As Long As There Is Hope
Haresh Shah
Up until then it was the coldest winter I had ever experienced. In January 1984, the temperatures in Chicago area dipped as low as -40 to -50 degrees and chilling wind went through your bones like a sharp spear of an arrow. Nasim (Yar Khan) had come to visit from Germany. I had brought for him some extra warm clothes to the airport, because even from the arrival hall to the garage would have him frozen if not wrapped up in some additional layers over his heavy winter clothes from Europe. Even though the furnace was running twenty four hours a day, the heat generated just wasn’t enough to keep our rickety old house comfortably warm. The windows were all frozen and from the inside looking out, what you saw was your mirror image. Carolyn and I took turns waking up every few hours through the night and brave the elements – heavily bundled up and ran across the 50 feet (15.2 meters) backyard to the garage and start both of our cars and run them for fifteen to twenty minutes to make sure none of the mechanism cracked and that they would run the next morning. Even so, there was always a danger of one of them breaking down in the middle of nowhere, in which case, it would have been absolutely devastating trying to escape anywhere.
They constantly told us all day and all night long, please don’t drive unless you must. Stay home, and try to keep as warm as possible. It was not beyond reason that our good old antique furnace could just give up at any moment. But it marched on. Except the water in the radiator in my study froze and a hairline crack appeared through the thick metal casing.
And yet, you can’t stop living. We bunched up in the newer of the two cars, Rosy Renault and drove some thirty miles to South Holland from Evanston to have dinner with Denise and the Abbott clan. It was hairy on the way back. The car was making all sorts of clanging noises that we had never heard before. The gear shift was behaving a bit funny, but we had already reached the cruising speed and inside the car was relatively warm. We all held our breaths, probably each one of us praying in our own way that the car would stand up to the brutal cold and the wind chill, and would get us all home safe. It did.
All huddled together in the living room in front of the roaring fire place, I broke out a bottle of Rémy Martin and we somehow managed to keep ourselves warm. That was also the winter I remember sitting in an elegant restaurant in Paris with my camel hair top coat on and the warm leather gloves, because it was so fucking cold. And that was the winter when during the weekend, my favorite, so lovingly planted by Carolyn inside a beautiful maroon ceramic pot for which she had hand macraméd the plant hanger in the matching color – the Wandering Jew or the plant name of Zebrina Pendula, hanging by the window in my office had over the weekend frozen to death. It made me sad, but looking at it, nothing I could do. I took it off the hook on the ceiling and discarded it by the garbage can.
Unbeknown to me, my secretary Teresa Velazquez had somehow salvaged a few twigs that too were frozen, but must not have looked all that dead to her. She put them in a jar filled with water by her desk and nurtured them with the tender loving care. Miraculously, in a few months those twigs had healed and grown and sprouted. She transplanted them back into its original pot, and I had my plant back hanging by the window, healthier and of the fuller head than ever. I took it home when I left the company, and was still around fourteen years later, up until I left to live in Prague. Now I’m trying to think who did I give it to? It’s probably still prospering somewhere.
I would think of it a dozen years later sitting in my apartment in Prague. The very first week that I had moved into my well furnished and amply lit attic apartment with the high ceilings and slanted skylights on Přícná 7, I had bought four potted plants to give the place some homey feeling. Over the six years, the big palm tree had grown into the greenest and the tallest, almost touching the ceiling. I gave it to my friend Jana (Dvořáčková) when I moved back to Chicago in 2006. When I talked to her earlier this week, she told me that it’s still well and alive and towering over everything in her apartment.
There were also two smaller variety of the palm. One I had placed by the window in the living room and the other in my bedroom. One in the living room too has grown by leaps and bounds – not so the one in the bedroom. It looked sick. I moved it also to the living room by the window. It got even sicker. Every so often when I looked at it and its fading luster and the falling leaves, it seemed less and less likely to survive much longer. I even had the owner of the nearby plant and flower shop from whom I had originally bought them come and look at it and followed his suggestions. I changed the location, given it plant vitamin and watered it religiously. Nothing was working. I said to myself, no use keeping it around anymore, the time has come to get rid of it. When Anjuli was visiting some months earlier, we together looked at it and she too agreed that sometimes you have to let go. The only reason it remained in the house was procrastination. It remained in the living room, in the clear view in the broad daylight, and yet, I didn’t “see” it. Almost forgotten about it.
And then suddenly, a couple of months later my eyes fell upon it. The plant as I knew was dead. It had shed all the leaves over the period of those months. The branches looked dry and brittle and old. And yet, as if by a miracle, I noticed at the bottom near the soil, the new leaves were sprouting like starbursts from the same old branches. There was one spurt first, then there were two, and now there were seven, some sprouting even from underneath the soil. And they look healthy, light translucent green with thin delicate red trim to every leaf. Incredible!
Why was I thinking of it that morning?
Because I had been feeling quite lonely. By then I had been living in Prague for almost eight years. Professionally speaking, my post – Playboy years of living and working in the Czech Republic had been good. Socially, not so. It didn’t help that I had now chosen not to continue to work nine to five. Because as much as I enjoyed being alone, I was and am a people person. I need interaction. Without a regular job, there was practically none. Unfortunately, I did not have a single friend with whom I could do things or hang out with on a regular basis. I saw people sporadically, mainly when they would have time and not necessarily when I needed them. Also, I was sort of lost as to what should be my next step and where should I go from there. This all got me down, especially the loneliness. There were times when I didn’t see anyone for several days – except for waiters and waitresses and shop keepers. This depressed me to no end.
I’m basically a positive person, quite optimistic. My theme song is the recently deceased Austrian singer Udo Jürgen’s Immer immer wieder geht die Sonne auf – always, always again rises the sun. And the Fleetwood Mac hit, Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone. I’m good at giving people and also to myself pep talk. Whenever I feel down and out, I prop myself up. Pat myself on the back. Tell myself, it will be better. Something positive will happen. Soon! Soon when? Wasn’t eight years more than enough time?
Perhaps time had come for me to move on and away. I would never have friends and the people close to me the way I did in other countries I had lived in. This of course was quite depressing. It was getting harder and harder to pump myself up, to refuel and crank up the motor.
That morning, like many others, I woke up feeling somewhat to quite depressed. And when it got me down too far, I thought of the dead Wandering Jew in my office and then looked at the sprouting leaves of the baby palm in my apartment. I knew, you never give up, because ironically, as the Czech saying goes: naděje umírá poslední – hope dies last.
© Haresh Shah 2015
Illustration: Celia Rose Marks
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