The Stare

He was a jovial man. He practiced medicine and had a good sense of humor. From the time my brother got married to his daughter he had been a family regular.

We discussed everything under the sun. From the latest developments in the medical field to kin's habit of gossiping. He enjoyed every topic and used to laugh a lot. Sometimes boisterously and sometimes like an innocent child. There was always a twinkle in his sharp eyes.

He was also a down to earth man always avoiding affordable luxuries like moving about in an air-conditioned car or in hired comfort. He used to walk and take the crowded city buses for all his household and professional chores. All he wanted to have was to own a good house in city premises. And he had it and was happy about it.

Nobody ever had an inkling of the coming catastrophe.

Once there was a family gathering in our house and surprisingly this most punctual person arrived quite late in the night. What was more surprising was his justification of the delay. He laughed wryly and said, 'I just got lost. I took the second turning instead of the first and was moving in endless rounds unable to find your house. Finally I asked a passer-by and he showed me in here'. I found his explanation a little eerie. He had been coming to my house for at least ten years and it was just impossible to get lost in this little neighborhood. I forced myself to banish any negative thoughts about this.

Then the reports started coming in, slowly but steadily. He was getting forgetful unable to complete mundane daily chores; he failed to recognize a regular visitor or failed to connect the present only articulating past memories associated with the visitor; he used to go out suddenly and went missing for long time; sometimes he used to go into a stupor refusing to budge; his family had no option but to lock him up when alone; and so on.

The signs were scary. The inevitable investigations and tests followed. And finally the dreaded disease was confirmed. The Alzheimer's. Nobody had a clue why it should have happened to a life loving active person and a person hardly sixty.

Since I worked in a big metropolitan city and visited our native place only periodically I could not meet him though I needed to do so very urgently.

When I landed up in his house finally he was in a more advanced stage. His wife welcomed me to a seat and after an exchange of hearty greetings she quietly went inside and brought him in. It was very clear why I came and she took it naturally.

He gave me his usual laugh and responded to my queries with more laughs and nods and shakes. But I shuddered. An emptiness surged up from somewhere low in my stomach to form a lump just down my throat. I tried very hard preventing it from deactivating my vocal chord and wetting my eyes.

His eyes betrayed him pitilessly. The twinkle was gone. It was only a stare. Blank and expressionless. His laughs and responses were maybe only facial or physical distortions fully abandoned by his mind.

He continued to listen to our conversations with his stare momentarily withdrawing into a drooping position now and then. He was taken inside in due course of time as if some purpose was served. I felt totally defeated.

He died a little more than a year after my visit. And everybody thought or was forced to think that was the right thing to happen to him. Why go on suffering without even knowing it!

His stare haunts me even after nearly ten long years. It represents the larger malady in its personalized pain and isolation. Why are you wasting your precious grey cells, time and money to go on exploring the universe trying to find out if life forms exist in other planets? Why don't you just concentrate on your very own planet and try to save already existing life forms from such basic maladies? Try making these reversible. I wonder.