My father smokes and eats too much. My mother drinks too much. He’s had a stroke; she has a stent in one of her arteries. They don’t live together, but it’s usually a health scare that unites us. With each passing day – not month, not year – I feel their growing fragility. I know it’s coming. And I think about it. Not loss, but the anticipation of it. Not death, but the fading of life. I think about the kind of caregiver I might be.
Dysfunctional families
Will I, like Deepika Padukone in Piku , be the exasperated adult that decides to blame all my inadequacies on their crippling sense of dependence? Will I, like Adil Hussain in Mukti Bhavan , reluctantly indulge their whims out of some misplaced sense of guilt for resenting them? Will I, like Matt Dillon’s racist LA cop character in Crash , channel my pain of housing a suffering parent by morphing into a hateful human being at work? Will I, like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as estranged siblings in The Savages , allow ‘family duty’ to mend bridges and lend perspective to my own dysfunctional history? Or will I, like the soft-spoken Bengali gentleman in Somnath Pal’s terrific animated short Death of A Father , quietly bemoan the procedural nature of death and its apathetic customs while bracing to repeat the whole thing with the next parent?
I see it all around in real life, and yet I choose cinema to inform me about it. Perhaps because most films identify the circularity of personal closure in these situations. They thrive on broken people finding themselves, introspecting and “improving” when faced with the inevitability of losing a loved one – a bereaved daughter unwittingly finds a soul mate in her father’s last days, a bereaved son recognises the value of living during his father’s final journey; another discovers the futility of diluting the privacy of death with the communality of religion; and bereaved siblings learn to persevere and change in the wake of their flawed father’s passing.
These are characters humbled by the very virtue of caregiving – its responsibilities and sacrifices, its selflessness and sadness. Circumstances force them to evolve; there is solace to be found in the fact that parents prepare them for greater liberations through the very ‘process’ of perishing.
Survival instinct
The truth is: sometimes, the mere fear of being held back tends to push us forward. The process of grieving, and therefore healing, begins even before the first medical report is assessed; it begins the moment we stop needing them. It begins the second we recognise that there will come a time when they need us. As a result, the stories that I’ve feared turning into are also the stories that have instilled in me the urgency of purpose. These films about different types of mourning are so affecting, and such convincing portraits of a culture I’m yet to embrace, that I may have subconsciously moulded my present to accommodate an imaginary future.
For instance, I have invariably hoarded my savings without quite realising it. It’s only lately I’ve understood that, being the only child, this subliminal ‘piggy bank fund’ might actually be the safety reservoir I intend to invade for the treatment of all the illnesses expected to befall them. I have traveled the world with a vengeance, partly driven by the urge to experience everything I can before they need me. I have worked hard, hoping to make them feel proud of me for as long as they can feel . I have unknowingly lived in a hurry, spurred on by the forecast of a phase that the movies paint as ‘cloudy, with a chance of absolution’.
In bracing for a rainy day, however, the son in me seems to have rescued the drifter in me. My ailing-parent movie hasn’t even started, but I can already hear the melancholic score of its narrative’s third act. Fictional circumstances forced me to evolve; there is solace to be found in the fact that my parents have prepared me for greater liberations through the process of surviving.
When, or if, those long hospital nights arrive, I will be a little more repairable, a little more capable of dissolving in my own tears. I might finally be in a position to be shattered, and not tragically unhinged, by their goodbyes. Or perhaps I just turn to cinema in a delusional burst of hope. A hope that since the movies aren’t real, maybe their mortality won’t be real either.
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
