The Power Of Prayer

Frankly, I am not writing this article to get comments nor ratings. It was seething inside and I didn't want to burst like an over-inflated balloon.

When last week my sister in law rang up just before lunch time, she sounded incoherent and hysterical. I knew my brother had been to Baroda, an industrial town in western parts of India where they have an apartment. They live with their two daughters at Bombay [Mumbai]. He was to take up a new job at Oman in the bubbling middle east, as he is quite used to working there with almost a decade's experience of working at Saudi Arabia.

I gathered bits of information barely recognizable from her sobs and wails -and it seemed something drastic had happened. He was hospitalized, partially paralyzed and fortunately she had her elder brother around -who's been more of a male parent to her than a brother since he happens to be nearly two decades older to her. Vandana, inbetween regained composure and talked coherently but I felt all my words and phrases, entire sense of articulation deserting me like fair weather friends when I needed them the most. When I rang off after saying let us all pray, there is little we can do, the cellphone in my hands seemed like a miniature prankster more than a handy device that is now a lifeline to so many of us on a global scale. A violent gamut of emotions frothed inside and I could barely think straight for hours.

By the evening I had worked up a lather of worry, anxiety, indecision and yes, a dollop of fear too.  Here I was nearly two hours of flight time away on the south eastern coast of India, which seems more like a continent than a country, and there they were in Baroda near the western coast.  My job would not permit me to leave immediately -and all the horror stories of acquaintances who had collapsed on the dinner table with brain haemorrhage became suddenly a three dimensional phantasmogoria that allowed me little sleep that night.

I spoke to my wife, to friends and later to Vandana's [my sister in law] brother who seemed perfectly poised, even hopeful of a recovery when we all were dissolving like a lump of sugar in this liquid of worry and anxiety. All said I must hurry over for this looked like a dangerous phase.  So next day I made the arrangements to leave, getting a seat on the sunday's evening flight to Bombay [Mumbai] from where I could take a smaller airplane to Baroda, or a train or a bus -whatever. Sunday was two days off, and those two days saw me sweat and fret like a kid left in a kindergarten by parents to teach him fundamentals of human interaction. I prayed silently for hours whenever and wherever possible.

It seemed, he was slowly responding to the overall treatment.  The MRI scan showed a tiny blood vessel had ruptured in his brain, there was a menacing blood clot that threatened to block  off blood supply to some vital organ or the other. The omplexities of modern medical technology are not only awesome, they turn awfully scary too because the more you know the more miserable you get, realizing then thousand more probabilities and even possibilities. I was phoning up people like mad, and luckily for my brother both his daughters who work at Bombay had turned up too through a serendipitious chance. They started massaging the soles of his feet, so that some nerves get hopefully activated. They were literally pouring a deadly mix of medicine down his gullet to achieve several goals, mainly to reactivate the nerves fully, with a degree of success too.

I have a close friend I have never met, Natasha Mukherjee now at Manilla, Philippines, who has a link to a massively organised prayer group operating worldwide. I usually turn to her when my brain feels to numb to handle a crisis, knowing that power of prayer is something of a miracle I can always bank upon. Two year back my own daughter Mimi had been going through dizzying spells that got her hospitalized four times in two months, and a bunch of specialists could not pinpoint any reason. The same prayer group had swung into action and when I had rushed home then, she was hale and hearty after two days of a comprehensive check up and including an MRI scan that traumatized her.

Ashphaque my brother, had regained strength and coordinating ability that allowed some movements, had begun to talk in a slurred and indistinct manner that only Vandana and the kids could follow. Once he tried talking to me on his cellphone, whilst I was driving through a particularly annoying stretch in Anna Nagar stretch here in Chennai. I couldn't understand him, though he sounded pretty positive on the whole.  I redoubled my efforts to detach myself from the routine and reach him before the Democles Sword in the form of that tiny blood clot in his brain actually fell.

The journey to Bombay was fine, and there I discovered there were no late night flights to Baroda,  only early morning ones, so  I decided to catch a bus from Andheri or Borivali, one of the northern suburbs on the highway to Baroda en route to Ahmedabad. On seeing the driver I went up and asked him what time would the bus reach Baroda. He gave me a very roundabout reply to my amazement. Later he told me that this was an inauspicious question. Whenever a passenger asked him such a question, the bus had always got late. So we would be lucky to reach by evening. Scheduled arrival was 6.00am, by the way.

As luck would have it there was non-stop rain, flooding of most rivers and a massive traffic snarl about which Vandana had warned me, saying the road was very bad around Ankleshwar area -barely 100KMs before Baroda. On waking up I found we were crawling through the traffic with trucks and buses queued up for up to ten kilometers or more... and I rang her up to say probably we were at Ankleshwar. The next time she asked me just before noon, when I was lucky to get a cup of tea, with my head splitting and the world spinning - I had to tell her we were far from Surat, meaning another 100 KMs to go before the bad roads began. Even the laptop had chosen to get into its hibernating mode, since the battery lasted barely an hour.

Nearing Surat, when we crossed the so-called new bridge on the river Tapti [or Tapi], that seemed full to the brim, I was horrified to see the bus waiting for clearance when we were nearly eight percent through, just two spans to go. Whenever a truck or bus came from the opposite side, I felt our own bus go up and down as it we were on a giant tampoline. I felt my heart throbbing somewhere around my throat, for the next ten minutes as we crawled out, for I don't know how to swim and a fat lot of use swimming would be when we plunge into a river in spate, I told myself. Luckily nothing happened. The recent floods had left that area buried under two feet of muck with carcasses smelling awfully. Villagers were doing the cleaning up and spraying of pesticide powder as the local government was caught off guard.

It was nearly sun set time when I made the next mistake, of getting off at a far eastern side on the highway, since the bus was taking the bypass route. Another hour wasted in riding a rickety three wheeler, an auto-rickshaw that showed me nearly one third of the entire city before depositing me at the destination.

Ashphaque had been discharged from the hospital, in the mean time, and he was lolling in bed when I entered their drawing room. Words deserted me again, when I saw him there with a plastic tube about one meter long, dangling from his nose, presumably for feeding him a liquid diet. He had lost considerable weight. Words, those thoroughly unreliable friends of mine, however returned to him  -to my surprise. He began talking to me in a normal tone, with a loud voice and clarity. He probably forgot he was recovering from an accident... again I was too deeply touched to say anything except the greetings.

He was hiccuping roughly at every thirty or forty seconds...later I found out it was due to the plastic tube perhaps causing an excess of acidity and thus exciting his diaphragm. He got up and hugged me, which was another miracle, because he seemed to have regained his balance, strength and general health.The miracle was too massive for words then, as it seems even now.

On advice from close friends, I made it a point to talk to him pleasantly, and provide a comic interlude now and then too. He told me later at night that on this late encounter with me, he had not only regained normal speech, his hiccups had slowed down noticeably too. We selected then the name of Sanjay Pattani, one of his schooldays cronies and a court jester sort of a person whose love for music is legendary -to ask him over. Perhaps Ashphaque wanted to create an ambience around him that could shatter the nightmares of the intensive care unit he had just left. I know how soul-crunchingly depressing that can be, having spent a night in one some years back. One longs for normalcy to return to one's life, with a sense of sheer desperation.

I stayed with him for three days, and Sanjay with his acerbic wit  and his hilarious stories, provided us with more music than we had hoped for. By the time we hit the sack finally it was nearly dawn, I guess. But this overdose music and hilarity was working wonders on the patient, we all had been watching.

Now that I am back in Chennai, in the rut of the daily routine or life and work far removed from all that I experienced there at Baroda, the visit seems to have been a very worthwhile adventure. The last problem still bothering Ashphaque is the fact he cannot swallow even liquids, and is stuck with the force feeding tube. I am sure it is a matter of time, for his physiology has always been excellent along with a very highly developed sense of medical awareness.

Both these help, the doctors had been telling us- and coupled with the power of prayer, I am fully sure that even such a grave injury as a tiny blood vessel bursting in one's brain can also be overcome successfully. I am asking every one I meet to keep praying, for even a drop of His munificence is invaluable for someone who has seen death upclose, teetered on the brink and made it safely back. I have done that myself so many times...

(c) Max Babi  082206