The first Organ Donor By N.S. Ravi

I first met Navar fifty years ago when both of us used to travel to the Delhi University campus by the famous university specials. It was an era when south campus did not exist and JNU was yet to be established. I was a year junior but we somehow hit off well. I do not know what I found interesting in Navar and neither did I ever ask why he chose being on friendly terms with me when there were so many other juniors and peers.

Besides the two of us there were four more that formed a group during those college days. Till we got married the six of us used to meet every day in the evening. The attendance started diminishing as one by one dropped out of the daily routine after marriage. Navar was the last but one to get married with the last spot belonging to me. While I would not venture to say that he was my best friend I would definitely confess that the extra one year we spent together sans others brought us really close. During this one year he opened up and shared what were closely guarded secrets of his personal life about which our other friends were not aware.

As per demands of career each of us slowly moved away from the earlier routine and all six of us coming together became a rarity. Professionally we were a diverse group consisting of a lawyer, a CA, a businessman, a civil servant, me an author besides Navar who had set up his own NGO. Once we approached sixty years of age most of us had more or less fulfilled the family responsibilities and there was more time in hand than before. It was thus natural for the six of us to try and renew our meetings but in keeping with diverse interests and relationships each had developed in the intervening period it was agreed that it would be once a month –the third Saturday of the month. The idea of fixing a day was to enable everyone to plan all other activities keeping in mind prior engagement for the third Saturday. We also decided to create our own WhatsApp group and called it friends of 60’s.

  

When the campaign to become an organ donor was launched a few years ago Navar was motivated and decided to do his might by signing up. Thus when we all met for one of our monthly rendezvous he proudly announced his act of signing up to us. When Navar made the announcement I was slightly uncomfortable and recalled what he had shared with me.

Navar’s grandfather was a businessman who had a roaring construction business in Lahore which after independence and partition they were forced to abandon. Like many others they chose to move to Delhi where refugees from the areas which had been handed over to Pakistan gathered in colonies specially set up for them by the government. Unlike others Navar’s family which consisted of his widowed grandfather, father and mother managed to bring with them a substantial portion of their savings which could be used as corpus for re-starting their construction business in Delhi. His grandfather assisted by his father were able to get a small contract from the government which ironically was a project to construct hundred houses for refugees who could  afford to buy it on hire-purchase basis. The requirement was urgent and all the houses were required in six months time. Fortunately the houses were single roomed with asbestos roofing which made the process simple. There was an assurance for additional five hundred houses on completion of first hundred. This possibility acted as a motivator for Navar’s family to spend all their time and energy to try and complete the first order before time if possible. They managed to do this and got order for additional houses which were not five hundred but thousand.

The partition took place in August 1947 and the family had moved from Lahore to Delhi’s refugee camp immediately after the announcement had been made. With their sheer work ethics they managed to move out of the refugee colony by end of 1947 and had their own house by end of 1948. The bungalow was constructed in a piece of land which his father had identified as available for purchase, near the refugee colony they were building. This facilitated easy monitoring of the construction and it was his mother who took it upon herself to supervise the construction of her new house in place of the abode lost in Lahore for no fault of theirs.

Navar’s birth more or less coincided with the house warming party which his father threw to his friends.

Unfortunately the supervision of construction along with child birth took its toll. His mother two years after giving birth to Navar succumbed to the asthma developed as a result of inhaling all the dusts and sand at the construction site.

Navar’s father took a dislike to the newborn holding him responsible for his wife’s untimely death and chose to stay away from his son as far as possible. This resulted in the development of a unique bondage between Navar and his grandfather who chose to be both the mother and father for the two year old.

The old man however did not forget his son and encouraged him to marry again. Navar was four years old when his father went on his second honeymoon.

Navar’s step mother was a good lady and realised she would be never accepted as a mother. She thus made sincere efforts to become a friend of her adopted son. But his father was still not prepared to forget the past and accept his son’s innocence.

His grandfather seeing the situation decided that their two storied house was divided into separate floors each with its own kitchen. His father took residence in the first floor whereas Navar remained in the ground floor with his grandfather. In any house and family it is the kitchen which binds everyone. The moment it stops functioning or two kitchens start functioning distances in relationships start developing. The two house theory completed the alienation between Navar and his father. Even the meetings between the father and son became a Sunday affair when all the four family members had to have lunch together as per the directive of his grandfather.

Navar’s step- mother did not give up on him in spite of strictures from her husband. She tried to somehow create a semblance of family but was unable to bridge the gulf which separated the father from son.

Initially Navar did not realise that his father held him responsible for the death of his mother. He tried to impress his father at every given opportunity. In this he was encouraged by his grandfather who felt sorry for both his son and grandson and wanted somehow to end the separation of the son from his father. Unfortunately one day Navar overheard his father and grandfather having a heated argument over the way the former was treating his son. Navar was aghast when his father accused him of being responsible for the death of his mother. His father had not stopped there but added that he did not want his new bride to be afflicted by the bad luck of his son.

That spelt an end to all efforts from Navar’s side to try and impress his father. From then on his efforts were directed to find ways and means to avoid his father. He even tried to avoid the Sunday lunch under some pretext. Fortunately he was able to use the extracurricular activities of the school as an excuse to be away on Sunday afternoon and escape the ordeal of having lunch with his father.  

The next ten years of his life was spent mostly shorn of all parental love though his grandfather showered him with all his love to make sure that the youngster never became depressed. His father in the meanwhile had sired two children and officially Navar had a sister and brother.

When Navar was sixteen years old his father was seriously ill and was admitted to a hospital. He did not want to go and see him but his grandfather managed to convince him and took him along. For the first time after the death of his mother he saw that his father looking at him with some affection. He was touched and persisted with his grandfather to know about the nature of his father’s illness. His grandfather who looked suddenly very old was unable to resist the constant barrage of questioning and confessed that his father had lost both his kidneys. His chances of survival were remote unless someone donated a kidney and it suited his body.  Navar managed to convince his grandfather that he would be a donor for his father. He had read in his biology class that people had two kidneys and that to lead a normal life a person required only one. The book had also stated that successful kidney transplant had been already performed in west. He also recalled having read that successful donors were immediate family members.

The kidney transplant was successful and his father came out of the hospital after a month. For the next three years the two started having normal father son relationship and tried to catch up with years they had lost. Besides the father and son the two other happy people were his step mother and his grandfather. The bonhomie between the father and son did not lost long as fate struck a cruel blow with Navar’s father suffering a massive heart attack and not able to survive it.

Navar had been very upset and chose to treat that phase of his life as a sealed chapter in his life.

I still do not know why he had chosen to share it with me and I think I was probably the only one amongst the friends of 60’s WhatsApp group who was a privy to this secret from his youth.

Thus when he was loudly telling about his signing for organ donation I was wondering if he had made sure to mention that he had only one kidney to donate in his declaration. But I did not want to rake the past and chose to go along with others in the group in congratulating him on this bold step.

That was about five years back.

One day I was woken up early in the morning with my telephone ringing incessantly. I am by habit an early riser getting up at five in the morning but had a friend in the group who used to get up earlier at half past four. It was him on the line and the news he gave me made me wide awake. My friend Navar with whom we had shared lunch two weeks before on the appointed third Saturday of the month was no more having passed away in his sleep. I was numb struck and my mind became totally blank.

Navar was a noble soul, a young man of seventy odd years. He had been always full of life at our get together and the idea of his not being present in the next one was difficult to accept. Anyway I chose to wake up my wife and after giving her the news booked a cab so that I could join his family and my friends for the funeral.

When I reached his house there was a commotion. I soon learnt the reason for the anger amongst the family members of my friend.

They had called the society which took care of organ donation as per the wish of my friend. There had been no problem in case of eyes, liver and few more but they were stunned when the doctor who had come said there was only one kidney and that one had been taken out earlier. My friend had obviously never shared the secret of his giving one of his kidneys to his father with the family and they were in dark. Few relatives immediately talked about lodging a police complaint against three of the hospitals where he had been admitted in the past fifteen years on the grounds that one of them had surreptitiously managed to remove one of his kidneys. I could understand their anxiety and anger considering the rackets carried out in many hospitals where kidneys had been removed from unsuspecting patients admitted for some other ailment.

I was in a serious dilemma. I did not know if I had the right to share the secret about my friend’s kidney. If he had not shared it with his family did I have the moral right to do so? I did not however want the family to make a fool out of themselves.

Finally I decided that I should look at the problem in a different manner. Here was a person who had donated his organ well before this campaign of organ donation had been started. True he had given his kidney to his own father. But how many youngsters at the age of sixteen would be bold enough to do so even today. When you add to this the stormy relationship he had with his father the very act of donating his kidney was not just laudable but path breaking. 

It was this line of thinking which gave me courage to share the story of his Kidney donations with all those present. Hearing the disclosure an eerie silence dawned amongst those present. His family which had been angry at the disclosure of missing kidney immediately became proud of my friend .In what was scene of sadness due to a death and missing kidney the past act of my noble friend became a small area of comfort and joy lessening the burden of missing the departed soul.

For me having known and been a friend of one of the first organ donors had been a privilege, to be cherished for the rest of my life.