TheBanyanTree: Letter to India

[Tobie Shapiro]

November 11, 20000000005



Dear Fellow Travellers,

	A long time ago, when my first husband and I were just 
starting out our lives, we knew this man, Phiroze.  Phiroze worked 
with my husband at Etcheverry Hall at the University.  They were both 
engineers of sorts.  Phiroze was a Parsi from India.  A gorgeous man. 
Just to look at him was stunning.  When my husband and I parted, I 
lost track of him.  In 1995 or so, I got an e-mail from Phiroze.  He 
spends half his year in India and half in Berkeley now.  I don't know 
what made him contact me, but we had him over for dinner once while 
he was in town.  He was still gorgeous, and older.  A very decent 
man.  But after that dinner, I lost track of him again.  Just about a 
month ago, he sent me an e-mail with some information about the first 
dramatic performance that was ever given at UC Berkeley's Greek 
Theatre.  It was an Indian play.  I don't know what made him contact 
me again.  But we've been writing sporadic letters to each other 
since.  I wrote to him yesterday.  I was afraid that he'd cringe at 
it, but he wrote back (using two fingers, according to him) and said 
he loved my letter.   I don't know why I wrote what I wrote, but here 
it is, with very little editing.

	Love,

	Tobie

                                                            *****************

November 10, 20000000005


Dear Phiroze,

	It had already been a long day when I got back home, but 
there was a pile of bills sitting on the dining room table, and I 
could finally pay them.  So I did.  I sat there writing checks for 
over an hour.  It's a pain, and it's a great relief.  Like the wave 
of well being that arrives after taking a big ugly exam, I rose from 
the table, a new woman.

	Financial situation was dire for quite a few months.  There 
is just more going out than coming in, and it had gotten to the point 
that I was borrowing money from my mother every month just to make 
ends meet so that we three of us can stay in this house.  I don't 
plan on staying in it forever, but just until the kids are more 
independent and the upheaval wouldn't harm them.  Now, their lives 
need stability; they need their beds, their rooms, their 
surroundings.  Everything was turned on its head for them when their 
father left, not the least of which was their mother's mood.  Their 
mother's mood is better now.  She even cracks jokes.

	My uncle Kuo died in May.  (Yes, this does have a connection; 
I'm not that schizoid.)  He was 96.  He is the one whom my great aunt 
Anne met in China when she lived there from 1924 to 1933, a very 
interesting time to be in China.  Kuo was 10 years Anne's junior, and 
they were an illustrious pair, famous in the family, clearly 
brilliant the both of them and leading a life they'd carved out of 
unyielding old world mores.  My great grandfather, when asked if he 
was going to let his daughter marry a Chinese man told them, "She's 
old enough to know what she's doing.  Sein sha!" ("Be quiet!", in 
Yiddish)

	The story of Anne and Kuo is long and worth reciting (like 
epic poetry, to some rhythmic chant), but not now.  I'll just say 
that they were the last remnant of my grandparents' generation.  Anne 
died in 2002 on my brother's birthday.  She was 104.  Yes, she was 
one hundred and four years old, but at the hospital they lied about 
her age, and told them she was only 99.  The humour in that still 
tickles me.  (Funny.  You don't LOOK 104.  You look more like 99.) 
That left Kuo alone in the house on the hill in El Cerrito.  An 
ordinary mid 20th century ranch style structure, about a step above a 
tract home.  Kuo had worshipped Anne, and was bereft when she died. 
He erected expensive monuments at the cemetery, and visited every 
week.  He never got over it.  And why should he, really?  At 94, to 
lose your life companion can't be easy.

	It really was when she died that Kuo started to die.  Slowly. 
It was so slow that it was hardly noticeable.  He just got more and 
more eccentric, less and less able to steer his own ship, more and 
more dependent on my mother who wound up taking care of him and his 
needs.  She was 85 paying the bills and organizing the house, 
watching over and hiring help to care for a 96 year old man.  He 
stooped, and he forgot things.  And then he started hallucinating. 
It was awful.  The last stage was losing weight.  He just kept losing 
weight, and his skin kept being stretched closer to his bones.  He 
was an alarming sight.  My mother and I went looking for a nursing 
home for him.  That was depressing.  In many of the places we 
inspected, the inmates were treated like human waste.  We would leave 
and shake ourselves to get the experience off of us.  Then in May, 
one day, Kuo just curled up and went to sleep.  He was already bent 
over and had started to curl.  On his last day, he returned to the 
foetal position and stopped breathing.

	My mother was the executor of the estate: all those scholarly 
books in Chinese.  The artifacts from all the lives he'd lived, 
politics, turkey farmer, professor, scholar, invalid.  And there was 
the house.  Kuo had written a will at the suggestion of the family 
only when he was told that if he didn't the government would take it 
all.  He was not over fond of the current administration. 
Everything was left to my mother.  There were bequests to be taken 
out of the sale of the house, to my mother, to her three children who 
took an interest in Kuo, to his family back in China.

	The sale of that house is a story in itself.  And I'll skip 
it for now.  Suffice it to say that the damn pile of wood sold for 
several hundred thousand dollars above the asking price, and there 
were multiple bids.  It was unreal how much that house sold for.  In 
fact, it was unreal and unfair.  It also put me in mind of how much 
my house must be worth.  It's chilling.  So these bequests were just 
skimmed off the top of the money when the funds came out of escrow. 
Money went to China, money was distributed to the descendents of the 
family that had taken Kuo in and made him one of them.  That means 
the indiscriminate sharing of legendary familial neuroses, and a seat 
at the table at all the Jewish holidays.  I guess that makes it a 
wash.

	It was the bequest that got deposited to my account and made 
it possible for me to walk in today, exhausted as I was, and sit 
there for an hour writing checks to pay all the bills.  There were 
people waiting for me to pay them: the dentist, the divorce lawyer, 
my therapist, my prescribing physician.  They are all paid now.

	After I got up from the table, I was flushed with a burst of 
energy.  I dragged a step stool under the light in the hallway and 
figured out how to change the light bulbs in it.  Then I pulled the 
stool over under another light that had been out for months, and I 
changed the light bulb in that.  But that was it.  My flash of energy 
was expended.  I came downstairs to the computer and found myself 
writing this letter to you.  It's more than you could possibly have 
expected or wanted.  You may wonder why I even did this.  After all, 
we barely know each other.  We have a point in history in common. 
Maybe I wrote this because you were part of my life during a far 
simpler era.  All my grandparents' generation were still alive, and 
my major worries were what to do with the time before meeting Dweller 
for lunch near campus.

	What have you been doing?
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net