I would rather be fooled than risk ignoring, criticizing, or humiliating a weak or diseased person.

I think now that my gross emotional shifts may not have been simple reactions to Paul and Saleem’s weakness; my anxiety and anger may have also been reactions to lingering bitterness and shame I feel about my own actions and the actions of people I care about; I may have been reacting to a reflection of my own weakness and cowardice and fear.

Paul and Saleem’s circumstances are different – just as every person’s circumstances are unique – and I don’t know everything about their lives. There may be understandable reasons for their decisions and tendencies, but even if there aren’t I believe my attitude should be the same. (And I should remember that I always feel viscerally anguished – but never angry or judgmental – when I think of ‘Caroline’, the 16 year-old girl in Traffic who becomes addicted to heroin.)

…I’ve written something like this before, but I think it can be meaningfully repeated once or twice, or maybe every day: It isn’t up to me to judge these men or say if they are strong or weak because of their behavior; it isn’t up to me to judge the symptoms of disease. It is up to me to treat all people with respect and love. (And I mean love and not pity; to pity someone is condescending at best and dehumanizing at worst.)

But even that is not so simple. I honestly don’t know how to respect and love a person who hurts himself; neither indulgence nor repudiation feels right. But I am learning. And I do know that however I treat a person, my decisions should not be motivated by anger or pride or bitterness or shame.

I also know that I should let myself be humbled by my own ignorance – by my weakness – and remember that we are all fluid combinations of vigor and illness and power and frailty; sometimes we see more of one than the other, but whether in this moment or the next we seem strong or weak, we always deserve to be loved.

This blended life

Last week Kolkata’s drivers went on strike again. For twenty-four hours (more or less) there were no active rickshaws or taxis or trains or buses; I could’ve walked to Prem Dan as I did during the last bandh, but I chose to take the day off instead.

After a time – during the perfectly rainy quiet day – I decided to ride my bicycle through the empty streets. The rain had stopped and women leaned at their balconies in the hesitant sunlight, and then the sunlight brightened and the wet streets lit up with the sun’s reflected glare. I had the freedom to pedal slowly in the middle of the usually congested roads; I meandered around a traffic circle and the few motorcycles that passed me made loud high solitary rumblings that I heard long before and long after I saw the machines themselves.

As strange as it sounds to say, my time bicycling was pleasantly post-apocalyptic. I imagined what life would be like without so many people and without so much chaotic noise; I saw the city’s muted corners become vibrant; I saw green plants grow from broken building-sides and seem to stretch their limbs after too much time pressed against the walls.

After bicycling, I went back home and – as I often do – I thought about my “old life”; I thought about the present and thought about the past; I thought about where I live now and where I used to live; I thought about the things that matter to me here, and the things that matter to me there.

I thought about my car. Because I’ve been trying to sell it for months. It now sits in Sidney’s driveway in Dallas with a “For Sale” sign in its window; I post ads online and in print, and Sidney and my mom meet with potential buyers. But nobody’s buying. So I stupidly pay car insurance every month and brood about the inconvenience my family tolerates and about my own dragging lingering responsibility.

I thought about my health insurance. Because the premium just changed. I have a policy with the company that insured me during my employment at Hong Kong International School; now that a full year has passed since I left HKIS, my policy is different. Depending on the decisions I make in the next week, I may be paying twice this year for the same coverage I had last year.

And I thought about my novel. Because I’m trying to publish it in the United States, and fearing what may or may not happen, and in general I’m starting to worry about money.

…About two weeks ago, I shared a taxi with a young man who – like me – was perhaps too quickly frustrated by the scarcity of auto-rickshaws heading from Park Circus to Gariahat. He spoke fluent English and as we talked about our respective careers, I discovered he was involved in the Kolkata theater scene. A play he had produced was being performed the next week, he explained, and he invited me to attend.

So the week following, one day after the bandh, I took the subway from Kalighat to Rabindra Sadan in search of Casa Toscana, the restaurant (and sometimes playhouse) where the play was being performed. I soon discovered that Rabindra Sadan is something like an arts district; I wandered through scattered galleries and among young people; I found the Nehru Children’s Museum, across from which was Casa Toscana.

Because of the neighborhood in which I live and the company I usually keep, I don’t frequent very many of Kolkata’s fancy establishments. And so I am sometimes surprised by restaurants with ultra-modern or ultra-western decors like Casa Toscana. When I arrived, I was led to a seat under an elegant white awning, told that the cobblestone terrace would be the makeshift stage, and that dinner would be served inside after the performance; I was greeted by well-dressed waiters with trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres; and behind me, within the restaurant, small yellow bulbs set into the wall like tea candles spelled out the place’s name in soft warm yellow light: Casa Toscana.

When I reserved my ticket over the phone, I’d been told that the evening’s events would cost “twelve fifty”. Although a part of me knew I was wrong, I thought this meant 12 rupees and 50 cents; I wasn’t completely surprised – but neither was I completely happy – when I arrived at the restaurant and was asked to pay one thousand two hundred and fifty rupees. It was literally ten times what I would spend on a nice dinner in Ballygunge, but after I paid and settled in my seat, I regained perspective. For an hour of theater, two little glasses of wine, two big glasses of whisky, mushroom crostini, sun-dried tomato risotto, and chocolate mousse cake, I would be paying around 30 American dollars; I laughed to myself before and after when I thought of how rare it is to pay so little for a similar evening in the States.

That night I was reminded of my “old life”, and not only by the money I spent. The play that was being performed that night – it was actually a series of comedic one-acts – was written by an American playwright named David Ives. I’d acted in Ives’ one-acts at St. Mark’s in Texas; I’d seen them performed at St. John’s in New Mexico; I’d even directed them at St. Stephen’s in Florida; and that night I saw them – because of a randomly coincidental cab-ride – at a fancy Italian restaurant in West Bengal.

The coincidences didn’t stop there, of course.

The one-acts at Casa Toscana had been adapted for an Indian audience. Two of the six plays had been translated into Bengali, and the play called “Philadelphia” had been renamed “Kolkata”.

“Sure Thing”, the last one-act in the series, had been least modified perhaps because it was already so universally funny; but when the play began, I wasn’t thinking of culturally shared comedic nuance. I was thinking about a girl I used to know. (And I should add – without any pride and with only sympathetic sorrow and shame – that she was a girl whose heart I broke long ago. Her name was D—.) I was remembering that over the last few weeks, through an unexpected series of friendly emails and awkward phone calls and confusing texts, we had finally communicated after more than a year of silence.

“Sure Thing” was the play in which I’d once acted, and the play in which I’d once cast and directed D—. With bittersweet nostalgia and surreal happiness, I smiled throughout the entire thing.

…My grandmother and I once talked about dilemmas in the West; she said – and I have not stopped thinking about this since – that in the West we feel the need to vilify or insult the options we don’t choose; that for some reason we cannot simply be content with the fact that the options in our lives – maybe not all of them, but certainly all those that cause us to hesitate and ponder and sleep fitfully before we choose – that the options in our lives have an intrinsic value, and that even after we decide against some thing or other, the value remains.

With this in mind, I will admit that sometimes I insult my “old life” and my past; sometimes I try to disconnect from it; sometimes I dream of a personal apocalypse. Sometimes I long for a death of self so complete that all memory and identity would be lost, and my undying soul would admit only new growth and rebirth (like saplings and little plants growing and shining on the sides of broken buildings after flood-like rains). Sometimes I walk through the train station near Prem Dan and see naked laughing children with smudged ribs and dirty hair, and I believe I could be like those tiny people; that I too could edge the world’s horrific realities and still – for a flashing passing time – be innocent and free.

But sometimes I remember what my grandmother said, and I let the past and present blend.

Because in some ways, my life in India has always been blended with the life I led before. Occasionally I feel like I’m completely here, but then that feeling fades. So I commit to my life in India for the time that remains, and I honor the past and anticipate the future; I start writing a new novel which feels enormous and overwhelming; I start reading War and Peace which is enormous and overwhelming; I appreciate reminders of my past; I fear financial defeat and hope for financial abundance; I imagine a settled life and a life of continuous artful wandering; I constantly reintegrate my past with my present and reintegrate the person I used to be with the person I’m becoming; I watch the movement of black centipedes with yellow feet and hear the noise of crows and car-horns; I meet new people and think of people I once knew; I help a man named Paul adjust to his new life at Prem Dan after his discharge from Mercy Hospital; I talk with students from Paris and with an American teacher – by coincidence – named D—; I accept what is and what was, and accept what I’ve chosen and what I didn’t choose.

Healing and Need

Not long ago, I was sitting outside in the shade of a tree with low branches and was shaving a man’s face. I was called inside by a nun; I would later learn her name was Sister Patricia. She stood with a nun named Sister Cyril Rose next to a man on a bed. The man had bulging wandering fishy eyes and gappy greenish teeth; his hair was short and wildly uncombed; he’d been brought to Prem Dan from one of the local train stations because of a pain in his thigh that was so severe he couldn’t walk. Sister Patricia asked me if I would be in Kolkata for a while. I said yes, and she asked me to join her and Sister Cyril Rose on a trip to Mercy Hospital where the man on the bed would soon be receiving treatment.

We all rode to the hospital on Park Street in a taxi. The two nuns sat in back with the injured man and I sat in front with the driver. When we arrived, the injured man was wheeled from office to office; he was admitted for what would probably be a week or more. As the nuns and doctors discussed the initial diagnosis and scheduled treatments, I stood next to the man’s wheelchair. He shivered under blankets despite the heat.

Although one of the nurses at Prem Dan had guessed the man’s injury could be something as benign as a pulled muscle, one of the doctors at Mercy Hospital said it could be something as serious as HIV. And it was not long after I heard that shocking assertion that I learned the man’s name: it was Paul Mondle.

The doctors decided Paul would need a number of blood tests, and that his leg would need surgery. And after all the related decisions and plans were made, and after Paul was lifted onto a gurney and wheeled into his hospital room, Sister Patricia gave him a bag; inside were a change of clothes, a package of cookie “biscuits”, and three greasy pieces of bread.

The process had taken hours, and although I was glad to be a comfort to Paul as he nervously and feverishly awaited treatment, I still didn’t know exactly what I was doing or being asked to do. Sister Patricia must’ve realized this because as we were leaving she looked at me and said very clearly, “You will visit him every day.”

She had said something similar while we were still at Prem Dan, but I had assumed she wanted me to greet Paul during meals or offer him a shave each morning; I had assumed he would be staying at Prem Dan like the rest of the men. But now that I knew he was going to be at Mercy Hospital for upwards of seven to ten days, I realized that I’d been asked to change my schedule and my routine. And as I selfishly thought of the inconvenient consequences of this change, I wondered if I really knew what Sister Patricia had meant. Perhaps I had misunderstood; perhaps she was asking a question; perhaps she had meant, “Will you visit him every day?”

But then with a sudden intuitive certainty I knew that even though the nun’s message could’ve been skewed in translation, I was still going to do exactly what she’d said. I was going to visit Paul Mondle at Mercy Hospital every day.

So for the last two weeks, that’s what I’ve been doing.

In the early morning I ride the commuter train to Prem Dan as I did in the months before I left India in June. I squish into the hot crowd; I look out at the train station. And in the last few weeks I’ve seen a man wearing a t-shirt that says, “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things”; I’ve seen grey smoke rising from piles of leaves and garbage being burned alongside the train station and seen thick black smoke rising from other trains; I’ve seen a tiny woman with chopped-off hair wearing a dirty shapeless brown dress and a purple scarf and dragging a chain hauntingly padlocked around her ankle. I’ve smelled the warm funk of crowded human bodies and the stench of grey and brown scraps of leather tanning in the heat.

At Prem Dan I hang laundry and shave faces like I’ve always done. And I hear pigs screaming before they are slaughtered and hear traffic rumbling nearby; I see hundreds of curly white flower petals fall from trees like surreal summer snow, and I smell the petals’ girlish perfume rising warmly from the ground; I see the familiar faces of old patients and see new faces as well.

(A new patient in a wheelchair motioned for me one morning and nodded mutely to his gory foot; I knelt next to him and saw that three of his toes were torn away; his wound was so deep that his muscles and tendons visibly bled and pulsed along the exposed bones; I grasped his hand and he began to cry softly; I put my forehead to his and I cried softly too.) 

(An old patient named George Wilson Mantell has been at Prem Dan longer than I have. He is a grey-haired blue-eyed Anglo-Indian and notoriously impolite. He speaks fluent but mumbly English and has told me to hurry up every time I’ve shaved him, and has told me that I don’t understand my own language when I ask him to repeat himself. He has called Prem Dan “a horrible joint” and when asked to explain why he’s said, “Don’t ask me that question or I’ll tell you more.”

George’s right leg was seriously injured in a car crash, and because of infection it once looked like a bandaged elephant trunk; it now looks like a leg of normal size – a leg that is healing – and George sometimes seems to be healing too. Almost every day he asks me to pray to “Our Lady”, who he says is like his own mother. He asks me to ask Our Lady to help him get better because he’s “just a poor boy who wants to go home.”)

My early morning routine is much like it has always been, but later in the day I don’t chat with volunteers or serve lunch as I once did. I go visit Paul.

After bussing or rickshawing to the intersection of Acharya Jagadish Chandra (AJC) Bose Road and Park Street, I walk the short distance to Mercy Hospital; I usually stop to eat mouri or drink fresh coconut water on the way. And when I get to the hospital I register at the “help desk”, flirt with the girls wearing wide-collared maroon shirts and beige neckerchiefs, and hustle up three flights of stairs to Paul’s shared room.

The first time I visited him – at the request of the hospital nurses – I dropped off soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a comb; since then – at Paul’s request – I’ve brought fruits, cookies, and a Bengali newspaper. Because Paul speaks very little English, and because I speak even less Bengali, we don’t talk together very much. I ask the bilingual nurses to translate the important things, but mostly I just keep Paul company. I sit with him; I read; I look at plastic tubes and paint-peeled yellow cabinets; I notice Paul’s English-speaking roommate smoking in the bathroom; I see nurses silhouetted at sunny windows; I put my hands on Paul’s forehead and chest, and I pray.

(Once I was asked to pray for a man across the hall. The man’s niece was talking to Paul’s roommate, and after seeing me pray with Paul – and after perhaps confusing me for a plain-clothes clergyman – she asked me to also pray for her uncle and showed me to his room; I stood at the bed with the rest of the man’s family and prayed for strength and health.)

It’s a new routine, but it too has become familiar. After I visit Paul, I walk through the neighborhood edging the Park Circus seven-way traffic intersection. And even though the monsoon is presumably over, I sometimes walk through light rain that falls – or floats – to the ground and admits the sun’s bright light, and in which children play with ducks next to big piles of rain-glistening green bananas and watermelons.

The day of Paul’s surgery was after a few days of tests and rest, and only then did I start to combine and comprehend what I’ve been experiencing. I went to see Paul in the morning, and was told that the operation would take place later in the afternoon, and that I should come back then. The nurses and Paul himself seemed to be expecting me to return; I didn’t say so, but I didn’t want to spend my entire day going to and from the hospital and waiting for Paul. I smiled and said I would come visit him the next day, and he conceded with a look of anxious disappointment.

I left Paul’s room and walked down one flight of stairs. I stopped and felt a twinge of silent self-reproach; I felt angry about the unspoken pressure to sacrifice my day; I felt guilty for my own selfishness; I said “Fuck” out loud.

In that moment, I decided to come back. And although I then realized I was standing in the “Donna-Mae Moore Mother and Child” maternity ward, literally five feet from the room where newborn babies lay swaddled in blankets, and that I’d just said the worst word I knew in one of the least appropriate places to say it, I felt like I’d done the right thing; I’d made the compassionate choice.

When Paul actually went into surgery, I didn’t do very much. He was wheeled on a gurney to the “Operation Theater”, and I was told to wait outside on the stairs until the surgery was finished. But before he went inside, Paul seemed to be struggling in his bed. One of the nurses said to me, “He is too much afraid.” She asked me to come stand with him for a moment while they prepared the surgeons. So I did. I stood with Paul and held his hand and looked into his frightened eyes. I don’t know if my presence was a real comfort or not, but I remember thinking then that Paul truly seemed to need someone there at that moment.

Paul went into surgery, and about an hour later he was wheeled out of the “OT” and back to his room. I spoke to him as he was being moved, but I don’t think he recognized me; he was groggy and incoherent from the medicine he’d been given, and I understood he’d be barely conscious for a long time; I encouraged him as best I could, told him I’d be back the next day, and left.

Since his surgery, Paul’s recovery has been marked and consistent. Every day he seems more animated, talkative, and healthy. His up-sticking hair remains uncombed, but his eyes are less sluggish and more bright. I still have not heard a definitive diagnosis, but it is easy for me and for Paul to be hopeful now.

…During the last week, Kolkata and the Missionaries of Charity have been celebrating Mother Teresa’s centenary. In honor of her hundredth birthday, symposiums and film festivals have been held, and a special Mass has been celebrated; throughout the city, it has been a time to honor and celebrate the life of “Mother”.

So when Paul asked me to get him a Bengali Bible from “Mother House”, I was glad to go. Mother House is the Missionaries of Charity hub in Kolkata and the home of Mother Teresa’s tomb, and since I had not attended any of the major centenary activities, I thought a visit might somewhat soothe my growing desire for both community celebration and personal pilgrimage.

As I rode the rattling tram from Mercy Hospital to Mother House, I thought about need. I asked myself if I thought prayer was necessary, or if comfort in a time of fear was necessary, or if community and kinship were necessary. All of these things can make us feel good, but do we really need them? And what would it mean if we did?

At Mother House I asked the nuns at the door if I could borrow a Bengali Bible. They said they would try to find one, and that meanwhile I should wait in the inner courtyard. I walked in and took off my shoes (one of five “necessary” pairs I brought to India), and then I saw Sister Mercy Maria, who I’d hoped to see. She has helped me in a number of ways since my first arrival in Kolkata, and because of her continued kindness and generosity, I feel able to trust her; I feel like she supports me.

I told her about the work I’d been doing lately, and surprised myself by adding that I’d been feeling isolated. I hadn’t said so to anyone; I hadn’t said that I’d been feeling overwhelmed and lonely; I felt my emotions rising within me as I spoke; I wasn’t expecting to feel a visceral response to my own admissions, but I did; and Sister Mercy Maria seemed to understand.

She and I talked for a short while about ways to re-involve myself in the community. I felt better and felt affirmed, and even though the other nuns weren’t able to find a Bengali Bible, I felt like the trip to Mother House had been meaningful and worthwhile. Before leaving, I decided to say a short prayer at Mother Teresa’s tomb.

I knelt on the stone floor in front of the flower-covered stone tomb. I closed my eyes and began to pray, and suddenly I felt a second rush of emotion, far more intense and powerful than the first; I reached out, flattened my palms on the tomb, and felt my fingers and hands begin to shake; I felt my belly rise and fall and tremble with expansive breaths; I felt an overwhelming heartache and felt its release; I felt myself accepting pain and sadness and solitude; I felt the catharsis I needed. I wept.

Shortly afterward I rose and walked outside, my face still wet with tears. Thinking of all the things I need and don’t need, and feeling the joyful sublime exhaustion of emotional surrender, I was brought back to the world. And then in spite of myself, with sudden anger and wisdom and idiocy and gratitude and grief, I said “Fuck” out loud once more… because someone had stolen my shoes.

But I probably didn’t need them anyway.

And so a part of me remains there still

After the time I spent in Dallas, I went to Miami to visit my father and my step-mother Cecilia. My father used to own a house in Coconut Grove; there were Florida pines and hanging orchids in his backyard; peacocks stomped on his roof and lizards skittered across his walls and doves perched in his trees and raccoons drank from his pool. Now he and Cecilia live in a house in Coral Gables. Their two fluffy cats Ben and Sam live there too, and my father’s collected paintings – amid sketches by Picasso and Rivera – hang on the walls. The neighborhood and the house itself are now different, but the spirit of the home is very much the same: it is a place to talk and eat and rest.

The house in Coral Gables is close to the big orange Biltmore Hotel where I once swam alone in the oversized pool in the shadows of Grecian statues, and where we all went to have brunch and drink mimosas with my dad’s friends Henry and Margaret; the house in Coral Gables is where I watched Avatar and Papillon, and where I ate Spanish tortillas and pecan pastries for breakfast and fried yucca and plantains and red beans for lunch; and it’s where I slept restlessly and anxiously the night before I saw Anne for the first time since last summer.

Things had never really ended between us. Last year we were a couple in July and broken up by October; our couplehood was brief but we’d been friends for years; and I’d planned to visit her in November in Switzerland near the Italian border where she was then (and is now) living, but that trip never happened. We stopped talking for a while but something wasn’t finished; I’m not sure either of us knew exactly what that was back then.

Anne’s family lives in central Florida and some of her friends live in Miami. During the time I was staying at my dad’s, Anne was at her parents’ house and planning to drive south to Miami for a party. We tentatively agreed to have lunch together, but I had very low hopes; I assumed our reunion wouldn’t happen; I assumed Anne would do whatever she wanted regardless of how it made me – or anyone – feel as a result. I was still bitter and scared and wounded, and it just felt easier to resent the person I’d once loved; it just felt easier to expect the worst. So I did.

I spoke to Anne in the morning on the day we were supposed to meet. She sounded tired and I thought she was simply going to cancel. But she didn’t. She gave me her friend’s address and we decided when I would pick her up; she said she would be sleeping until then.

I was nervous. I organized my room. I ironed the shirt and pants I planned to wear. I tried to read. I went for a walk through the steamy neighborhood. I showered and got dressed and I cleaned up my father’s car. (My father drives a 1988 Porsche Carrera 911. It’s navy blue with a soft convertible blue top. It’s gorgeous, and my dad agreed to let me borrow it for my lunch with Anne.)

With some time to spare, I drove the short distance from Coral Gables to the University of Miami, across from which was the apartment where Anne was staying. I struggled with the Porsche’s nuanced transmission and steering; predictably, I also got lost on the way. When I finally arrived at the Red Road Commons complex, Anne was already standing in the street. She got in the car and we hugged awkwardly in the small interior. She had traces of glitter in her hair and black makeup smeared faintly around her eyes, and she said she was still painfully hungover. It was 2PM.

I didn’t know the neighborhood and neither did Anne. We drove to a mall across the street and searched for a restaurant before impassively choosing Dan Marino’s Town Tavern. I don’t remember what Anne ordered, but I ordered a roasted vegetable sandwich on grilled focaccia bread; and I don’t know if it was the effect of the food or the cold glasses of lemon-water, but despite its many inauspicious beginnings, our reunion transformed from what could’ve been a disappointing final confrontation to a real reconciliation.

I had supposed Anne would not want to revisit old grievances and mistakes, so I was surprised when she spoke openly about our shared romantic past. Without prompting from me, she apologized for the things she thought she’d done wrong and addressed some remaining sources of pain; she spoke sincerely and compassionately; she said she’d had impossible expectations of our relationship, and that she’d become resentful when she was disillusioned by the flawed reality of our time together.

Our conversation lasted for hours. And during those hours I remembered something: I remembered what it was like to be Anne’s friend. I felt traces of remaining passion, jealousy, lust, anger, and all the things troubled couples feel, but even as I noticed and remembered Anne’s long legs and short temper and the endlessly shifting plays of green and blue and grey and yellow light and color in her eyes, I also felt a genuine warmth and platonic affection for her that I’d almost forgotten. I felt my associations with all the things that remind me of Anne start to change from torturous sources of spite to bittersweet reminders of earnest friendship. I felt forgiveness.

I dropped her off at her friend’s apartment not long afterward. We wrote to each other that night and in the days and nights that followed, and we even talked on the phone a few times. Our renewed friendship is not without challenges, but it’s been a source of hope and joy to have Anne back in my life.

Two weeks after Anne and I re-connected, and after snorkeling on Key Largo with my brother Cristian and his girlfriend Karen, and after celebrating my father’s 67^th birthday at an Italian restaurant called Calamari’s, I left Florida for New Hampshire. I was leaving for my friend Neal’s wedding in Concord, and as a parting gift, my father gave me a silk pocket square that matched the grey suit I would be wearing as a groomsman in the wedding party. (I am starting to realize only now the depth of my father’s generosity as it manifests in so many small and great gifts. As a young man I expected – and even occasionally resented – the things he provided for me; I have tried to express my appreciation to him now, but sometimes I fear my words will always fall short of my gratitude.)

Neal and I became close friends during my senior year at St. John’s College in Annapolis. In those days Neal breakfasted every morning on cigarettes and coffee, played croquet for the curiously illustrious St. John’s team, wore a yellow mohawk, read poetry, and drank beer. I’d seen Neal a few times since my graduation, but as I approached the Manchester airport and gazed out the airplane window across the rolling, woody, and sparsely populated New Hampshire hills, I felt deeply nostalgic and giddy about our coming reunion.

I met Neal and the other groomsmen at the Manchester Holiday Inn. We all swam in the little indoor pool, drank clear corn-whisky from a mason jar, and laughed freely; we were together at last. And that night was Neal’s bachelor party.

The actually-two-day party’s public highlights included dinner at a Brazilian churrascaria called Gaucho’s, drunken karaoke, and an early morning trip to the Manchester Firing Lines where we fired rifles, handguns, and even a Thompson submachine gun (a.k.a. the Tommy gun). During the night and in the morning we reminisced about school and old friends and our wild roadtrip from Annapolis to Santa Fe.

The rehearsal dinner was the following night at a rented cabin outside of Concord; the place was beautiful and quiet and surrounded by woods. We ate dinner outside and I talked with Brooke’s great aunt Mary, with the Maid of Honor’s Chilean boyfriend Rodrigo, and with Neal’s profoundly pious and thoughtful Best Man Bronson. Neal gave each of the groomsmen engraved silver flasks, and as the evening cooled and quieted Brooke and Neal asked for the attention of their guests so they could thank everyone and toast one another.

Their toasts were among the most charming, endearing, and touching things I’ve ever heard two people say. Neal told a story about the first deep conversation he and Brooke ever had, and how he realized then that he’d found a friend for life, and how he realized only later that he’d also found a partner. And Brooke spoke about Neal’s love of life and of others, and about his constancy, strength, gratitude, and joy. I don’t know how everyone else responded, but I know I’m not the only one who was moved to tears.

The wedding itself was held the next day at the historical Shaker Village. The serene colonial grounds, presumably preserved very much as they were centuries ago, seemed fitting for the humble and intimate open-air ceremony. I admired the hills and ponds and gravel paths; I browsed the gardens’ onions, yellow flowers, black butterflies, and flax; I thought of Robert Frost.

In the electric minutes before the ceremony, the wedding party stood behind the congregation, slightly hidden by swaying stalks of corn. Brooke was walked into position with groomsmen and bridesmaids obscuring the view of the curious crowd, and of Neal, who stood before the guests in a white linen suit, a lavender shirt, and a purple boutonniere. Brooke’s mother reassured her daughter as the wedding party processed before her; and once all men and women were in place, Brooke – the shimmering blushing blonde and white bride – walked over grass and through sunlight to the groom.

Neal’s mother served as officiant, and the wedding was as sincerely warm as it was evocative and lyrical; the bride and groom stood under a tree; the readings were poems; the afternoon’s golden breeze glittered and played its music in the leaves. The couple kissed, and again people wept with joy.

Afterward we ate and drank and danced. Neal and Brooke first danced as a married couple to “Such Great Heights” by Iron and Wine, and they and all the guests ended the night dancing to “Love and Happiness” by Al Green. The bride and groom were driven away under a bright shower of yellow sparklers a short time later, and I joined some guests for late-night drinks at our hotel; and in the morning, I boarded the first of three flights that would eventually take me back to Dallas.

The flights were not easy. Although I had made some effort to drink moderately and slowly the night before and during the week, I was feeling the lasting effects of far too much alcohol. But the sweet images and thoughts the wedding week had nestled in my mind and heart did much to ease my emotional, physical, and social weariness. And moreover I had practical concerns: I needed to respond to all the people I had electronically ignored for the last few days; I needed to write; and I needed to find a ride home from the airport.

My mom and step-dad were traveling that weekend; they were not able to pick me up. I considered the other friends and family members I could call, and decided on my friend Rob, who I had driven to the airport early in the morning a few weeks before. (Rob’s wife Nicole was a friend of mine in highschool and has become a very good friend since. She and Rob moved to Dallas around the same time I was living there with my brother, and the three of us bonded through yoga classes, vegetarian dinners, and the Austin City Limits music festival.)

Rob had been one of the people whose messages I had not lately returned. He’d emailed and texted me saying he wanted to talk before I left for India, so I was glad to have a chance to see him, for personal and practical reasons alike.

I can’t remember if I confirmed my ride home with Rob first or not, but I know I called Nicole while I was still waiting for my last flight. And I can’t remember everything else she said, but I know she told me – I can remember her saying – that she and Rob were “breaking up.”

Rob picked me up at the DFW airport a few hours later and said the same thing. But he used the word “divorce.” He said that night what Nicole would later echo: that the separation had been amicable and that each person wanted the other to be happy and that they both felt like it was the right thing to do. That they both felt suddenly free.

I was glad to know that they each saw the positive side of their divorce, but my heart also swelled with empathy at their pain. I was sad to think that they would no longer be the loving partners they once were – or seemed to be – and I was sad that our triply-combined friendship would now be a divided one. Of course the crisis was theirs and not mine, but I nonetheless felt myself considering their divorce in the context of my recent experiences.

Even in the affirming afterglow of Brooke and Neal’s wedding, Rob and Nicole’s divorce was a deep source of doubt. I wondered how sustainable love really was, and I lamented the duality – the beauty and tragedy – of finite bliss.

In the context of my own experience and attitude, with doubts and lamentations included, I have not given up on romantic love. In some ways I feel I’m only just now starting to understand and become ready for it. And even though I’m currently experimenting with sustained erotic abstinence (and even though upon returning to India I felt the increasingly heavy pressure to find a partner lifted from my back like a block of ice suddenly and impossibly turned to steam), I don’t believe my changing perspective is irrelevant. Narrowly I am not seeking romance, but broadly I am opening myself again to the pain and pleasure of love; in a way, I believe I am healing.

Part of that healing is acknowledging grief, honoring the past, finding balance, and moving forward. And it is also remembering the wisdom of other people. Now, as I think of love and its widely varied and sometimes problematic pleasures, I remember what Brooke said the night of the rehearsal dinner, and what Neal’s father Bruce said the night of the wedding.

In addition to praising Neal’s virtues in her toast, Brooke said she had once imagined love to be “forgiving, gentle, joyful.” She said she had idealized love, calling it “the love of stars, a constant peaceful moving in tandem, choreographed by some divinity”; but she “had all but come to believe that this is not true, that no real love is like that.” She had told herself “to stop wanting this kind of love, stop needing it, and to be happy with a flawed human earthly love.”

And then she said to Neal, before family and friends and with tears in her eyes, that now everything had changed. “This is before I met you,” she said, “and once with you my eyes adjusted and I saw that the love of stars had settled quietly, almost unnoticed, between us. I have come to know this love, our love, to be utterly gentle and endlessly possible.”

The next night, in a small idyllic barn, Neal’s father stood before the same family and friends to read a sonnet he’d written. Almost as if in reference to Brooke’s toast the night before, he movingly said that “The stars align and call upon the night / To give its blessing for those joined as one.” But it was the third quatrain that moved me most – emotionally and philosophically – because it acknowledged what we must all acknowledge as we approach, accept, and cultivate romantic love in our lives: “Though time will set its trials upon their way, / Though in our flesh we know both joy and pain; / Still night will give its power to the day, / And daystar arc its light within the rain.”

Committed romantic love is a great gift, but it may also be our greatest challenge. It changes shape, becomes difficult, changes shape again, and surprises us. And it is in that context that I remember the last thing Anne and I communicated to each other the day we met in Miami. I wrote an email to her that evening; I wrote that there was something I’d wanted to say to her all day – and that I’d even felt rise in my throat – but never felt right actually saying. But I wrote it that night. And after she read my email she wrote the same thing back to me and said she’d wanted to say it all day too. Ironically, in what may seem to be an opposite context, as a beginning and not an end, I believe it was the same thing Brooke and Neal said to each other in so many touching and beautiful ways during their wedding week.

It was: “I love you and I always will.”