Daddykins

by Kalpana Mohan

  Every morning and evening, Daddykins and his bride were lifted up by their maternal uncles. They exchanged rose garlands. They held hands. They swung on the oonjal, a wooden swing with a rice flour design on it, while their aunts sang songs about gods and goddesses. Women hurled red rice balls in the air to ward off evil, fed the couple mashed banana in sweetened milk and washed their vermilion-adorned feet with scented water.

  After lunch, on all four afternoons, the bride and the groom sat on the floor, across from each other, on a woven grass mat, while womenfolk from both families sang. There were endless games symbolising courtship – as if they’d had one. Daddykins pried a coconut from Parvati’s hands while relatives cheered for her, begging her to hold on tight and not give in. Then, Parvati smeared sandalwood paste on Daddykins’ hands and forearms and feet. He broke a whole lentil papad over her raven black head. He noticed that her hair felt soft and slippery under his fingers and while papad dust settled on her hair, her braid and her neck, their tiny nieces and cousins clapped and shrieked with delight. When the gold chain symbolising their union was placed around the bride’s neck and Daddykins and Parvati had smiled at each other, the two parted ways.

  ***

  ‘Like all men, your father always wanted to marry a stunning beauty, you know,’ Mani, Daddykins’ nephew, said to me when I met him at his house in Chennai. I wondered if he was implying that my mother was not that much of a peach. I suppose he was right. My mother was a good-looking woman with even features but hardly one of those doe-eyed beauties with rosebud lips painted by Raja Ravi Varma.

  ‘Your father had a particular notion of beauty and he thought he had found what he wanted in Gangu, this woman from the neighbouring village. Perfect. Sharp features. Classic lines,’ he said.

  Mani said he had met Gangu again at a wedding in Chennai a few years before. ‘The woman looked ghastly. Haggard. Grey hair. She hadn’t aged gracefully at all. In retrospect, I think your dad did very well for himself by implicitly obeying my grandfather and marrying your mother.’

  I wanted to tell Mani that my father did well by marrying my mother for reasons that transcended physical appearance. By the time I was born, arranged marriages had evolved. I was thankful that by the 1970s, both the man and the woman had a choice in their partners. A period of courtship following the engagement helped a couple get to know each other so that decisions were not based solely on beauty, education, wealth and other such markers.

  When I went back home that afternoon, I asked my father about Gangu. Vinayagam touched his shoulder. ‘Was she really, really beautiful, Saar?’ Daddykins ignored him and glared at me. ‘That nephew of mine told you such asinine things? What was the need for Mani to tell you all that from years ago?’

  Vinayagam laughed. ‘Saar, you were up to mischief, weren’t you, Saar?’ he said, giggling and massaging my father’s shoulders. The young man winked at me and then he began to preach, as usual.

  ‘Truth is, every human being has a soft corner in his place for his first love, Amma,’ he said, even as Daddykins got up and stalked off into his bedroom while his leather armchair rocked violently in front of the television in his wake.

  5

  Madras Central

  My father used to frown when my teenage sister vegetated on a rattan chair, her legs on the coffee table. Newspaper splayed over her thighs, she liked to turn the knobs of our old Marconi radio with her toes while listening to Binaca Geetmala. Daddykins often called her a butter-cutter.

  ~~~

  Through the course of his life, Daddykins managed to brand almost every non-starter a butter-cutter: Urmila, me; Vinayagam; my mother; Gandhi, George W Bush, Federer. On and off, the name was also awarded to his three sisters—called Three Roses by Vinayagam after a brand of tea he bought—Vijaya, who was now in her eighties, Saroja in her seventies, Samyuktha in her sixties, who doted on Daddykins, nevertheless, and called him every other day to check on him.

  The Three Roses told me how, in Palakkad, everyone was characterised by a brand: of laziness, of frugality, of shrewdness, of lewdness, of loudness. They mentioned the teacher everyone knew as Mashikupi—‘ink-bottle’ in Malayalam—who had a short neck over wide shoulders, his torso resembling an ink-bottle of the olden days. A label was a rite of passage for every young man in Palakkad and I suppose it would have been impossible to not have been influenced by a peculiar lot of people. The village assigned Daddykins the prefix of ‘dosa’ owing to the smallpox scarring on his face.

  Names stuck long after people had changed in Palakkad and Daddykins always said that life in the village imbued its people with both a sense of community and a sense of humour. Most of my father’s choicest anecdotes traced back to his boyhood. Until my father fell chronically ill, one thing was a daily occurrence in our home. During the telling of a joke, he would clutch his chest in a breathless fit for several long minutes, spluttering into laughter because the joke was always on one of us and funnier still when his victim was not amused.

  In the eighties, he pulled off one of his signature pranks on Usha, one of his youngest nieces, a girl born and raised in the state of Orissa, who, Daddykins maintained, was always much too ‘gussa,’ meaning ‘angry,’ in Hindi. Like every cousin and grandnephew and grandchild before her, Usha too was ensnared by Daddykins’ dhoti.

  Whenever he was about to play the dhoti trick, Daddykins waited for cacophony in the house. While the mickle of cousins and aunts and uncles was knotted up in conversation, Daddykins slid out. He walked about the house as if he were engaged in a chore. But all the while he busied himself twisting one end of his fine cotton dhoti such that the thinnest part of cloth stuck out. He went to a faucet to wet the corner of the dhoti. He dragged the edge of his nails over the cotton and sharpened the end of the threads. Daddykins worked the cloth until it was delicate and pointy, like the antenna of a grasshopper. Then he moved about in stealth among the unsuspecting family members, prowling around us as we chatted over coffee and snacks. Suddenly, when everyone was oblivious to him, Daddykins snuck into view, with a soundless shuffle, from behind a pillar or a sofa or a door, teasing the soft, needle end of his dhoti into his victim’s ear.

  The afternoon Usha’s ear was the target, she jumped from her seat, shrieking, covering her ears in fright. And while the rest of us roared with merriment, Usha, laughing and screaming, chased Daddykins all the way into the verandah and down into our courtyard.

  Thirty years later, as ill health whittled down my father’s muscle mass, he had lost that gift for slapstick and now he resembled a gourd that had dried in its bin too long—no flesh, all ridge.

  And yet, so late in his life, I saw my father’s caustic wit at work as on the December morning he padded over to the telephone. He eased into the leather chair in front of his phone desk. In slow motion, he turned the pages of his black address book. Notepapers tumbled onto the floor. Vinayagam, always eager to help, wanted to know exactly whom he was calling.

  ‘Ganesan,’ Daddykins responded, in a cryptic tone. My father probably felt that access to the information was not necessary for the conduct of Vinayagam’s official duties.

  ‘Which Ganesan, Saar?’ Vinayagam asked, picking up the pieces of paper from the floor. He stared at them for clues. He often told me he never forgot a relative’s face, their apartment name and floor number, the design on an apartment door, the direction in which a house was located from the stairwell.

  ‘Which Ganesan, Saar?’ he demanded again. Vinayagam rarely gave up. Daddykins rarely gave in. ‘The Ganesan on Scheme Road?’ he asked, again. ‘Or the one over on Nachiappan Street?’ He paused. ‘Or the electrician?’

  ‘Sivaji Ganesan,’ Daddykins retorted flatly with a blistering stare at Vinayagam before plunging into a conversation with his nephew on Scheme Road.

  The one and only Sivaji Ganesan—South India’s Marlon Brando, a schmaltzy actor too famous to have entered Daddykins’ address book—had been cremated over a decade ago, in 2001.

 
***

  On a cool morning in November 1943, Daddykins dismounted a tanga outside his cousin’s home on Ranga Iyer Street in Madras. He counted out his last few annas to pay the driver. That week my father, then barely twenty years old, would join duty at the local Accountant General’s office as an entry-level clerk on a salary of 50 rupees.

  Madras Central Station had awed him. He had gaped at its vast interior. Outside, he had marvelled at the building’s Gothic towers and Romanesque arches in terracotta and white. From the tanga, he had taken in the sign for ‘Murphy Radio,’ the clock tower, its flagstaff, and then—as he inhaled the dung-vapour and horsehair of the animal trotting ahead of him—the town’s broad roads, its spacious parks, its street lamps and the big shops. And the cars. They sailed like ships. He had counted at least ten cars on the five-mile ride into T. Nagar from the railway station.

  ‘Don’t forget to tell my son to drive you to Marina Beach,’ Periappa had told him at Olavakkot station the night before, patting him on the back, hurrying him along as the night train rolled to a two-minute stop. Daddykins had waved frantically to his uncle, his mother and Saroja and Anandan.

  Now, as he turned to look at his cousin’s bungalow, he began to fret. Should he call Periappa’s son ‘Doctor’ now that he was a doctor? Would Kunju, Doctor’s wife, be hospitable? He tugged at the latch of the iron gate leading into the garden. He saw the little sign, black on white: ‘Doctor is in.’ He noted the sweeping verandah, a sit-out for patients with cane chairs and benches. He wondered when he would afford a room of his own.

  Kunju made him feel special and welcome in her home. ‘My father-in-law asked you to stay here and, here you’ll stay as long as it takes you to settle down.’ The next morning, he reported to work at the office in Teynampet. Daddykins was shown to his desk in a crowded corner of a bright, noisy room. He could smell the dust trapped between bundles of papers stacked up on tables and shelves.

  The monotony of work soon caught up with him. Periappa had thwarted his attempt at working at a small fertilizer factory where he might have used what he had learned in college. As far as Periappa was concerned, accounting was most respectable and his brother and his nephew simply didn’t know any better. And so, Daddykins listened and worked hard, often suffering lackadaisical older men who gossiped, chewed betel and bullied their subordinates, and turned unctuous the moment a big boss walked by their desk. Daddykins compared their lack of work ethic to his cousin’s sense of propriety.

  Doctor was ten years older than him and one of only a handful of physicians practicing in T. Nagar. He was a slight man, not taller than five feet. He lived by the clock. He prayed after he showered in the morning. When Daddykins dined with Doctor and Kunju every night, Daddykins noticed their strict diet: the quantity of rice, the greens, the three-hour break Doctor insisted upon between dinner and bedtime. Years later, Daddykins would tell us that Doctor’s military discipline and his philosophy of ‘eating to live’ kept doctors away from him.

  Sometimes, through the swinging half door leading from the patients’ sit-out into the consulting room, Daddykins heard how Doctor listened to his patients. Daddykins knew he said very little to his patients and sometimes he sounded brusque, as if he wanted to dismiss the patient quickly. Later in the night, when they talked after dinner, Doctor told Daddykins that the best clinician was one who spoke little, listened the keenest and prescribed minimum medication. Saying that, Doctor would break into his restrained laugh.

  Daddykins enjoyed listening to Doctor and Kunju dissect a Carnatic music concert after they attended one with him in tow. On some weekends, Doctor drove Kunju and Daddykins to Marina beach in his Wolseley. They walked on the sand. Daddyins considered that he too could learn, like his cousin and his wife, to be a connoisseur of the good life within prescribed limits.

  Doctor had worked very hard, but Periappa had also given him a sprawling bungalow when Doctor was barely nineteen. He had also bought his son a car when he graduated from medical college and built a garage for his car right across the house.

  Daddykins’ life, on the other hand, was penurious at twenty years of age, until he received, a month after arriving at Doctor’s, his first salary. Out of that, he would need to send money home to his mother in Palakkad and also try to carve out some savings.

  6

  Parvati Makes a Life

  Daddykins began subscribing to Ananda Vikatan, a Tamil weekly, so that Parvati would read and learn about the world. He said that even though his wife had not had a formal education, she was a shrewd observer of people and their ways.

  In early 1945, Daddykins returned to Palakkad a year after their marriage. Parvati had reached puberty. Now, she would begin conjugal life with her husband while getting to know her new family. A charcoal-burning bus ferried Parvati, her parents and her siblings to the railway station in Alwaye, wheezing across ten rain-sodden miles of a narrow, pockmarked road flanked by pepper vine creepers, jackfruit orchards, coconut groves and banana plantations. The family then chugged through eighty miles of algae green paddy fields at the foothills of the Western Ghat mountains before disembarking at Olavakkot railway station. For the last three miles to her husband’s village in Palakkad, the young bride swayed to the ambling bullock cart, riding amid the scent of wet mud, dewy shoots of paddy, hay and dung.

  The afternoon Parvati was to arrive, Daddykins waited, light-headed with nerves. He ran to the thinnai when the sound of crunching wheels reached his ears but he ran back into the house, seized by an awkwardness he could not explain. He stood wooden-legged by the kitchen, the sound of his heart in his ears. In a few minutes the whole village would throng their thinnai.

  Saroja ran up to him and tugged at his arm. She ran back to the road to summon the help of her brothers. Then, with Krishnamurthy dragging him by one hand and Saroja hanging onto the other, Daddykins made his way outside, where the beat of a thavil drum rattled the pillars. The first strains of nadaswaram played the wedding song Kunju had taught him. His mother stood outside, holding a welcome tray of fruit and flowers, smiling and laughing with other ladies of the village. The driver of the bullock cart clicked his tongue and slapped the beast. It stopped moving. He eased down to help unload his colourful cargo.

  Daddykins saw his wife’s small, henna-tipped foot dangling from the cart, the soft, bare foot he had painted with vermilion less than a year ago. Her silver anklet glinted in the sun. Then, old Gopalu held her hand as she stepped down from the cart. Draped in a red silk sari, she seemed taller and less fragile now.

  Someone in the crowd cried out to make way for the child-bride to enter her new home. Then Daddykins’ mother and his aunt stood in front of the young couple, holding a plate of water dyed red with vermilion, and moving it in a circular motion as they sang to ward off the evil eye.

  Parvati’s hand was in his. She was climbing up the steps into his home, right foot first. The couple crossed the threshold decorated just that morning by Vijaya with a white kolam outlined in red. Parvati’s parents entered the home with trays of sweets fused into conical molds, brass drums of savouries and garlands for the couple. Packed into the front of the bullock cart was a new blue aluminum trunk with Parvati’s silk, cotton and Chinnalampatti saris. Her father had also loaded produce from his orchard. They were gifts to Daddykins’ home: bananas, coconuts, jackfruit, braided jasmine and ripe mangoes. They unloaded other gifts in kind: gold jewellery, a tall silver lamp for special festivals, a brass lamp for daily prayer, an oval silver plate and an ensemble of cooking utensils in bronze, stone, and brass; and finally, they brought in a heaping vessel of puttu—sweet and crumbly jaggery, beaten rice, coconut flakes and cardamom—to celebrate their daughter’s coming of age in her new home.

  Later that night, for the first time, Daddykins took his wife in his arms but he left her side a few days later to resume his work back in Madras. They began writing to each other on yellow postcards. He wrote that he waited for the day she would make him some rasam. She wrote back t
hat she had just learned how to make rasam with tamarind and tomato. He replied: ‘Will you make it for me?’ And she scribbled, in thick, blotchy letters, because droplets of water from Babu’s hand had made the ink smudge so: ‘What will you give me in return?’ And to that he said: ‘I cannot promise you more than a roof over your head. I’ve found a temporary place for 18 rupees a month on a ribbon-wide lane called Kasi Viswanathar Street. A cozy 800-square-foot space with a kind landlord.’ She wrote asking if the place would be lit up by a bulb hanging from the ceiling. He wrote back in the affirmative.

  When Daddykins saw her again some weeks later, he realised Parvati was now just another of his mother’s girls. Parvati and Vijaya were constant companions. Every afternoon, the girls, including Saroja, stood under the direct rays of the sun in the tavaram. His mother rubbed coconut oil into the girls’ scalp, combed their hair with long, heavy strokes and plaited it into a tight raven rope because girls from decent families always braided their hair.

  Parvati arrived in Madras in early 1946. Every morning, as Daddykins left for work, she would wave until he turned the corner towards the bus stop. By 5 PM, she would sit at the windowsill. He scanned the open window as he walked down and if he didn’t see her there behind the horizontal bars, he’d whistle—two short, shrill bursts, like that of a mynah—and she’d appear above the blue frame of the window, her rice teeth shining in the centre of her moon-shaped, powdered face, dusted and ready to go for a short outing with her husband after she had served him a cup of coffee and tiffin.