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- [00:00]
Unknown Speaker
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- [02:10]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by stamps.com these days you can get practically anything on demand like this podcast. Did you know you can even get postage on demand@stamps.com buy and print official US postage right from your own computer and printer. It's easy and convenient. Plus stamps.com will give you a digital scale. It'll automatically calculate the exact postage you need for any letter or package. You can print the postage directly onto envelopes or labels, or even plain paper. Then you just hand your mail to your mail carrier. There's no need for you to go to the post office ever again or even lease one of those expensive postage meters. Right now there's a special offer for listeners of the Moth podcast, a no risk trial plus a $110 bonus offer that includes the digital scale and up to $55 free postage. Don't wait. Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the home page and type moth. That's stamps.com and enter moth. Join the Moth at New Belgium Breweries Tour de fat in Washington, D.C. on June 1 for your chance to tell a story at the show. Just submit your one line pitch via email to tourdefatthemoth.org and you can check themauth.org for all the event details. Hope to see you there. Dressing freaky Riding bikes and bands and.
- [03:40]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Beer are things you like the most.
- [03:43]
Dan Kennedy
Fun fundraiser around the Dirty Fan New Bell Jump Back in Town the story you're about to hear by Siddhartha Mukherjee was told live in New York last year at our annual collaboration with the World Science Festival, which by the way is happening again this week in New York City. The theme of the night that Siddhartha told his story was Too Close to the Sun. Stories of Flashpoints.
- [04:17]
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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 Borishal, 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, and 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 a 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 sort of mythology in our family, a myth in our family, and that is that 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 quarters, 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, and it was impossible for any Muslim to step into that innermost quarter. And 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 it was a dream, 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. And 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? You know, 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. 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. In 1964, before I was born, she moved with my father to our. Which was then going to become our home in Delhi. And she set up her own living quarters there with a threshold. And 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. And she became. 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. And I Have a couple of memories of her from my childhood. One memory is that I looked through 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 to touch. And the other memory that I had was that at one point of time, I had made a picture of a tiger, if I remember correctly, and brought it to her, as grandchildren often do, for appreciation. And 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, which means, yes, but it can also mean, it's horrible. We've all heard about the tiger mom. She was the mom of the tiger mom. 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. 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. And I remember this because one morning, my father was about. She was about 80 years old. My father was about to leave on a tour to another city. And as he was coming down the stairs, she called him, and she said, I think. She said, don't go. I think I'm going. And my father looked at her quizzically, and she said, I think I'm coming to an end. And my father wondered about what was going on with her, but she really. He had learned by this time that usually when she made declarative statements, she was usually right. And so he stayed back. And when I came back from school, I also heard the same story. I went to her room and I said, grandma, what's happening? And is there something I can do for you? Can I bring you something? And she said, yes, I want some sweets. And I thought, you know, 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. And 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, 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 sort of distantly. I remember a moment when I was 7 or 8 years old. I went with my father to Banaras, the city where many, many Indians will cremate, burn their dead. It had rained the night before. 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, was wet. It was slippery. And then I was on a boat, and the boat was on the Ganga, the Ganges. And I drove out onto. 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. And 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. And 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. And as I was watching, I saw one of these men who had probably previously been carrying a body. He was holding out his arms, but he was just carrying air. And then, just like that, the boats 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 she. 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. And we watched, 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. And I went to the funeral of a woman who had died of breast cancer. And this was in Boston. It was in a church very near Boston. And while I was driving there, 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. An intern had pronounced her dead. And by the time the children had come to the hospital, she'd been fully dressed up again, as it were. And I went to the funeral. And as I walked towards the coffin, I noticed something unusual. I looked down, and her lips. Someone had put lipstick on her. Lipstick on this body. And 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. And 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.
- [16:31]
Dan Kennedy
Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He's an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. A former Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for his book the Emperor of All Maladies, a biography of cancer and we have this word from our sponsor the people you work with the most aren't always the people that you see every day. You've got co workers on the go in different offices. You've got clients spread across the country or maybe around the globe. To work efficiently today, you need to have a stronger connection to your team to build trust, stay focused, and brainstorm. Use GoToMeeting with HD faces, the powerfully simple way to meet online and see each other face to face. With GoToMeeting, your team is always just a click away. You can share the same screen to collaborate in real time, and with a webcam, you can turn your online meeting into an HD video conference. It feels like you're in the same room even when you're miles apart. Plus, with GoToMeeting, you can launch or join a meeting from anywhere using your computer, smartphone or tablet. You can even present now from your iPad. Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days. For this special offer, visit GoToMeeting.com Click on the Try it Free button and use the promo code moth. Remember, use the promo code moth. Gotomeeting Meeting is believing. Also, here's some news for our listeners in Pittsburgh. The Moth is returning to Pittsburgh, presented by Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures. That'll be on August 22nd. For ticketing information and for a list of all of our upcoming tour stops, visit themoth.org Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy, is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit, available May 28. Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx. Org.