Letting Go
ìDo you have children?î
ìI have three. I had three. My son, Rajiv, died when he was a young boy.î
While I stood outside talking to Adam on my cell phone, Maya set a place for me at her kitchen table. I walked back inside to see ìsomething before you begin workî: a mug of spicy Indian tea, a paper cup of water, two round, tan-colored chappathis, two cookies, and a handful of pistachio nuts. She stood some distance away on the other side of the kitchen, and when she told me about Rajiv she looked away, as if into another room.
Later, I walked to where she had glanced and on the kitchen counter was a small shrine . Inside an open cabinet that would normally hide a blender or a toaster was a photo of her son at about four: round face, dark brown eyes, hair cut short, and a smile perhaps coaxed by an adoring mother standing behind the photographer. On narrow shelves above and below his photo were carelfully set Hindi religious objects.
ìWhat God gives, God takes away.î
Maya seemed equally at ease talking about her son as sitting in her worship room with the sun streaming through the skylight two stories above. She wore a red sari, the same color as her third eye dot, with a flowery pattern sewn into the hem. Her white sandles were either on or off depending on which room she entered. She told me sheÃd moved to Weston thirty-six years ago and that her eldest daughter had married after graduating from Northwestern.
ìI didnÃt think Hindus believed in such a God. That sounds very Christian.î
ìWe believe in God, one God, and that we are all a small part of God. All religions are the same. The Jews have a saying, ìWhat goes around, comes around… .î
ìReincarnation?î
ìYes. We believe we have eighty-four incarnations and what you donÃt learn in one lifetime you learn in another.î
ìBut your son…it must have been rough.î
ìIt was very rough for three or four years, but when my second daughter was born I realized it was okay. And my aunt-in-law told me that if I love my son, I have to let him go. That my holding on would make him unhappy.î
ìEasy for others to say. But you were ready to let go after those years of suffering?î
ìI was, and I watched my husband. HeÃs so strong and he, better than I , accepted what was happening.î
ìYou must have gotten much closer then.î
ìWe did. We were not close before that. I hate to say it, but we werenÃt. It was an arranged marriage… ì
ìOf course.î
ì…but not forced.î
ìYouÃve accepted your sonÃs passing… ì
ìIt still hurts. Now and then it catches me when IÃm not aware.î
ìDid you talk to him at the end?î
ìOh yes. He knew more than we did. His doctor said Rajiv had the brain of a sixteen year old, though he was only ten. The doctor told his other patients they should be like my son.î
ìWere you able to say goodbye?Ã
ìNo. I couldnÃt .. .î
ìYou…î
ìI couldnÃt face the reality. You know he would have thirty-five this year.î
Today’s required reading
As a Word Doc to read on the plane to Spain.
Room with a view (Thanks to Chris)
What a far-flung and magnificent piece of writing that TAL piece is — from mute mementos to the birth of WWII, the coopting of Wagner, friendly fire and spin, the “Greater Asia Coprosperity Sphere”, and horrific descriptions of Midway and Okinawa. And that’s just the first half. A rich exploration of the tragic gulf of those who knew war but cannot teach its lessons and those who have but heard of it, even if during the course. Way too quotable by far, but knowing few will walk its prodigious length, I offer these nuggets:
On the perspective of those of us who’ve known nothing but “peace” (and not without some facetiousness):
“War, any war, is for us a contemptible death trip, a relic of lizard-brain machismo, a toxic by-product of America’s capitalist military system–one more covert and dishonorable crime we commit in the third world.”
and
“We’re smarter now–smart enough to see through war, anyway. We think it’s a sick joke to suggest that war could ever teach anybody anything good.”
And some pure prose, following some graphic battlefield reporting descriptions:
“The launch of a shell and its explosive arrival were so far apart in space and time you could hardly believe they were part of the same event, and for those in the middle there was only the creepy whisper of its passage, from nowhere to nowhere, like a rip in the fabric of causality.”
And on those who thought WWI had ripped away all veils of illusion:
“But they weren’t prepared, not really. World War I had been a generation earlier, and the military industries of the great powers hadn’t stopped their drive for innovation. The combatant nations of World War II were supplying their forces with armaments of such dramatically increased power they made those of World War I obsolete. The reporters got out into the war and discovered a scale of mass destruction so inhuman that cynicism and disillusionment seemed just as irrelevant as the sentimental pieties of the home front.”
And finally, from the second chapter (bear with me, it’s a long one):
“The bomb should never have been dropped on Hiroshima.
It’s an argument that stands on the dividing line between two worlds, the world of the war and the world after. Hersey was one of the first to write out of a dawning sense that the dropping of the bomb wasn’t the culminating moment of the war–it was the point at which the war’s graph of escalating destructiveness finally went off the scale and rendered everything that had happened before trivial. He draws this moral with typically understated eloquence at the climax of his first chapter, when he recounts what happened to all his characters at the moment of detonation. Strangest of all, he says, was the fate of Miss Sasaki, who was hit by a falling bookcase in the reference library of the factory where she worked: “In the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.”
Well, what of it? All over Hiroshima people were at that moment being pummeled to death by erupting walls, boiled alive by hurricanes of steam, and flashed into nothingness in the glare of a thousand suns. Why does it seem so ironic to be struck by flying books? Because books stood for the past–they represented the whole of the dead weight of history and culture that had just been annihilated. The bomb wasn’t the end of the last war, but the beginning of the final war to come.”
Comment by adam — March 13, 2005 @ 2:29 pm
Oh yeah, so why’d I take on the 33.5k-word text and ignore Mikey’s excellent post…….? Truth — I didn’t know what to say. Poignant, moving, well-written, fluent dialogue, but for a self-avowed voyeur, a bit voyeuristic. So I procrastinated with the required reading, whose vastness didn’t register at first, but by the end of which I’d forgotten Maya and Rajiv.
Comment by adam — March 13, 2005 @ 2:34 pm
As often happens, Adam, you focused on many of the same passages as I. IÃd like to add that this: ì”The launch of a shell and its explosive arrival were so far apart in space and time you could hardly believe they were part of the same event, and for those in the middle there was only the creepy whisper of its passage, from nowhere to nowhere, like a rip in the fabric of causality.” was presaged a few pages earlier by John HerseyÃs: But weirdest of all was the sound of our artillery shells passing overhead. At this angle, probably just about under the zenith of their trajectory, they gave off a soft, fluttery sound, like a man blowing through a keyhole.î
What prose. SandlinÃs writing rips the causality right out of my fabric.
This was more required reading by brother, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Brian who stumbled on it as Matt did his teacherÃs photo. After we landed back in Boston and I told him I had finished MattÃs Patterson crime novel, Brian said, ìYou could have read Sandlin.î He was right, and the perfect (woulda wished for some other) opportunity presented itself when we spent the day at Emerson with Flo.
That you read all 76 pages (57 in the word.doc) on this Sunday amazes me. That it subsequently flattened Maja and Rajiv does not. ItÃs a foundation shaker. SandlinÃs ability to both pinpoint pivotal parts of that war, and to paint the horror in prose, is truly impressive.
Mark, the tank commander, Schreiber has read more than half of it.
Comment by michael — March 13, 2005 @ 3:28 pm
Muchas gracias for the story. I’ve skipped over Adam’s spoilers so it will be fresh when I read it enroute to Lisbon, on the road to Madrid.
Comment by rakkity — March 13, 2005 @ 5:19 pm
And remember your promise…. .
Comment by michael — March 13, 2005 @ 6:00 pm