Daddykins

by Kalpana Mohan

  In Vinayagam’s eyes only one thing united the early years of his own life with those of his boss: their poverty. The rest did not matter. And time mattered the least.

  3

  Living Small

  After Daddykins complained about clocks running anti-clockwise and print sliding off the newspaper, I checked the internet about hallucinations in dotage. I knew it was more likely to have something to do with his medication. Still, I had to check.

  One afternoon, I pointed to the big clock on the green wall in his bedroom. ‘What’s the time now, Daddykins?’

  ‘It’s 5 minutes after 3 PM,’ he said, from his seated position in the middle of the bed. Seconds later he looked at the clock again.

  ‘Or 6 minutes after 3 PM, depending on any error of parallax,’ Daddykins said, quickly correcting himself, ‘given the angle of vision from this point on the bed.’

  I let the matter rest.

  ~~~

  I slept by Daddykins’ side every night after he returned from hospital. In the first two weeks, he needed help sitting up and walking to the bathroom. In the middle of the night, I’d escort him to the bathroom and wait outside the door. I would help him back to bed, easing him into his pajamas on some nights. Every time, he would thank me, through toothless gums. In the day, however, he was another man altogether.

  It began with little things, like the water heater. My father’s water heater was a local gadget, as it was in most homes in Chennai, intended for use only in the bathroom. Typically, we turned it on first thing in the morning and left it on for a few hours until the last person in the house had finished using the shower. My father, on the contrary, turned it on just about fifteen minutes before his shower and turned it off the second he stepped out of the bathroom. If guests stayed with us, he watched the switch like a vulture eyeing a deer carcass.

  Whenever I called him a miser, Daddykins said he practiced economy because he had grown up during the Swaraj era. He had seen rations on countless things during his early years and World War II. Daddykins still saved all the envelopes he received in the mail and reused them for salary payments to Vinayagam, to the watchman who slept in our apartment building and to Ganga, the sixty-seven-year-old harridan who cleaned our home.

  My father’s implacable recording of thrift until the finish line of his life baffled me. Head bent over the open page of his 1998 accounts diary, Daddykins often sat on the edge of his bed, writing, in pearly script, any amounts that had been spent in his household on a given day.

  One evening, he looked up at me from his perch on the bed when I asked him why he continued to record such infinitesimal expenditures.

  ‘I need to know about what’s coming into my hand and what’s leaving it,’ he replied.

  ‘But it’s not even half a dollar,’ I said.

  ‘Americans may not need to keep accounts,’ Daddykins said, meeting my eyes, sucking in the spittle that had pooled at the edge of his lower lip while he had been looking down at his book. ‘But I’m Indian.’

  I pointed out—to my own peril—that he could afford more. ‘As with the heater,’ I said. Daddykins retorted that even though the heater was thermostat-controlled, if it were always on, it would cause the whole thingamajig to explode, causing catastrophic injuries to him or anyone in the bathroom. And then there would be the unnecessary expense of a new heater, he added, as an afterthought.

  Daddykins and I had a heated exchange over the matter of the heater on yet another day. That morning, my father had turned the heater off while I was still in the shower. The water had turned cold before I had barely begun to bathe. Livid, I ended my shower quickly and stomped into the living room where Daddykins sat reading the newspaper. I berated him for being a thoughtless Scrooge even with regard to the bare necessities of life. Then I marched into my bedroom and banged the door shut behind me.

  I stewed for a time inside the room during which I began to comprehend my own children’s gripes whenever they returned home for a vacation. But I also realised how the reasons I’d fought with my parents over the course of my life often seemed puerile, in retrospect. Just as I was about to leave my room to make amends with my father, I heard two gentle knocks on my door.

  Daddykins stood outside, a fading silhouette of the grand, invincible man I had grown up admiring. I hugged him for a long time. When I let him go, he chuckled, between sniffles. ‘Sorry, baby,’ he said, his face contrite. ‘Won’t you forgive me?’

  ***

  On the day Daddykins was swallowed by the river, he had been a slave to routine, as always. At the back of his ancestral home, the door opened to a cattle-shed reeking of dung and grass. Daddykins and Anandan set out hay for the two cows and drew water from the well for the day’s needs for their mother. She was an asthmatic. Daddykins picked up his clothes from the drying room where they lay soaking up the stench of burning wood from the water boiler by the well.

  He bounded down the steps onto Double Street, his Brahmin thread diagonally across his bare chest, his cotton towel and dhoti around his shoulder. Daddykins and his friends from Double Street made for the riverbed, away from the Gopalakrishna temple whose bell sliced the peace of the early morning.

  Looking like clones, the boys hurried on, chattering, skipping past homes. Their own sisters bathed at home, rarely coming to the river. For an unmarried girl to not stay home was to stray, especially in the eyes of the widow Thangam, who watched the girls of the village from her thinnai on Single Street.

  On that fateful day, the boys ignored all warnings about the rheumy river from men returning from the puzha. Daddykins’ friends stayed back to play on the banks but he proceeded to the water. He floated for a time. The water cradled him. He turned to look at his friends playing kalli. Water splashed in his eyes. He lifted his face to the sky. The leaves of the peepal tree stretched and danced in the breeze.

  The man on the elephant rock spotted him first. He pointed and shouted, between brushing, his index finger and teeth coated with toothpowder. ‘That boy!’ he yelled to the men scrubbing themselves, closer to where Daddykins seemed to be swimming. ‘Look! He’ll die!’ Everything happened at once. The swimming. The flailing. The rippling. One man dove in, perhaps not remembering his wife or his parents or his children. He bubbled back up. Daddykins’ friends ran to scan the waters. Some bathers propped themselves over rocks. ‘Who is it?’ A hush. ‘They say Rajamani.’ A scream. A sigh. A wail. Frantic pleas into the darkening sky.

  Later, Daddykins’ mother said that their family goddess, Bhagavathi, had watched over her son that morning. Else, how did one explain how her boy slipped from the greedy clutches of Yama, and hovered, for shimmering seconds, in the time warp that sometimes lets a man return from the dead? From the arms of his mother, Daddykins told all the assembled friends and family that he didn’t realise the river had swollen so. Or that he’d feel too drained to fight the current anymore.

  Daddykins was fortunate that when he was dragged into the puzha, its gargantuan mouth spat out two fingers around the bend of the river at the bank of Kumarapuram village. The man who saved him told the people gathered in his thinnai that he had glimpsed the lad’s fingers for a mere second before his gut told him to just dive in.

  ***

  Thalaivar had told his father-in-law to resume work for a few hours a day when he felt fit. Across the country, Diwali marked a beginning and Daddykins decided he should resume work on this special day, at an auspicious hour, when the Mumbai Stock Exchange opened for trading.

  Attired in a crisp beige shirt and brown pants, much more frail than the last time he wore his work clothes, Daddykins arrived at the office at Capital Place a little before sunset. Since Thalaivar was spending Diwali with his family in Singapore, Daddykins was expected to sign off on the inaugural Diwali day purchase of a company stock. A box of sweets circulated through the office. I popped one into my mouth. Daddykins eyed the confection rolled with nuts, rose essence and sugar. Then he looked at me through the corner of his
eyes. I knew Daddykins longed for something sweet. Halwa. Burfi. Laddoo. Foods of sustenance for my father. For a man who drizzled honey on the sweetest mango, a ban on sweetmeats was worse than the prospect of solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison. I felt heartless as I reminded Daddykins that he could not eat anything rich owing to his condition, that he was on a bland lean diet of mashed vegetables, rice and yoghurt until further notice.

  At dusk, all the employees gathered outside to burst a bandolier of firecrackers that Thalaivar had bought for the staff Diwali party. Vinayagam laid out the strip along Chevalier Sivaji Ganesan Road, right outside Capital Place. He lit the wick. Bicyclists stopped to watch. Auto-rickshaws swerved past the splutter of fire. The cigarette ends detonated in rapid staccato fire for several minutes pummeling the air with the acrid odour of sulphur, fire, paper and gunpowder, taking me back to the Diwali of my adolescence when Daddykins set aside a scrimpy budget for fireworks. ‘Our father never spent more than fifty rupees in the early sixties,’ Urmila reminded me on Diwali morning when I called to say that I was planning to gift our father a bag of fireworks. ‘And then it inched towards a hundred, staying there long after I got married.’

  When I asked Daddykins whether his poor fiscal allotment was because of philosophical beliefs, he shook his head. Children always wanted to give their parents the benefit of the doubt, especially as they grew older, and so I thought my father had been mindful of the poor children employed at fireworks factories under perilous conditions. Daddykins said that it hadn’t crossed his mind at all. ‘I just don’t like to burn money,’ he said, ‘because I grew up in poverty.’

  I pulled out my present for Daddykins to mark my first Diwali with him in twenty-nine years—a box each of sparklers, pinwheels and flowerpots. Vinayagam placed a glowing sparkler in my father’s hand. It crackled into a trail of stars. I caught a million golden showers in Daddykins’ glasses and on his face I saw a moment of wonder. It was my last Diwali with Daddykins.

  4

  Marry Her, Or Else

  When my father appeared before his gastroenterologist, the physician wanted to know the names of the medicines that Daddykins ingested daily. ‘Shinkora, doctor,’ Daddykins said. ‘It’s for my blood circulation.’

  ‘But why does Vinayagam call it Zinkosar?’ I asked my father. He didn’t know.

  I made Vinayagam show me the strip from the pharmacy. I examined it and checked the internet for clarification.

  ‘Aha! The medicine is, in fact, Gingkocer,’ I told Daddykins and Vinayagam. I showed them the information I’d found on it. ‘Repeat after me,’ I said to them. ‘It’s Ging-ko-cer. It’s an extract from the leaves of the tree called Gingko Biloba.’

  ‘Of course, madam,’ Vinayagam said, repeating the name with reverence. ‘Gin-ko-sar.’

  Daddykins called out to Vinayagam after breakfast the following morning in the same old way, ‘Can I have my Shinkora?’ Vinayagam placed the peach-coloured pill by Daddykins’ teacup just as always, ‘Here, Saar, take your Zinkosar.’

  ~~~

  A few weeks after his treatment at Med-India, Daddykins could not eat his favourite meal of the day. For years, he had relished his breakfast of toast with jam and butter. On dark brown toast he spread salted Amul butter. Over that he smeared Kissan fruit jam, colouring the entire surface of a buttered toast as if it were a wall on which he, the painter, could not afford to miss a spot. He relished each toast to the last crumb. When he was done, a streak of jam hung at the corner of his asymmetrical lips. He dabbed it with a tissue until every sign of his continental breakfast was gone.

  When I telephoned my sister about his trouble swallowing solids, she suggested blending toasted bread with milk. Daddykins acquiesced grudgingly to the change in his daily regimen.

  One morning, he expressed his longing for another of his favourite foods when Vinayagam placed his breakfast of oats blended with toasted bread, sugar and milk in front of him and went back into the kitchen to make us some ginger chai.

  ‘I want to go to Pizza Hut for dinner one of these days,’ Daddykins said to me, taking a sip of his warm breakfast. He cast a swift glance to his left and right. ‘I like their paneer tikka pizza,’ he whispered. He must have caught the astonishment on my face. ‘Yes, I’m having a little trouble swallowing’ he said, meeting my eyes briefly before he looked away, ‘but I can definitely swallow a slice of pizza.’ He was in abject denial.

  I recalled how a few days before, he had stared at me as I ate a square piece of Bombay halwa in his presence. My father had always eaten small portions but he craved excellence in every bite. He had raved about cousin Kunju’s glistening wheat halwa long after she had died. He heaped encomiums on his sister Saroja’s Mysore Pak. On his two-month stay in Paris, he was rapturous over the city’s croissants. During his repeated visits to San Jose, he pressed us to take him ‘just one more time’ for a falafel sandwich at Falafel Drive-in.

  I understood his yearning that day. ‘Maybe a bit later, when you’re better?’ I said, patting my father’s shiny bald pate. ‘Don’t forget, pizza is bread.’

  Vinayagam was by the dining table within seconds, irritation writ large on his face. Ostensibly, he had heard a taboo word mentioned several times in a minute. I have a pet theory that Vinayagam can hear a green anaconda fart in the Amazon even when he’s grinding rice and lentils in my mother’s stone grinder in noisy Chennai.

  ‘Saar, did you say you wanted to eat pizza?’ Our Man Friday now stood ramrod straight by the phone desk on which flashed two cordless phones and two corded phones and an answering machine that my sister had bought for Daddykins, who promptly turned off the answer function on it. Daddykins nodded to his valet.

  Vinayagam looked down at my father. ‘You cannot even swallow a sliver of watermelon or papaya, Saar.’ He waved his hands, dismissing my father’s request. ‘We won’t be going to Pizza Hut.’ He touched my father’s shoulder. ‘Not in MY car.’

  Stone-faced, he moved next to the spot between Daddykins and me. ‘And you, Amma, remember that you are answerable to Urmila Amma in Singapore.’ My father’s head stayed bent over his breakfast so as to make himself impervious to his manservant’s rant.

  Vinayagam’s insinuation that I was daffy and insensitive with respect to the gravity of my father’s condition and that he, Vinayagam, was the only responsible human around the apartment and that Thalaivar and Urmila were equivalent to Lord Shiva and his consort, respectively, further annoyed me.

  Later, out of earshot of Daddykins, I told Vinayagam that I was aware that Daddykins would not be able to eat pizza but that, unlike Vinayagam, I didn’t want to be blunt when Daddykins craved it so much, and that there was a kinder way to talk to an old man than to tell him that his body could no longer cope with his desires.

  ***

  The day they watched T. P. Rajalakshmi on the screen in Savitri Satyavan, Daddykins and Periappa’s grandson, Mani, first began wondering about love, the sort of love that might make a man come back from the dead. Daddykins found himself more conscious, suddenly, of the bigger boys snooping around for a whiff of girls. Daddykins would not tell Mani that ever since he spotted a girl called Gangu, he had sat at the teak writing desk by the window of his home and written their names down next to each other.

  He thought about Gangu every morning before he went to college. He would tell his mother he needed to stop at Periappa’s place for this or for that, and his mother would tell him to run back quickly because she’d have his lunch box of rice with curd ready for him. Mani would be waiting for him in the thinnai. They waited until a bullock cart crunched towards their thinnai ferrying Gangu and her friends to Moyan Girls High School. The boys stood by the pillars until it disappeared from sight.

  Daddykins never pitched the idea of Gangu to his parents. His uncle, Periappa, would have given Daddykins no choice in the matter anyway. He was ‘Rao Sahib’ from the British Raj for his visionary leadership in the world of accounting and the family, including Dadd
ykins’ father, obeyed him implicitly.

  In November 1943, Periappa found Daddykins an entry-level job as a clerk in the Accountant General’s office in Madras. Then, he let Daddykins know, as casually as if he had bought a pumpkin at the local market, that he had also met his future wife on Daddykins’ behalf and that from what he could tell, she was a fine girl from a family with considerable standing, vast property and respect among the local gentry. Periappa informed Daddykins that he would be getting betrothed to the girl in May.

  Daddykins was shocked by both decisions. He was not pleased about going to Madras, a target in the crossfire of a world war. Japan had just bombed Madras harbour and newspaper reports claimed some people had fled the city in fear. Daddykins trembled with rage as he asked his uncle how he could marry a woman without first casting eyes upon her. ‘But Parvati is perfectly decent to look at. With a round face,’ Periappa shot back, unused to defiance, not least from his nephew. ‘What is your problem? Do you want to marry a movie star? Is that it?’

  Daddykins would claim years later that he was never intimidated by Periappa and that he had relented because one’s elders were accorded due respect in those days. But his sister Vijaya, who was fourteen at the time, watched Daddykins lash out at his mother the day before the wedding: ‘If I like Parvati, I will keep her, else you get to keep her.’

  Busloads of family and friends travelled with Daddykins from Palakkad to the hamlet of Parur to attend a grand celebration muted only by the absence of the sound of drums since the state of Travancore was in mourning due to the death of its young prince. On the first morning of his wedding festivities, Daddykins dismounted from the bus to meet Parvati, his fourteen-year-old bride-to-be with a round face. He noticed that his bride did indeed have a face as round and fresh as the roundest gooseberry his mother had ever grown. He saw also her kohl-painted eyes and the painted tails at the end of each eye. The morning he met his bride, Daddykins was, in fact, secretly relieved that the British laws banning child marriage did not affect Parvati who was from Travancore. The prayers and festivities went on for four days.