My Temporary Son

Two writers map different landscapes of loss and love with poignant and marvelously written memoirs: Joan Didion (Knopf) in The Year of Magical Thinking and Timeri Murari with his tale of losing an adopted child to another family in My Temporary Son (Penguin India). WORLD BOOKS. I was a contented elderly man not looking to be immersed in any emotional cauldrons . . . and then unexpectedly Bhima came along skewering all my calculations.. On a hot June evening Timeri Murari returns home from a game of tennis to find a baby lying on his bed and watching him through beautiful large bewildered eyes. ‘He’ll be here a few days’ his wife Maureen tells him. ‘When he’s well he’ll go back to the orphanage.’ Having played host to other young orphaned house guests before Tim assumes that once the wound from his recent nine –hour surgery has healed Bhima will do the same.. But Bhima brings much more to their lives than Tim and Maureen have bargained for. With the unquestioning faith of a child he surrenders himself to their care and with his quiet resilience in the face of excruciating physical pain his mischievous pranks and unusual intelligence he takes complete possession of their hearts. Before long Tim who has never been comfortable with children finds himself busy learning to be a father and loving every moment.. However their idyll is short-lived for Bhima’s destiny lies elsewhere. His adoptive parents are about to arrive in India to meet him and Tim and Maureen have to confront the harsh reality of handing him over to them. They are tormented by guilt and the agonising doubts about their own decision for Bhima’s future. The day the adopting parents leave with their Bhima is one of grief for both Bhima and for Maureen and Tim.. A REVIEWAnyone with a child in their life anyone who has ever longed for a child and anyone but anyone who has ever been at the receiving end of a child’s love will find something in this book. For even the most cynical will not be moved by Timeri Murari’s true account of caring for an orphaned and disabled child. Murari’s life took on a new meaning when baby Bhima entered his life. At first it was a nameless pair of deeply troubled eyes a two-dimensional image from a photograph that was taken in the orphanage to which his parents also nameless had surrendered the child. A child who left a profound impression in the precious 11 months during which Murari became his fatherMy Temporary Son is a thoroughly honest self-scrutinizing and in places brutal narrative. It documents young Bhima’s entrance into a hard world and the inordinate medical procedures he undergoes all the while following the author’s growing emotional attachment to his ‘son’.Murari’s great skill lies in the way he encapsulates his love for baby Bhima not by wild gut-wrenching emotive adjectives but by a pensive and almost introspective examination of his emotions creating g an altogether different but equally painful type of tragedy.The book delights and saddens in turn. Murari and his wife provide a firm presence as the baby Bhima suffers and triumphs; there is pain in his surgery his recovery his first smile. His joy in discovering rain. This is a tremendously powerful book and tragic too in its way.