Host: Catherine Burns
[The Moth Radio Hour theme]
Catherine: [00:00:12] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Catherine Burns, artistic director of The Moth, and I'll be your host this time.
The Moth is all about people telling true stories from their lives on stage in front of a live audience. It's a celebration of both the raconteur who's been telling stories on stage for years, and the first-time storyteller who's lived through something extraordinary and wants to share it.
We have three stories this hour. A young doctor is dragged halfway around the world to save the life of a famous patient, a young woman discovers a shocking family secret in the moments before her father's death, and a single mother of four flees Pakistan right before the partition.
Our first story is from Dr. George Lombardi. He told it at our annual collaboration with the World Science Festival. The show is a celebration of the wondrous, if sometimes chaotic, lives of scientists. The theme of the night was Too Close to the Sun: Stories of Flashpoints. Here's Dr. Lombardi, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Dr. George: [00:01:15] It was a Saturday afternoon in September 1989, and I was home alone unpacking boxes when the phone rang, and a woman that I did not know started to interrogate me, “Are you Dr. Lombardi? Are you Dr. George Lombardi? Are you an infectious disease specialist? Did you live and work and do research in East Africa? Are you considered to be an expert in tropical infections? Would you consider yourself to be an expert in viral hemorrhagic fevers?”
At this point, I paused and I gathered myself and I asked the obvious question, “Who are you?” [audience laughter] She introduced herself and said she was the representative of a world figure and a Nobel laureate, someone who was suspected to have a viral hemorrhagic fever. She was calling to ask if I would consult on the case. Now, I found this highly improbable. I was 32 years old. I had just opened my office. The phone never rang. I had no patience. [audience laughter] In fact, I remember staring at the phone, trying to will it to ring. [audience laughter]
But she persisted, and she mentioned that she had gotten my name from a colleague of mine who had told her to call Dr. Lombardi, he knows a lot about very weird things. [audience laughter] She arranged a conference call. And in 10 minutes, I was transported through the telephone wires to a small hospital in Calcutta, India, where I found out for the first time that the patient was Mother Teresa. And on the line were her two main Indian doctors.
We chatted and discussed the details of the case for about an hour. And though those details are now hazy to me, what came through the staticky wires was their deep, abiding concern for their patient. These guys were worried. I wished them well as I got off the line, and I went back to unpack some boxes. She called an hour later. She said, “They were very impressed by what you had to say and they'd like you to go to Calcutta. I'm making the arrangements. I can get you out tomorrow afternoon on the Concorde for the first leg.” I said, “This is impossible,” as I had just found my passport in one of these boxes and I told her it had expired three months before.
She said, “That's a minor detail. [audience laughter] Meet me in front of your building tomorrow morning, Sunday at 07:00 AM,” well, as you can probably surmise, I'm somebody who pretty much does what he's told. [audience laughter] So, 7 o’clock the next morning, she comes careening down the block in a wood paneled station wagon with bad shock absorbers. I jump in. The next stop's the passport office at Rockefeller Center, where on a Sunday morning, a State Department official came, let us in, took my picture, and handed me in 15 minutes a brand-new passport. [audience laughter]
The next stop was the Indian consulate, where again, on a Sunday morning, the entire staff came in full dress uniform to give me an honor guard procession, which I walked past as they ushered me in to the Consul General himself, who affixed the visa to my passport. He leaned in towards me and said, “We bestow our blessings on you. The eyes of the world are upon you.” [audience laughter] Now, I knew who Mother Teresa was, of course, but this was my first realization in finding out what she meant not just to the world, but to the Indian people.
I get back in the car. “I'm getting into this. Where next?” [audience laughter] She says, “We're ahead of schedule. I'm going to drop you off. I'll be back at 11:00 AM. I'll meet you downstairs.” Sure enough, 11:00 AM, tire squealing, she pulls up with one addition. In the backseat of the station wagon are wedged five sisters of charity, five nuns, as if sitting on a perch. [audience laughter] They start handing me letters, and envelopes, and small packages wrapped in burlap and tied with twine, and handing me these things and saying, “If you see Sister Narita and Sister Rafael, please give her this from me.” I'm a courier. [audience laughter] This is all before Homeland Security.
We barrel off to JFK. When we get there, I ask sotto voce, “Why are the nuns here? They could have just given you these things. I don't understand why they had to come to the airport.” And I was told, “Well, I didn't know how to tell you this, but you don't have a confirmed seat on the Concorde. You're flying standby.” So, my eyes widened. Well, the sisters are going to go up and down the line of ticketed passengers, [audience laughter] and beg until someone gives up their seat. [audience laughter]
I stood off to the side, as I watch this scene unfold just out of earshot as these five nuns surround this first New York City businessman. [audience laughter] He's listening to them, he's looking over at me, he's looking back at them, he shakes his head, no, he's sorry, he can't help. They move on to the next one. And now, I can hear their voices, which obviously have been raised. And in about 15 seconds, he realizes that resistance is futile and he hands over his ticket. They come towards me, and they hand me this ticket as an offering. They have small triumphal grins on each of their faces, the nonequivalent of a high five. [audience laughter]
I wagged my finger at them, I said, “You sisters are little devils. I'm going to tell Mother Teresa what you just did.” And they laughed and that broke the tension. Next stop, Calcutta. 24 hours in flight. 100 degrees, 100% humidity. I get off the plane, and I'm met by my own personal private security detail of nuns. [audience laughter] They whisk me through customs and deliver me directly to the hospital where the doctors are waiting for me, and they intone, “She's deteriorating.” I go directly to her room. I'm meeting Mother Teresa for the first time. She's clearly very weak and she beckons me towards her. And I feel as if I'm about to get a blessing. And she says the following, “The thank you for coming. I will never leave Calcutta. Do not ever disagree with my Indian doctors. I need them. They run my hospitals and clinics, and I will not have them embarrassed.”
And with that, she dismisses me with a wave of her hand. I go and wash my hands, and I come back to examine her. As I go to pull her down gown to listen to her heart and lungs, the nuns that surround her lift the gown up. I pull the gown down, they pull the gown up. This kabuki dance goes on for several minutes [audience laughter] until from clear exhaustion, I just banish them from the room. After I perform my examination, I still don't know what's wrong with her. So, I do what an infectious disease doctor does. I do my cultures and my gram stains and my buffy coat smears and my ZN preps. And we agree we'll meet the next morning at 09:00 AM.
As I leave the hotel, I'm set upon 5,000 pilgrims who are holding a candle lit prayer vigil. I escape back to the hotel where I pour myself a stiff drink, and order room service for dinner, and turn on the local news, hoping it will serve as a distraction. And there I am, [audience laughter] the lead story on the evening news that night and every night. Footage of Dr. Lombardi entering and leaving the hospital with the reporter saying, “Dr. Lombardi's come from the United States to attend to Mother Teresa, as she inches closer towards death.”
The drumbeat of the death watch had begun. She deteriorates over the next 48 hours. She's in septic shock. The rude unhinging of the mechanism of life, as it was described 150 years ago as apt a description now. And on the third day, two propitious events collide. The first is the most beautiful sight I've ever seen. Small, tiny, translucent dew drops on the blood culture plate. This is important. This could be a bacterial infection. This is an important clue. And the second is the Pope's cardiologist flies in from Rome. He's an impressive man, straight from central casting. A head of silver hair, a Brioni suit, Hermes tie, Gucci loafers.
At our first meeting, when I tell the group of doctors excitedly that the cultures are turning positive, we may have answer here. And my concern is that a pacemaker that was put in several months before could be the cause of the infection. He erupts Vesuviusly. [audience laughter] Out of the question he bellows, this is a clear case of malaria. Well, if they could diagnose malaria anywhere, it would be on the subcontinent of India, and this wasn't the case.
She worsens over the next couple of days. I'm having dreams where she's actually falling just beyond my outstretched hand. And I change my routine. Rather than fleeing the hospital at the end of the day, through the side exit, I go out through the front and I walk through the pilgrims, and I'm bolstered by their love and their devotion. On the fifth day, I make my most impassioned plea. I stand before the group and I tell them that “This is septic shock, it has a bacterial cause, and it's due to the pacemaker. This pacemaker must be removed.”
Dr. Brioni, as I've come to call him, stands at the lectern carrying his copy of the Merck Manual. It's a small book that many doctors carry. He has the Italian version, Merca Manuale. [audience laughter] And in a scene right out of Shakespeare, as he talks, he's pounding the lectern. “If you listen, boom, boom, boom, to this American upstart, boom, I will not be held responsible, boom.” The sounds ricochet through the somber conference room like gunshots. And in that moment, in that instant, I looked into the eyes of the courtly, elegant Indian doctors, and they had lost respect for him.
They asked us to wait outside as they considered their options. I sat there with my vinyl knapsack and my socks with sandals. [audience laughter] He sat next to me, elegantly attired, with two equally elegantly attired attaches from the Italian consulate. They called us back in and said, “We've decided to go with Dr. Lombardi.” He silently packed his bag, left the hospital, went directly to the airport, and flew out of the country. I said, “Let's get that pacemaker out.” And they looked at me. “You want it out, you have to take it out.” I said, “I've never done that before.” They gave me this wonderful non-verbal Bengali head waddle like-- [audience laughter]
So, I went down to her room. I banished the nuns, I got a charge nurse and a basic tray, and I prepared the patient. The pacemaker box came out readily, but the wire, the wire that had been sitting in her right ventricles for several months was tethered into place and it would not budge. I twisted and turned and did all kinds of little body English, and this thing was stuck. I started to sweat. My glasses fogged over. There have been stories if you pull hard enough, you can put a hole in the ventricle, and she could bleed into her chest and die within a matter of minutes. So, in the most surreal moment, I said a prayer to Mother Teresa for Mother Teresa. [audience laughter] And this catheter came loose. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]
Thank you. I took it out, I cultured the tip, and I proved that this pacemaker was the cause of her infection. She got better. Her fever broke, she woke up a couple of days later, she's sitting in a chair, eating. My work was done, but they wouldn't let me leave. I stayed another two weeks as I was the only doctor who could start her IVs, who could thread these catheters into these tiny, fragile, elderly woman's veins. It's a skill I had picked up in the mid-1970s as a medical student at NYU Bellevue, where I learned to start IVs in the hardened veins of IV drug addicts. It's a skill I honestly thought I would never, ever need again.
When it was my time to leave, they held a press conference and they publicly thanked me, and that's why I'm able to tell this story, I flew back to my life and to my two sons. She lived another eight years, and I saw her periodically. But the best part of this for me, is that I have an ongoing relationship with the sisters. They're a wonderful group of women. They truly do God's work however you may want to define that. I take care of whatever their medical problems are.
Several months ago, The Mother Superior came in. I had to fill out some paperwork, and she brought two young novitiates with her, and she asked me, “Dr. Lombardi, can we go to the back? Can they see the pictures?” I have some pictures on the wall that memorialize this trip. They like to see the faces of the other sisters when they were so young. And I said, “Of course.”
We go to the back, and they're oohing and ahhing. And one young novitiate squeezed my arm, and she says, “Dr. Lombardi, you represent a link to our past.” And I said, “I'm deeply honored by that.” And the other sister says to me, “Dr. Lombardi, in the convent, we think of you as a rock star.” [audience laughter]
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:17:30] That was Dr. George Lombardi. Dr. Lombardi is a lifelong New Yorker, where he's in private practice. As you might guess, this story was a tough one to fit into The Moth's time limit. And Dr. Lombardi recently sat down with The Moth's curatorial producer, Meg Bowles, who directed this story, to talk about what was left on the cutting room floor.
Meg: [00:17:49] You mentioned in your story that when you're in your hotel and you turn on the TV and there you were on the TV, and I wonder, was that the moment when you felt that all the eyes of India were watching you, or was there another time that started to kick in?
Dr. George: [00:18:05] Well, I think that-- So, again, I'm operating on fumes, because I'd been awake for probably close to 30 hours. I step out of the hospital, and I'm waiting for my ride. And my ride, of course-- Again, I didn't go anywhere without my security detail of nuns. I'm waiting for my ride, but I was told that they were in chapel, so I had a stand outside. I saw this orange haze, and I thought maybe there was a fire off in the distance. And then, I realized as things came into focus, that, again, it was what was estimated to be about 5,000 people holding candles. And that was my first real moment that I saw how desperate things were that what had I gotten myself into.
Meg: [00:19:02] I love that you still have a relationship with the sisters. You also still have a relationship with the sisters here in New York, right?
Dr. George: [00:19:09] They have their main convents on East 149th street. Medical issues they call or come by, though they're a pretty hearty stock. I had some surgery several years ago, and I wake up-- Well, I'm out of the recovery room. I'm surrounded by a group of nuns who are holding hands, saying a prayer. Now, you can't buy that really. Anyway, they're very devoted to me, I'm very devoted to them.
Catherine: [00:19:51] That was Dr. George Lombardi. Dr. Lombardi practices in New York, where he says he sees both saints and sinners.
To hear more of Meg Bowles interview with Dr. Lombardi and to see pictures of him with the nuns in Calcutta, go to themoth.org.
In a moment, we'll have a story about a shocking deathbed revelation.
[Introspection by Rudresh Mahanthappa]
Jay: [00:20:28] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
[Introspection by Rudresh Mahanthappa]
Catherine: [00:21:40] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns.
Next, we have a story from Bliss Broyard. Bliss is a writer who's been telling stories of The Moth for over a decade. The story was her very first, recorded way back in April of 1999. Here's Bliss Broyard, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Bliss: [00:22:11] So, I'm at this dinner party in Charlottesville, Virginia. I've just moved to town and I don't know anybody, except for the second cousin of my ex-boyfriend, this woman named Whitney, who invited me to the party. All I really know about her, is that she's like a huge WASP, [audience laughter] which is fine, because I'm a WASP, too. I was born in Fairfield, Connecticut, which is like the land of WASPs. So, I felt like I knew the drill. They were going to have two black Labrador retrievers, a house full of 18th century furniture. And then, these WASPs always have these really threadbare linen napkins. I know it's a weird thing. they just can't throw them away.
So, we're at dinner, and Whitney turns to me and she says, “Oh, if you're free next weekend, you've got to come with us fox hunting.” [audience laughter] And so, “All right.” Which is it's really fun. We hunt all day, and then at night we have dinner and then we go dancing at the club. Okay. When her husband says, “Oh, just make sure you watch out for Chuck.” Yeah, Chuck, he's a little annoying. Sometimes he attaches himself to single women. So, yeah, you should avoid him. At this point, the hostess breaks in, and she's “Who attaches himself to single women? I'm single and nobody ever talks to me.” She's “Who's this Chuck guy? You know Chuck? You know who he is?” He's got really curly hair. He's got full features.
She goes on describing what he was wearing and what happened at the last party. And still the hostess has no idea who she's talking about. So, then John says, she's “Oh, just say it.” Chuck was the black guy. So, this whole cry goes up around the table. Chuck's black. He's black. I didn't know he was black. Well, you wouldn't exactly call him black. He's more like a high yellow. So, the hostess still has no idea who they're talking about. She's “Wait a minute. I have photographs from that party.” And so, she jumps up and then comes back with this photo album, looking through. “Oh, him. Yeah, Chuck. Okay. God, he's black. It's so hard to tell.”
So, then she starts passing the photo album around the dinner table. “Oh yeah, yeah, look at his hair. It is kind of kinky. Yeah, I hadn't really noticed. Look at his lips. Yeah, they are full. I guess his nose is sort of wide.” And then, the photo album gets to me. So, I stand up and I say, “Sometimes it's really hard to tell. [chuckles] What would you say about my hair? it's curly, but would you say it's kinky? And what about my lips? the bottom one's full. Yeah. But the top one actually is really thin. How about my nose? You think my nose is wide? If you saw me on the dance floor, you know I've got natural rhythm. But I'm not very good on the basketball court, because I can't jump.”
And then, I said, “What about my skin? What would you say about my skin? Would you call my skin a high yellow?” Actually, when this photo album came to me, I passed it to the next person, I didn't say anything. And then, about five minutes later, I said I was sick. I felt sick, [audience laughter] which I did. And I laughed, because four years before that, when my father was dying of prostate cancer, I found out that he had a secret. And then, one night, a tumor broke through the wall of his bladder, and he had to go in for emergency surgery. It looked like he wasn't going to live till morning. My mother sat my brother and I down, and she said, “Look, kids, I got to tell you what the secret is. Your father's black.”
Now, I'd always known that he was a Creole from New Orleans. I thought it meant that he was French and he spoke patois and they ate jambalaya. [audience laughter] What I didn't know, is that it also meant that he was black. But that night in the hospital, we were “Oh, that's the secret. Dad's black. Well, cool. Hey, that means that we're black, too. Multicultural. Yeah.” [audience laughter] And honestly, with my father in the next room about to go into this life and death surgery, it really didn't seem like a big deal. And so, he made it through the surgery, but he was never lucid again, and then he died a month later, so I never got a chance to talk to him about it. And pretty quickly, the secret started seeming like a big deal.
First of all, why was it a secret in the first place? That was one thing I had some trouble understanding. His whole identity crisis is another long story. So, since I have only eight minutes for mine, I think [audience laughter] I better move on. [laughs] But I thought, well, I didn't really know how to identify myself anymore. For the first 23 years of my life, I was like a white girl from Connecticut. I didn't really feel white anymore, but I didn't really feel black either. Partly, I don't look black. I thought, well, maybe I should just dread my hair and then that'll solve it. [audience laughter] But I thought, no. [audience laughter] So, I had this question about I needed to figure out-- I didn't really know anything about being black either, anything about black culture. At this point, I didn't know anybody who was black.
Well, I guess I should start with my own family. I looked up my father's family, who I had met for the first time at his memorial service. This is an interesting side note. Out of 400 people at the service, there were four black faces there, and three of them were in the front row next to me and my mom and my brother. I thought that was pretty cool. [audience laughter] So, it turns out that my father's sister, my aunt Shirley, her husband was this amazing civil rights leader. He'd been the head of the NAACP for the whole western part of the country in the 1950s, and then he started the first civil rights division for the state of California, and then he was the second African-American person ever appointed to the UN and then he was the ambassador of Ghana. He was this amazing guy. I never even got to meet him, because he died a couple months before my father.
So, I said to my Aunt Shirley, “I don't really know what to do with this information. I don't know how to identify myself.” I used to say I'm French and Norwegian, and now I would say, “Well, I'm Norwegian and black and people look at me ‘Oh, ooh, really?’” [audience laughter] I say, “Well, I'm Norwegian in Creole, which means French and black. But I didn't know about the black part until a couple years ago, and so that's why I don't see more black.” [audience laughter] And they're “Well, sorry, I asked.” [audience laughter] I'd just be going on and on. And I'm “Why am I telling them all this?”
And so, my aunt said, “Well, you know who you are. You're Bliss. That's who you are.” And she said, “You have a whole life in front of you to figure out what that means.” She said, “Look, the minute you let other people start to define you, you were just giving away your power, so don't worry about it.” So, I was like, “All right, well, I'll try and figure out who Bliss is. That seems like a pretty good question.” So, I started to read. I went to the library, and I looked up words like passing, mulatto, mestizo, and miscegenation, words I'd never even heard of before. [chuckles] I looked about the one drop rule. If you have one drop of black blood, it makes you black.
I started reading all these books that we didn't really cover in my prep school in Connecticut, [audience laughter] and reading Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. I was learning all about this rich, interesting, and painful culture. I went down to New Orleans, I tried to trace my roots, I was “Well, so, how did we get here anyway? Did we come from Africa?” I didn't know. I didn't know how we got there. And then, one night at dinner, I was having dinner with my aunt, and I asked her this question that was really weighing on me. We were having dinner up in the upper west side, this cafe. I remember the tables were really small together.
So, I lean forward and I say in a whisper, I said, “So, Shirley, is it possible that some of our ancestors had been slaves?” She gave me this look, and she sat back in her chair, and she said, “Well, not too many black people came here as immigrants back in the 1700s. [audience laughter] So, probably they were.” So, I still had many, many more questions. And so, a family member put me in touch with the head of the African-American department at Harvard. So, I call him up. He was pretty interested in my story, because my father, when he was live, had been a well-known writer.
And so, we talked, and he gave me some more books to read, and he promised that he would put together a bibliography, and put it in the mail. And then, the next time I hear from him, he calls up and he says, “Hey, I pitched the story of your father to the New Yorker, and I'm going to be doing a profile on him.” I was upset about that. [audience laughter] I'd always wanted to be in the New Yorker, but this really wasn't the way I'd imagined it would happen. [audience laughter] So, he writes this article. And in it, he says that he never even told his kids-- His kids didn't know until his daughter was 23. And so, I figured, well, I really need to work out this question of what my identity is, because now everybody's reading about it.
So, then I get this phone call from this woman. She says, “Hi, I'm your cousin Claire Cooper from Los Angeles. I grew up down the street from your father in New Orleans, and I want to tell you that, that article is full of lies. Your father is not black. The Broyard’s are white.” And I said, “Are you sure? Because, I went down to New Orleans, I looked at some records, and it said colored on the birth certificate.” “No, no, no, that's a lie. Those are people that are just trying to pin something on us.” And then, I said, “Well, you know, would it be all right if were?” And she said, “Well, it doesn't matter, because we're not.” She said, [audience laughter] “There's all these Broyard out here in California, and we're all white.” I'm like, “All right.”
I was prepared to believe anything. I'd been told so many things. I called my brother up and I was like, “Hey, guess what? We're not black.” [audience laughter] But then, I find this guy on the Internet, a writer, named Mark Broyard, and he lives out in Los Angeles, too, and he wrote this play called Inside the Creole Mafia. It's all about the politics of skin color and who's passing and who's not. And so, I call him up. I think maybe we're cousins. And he said, “Yeah, I bet we are.” I said, “So, what's the deal? Are the Broyard's black or not?” And he said, “Well, I'm a Broyard and I'm black, and all the Broyard’s I know out here are black, too.” I was like, “All right, well.” [audience laughter]
So, I headed out to California. I was like, “I got to see this for myself.” So, we all get together at a Creole restaurant called Harold & Bell's on Jefferson Avenue in South Central. I got Claire Cooper there with her husband representing the white side of the family, [audience laughter] and then I have Mark Broyard and his family from the black side. We're all having brunch. So, once again, I'm around this dinner table and once again, I'm with this group of people that I don't even really know, and lo and behold, once again, there's a photo album coming my way. [chuckles]
This one belongs to Claire Cooper, and it's filled with pictures of my relatives, this whole family I didn't even know I had, and all these ancestors going back to the 1800s, these five brothers that came over-- She said, “They're from Morocco.” So, Mark is sitting next to me, and he passes me the photo album, and he goes like this, and he's like, “Hey, check out all those white Broyards.” So, we looked at them both started laughing, because all these people looked black. [audience laughter] And we were like, “Claire, whatever, if you need to be white, all right, yeah, you know, whatever.” [audience laughter] So, I'm sitting there and the silliness of so much of this situation hit me and I thought, well, here I am, I'm a WASP from Connecticut having brunch with her black family in South Central. [audience laughter] But the real truth of the matter is, is that I felt totally at home. Thanks.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:34:35] That was Bliss Broyard. She's the author of the memoir, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life - A Story of Race and Family Secrets. Bliss and I recently sat down to talk about her father, Anatole Broyard. He was a well-known writer, and literary critic, and editor for the New York Times.
Now, this is before you wrote your book One Drop. And how much had you spoken publicly about your father and your family before you were standing on stage in front of 300 people at Lansky Lounge?
Bliss: [00:35:01] Never. [Catherine chuckles] I didn't know how it would feel. It was always a hard conversation for me. Not because there was anything that I was ashamed about. It just seemed like there was a lot of information to convey, and there was a lot of history that people needed to understand, and I had all these questions still. And so, part of the great thing about telling that story, is that it forced me to make sense of some things for myself. So, it was really incredible to share it and to have people respond and there was nobody else in the audience that said, “Oh my God, I found out that my father passed for white, too.”
But people really identified, and they were coming up to me afterwards and saying, “I never knew my family was Jewish, or my father was adopted and didn't tell me, or I was adopted.” And so, people related, which is just the great thing about stories in general is the more specific and honest and personal you are with your experience, the more it connects to other people, even if they haven't had that same experience, because they can relate to the feeling. So, it was incredible.
Catherine: [00:35:58] I asked Bliss how her father's family had reacted to her telling these stories.
Bliss: [00:36:03] With my father's family, it was so personal, the rejection. My father didn't see them. My cousin grew up knowing that he had an uncle that lived an hour away that didn't want to see him, because he was black. It's such a heavy thing to have to, how do you explain that to a kid? I can't imagine having to explain to my own kids. Somebody doesn't want to know you, because of the way you look or the color of your skin.
Catherine: [00:36:25] To hear more of my interview with Bliss Broyard and to see pictures of her family, go to themoth.org. While you're there, pitch us your own story. We listen to every pitch that comes in, and many are being developed for our Mainstage shows around the country. We really are listening. So, please call us if you have a story you'd like us to hear. 877-799-6684. Again, the number is 877-799-6684.
When we come back, we hear about a healthy woman who woke up one morning and decided that she would die that very day.
Jay: [00:37:01] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media, and presented by the public radio exchange prx.org.
[Liberty City by Jaco Pastorius feat. Herbie Hancock]
Catherine: [00:38:12] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns, artistic director of The Moth.
Our last story is from the oncologist Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. He was a part of our collaboration with the World Science Festival. Here's Dr. Mukherjee, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Dr. Sidhartha: [00:38:34] Thank you. In the spring of 1947, about six months before India would be split on the northern front into India and Pakistan, and on the eastern front into Bangladesh and West Bengal, my grandmother, who was a single mother, moved five of her boys from her village in Barishal, southern part of Bangladesh, to a safe haven in Calcutta.
Now, I use that word move very casually, as if it's something you could do very easily. You could get up and catch a train or catch a bus or maybe even a ferry. But this was literally the most deliberate, the most calculated, and the most seminal moment in her history and in the history of our family. Had she waited six months, she would have faced an incredible political conflagration. Rapes, pillages, occupations of homes, but she did move. She came to Calcutta as an immigrant and not as a refugee. And that distinction was critical for her.
She came to a home which she then could live in, as opposed to the camp which others came six months after her. She came with the full suitcase. Had she waited six months, she would have come with an empty suitcase into an over packed city. Why did she come? What made her move six months before? In fact, what gave her the confidence to move? Well, decades later, she would tell this story which became a myth in our family, and that is about six months before, around the time she lived, as many Hindus did in Bangladesh, in a relatively traditional home.
The architecture was traditional, and in fact, the home was divided up into three living quarters. There was an outermost quarter, where Muslims were allowed to step, move, talk. There was an intermediary quarter, where the accountants would sit. And they were allowed to perform business between Hindus and Muslims. And then, there was the threshold to the innermost quarter. It was impossible for any Muslim to step into that innermost quarter.
My grandmother said and maintained that about six weeks before she moved, she had watched-- Perhaps it was a vision, maybe it was real. She had watched a Muslim man cross all the way from the outermost quarter and put his leg or his hand into the innermost threshold. And this for her, whether was it a dream, was it a vision? But this for her was a seminal experience. It was a signal of something to come. It was an occupation, even if it was an occupation of that crossing of a threshold.
She went to consult her friends, her relatives who lived all around her, and they said, “That's all nonsense. You're dreaming. Why don't you stay?” Things have always been tense, between Muslims and Hindus, but there's been a stable tension here. But she wouldn't listen to them. She, in fact, lifted up, packed her bags, suitcases, and moved with her five young children.
This experience was a peculiar experience for her, because rather than making her believe, it actually made her disbelieve. And by disbelieve, I mean, she began to fully disbelieve that anyone in the world could be correct, except for herself. [audience laughter] And this process hardened her. It was as if something had broken and then reset itself like a bone or a piece of steel. And that process of annealing had, in fact, hardened her enormously.
People talk about the very loving Indian grandmother. She was the opposite of the loving Indian grandmother. [audience chuckles] In 1964, before I was born, she moved with my father which was then going to become our home in Delhi. She set up her own living quarters there with a threshold. You could only cross that threshold if you had bathed. She became incredibly austere. She would clean her floor every day, and she had only four items of clothing, and she replaced them. She would wash one to wear one. One of her measures of incredible austerity, was that she began to essentially eat the same meal every day. She would have boiled lentils and rice for lunch, and boiled lentils and rice for dinner, the same meal over and over again.
I have a couple of memories of her from my childhood. One memory is that recently while I was thinking about this story, I looked through photographs. There are many photographs of me with her, and yet not in one photograph is she actually touching me. She had become peculiarly aversive touch. And the other memory that I had, was that at one point of time, I'd made a picture of a tiger, if I remember correctly, and brought it to her, as grandchildren often do for appreciation. She looked at me and she looked at the picture, and I said, “Did you like it?” And she gave the very famous Bengali nod, [audience laughter] which means yes, but it can also mean it's horrible. [audience laughter] We've all heard about the tiger mom. She was the mom of the tiger mom. [audience laughter] She was the tiger grandmom.
Well, there are many disadvantages in life to having the same meal of lentils and boiled rice every day. But there's one advantage, and that is you live for a very long time. [audience laughter] And indeed, she did. She lived for a very long time. And then, something bizarre and astonishing began to happen to her, and that is that she began to have a very acute sense of her dying, of actively dying. I remember this, because one morning, she was about 80 years old, my father was about to leave on a tour to another city. As he was coming down the stairs, she called him and she said, “Don't go, I think I'm going.” My father looked at her quizzically, and she said, “I think I'm coming to an end.”
My father wondered about what was going on with her. He had learned by this time that usually when she made declarative statements, she was usually right. And so, he stayed back. When I came back from school, I also heard the same story, I went to her room and I said, “Grandma, what's happening? Is there something I can do for you? Can I bring you something?” And she said, “Yes, I want some sweets.” And I thought, not only is this woman losing her body, she's losing her mind. I said, “Sweets?” And she said, “Yes, I want-- There's a particular Bengali sweet which is a luxury made of milk. And she said, “I want sweets.”
So, in deference to all of this, I got on my bicycle, rode off, and I brought back a pack of these Bengali sweets, like candy. She ate five of them, and she said she had never had five sweets in the last 20 years. She felt very sated. And then, she literally, in the most astonishing manner that got on her bed and began to prepare to die. And over the next 24 hours, we watched her slowly decline in front of our eyes in full astonishment. A priest was brought in, and her breathing slowed and slowed more, and then there was that uncomfortable moment that many of us don't know which is the moment in which there's a kind of gurgling, gasping sound. It's called air hunger in medicine. And then, the air hunger subsided, and she was no more.
The next morning, we got ready for her funeral. Now, I had been to a funeral. I'd seen an Indian funeral. I'd seen them before, but I'd seen them distantly. I remember a moment when I was seven or eight years old, I went with my father to Benaras, the city where many Indians will cremate, burn their dead. I was seven or eight years old, it had rained the night before. And the ghat, which is the stone step that leads out onto the river is wet. It was slippery. And then, I was on a boat, and the boat was on the Ganges.
I rode out onto the boat with the boatman, and then all of a sudden, the boat turned a bend, and we were at the burning ghats, the ghats where actually the dead are burnt. It was an astonishing sight, a sight that takes your breath away, because all along you're on this river and all along there are these stone steps and their bodies burning, like lanterns lit along the river. There are men and women performing the rites of the dead, carrying them, moving them down into the water, bathing the dead, bringing them back and putting them on the funeral pyres and then setting them alight. And occasionally, a priest would come and shovel the still burning embers into the water.
In Plato, there's a moment in which the soldier Leontius says he cannot look upon the corpses. But as a child of seven, how can you not look? And so, I had to look. My curiosity was literally morbid. As I was watching, I saw one of these men who had previously been carrying a body, he was holding out his arms, but he was just carrying air. And then, just like that, the boat rounded a bend and we were back in the city of Benares. Someone was throwing birdseed at pigeons, there were children playing, and the normalcy of life returned just as quickly.
Well, this was what we did with my grandmother to some extent as well. We brought her over. She was now placed in a white sari. My father and I, mostly my father, we carried her into the water, we bathed her, and then we lifted her out of the water, and we moved her into the wooden pyre, and my father lit the fire. All of us, we watched until all that was left was the little umbilicus that's the last part of the body to burn, and then everything else had become ash, and gone up into smoke.
Decades later, I became an oncologist. I saw cancer patients. I still see cancer patients. I went to the funeral of a woman who had died of breast cancer. This was in Boston. It was in a church very near Boston. While I was driving that I was thinking about this woman's death-- This woman had actually died in the hospital. She'd been admitted because she had been short of breath, but she had been admitted alone. She had come from an acute care center, been admitted directly to the hospital. Her relatives, her family, had been unable to get to the hospital in time. And in fact, she had died overnight. And intern had pronounced her dead.
By the time the children had come to the hospital, she'd been fully dressed up again, as it were. I went to the funeral. As I walked towards the coffin, I noticed something unusual. I looked down and her lips-- Someone had put lipstick on this body. There was a weird chill that went through my body, it was as if the entire process had become sanitized, had become ethereal and sanitized.
And so, I went back the next morning and I talked to my residents, my interns, and I said, I asked them, “How many of them had actually lifted a body. What does a weight feel like?” It is a peculiar thing. I don't know how many of you have. It's a peculiar thing, because it is as if gravity has become changed. The word gravity, which has to do with the word grave, all of a sudden, they collide with each other. Even when you're lifting a sleeping child, the muscles cooperate with you. It is only when you lift the dead when you realize that it is a failure of the muscles, the muscles go away. What about that moment, that air hunger that I talked about? How many of you have experienced that air hunger or have seen it?
Or, of course, the thing that's written so often in literature, the idea of the light going out in someone's eyes. How many of us have seen the light go out in someone's eyes? It seemed to me then that we're actually, actively forgetting how to die. We're actively forgetting what the act of death looks like, what it seems like, what it feels like, what it weighs like. It seems to me sometimes that we've become a culture that is forgetting the rituals that are associated with death. It seems sometimes that we're like that man who's on the riverbank and we're holding up our arms, but there's no counterweight to bear. It seems as if sometimes that we're just holding up air. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Catherine: [00:50:55] That was Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. He's a staff oncologist at Columbia university medical center, and won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his book The Emperor of All Maladies, a biography of cancer.
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