Daddykins

by Kalpana Mohan

  ***

  A few days after we brought Daddykins back home from the hospital, in early November, Urmila returned to her home in Singapore. I assumed charge of my father’s health and his home.

  Chatting after lunch one day, Daddykins, seated on his rust-orange sofa, as usual, reading a letter to the editor in The Hindu, with Vinayagam lounging on the floor nearby ready to be of service, we meandered into the topic of his parents and large families of the olden days.

  ‘Given that your father lived miles away from your mother and rail travel was slow,’ I said to Daddykins, ‘did you ever wonder how they managed to have seven children?’

  A bark of laughter erupted from Vinayagam. My father bristled at the unspoken accusation leveled against his mother. ‘Are you asking me for details of my parents’ sex life?’ Daddykins asked, shaking the newspaper vehemently. ‘How would I know?’ He folded the paper cleanly in the centre. ‘I suppose things happened when my father visited during the holidays.’

  An exchange with a cousin sprang into my brain from decades past. My cousin believed that the sari—whether it was the traditional nine yards version or a modern six yards edition—was the perfect apparatus for sex. ‘The sari is the least cumbersome garment of all,’ he had said wryly. ‘Remember there were no underpants in those days. Just lift, that’s all.’

  I had assumed that Vinayagam had only half-processed what Daddykins was telling me in English. But Vinayagam had apparently understood, that too, exceptionally clearly, the words ‘sex’ and ‘life.’ And, of course he thought it fit to thrust himself into the conversation at that tenuous moment.

  ‘Listen to me, Amma,’ he said, rising from his spot on the marble floor right by the Sony Bravia television that he, like his boss, often watched on mute. He had been laughing at Tom and Jerry’s antics. Now he towered next to Daddykins, his right arm raised theatrically in the manner of M. K. Stalin campaigning for Tamil Nadu’s DMK party.

  ‘In those days, the husband used to visit his family once or twice a year. First of all, Amma, understand one thing,’ he said, ‘There were no distractions. No television. No one had money. For entertainment. Or for anything else. They had no work—other than to eat…and…sleep, that is. Life was so simple then, Amma.’

  Daddykins leaned back in his sofa listening to Vinayagam’s pronouncements. He wore a peeved look on his face because while he held his semi-Gandhian parents in great regard, he and I knew, just as well as his whelp of a driver did, that there was much stronger evidence to their experiments with sex than to their experiments with truth.

  2

  The Boy Who Lived

  One morning the blackboard at the local Jeeva Park offered this advice:

  ‘Listen to your heart because even though it’s on your left, it’s always right.’

  ~~~

  By early November, Daddykins was back at Jeeva Park. Every morning, he allocated fifteen minutes to dressing up for his daily walk. He went about it as if he were gearing up to ski the black diamond at Courchevel.

  First, he glided into a pair of Gap tennis shorts, hand-me-downs from his grandson in Singapore. Over his shorts he fastened, in slow motion, a hip-belt to prevent a third recurrent hernia. He slipped an ironed Adidas T-shirt over his head. Next, wristwatch pressed in place, he lifted his left arm to his left ear and snapped on the latch, listening as the lock clicked in place. Then, he sat on the low, two-foot shoe cupboard right outside his front door and pulled on dark socks that Urmila brought him from every Business Class trip on Singapore Airlines. He slipped his feet into sneakers that were a size too large for them. On his satiny head—it looked like Ayers Rock except for a stray hair that sprouted because he still showed up for a haircut every four weeks—he pressed a baseball cap from Disneyland. All of December and January, he also wound a red, woollen muffler to ward off the chill around his neck. And always, just before he shut the door, he tapped the right front pocket of his shorts once to ensure he had the brown leather pouch with the house keys. Sometimes, his regimen shifted by a minute or two, due to a coffee-related mishap in the kitchen or a slow inimical bowel. But mostly, this soldier reported for his stroll at the park, even on a rainy day, by 6 AM, and thus, quite naturally, eight days after he returned home from Med-India, he was back at Jeeva Park.

  He was barely able to walk one round, a fourth of a kilometer, that first day. As we walked he said that the thrum of life in Jeeva Park rejuvenated him. ‘Jeeva’ meant ‘life’ in Sanskrit, he reminded me. He retired to a bench, staying to greet friends and revelling in the cool morning air.

  With its central peepal tree and the stone idol of Lord Ganesha beneath, the kapok trees on the outer rim and the tall ashoka trees on the inner rim, Jeeva Park became the constant in the infinite variables of my life as I cared for my father. The park also had its own blackboard for announcements.

  November, I noticed, had begun to sparkle with Diwali razzle-dazzle. Walkers talked about where-to-buy-what or how-to-make-what for Diwali. But right in that season of revelry, death made its presence felt, as it always did about once every month and the blackboard reminded us of it. Below a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt—‘Anger is only one letter short of Danger’—the blackboard regretted to ‘announce the demise of Mrs. Krishnan.’

  On the day after a member’s demise, the president of Jeeva Park Walkers and Joggers’ Association waited by the blackboard. He motioned for walkers to gather. Speakers spoke solemnly about the departed. They bent their heads, praying for the soul before disbanding to walk again. Some walked on, talking about the departed member, about his gifts or her wisdom. One round later, walkers seemed to forget about the departed; banter about the departed’s love for tennis unmindfully segued into a countdown of the next day’s cricket match. Cricket spilled over into the politics of cricket and then into politics itself. Thoughts of the departed soon departed.

  Every morning at 7, the bell tolled in the centre by Lord Ganesha. A mantra for peace—for Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jains, Buddhists, vegetarians, non-vegetarians, non-believers, pretend-believers, the Google T-shirt wearers, and the grumpy ones, who didn’t ever let others pass them on the track.

  vakra thunda mahakaya surya koti samaprabha

  nirvignam kurumedeva sarva kaaryeshu sarvada

  O Lord Ganesha, of the curved trunk and massive body,

  Whose splendour is equal to a million suns,

  Please bless me so that I do not face

  Any obstacles in my endeavours.

  And thus the day’s prayer wound down at the peepal tree.

  The daily messages on the park’s blackboard as well as the care and concern of his walking friends energised Daddykins as he recouped. He walked another half round every day.

  One morning in mid-November, a flash of nocturnal rain exhumed the mosquitoes. They zeroed in on the skin above my ankle-length socks. Daddykins and his two friends trekked a semi-circle and stopped, at 6.50 AM, in direct view of the stone-faced lord some forty feet away. My father prayed, eyes shut, head bent.

  ‘I’m being bitten by mosquitoes,’ I hissed against his ear. ‘Let’s leave.’ Daddykins raised his head, opening his eyes. ‘A few more minutes,’ he said. He liked to watch the ritual bathing of Ganesha. ‘Once the abhishekam is done.’

  ‘But they’re feasting on my ankles,’ I said. I looked at his two walking buddies who grinned at my plight.

  ‘That’s nature. It’s god’s plan,’ Daddykins intoned. ‘We are food for mosquitoes.’ He looked sideways at his buddies whose bodies shook in merriment. Then his eyes met mine. ‘Just like lions eat deer. Patience, baby.’

  I pinched his forearm. ‘But I’m about to contract dengue fever,’ I said. Unperturbed, Daddykins looked at his friends and then pleaded to the deity, hands clasped in front of his chest: ‘I beg you, Lord Ganesha, O Remover of Obstacles, to relieve my daughter who is being eaten alive by mosquitoes.’ This was as much sympathy as one could expect complaining about mosquitoes to one born into Daddyk
ins’ circumstances. While his childhood seemed inconceivably arduous to me, his eyes would light up whenever we spoke of it.

  ***

  My father told me that the colour green was born in his village in god’s own country.

  I knew the green: a moss green like the algae splattered on brick walls on a summer day; a putting green like the horizons of paddy flanking a railroad track; a leaf green, like the betel plant madly rising towards the sun; an olive green, like the murky lagoon behind a plantation home; an emerald green dipping between the ridges of a banana leaf; and a sea green of the banks beyond the puzha that connected the eighteen villages of Palakkad town.

  My father was not expected to live beyond the age of six. One photograph remains from his earliest days to celebrate his triumph. In that earliest picture ever taken of Daddykins in 1934, right about the time portrait photography reached the lower middle-class in India, my father is about eleven.

  Known then by the name of ‘Rajamani’ or ‘king’s jewel,’ Daddykins is sitting tall to the left of his mother while she holds his youngest brother on her lap. To the far right, his brother Anandan stares in the way I remember him even in his twilight years—with a quizzical look in his eyes and a tentative frown, as if he had just observed something odd or funny but dared not talk about it. Below my grandmother, half-lounging on the floor but looking like he’s not enjoying it at all, is the third brother, Babu, who, in his later years, would talk and laugh to himself in front of the mirror, lost in the world of his brilliant mind.

  My father’s first sister Vijaya, eternally concerned about everyone and everything, not unlike my sister Urmila, looks straight into the camera. In later years, Vijaya tortured cashiers at Chennai’s G. R. Thanga Maligai Jewellers with math formulae that never factored in jewellery labour charges and gold wastage rates. Everyone hesitated before placing a long distance call to Vijaya. She enunciated every consonant and every vowel and every diphthong.

  In that old photograph, Daddykins’ face had already assumed the gravitas of the eldest child. His shirt looked like one fished out of his father’s closet; its sleeves dripped all the way to his elbow, there was no shoulder at all and the shirt collar lay flat against the neck. Not that fashion mattered to this poor family. Krishnamurthy the youngest, probably all of six months old, sat on his mother’s lap, beatific and unconcerned and naked below the waist. The studio where my father remembers this as having been shot was a makeshift one in the home of a friend in Tiruppur—a cotton ginning town that has been India’s primary supplier of cotton underwear for decades—and in a moment of dramatic irony, my uncle was caught with no cover over his privates.

  Family photographs from that era flashed male genitalia because producing a male heir was worthy of an Olympic gold. Families would send each other photographs of their naked newborn males, which would then be put in albums with the boy’s name written on the back.

  My father’s family portrait would thus be the first of a rare few. It celebrated another victorious escape from death. In 1929, small pox almost scorched the life out of Daddykins. He survived, yet carried the scars, which cratered his body and face. Though the Vaccination Act of 1880 required vaccination within six months of birth, it was not enforced until the middle of the 20th century.

  Daddykins spent a nomadic early childhood, often staying in the hamlet of Chennimalai with his maternal grandparents while his father travelled to places up in north India looking for a teaching position. For a time, Daddykins’ father had taught science at the Native High School in Palakkad but as expenses mounted, he began to explore opportunities outside the state of Kerala. In 1933, he became a teacher at Dahod in Gujarat, 1200 miles away, three nights away by train. His mother chose to raise the family in Palakkad because her lungs could not tolerate the dry climate in Dahod. For the next three decades of their lives, his father sent money home every month and visited home twice a year—for two months of summer and then for two weeks during Diwali holidays. In his absence, their whole family looked up to Daddykins’ father’s brother—Periappa—who appointed himself the paterfamilias.

  The family settled down in the village of Lakshminarayanapuram, where Hindu Brahmins lived on either side of a broad road called Double Street. The two tiled-roof rows of homes formed a garland around the 300-year-old temple and the village deity, Lord Gopalakrishna, ruled from its centre.

  Daddykins’ mother grew produce for daily cooking: curry leaves, coconuts, coriander, taro roots, yams, bananas, gooseberries, drumsticks and mangoes. Most of Palakkad was unshorn forest. Reptiles lurked in thickets. Just before harvest season, rice saplings rose over three feet in length. Paddy shoots preened in the breeze on either side of the meandering lane when Daddykins walked to school barefoot, holding a satchel of books and pencils in one hand and a cloth bag with a brass box of curd rice in the other, feeling the mud and gravel under his toes and his heel.

  ***

  ‘How did you not cut your feet?’ I asked Daddykins. ‘Or get bitten? Your father didn’t think you needed chappals?’

  ‘Chappals?’ my father said with a laugh. We were seated at the dining table. Vinayagam pottered around the kitchen making our coffee. ‘Where was the money for footwear in those days?’ I’m sure he was wondering, right then, about how much money I squandered on weekly pedicures at Green Trends Beauty Salon right down the road from us.

  ‘Chappals would have been a luxury item on the meager allowance my father sent us from up north,’ he said. ‘I went to school barefoot, clad in a pair of blue shorts and a white shirt.’

  I asked Daddykins why Ambi Saar School did not mandate a uniform. In the India in which I grew up during the seventies, uniforms were compulsory in both government-run schools and private schools. It was one way to iron out the wrinkles of economic disparity.

  No sooner had I uttered the word ‘uniform’ than a guffaw erupted in the kitchen. Vinayagam appeared in the doorway and giggled all the way to the dining table.

  ‘Aiyo! What are you saying, Amma? Uniform?’ he asked, setting a hot stainless steel tumbler of coffee in front of Daddykins. He tapped my father on the shoulder. ‘Saar, what is your daughter thinking?’

  Both Daddykins and Vinayagam were now laughing at me.

  ‘No uniform in those days, my dear.’ Daddykins smiled and set the steel tumbler back in its ‘davara’ and moved them both away from himself as he always did when he was done eating or drinking something.

  ‘What did you wear inside your clothes?’ I asked. I heard Vinayagam cackling yet again inside the kitchen as he got my cup ready. ‘A vest? Cotton underwear, maybe?’ I liked details. My father needed prodding.

  Daddykins shook his head. ‘I didn’t wear any underwear, if I recall correctly. Why is it important anyway?’

  I told him that whether or not he wore underwear in the 1930s gave me a sense of the mores of those times.

  Vinayagam set a mug of coffee in front of me. When he made my cup, he always made it extra-hot, rustling up a mountain of foam so it crested up two inches from the rim of the cup and gave me a coffee mustache.

  ‘Trust me, Amma, no one wore underwear,’ he said, raising his right arm. He stood in front of the fridge—watching me, I know, for the mustache—a red and white checked kitchen towel still slung over his right shoulder. He stood on his imaginary lofty pedestal, like the statue of the late state minister C. N. Annadurai at the Chennai headquarters of the D. M. K party, where this legendary orator stood carved in stone, an upper dhoti cast over his shoulder, his right arm raised as if he were addressing a gathering of a million people.

  ‘Amma, understand that your father could not afford underwear. Just like me. My parents could not afford it. Do you know how many days I went to school with ragged shorts? And torn shirts? Chappals? Aiyo! My parents could not afford chappals.’

  ‘But you didn’t get hurt walking barefoot?’

  ‘So?’ Vinayagam said. ‘In any case, just imagine walking in a village full of potholes through slus
h and water. Remember, it rained. A lot.’

  He tapped my dad again on the shoulder. ‘Am I not right, Saar?’ Daddykins looked up at him and nodded. ‘No, no, Amma, chappals would have been a nuisance in that village.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when my parents bought me my first chappals,’ Daddykins said, talking over Vinayagam, who couldn’t object because he always made it a policy to talk over his boss. ‘Around 1939. When I’d just started working at the chemistry lab in intermediate class in Victoria College.’

  I wanted to know exactly what type of sandals Daddykins wore that very first time. Unfortunately, Vinayagam had to step in with an opinion on that too.

  ‘I know, Amma, I’ll tell you,’ he said. Then he turned to my dad as he picked up his cup. ‘You would have worn the chappals with a white base and blue straps. That was the standard, Saar. All of us wore those first. Right?’

  Daddykins shook his head. He had no memory, he said, of what his first chappals were. He told Vinayagam that the Hawaii chappal he was alluding to was a much later poor man’s fashion statement in India.

  Vinayagam often forgot that he was born in 1978 and attended school in the early eighties. Daddykins was in elementary school in the early 1930s. Daddykins had lived through an era that he, Vinayagam, was completely clueless about—a time which saw Love In Tokyo hair fasteners, gramophone records, bronze water carriers or koojas, the first Coca Cola bottle, Mahatma Gandhi, giant-sized Marconi radios, rumbling Ambassador cars, black paged photo albums with inserts, Lord Mountbatten, rattan punkahs, the Indo-Pak war, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, bell-bottoms, Pan Am Airways’ Jumbo Jet, crimplin pants, the Marina beach stampede, the Land Reform Act of Kerala, Air-India briefcases, terylene pants, nylex saris, sideburns, safari suits, and rubia sari blouses.