Dementia or Alzheimer’s disease is painful for a person suffering from it, initially fails to discern what has happened to him, but when he understands it, the pages of his memory have begun to fade away.
According to WHO, over 55 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. Eminent Urdu poet Bashir Badr, who is in Bhopal, is down with this disease these days. Besides him, litterateurs, like Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Booker Prize winner Iris Murdoch, Terry Pratchett and Indian poet and winner of Sahitya Academy Award and Padma Shri Nissim Ezekiel suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.
Early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease are weakening vocabulary, failure to speak with certain frequency, and inability to recollect facts with accurate dates, says neuroscience researcher Peter Garrard.
Bashir Badr |
All writers across the world count on the diary of their memory, vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar. Marquez once wrote: “Memory is at once my source material. Without it, there is nothing.”
When the dark shadow of memory loss began to descend on Marquez, he was in the process of writing Until August, and it was his last effort to continue to write against all odds, and he knew he was slowly going towards nothingness.
Writing ‘Until August’ was a struggle between the author’s artistic conscientiousness and his dwindling mental faculties. Marquez then wrote: “This book does not work. It must be destroyed.” The work was published in 2024, ten years after his death, but one who has read ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ or Love in the Time of Cholera’ or ‘Autumn of the Patriarch’ may not find ‘Until August’ as polished as these novels are. Yet, it is one of his many wonderful achievements.
How dementia gripped one of the finest British authors, Iris Murdoch, and how it sapped her thought process is known to her readers. When Murdoch was writing a new novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, in early 1990s, she realised something had terribly gone wrong with her.
The protagonist of her novel, Jackson, a manservant, who was so finely etched on the pages of her memory, began to fade away, becoming stranger to her. It all began with Jackson, but its shadows slowly destroyed her life.
Like Marquez, Murdoch said, “I think of things and then they go away forever.” Jackson’s Dilemma failed to hit the stand.
Her earlier novels display a rich command of words and fine grasp of grammar, but Jackson’s Dilemma is loaded with sentences that want delicate structure. Similar was the condition of Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel.
If one talks of Indian writing in English, one cannot forget him. Ezekiel was born on December 16, 1924 and passed away on January 9, 2004. For his contributions in Indian writing in English, he was given the Sahitya Academy Award in 1983 and Padma Shri in 1988. In the 1990s, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. At a reading session, he was sitting in front of a group of people, staring at them as if he had known all of them, but could recognise none.
He seemed to be wandering like King Lear in a storm, trying to recognise each face blurred by the grey dust raised by a strong wind.
Bashir Badr, master of words
Urdu poet Bashir Badr, who has composed over 18,000
couplets, was felicitated with Sahitya Academy Award and Padma Shri. He is living in Bhopal these days. UP Urdu Academy honoured him four times. He did MA PhD from the Aligarh Muslim University where he worked as a lecturer.
Afterwards, he joined Meerut College. He also composed many Ghazals which depict anguished love and enigma of life and death. His poems are lucid and pregnant with fresh imagery and metaphors.
He has displayed how intricate human emotions can be portrayed in a few words, but Alzheimer’s disease has consumed his memory so much that the wordsmith can muster fewer expressions now.
The genius once wrote: ujale apni yadon ke hamare saath rahne do; na jaane kis gali mein zindagi ki shaam ho jaye (let the glow of your memories radiate my heart; who knows in which alley the dusk of life may descend). His suffering began with mild memory loss, and it gradually consumed that part of the brain which controls language and thought. He struggles to recognise friends and family; and the past, present and future cloud his mind.
