Toothless and Shameless; Not Just A Visa

Toothless And Shameless 

OPG, or Orthopantogram

My father lost all his teeth by the time he was 55. My dentist had warned I was going the same way, due to a bad case of root caries. Over the last few years, he was able to stabilise many of the teeth in my upper jaw, but a wide-angled OPG (orthopantogram) showed that only two teeth in the lower jaw could be salvaged.

Two weeks ago, we yanked out all the other rattling teeth in the lower jaw, and I announced to a younger friend that I was now a TOM, a toothless old man. A permanent solution will have to be found, and we are currently debating the pros and cons of dentures versus implants.  Either way, it’s going to be at least three months before the mouth has healed enough to accept a hard new inhabitant, so I am currently being fitted for temporary, soft dentures.

When we had planned this process a couple of months ago, my dentist said it would take about 3 weeks before I had dentures - “for show, not for go”, he said, because the hard dentures that would really help me to chew food would have to wait. For those few weeks, till the ‘show’ is installed, I thought I would lie low, meet only family - and the dentist. Go cycling in the early morning, turn my camera off on zoom meetings, and make a public appearance only when the mouth was inhabited again. 

The night of the mass extraction, I felt a strange organic sense of loss, but luckily, little pain. My calendar blank, I spent much of the next day in bed, reading and sleeping, woozy from the massive injections of anaesthetics to numb my jaw.

By the second morning, the rawness was ebbing. Outside, the sun was bright, and the thought of a swim was tempting. I figured I could slip into the pool without too much engagement - smile with my eyes, as it were. By a quirk of fate, the swimmer in the next lane was a dentist, to whom I had mentioned the upcoming procedure earlier that week. He urged me to get implants fitted, and exited the pool with the comforting words, “The worst is behind you.”

Of course he’s right, I thought. And if I skulk around, hiding the gaps in my jaw from the rest of the world, I’ll only create a sense of ongoing trauma for myself, where none is warranted. The first time someone notices my lower jaw, though, it’s likely to be a bit unsightly. That Monday, I went into a studio to record a podcast with Dr. Vasant Dhar, an NYU Professor of Artificial Intelligence. As we waited for the technician to set up the studio, I warned Vasant that I had no lower teeth, which he might find disconcerting if he wasn’t forewarned. 

“What next”, he asked, “Implants? I’ve had four done. They work really well”

That was it. Matter of fact.

Most life is a matter of fact. Shame has little place if you haven’t violated your own code of conduct, your own dharma. 

And so I sallied forth into the world, a Toothless Old Man, waiting for his dentures, and for all the factual matters of a decaying body, but shameless - to the last, I hope.

More Than a Visa

Last  week was nasty.

My application for a Schengen visa through the Finnish Embassy was rejected under Clause 10:  “The information submitted regarding the justification for the purpose and conditions of the trip was not reliable.”

I felt like I’d been bludgeoned. Earlier in the year, I’d missed the slot for renewal of my US visa, due to a bureaucratic ambiguity, and had to renege on my promise to spend a month with my son in Chicago, where he lives. My wife was invited to a conference in Berlin, so we thought a week together in Europe would be some consolation. 

And then this, for a 66 year old man of means - who, I counted, has visited 39 countries in his life. Not exactly a prime immigration risk, you would think, who cannot justify a short  trip to Europe. In the last 12 months, I wrote to the Finnish consular office, I have visited the UK, Austria, Slovakia and Slovenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. This would have been my third trip to Europe in under a year, the fourth, if Georgia joins the EU, as proposed. In my state of shock, I forgot to add to that list Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

Not that it matters - bureaucrats, regardless of nationality, don’t feel answerable to anyone except their bosses. I don’t really expect an answer to my mail. And what several events of the last year have demonstrated to me is that the consular processes of the white world have the lowest regard for the blue passport of the brown Indian.

This is not going to change in a hurry, and I texted my wife and son that morning that I no longer want to go through the ignominy of appealing to other governments to let me into their borders. I’ve travelled the world more widely than most, and had more than my fair share of adventure. There’s still so much to see in our country, and honestly - moments of anguish bring tremendous clarity - I won’t feel deprived if I never leave India again.

The only deprivation will come from time not spent with my son. When he was at University in Chicago, he came home twice a year, and except for the summer when he interned in the US, those were long periods spent together. Now that he’s working, the time he has for visits home is short. As our time on the planet shortens, this time together is what matters most to us.

I lived the next twenty-four hours in an emotional hollow. We had planned so much together - tickets for a choral concert (let’s surprise Ma), a trip to a nature reserve, cycling around the city. In the grey light of the next morning, I tried to quieten my mind, as is my practice. That quiet comes to me quite easily, and I drifted into the day with a roster of things to do, the hollow receded to the back of my skull. By the evening, it became a memory of a memory.

But maybe that’s wrong. What’s precious is precious, and if it is lost, even for a while, maybe I should let that sense of loss linger for longer. For, isn’t that sense of loss at the very heart of being human?