Children in the Kingdom of God

The power of now, living in the moment, mindfulness and so on: these are the mantras by which we seek to find tranquility in the eclectic and febrile world we live in. We are constantly at siege, trapped between our misgivings about the past and our anxieties over the future. Again and again the sages exhort us to live in the present, for both the past and the future are not in our hands. But we all know how impossible that task is, for our minds are like idiotic monkeys jumping from branch to tree to the ground, purposeless and without a shred of peace and serenity.

This morning I returned from a trip to see my father, Apai, in Gujarat. Some of you who may have read my last blog https://mathewspeak.wordpress.com/2015/11/11/yoricks-songs/  (published on November 11^th 2015), will know more about him and the poignant circumstances of his life. They are no better now: the past is but a blank slate for him, the anxieties of the future do not bother him. He is almost 94 now, battling with a dementia which has wiped his mind clean, with but distorted and garbled versions of the past he had once lived in.

He cannot recognise me; and wonders who I am. He gropes for words and speaks a kind of gibberish which we, his four children, struggle to interpret. Physically he is fit and strong: he eats well, he loves to play the casio keyboard and laughs at the joke he thinks he has said. At times he says things that make no sense, and we nod our heads as if we understand.

He lives in the present, delighting in the movement of the birds and insects in the lawn and the colours of the flowers in the garden and the changing patterns of the clouds in the sky. As I sat with him in the verandah of the house that his body he now occupies, I marveled at the childlike wonder he so artlessly displays, laughing at the playful pirouette of the squirrel or the paper kite darting in the sky. A long smoke trail left high up above by a jet in the sky fascinates him. Surely this is the power of the Now: the true art of living in the moment. Is this what the Prophet meant when he said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

A year ago, he had been transplanted, after the disposal of our property in Trivandrum, to my brother’s place in Gujarat. A few months later, his wife, our mother left him, hopefully to a better place.  He barely knows that she is gone and often asks after her: is she ok? Has she had her dinner? And when the truth sometimes hits him, he weeps and asks me for a handkerchief to wipe his eyes. I can but painfully watch the decline of a man who is our father; I once thought of him as a powerful personality, an effective civil servant, an articulate speaker, an absorbing conversationalist with a great sense of humour. A self made man, who pulled himself up from his rural background and occupied the highest echelons of the administration of his state.

Sleep often eludes him now at night and he startles awake, rises from his bed and stalks the house insisting that he wants to go back to his home in Trivandrum, or even to his native village which he had left some seventy years ago. My brother, in a reversal of roles, is now the caregiver and protector, a worried and hapless ‘father’ to a ‘child’ who does not know day from night, past from present or sorrow from happiness.  He is harried and sleepless and grieves at the disappearance of the man who dominated our lives for so many years.

I returned this morning back home to my own set of circumstances in Bangalore where I too have the responsibility of taking care of the aging parents of my wife. Thank God, they are as good as they can be considering their age, managing to look after themselves as best as possible. The plane left from Ahmadabad in the morning and on the way back, I looked out of the window and saw the tracks left by some unknown river lying 30,000 feet below the wing-tip of the Boeing I was flying in. Do we too leave tracks on the sands when we go? Or do we just dissolve into the sunlit air and merge with the clouds and the rivers? This awesome space under the skies, spreading limitless from heaven to earth, surely this is where Yorick’s songs, and his gambols and his flashes of merriment have gone to. They have not disappeared forever, but lie hidden, wafting in the gentle breeze, waiting for that special gift of sight and hearing that only the most evolved amongst us can hope to possess.

So what if Apai cannot recognise me; what if I am sorely hurt when he does not call me by my name; what if I fail to engage him in a meaningful conversation? I must console myself and remain assured that his memories are still there, somewhere under the heavens, a part of the azure of the sky and the waft of the winds. He is a child in the kingdom of God and as long as we are blessed to have him in our midst, we must seek to protect the spark that flickers in his body even as we tremulously try to understand the mystery of what it all means. O God, if You are out there, give us strength, give us solace and give us the wisdom to see beyond the sight of our eyes.