A memory for details, Elena knows, is only for the brave, and being cowardly or brave is not something one can choose.
This image was taken under the winter sun of a remote North Indian village where I visited my great grandmother in a crumbling home marred with wild trees, woodpeckers, owls, and peacocks and to my absolute irritation about a hundred frogs.
“I cannot explain how I feel but I can give you this book that just might do the trick for me.”, is something I’ve been saying/doing/aggressively recommending for a really long time and it has been a solid while since I found a book that would be a worthy contender in this category.
Elena doesn’t feel pride, she feels something else, not sadness, not anger, she feels an emotion she doesn’t have a name for, the feeling you get when you realise you have been foolish.
This is the story of Elena, an Argentinian woman in her sixties with Parkinson’s disease. She is taken care of by her daughter Rita, a middle-aged woman who hasn’t married yet but wants to, to a man her mom refers to as ‘the hunchback’. Parkinson’s is a disease that takes complete control over the nervous system and shuts it down - this affects movements, even the most commonplace ones like opening the mouth, chewing food, walking, lifting your limbs, etc. A person with parkinson’s is completely dependent on their caregiver.
The story opens with the revelation that Rita has killed herself, or so everyone thinks. Elena, her mother thinks (knows) that it’s impossible that her daughter would kill herself and she sets out to find the real killer.
She wonders why she says she has Parkinson’s when she doesn’t have it, it’s the lastv thing she wants to have. She suffers it, she curses it, but she doesn’t have it, having it implies a desire to keep something close but she desires no such thing.
I am fighting a chronic illness and I have been at it for the past decade. Every disability is different but there are none with grief and anguish. Elena’s pain is woven carefully without the abhorrent sympathetic tone that abled people often use when they address us. And yet the author has been successful in communicating the harrowing emotional and physical state that Elena is in. It passively circles through what Rita thinks but as the book progresses we get a perspective on what she thinks or must have, as she is now dead.
The book deals with a lot of universal social themes, the most important ones being those of disability, the taboo against homosexuality, and reproductive rights.
What hurts, the most though, at least for me, is that Elena thinks she knows, but she doesn’t.
What she knows for sure is that she possesses what we call here Jiye Ka Jid, a stubbornness to go on living, something that most of us inherit, something that protects us, convinces us to overlook and forget and hop from one moment to another.
I don’t handle grief well, I am still mourning the death of someone I loved for the past eight years, so reading Elena Knows was not easy for me, and the detached way in which it is written only makes the pain sharper.
But I guess I have the Jid too, so we keep on going.
Love,
Nidhi xx