The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India - the Emerging 21st-Century Power by Shashi Tharoor

Author:Shashi Tharoor [Tharoor, Shashi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781559708944
Google: _yFGPgAACAAJ
Amazon: B006G8FPE6
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2007-10-15T07:00:00+00:00

37

The Dear Departed

I cannot omit, from a section on the people who made up my sense of “my” India, Indians who are far from famous, but who profoundly touched my life and mind, none more so than my own father.

MY FATHER'S HEART

IT WAS IN 1993, WHEN I WAS THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD and a father myself, that the telephone call I had been dreading for twenty-five years—ever since my father, then thirty-eight, had his first massive coronary—finally came. On October 23, 1993, Chandran Tharoor's heart had finally given in.

For a quarter of a century I had feared this moment. I had grown up thinking that every unexpected call at an unusual hour, every unannounced visitor, was to convey the news that my father had suddenly been taken away. Three times in the previous ten years, I had called home—three of my hundreds of regular, routine, anxious calls home—to discover he was in the hospital. Each time he had pulled through. Once, a decade ago, I had brought him to the United States for open-heart surgery and had experienced the very different anxiety of the hospital waiting room, the awful moment when the doctor emerges and you scan his face for the slightest sign of bad news before he speaks. At that time, too, the outcome had been positive. But the time had come when surgery could afford no new solutions. We hoped that my father's zest for life would itself open up the flow to and from his heart. Certainly, there was nothing in that booming voice, that irrepressible spirit, that boundless type-A do-it-all enthusiasm, to suggest that life was ebbing away, that each day his heart was failing, coming closer to admitting a defeat that my father's own manner had never acknowledged.

I was barely twelve when my father first fought for his life in hospital, while I battled fear and bewilderment and prayed for him to recover. He was the only security my mother and little sisters and I had in the world. His work, his income, his drive, kept us in style, fed and clothed us well, sent us to the best schools in Bombay. I loved him: the word games we played together, the cricket matches he took me to, the magic of his irresistible smile as his warm brown eyes lit up at me, even the daily (and all too uncritical) encouragement he provided my writing. But I also understood that my father's survival was intimately bound up with my own, that his dreams for me could founder on his own mortality.

With each passing year, of course, this became less true. As I finished my studies at breakneck speed (always fearing my luck—his health—would run out before I could attain my goals) and embarked on a career, I shed my material vulnerabilities. But the fear of his loss had become so deeply entrenched that it continued to dominate me, my own heart shuddering whenever the faint hollow whine on the telephone suggested an unexpected international call.

Now it

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