Everyone asks the question with the same eyes. Anxious, yes. Sympathetic, yes. They prefer not to ask, but they know they have to.
They’ve seen me now. Time for a difficult conversation.
It’s been over a year since my father traveled to Rome to spend Christmas with his girlfriend. It was on Boxing Day that he fainted and fell, injuring his neck and becoming paralyzed from the head down. Countless hospitals, operations, doctors, flights and interviews later, he is finally home in West London, albeit transformed.
As we prepare to leave the house, we talk about the same things we always did. But now he’s telling me about the friendly bike thieves he watches from his window while his live-in caregiver performs his bed bath. We discuss our favorite vape flavors as he is plucked from his bed by a robotic arm, which cradles him in a blanket as he is transported like a stork across the room to his wheelchair.
We gossip about our golden retriever’s weight while I shove a Pret crayfish sandwich into his mouth. Then I brush his teeth and put on his coat, hat and mittens, just like he would do for me when I was a baby. After I packed his essentials into a bag, we finally set off on the long journey through Shepherd’s Bush for a haircut, the first proper one he’s had in a year.
Hanif (second from right) before the fall, with sons Carlo, Kier and Sachin from left
When my father’s girlfriend, Isabella, called on Boxing Day to tell me, my twin brother and my mother about the accident, she tried so hard to downplay it, to shield us from the pain, that I wasn’t sure whether he might have been sprained. are single.
Two days later I was on a plane with my youngest brother, Kier, to Rome to visit him in the hospital. My father doesn’t remember this visit because he was so high on drugs. I wish that could have been me. What do you say to someone who has just woken up and realizes that he can no longer move his body? Jesus would know, although I can’t say that his huge crucified statue above my father’s bed was particularly comforting.
In the weeks and months that followed, some things became clearer, others more confused. He had become tetraplegic, causing him to lose voluntary control of his upper and lower body. He had some movement, the way you have some movement in a straitjacket: his arms hung listlessly down, his legs flapped and could not support his body.
The inability to move his hands is a particularly diabolical affliction: he is forced to endure his punishment without distraction, unable to pick up a book or answer messages. When he wasn’t with friends or family, he would simply stare at the ceiling, waiting for the next arrival. A new movement in his finger was celebrated as if he had won the Nobel Prize.
After successful surgery to remove pressure from the top of his spine, we started to see improvement in his mobility. But it was slow, Sisyphean. Due to the severity of his accident and the excellent rehabilitation clinic in Rome, we decided to keep him there until he regained enough strength to travel back.
From time to time, me, my brothers and my mother – who has always remained close to him – flew to visit in shifts. Isabella was by his side all day, every day.
Sachin shaves his father Hanif
On another visit to Rome months later, we saw our beloved Manchester United play Liverpool at Anfield, a match we lost 7-0. I spent the game distracting myself with my phone. My father, helplessly paralyzed, was forced to watch the whole thing, a torture of medieval cruelty.
As I walk next to him now to get his haircut, as he rolls in his wheelchair along the shaky sidewalk, steering with his slowly recovering hand, he is buzzing with excitement about being home and the ecstasy of going to Tesco.
He wasn’t always so cheerful. The initial euphoria after the accident, his gratitude that he had survived, gave way to a deep melancholy so consuming that he did not speak much for weeks. When he returned to London to continue his rehabilitation, he was temporarily forced to stay in a dementia unit at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. One night he was startled awake by a creepy presence at his bedside, a groaning ghost dragging a torn catheter bag behind him.
“How did that make you feel?” the hospital therapist asked him the next day. Dad found himself at a loss for words.
We all did our best to cheer him up. During those summer months, our family kept a strict schedule, guaranteeing that one of us would be with him from sunrise to sunset. He was also visited daily by a procession of devoted supporters. All kinds of people: writers, musicians, directors, philosophers, chefs, psychiatrists, artists. They came in with chocolates and treats, and ideas they had on how to remedy my father’s situation.
Some would bring state-of-the-art, special voice-activated computers and immersive VR equipment. Others presented literature on hypnotherapy, neurotherapy, psychedelic therapy and sound healing. My aunts called from Pakistan to reassure us with the news that they had solemnly released a flock of pigeons and slaughtered a goat.
In these gloomy hospital rooms, my father’s large circle of friends, often strangers to each other, met for the first time. On one occasion the room was populated by a sex therapist, a psychoanalyst who had recently written a book about sex, and a chef. The conversation turned into an in-depth analytical discussion about the sandwich: the slices of bread represented different bodies, the hidden fillings symbolized the intimate exchange of bodily fluids and primal instincts.
Months later, when my father was transferred to a specialist rehabilitation clinic in north London, he was surrounded by people who had experienced similar accidents. Some had fallen while cycling, others while rock climbing, yet another had tripped over a rake in his garden. They were all paralyzed.
When I visited at weekends I would sit with a group of patients in the large airy garden room outside the main hospital during the craft sessions. The energetic young woman leading the class had been paralyzed by an infection that was destroying her nervous system. Barely in her twenties, she now taught others the difficult craft of painting with their mouths.
Some enthusiastically embraced these craft exercises. Others, like my father, couldn’t believe it had come to this. A friend he met on the ward tried to cheer him up by telling him about his carefully crafted suicide plan, how he planned to strip naked, drive into the yard and freeze to death.
We stop outside the hairdresser. I’m afraid the step to the store might be too high for Dad’s wheelchair. And I know it is humiliating for him to crash into the humble step, this mountain, at the mercy of such a seemingly insignificant obstacle. Just then, a chattering junkie in a wheelchair approaches to admire Dad’s upgraded wheels, another unwanted encounter my dad can’t avoid. With a lot of effort I manage to hoist Dad into the store.
It is a beautiful, sunny winter day. I see Dad is happy to be here again. My brothers, my father and I have been coming to this hairdresser, often together, for 15 years. While our barber sharpens his tools, my father has the same conversation with him as always.
After inquiring about the company, with our hairdresser complaining about the challenges of Brexit and the ever-increasing costs he has to bear for the mountains of hair-filled bin bags he is throwing away, my father sings the familiar refrain, for some must be the thousandth time, ‘You must be a multi-millionaire now!’
Despite his difficulties, our hairdresser has opened a new shop and a new restaurant nearby. He embodies the aspiring immigrant, but looks exhausted from the toil.
In those fifteen years I finished school and university, became a screenwriter and moved out of the area. But like most men, with a loyalty that isn’t even reserved for their lovers, I always come back. And it’s always the same. Time has a way of racing forward while remaining completely still.
I look at those same celebrity portraits on the walls, with sharp haircuts, who have probably come in for a haircut. George Clooney smiles at me, as if to say, “How’s your dad?”
Well, he’s good and he’s bad, he’s happy and he’s sad, just like the rest of us.
- This piece originally appeared in The fence Magazine.