Every day after Daddykins left for his work and before she began cooking, she people-watched from her window perch. She told her husband that she loved to hear the bells pealing at the Shiva temple as she looked onto the road. It reminded her of home, of both Parur and Palakkad. It brought her peace. She loved all other sounds too, she told him, especially the bleat of goats and the calls of vendors. She enjoyed looking at bicyclists and the things they ferried and the balancing act it sometimes required. Most of all, she told Daddykins, that she waited morning and evening to catch a glimpse of two college-going women walking down their street because they wore the latest styles in blouses and saris. She would also watch cadaverous priests walking about the neighborhood seeking business at death ceremonies, feeling awful for them. She confessed that sometimes fear gripped her throat about their own lives. Why did those priests look like ghosts? Could this happen to them too? Did poverty really do that to people? Daddykins told her that as long as he could work and Doctor was by their side, they would survive.
Sometimes, in the evenings, Daddykins took Parvati by the city bus to the shops at T. Nagar. At Nalli’s Silk House, Parvati would stand outside the glass window, sighing, watching the light bounce off of gold thread on silk. Daddyins would warn her that he could not buy her anything until they came into some money. He would watch as her face fell. He told her they must save to buy more important things, like a radio for the house that would cost about 500 rupees, at least eight times his monthly salary. There was also the rising price of kerosene, the rationing and the inflation, all of which were the fallouts of the world war.
Once a week, he came home early. He told her to dress up. They rode the bus to Marina beach—the sea-breeze does not cost us, he would say—where she would walk with him, past the speakers on lampposts blasting news from All India Radio, all the way to the water’s edge. There, she’d wet her feet, lifting her sari almost to her knees. He’d call out to a boy selling lentils flavoured with ginger, green chilly, mango, coconut and lemon. The boy would run down with a paper cone of sundal. Parvati smiled. Daddykins paid him one-and-a-half annas. Then the couple would eat sundal in the salty, balmy air, hearing the waters crash and curl.
When his accounts showed he could spare a few annas, they bought tickets to see a mythological play at Madurai Devi Bala Vinodha Sangita Sabha. There, Daddykins and his woman-child sat enthralled watching song and dance, cooled by the breeze from punkah-pullers travelling with the troupe.
By the end of the month, however, Parvati worried about the state of their pantry. Daddykins obsessed over the price of everything from coffee and grain to kerosene and sugar. As he wrote his accounts diary, she would remind him of an expense he had missed. Whenever Daddykins’ cousins showed up to stay with them for a few weeks while they hunted for a job, Daddykins and Parvati remembered how Doctor had helped them. They slept upstairs, snuggling together in the thin strip of landing while their cousins occupied the living quarters below. Late at night, in bed, when the uncertainties of the nation and the civil unrest hovered as shadows on the walls flanking the stairs, Parvati asked Daddykins whether freedom for India would free them from financial worry. He was tentative. But on the night they saw Gandhi, in February 1946 at Hindi Prachar Sabha, he felt reassured. Gandhi spoke of the country’s heritage, the need for independence, of the importance of speaking one national language, of renewing faith and confidence in oneself to self-govern. Daddykins saw how Parvati’s eyes turned misty after she saw the great man just twenty feet away. As they walked back home, Daddykins told her of the day he had missed classes at Victoria College and joined his college mates to shout anti-British slogans during the Quit India movement. He told her how all the boys at Palakkad’s Double Street would fight to read sections of the newspaper to know what Gandhi wanted young people across the country to do. It had all been worth it, this is a great nation forged by great minds, he said, explaining the gist of Gandhi’s speech. And then, although the thought had just seized him, he told her of his desire to travel to other parts of the world to see how people lived, to broaden their minds and maybe even to make some money.
Charged after Gandhi’s visit, Daddykins, Parvati and their cousins sat huddled around Doctor’s radio on August 14, 1947, the eve of India’s independence. Eyes shining, they listened to Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech: ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’
***
‘Stay in America as long as you can,’ Daddykins said while we sat at his dining table one morning. He had issued the same orders on the phone several times over the last three decades. ‘At a minimum, your children can gain admission in decent colleges without your having to pay bribes and capitation fees,’ he would say. ‘Don’t return home unless something changes at the centre in India.’ Then he lowered his voice dramatically saying that he prayed that no one was wiretapping him, else he’d be counting the bars from the inside of a jail cell.
Like his father before him, my father felt a deep anguish for the country of his birth. Every morning, from behind the centre of the newspaper, he lamented that his nation was being led astray by rogues and bigots. He was angry at India or Pakistan or both, calling the heads of both countries muttaa pashanga or madaiyan, both of which were verbal daubs that boiled into a concentrate of 100% blackguard, plus 80% schlep, plus 50% jackass.
In Tamil, my father’s curses tinkled with life. In English, they turned sterile: blackguard, madman, terminator, woodenhead, lazy fool, imbecile, madwoman. Some couldn’t be translated at all. Some made no sense when translated: in Tamil they meant ‘customer of death,’ ‘pubic hair puller,’ and ‘midnight umbrella.’
The morning my father told me to remain in the United States, Daddykins had been stewing after reading a news item. It described how some inert politicians had scoffed at the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, the CAG, the ‘supreme audit institution of India’ that he had reported to for his entire career.
‘How dare these politicians try to rattle an institution like the CAG,’ Daddykins cried aloud, dipping his spoon in a bowl of warm oats. ‘Shameless fools! No more democracy for this country!’
Vinayagam patted his back, and stroked his neck to steady his nerves. ‘Calm down, Saar.’
Daddykins waved his pointer finger at me. ‘Stay in America. Don’t you ever, ever, come back!’
‘Don’t yell, Saar,’ Vinaygam said softly. ‘You’ll choke, Saar.’
I urged Daddykins to view it from another angle. ‘Do you want India to be ruled by a dictator?’ I asked. He stared at his bowl for a time before he turned to me. ‘Yes!’ he cried, stirring his oats, his eyes darting back and forth between his valet and me. ‘Remember the Emergency during Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s days? For twenty-one months, everyone peed in their pants. That, I believe, is what India needs. Now.’ He sat scowling through the rest of his breakfast hour.
7
Death in Kerala
Vinayagam and I were talking about death and condolence and Daddykins’ insistence on paying his respects to the dead.
‘You know, Amma, in the last many years, I always knew that someone had died when I arrived outside our door in the morning. I would peep through the long window by the door before I walked into the house. The old man would be sitting in his favorite chair, all ready to go somewhere—dressed in a neat white dhoti and a freshly ironed shirt. When he opened the door I would ask Saar who had kicked the bucket. And he would say there was no time to talk and I would argue with him and run to make him some breakfast. Then we would hurry to wherever it was. Your father always said that it would not matter if he did not attend a wedding or a birthday. But one must never ever miss an opportunity to commiserate and condole, he said. That it was one of man’s most basic duties for having been born on this earth.’
~~~
The night before Urmila flew down from Singapore, my father and I talked as we lay on his thin, hard bed. ‘I should have followed Doct
or’s orders,’ he said. In his later years he’d said it to me many times. Perhaps saying it was a sort of atonement.
Seventy years after it happened, Daddykins had never recovered from my eldest sister’s death. At almost ninety, with everyone he could blame having been dead for years, my father still believed that he could have snatched Nirmala from the chokehold of smallpox.
In May 1952, when his father-in-law wrote to Daddykins informing him that his child had fallen seriously ill upon arrival at his home in Parur, Daddykins had consulted with Doctor. His cousin had advised him to rush Nirmala to Madras for treatment. Daddykins had dithered and then decided against it.
‘I dared not confront my father-in-law to tell him that my child would receive better medical care in Madras,’ Daddykins said to me. ‘It was just not done in those days.’ Daddykins pointed out that there were many superstitions around smallpox. People believed that goddess Mariamman visited in the body of a child to rid the family of evil. No one defied the wrath of the deity. Daddykins said none of the elders in Parur would have acceded to his request to transport a sick child to seek allopathic care. He had also been afraid to challenge the quarantine measures in force in Parur. Daddykins thus left it up to providence.
Now, years later, in the thickness of the night, I heard the remorse in my father’s voice for decisions he had made in that calamitous time. As a child, I too had been privy to the stifling traditions in the Parur household where, until the mid-70s, we, the grandchildren, were delivered by midwives in the privacy of the home. Mother and infant were sequestered in a room for over a month—subject to a Spartan diet, ritual ablutions, and rules of hygiene and etiquette. When Nirmala was born, Daddykins was 300 miles away in Madras. He would find out only much later that Nirmala had not been vaccinated.
She was the first grandchild on my paternal side. The first baby and the darling of my parents, my grandparents, aunts and uncles. I found out about her by accident. When I was about four, I had stood next to my father on tiptoe, bursting with curiosity at the magical objects in his almirah. The face of a beautiful baby, composed, yet fragile, had stared back at me from the farthest corner of the wooden cupboard.
In that only portrait taken at G. K. Vale studio, Nirmala was about two. She wore an A-line shift with a rounded neckline; the sleeves puffed out slightly and tightened into a tiny band at the cuff. A frill flared below it. Her face looked clean, without any make-up in the eyes or a bindi on her forehead or a big black spot on the chin drawn of kohl often meant to ward off the evil eye.
‘She had soft brown eyes, brown hair and fair skin and was so angelic that it seemed she didn’t even belong in our family,’ my grandmother had said to me one night when I asked her to tell me all she remembered of my late sister. It was intended as a compliment, for one to be so fair that they looked like a foundling among their family. None of the fifteen grandchildren who followed Nirmala would evoke that sense of wonderment.
When she died, Daddykins insisted that no one mention her name or put her photograph anywhere in the house for the remainder of his life. Growing up I almost never heard Nirmala’s name.
That night in bed, it had seemed perfectly natural for Daddykins to begin talking to me about his late daughter, especially preceding Urmila’s short visit during Karthikai, a festival to celebrate the daughters of the family. Daddykins told me how in the months following Nirmala’s passing, he would often see my mother lost in her own world while Urmila played with her dolls by her side. I told Daddykins how my mother finally spoke to me about Nirmala the year I turned thirty-three.
My infant son had just returned home after surgery to his stomach. I noticed that my mother had been traumatised as doctors struggled to diagnose his condition. She told me then, how, in 1952, she had been terrified to care of her dying child, knowing that no medical help would arrive due to the quarantine. Visitors approaching their infected home had kept away when they spotted the telltale bunch of neem leaves hanging outside the door. While life evaporated from Nirmala, my mother and her elder sister wrapped her in fine muslin and caressed her with a cluster of neem leaves. They tried to keep her cool on the outside. But inside, in her tongue and throat, the virus raged. When the child stopped urinating, her sister told her it would not be long. ‘I watched my child die inch by inch,’ my mother said that day as I held my son in my arms, her eyes far away in an ill-fated room in the home of her birth. ‘I just held her until she let go.’
As Daddykins listened, I told him about the torment on my mother’s face on the day that a door long sealed shut had been broken open. ‘I often told your mother that if our child was meant to live, she would have lived,’ Daddykins said, his voice petering out. In the band of light that streamed in from between the wall-length drapes, his chest rose and fell with the lightness of cotton fluff from the kapok tree.
***
He couldn’t believe the power of a tiny ticking heart. The first time she saw Daddykins’ butterfly maneuver, the baby bawled in fear. And then every time after that, Nirmala gurgled and laughed, drooling and hiccupping. Seeing that, Parvati told Daddykins to please stop teasing the baby in case she spat up her milk.
Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948 had sucked the joy out of the first trimester of Parvati’s pregnancy and cast a pall over their lives. At that dismal time, Daddykins began believing that Nirmala had brought them good luck.
A year after she was born, Daddykins passed an accounting exam that brought him both a promotion and a salary of 350 rupees. By the time he arrived in Bangalore with Parvati and his two children—Nirmala, born in 1948, and Urmila, born in 1950—he started believing that the bleakest times for both his country and his family were behind him.
As the superintendent of accounts in a different department, he found himself immersed in an adventure—of language, food and culture—while living on Venkatappa Road, a colony of Tamil-speaking Brahmins eking out a modest life. On some evenings, Daddykins took his family to Cubbon Park two kilometres away, walking past Mani Iyer’s café where they ate once a month. The four of them sauntered past acres of foliage, past the old red brick façade of Karnataka High Court and beyond the scaffolding that housed the Secretariat, a colonial Indo-Saracenic edifice.
By the time they were ready to trudge home, Nirmala wanted to be carried too, like her sister. For the rest of the walk the parents found themselves breathless. Parvati was irritated about having to walk the entire distance carrying Urmila who crumpled her cotton sari. And Daddykins would not holler for a tanga or a jhatka, which vexed Parvati further. After a bit of an argument, they jumped into a tanga that would cost them a half of an anna. And the horse soothed them all, its clippety-clop putting them in a trance as it trotted through the garden city susurrant with the rustle of bottlebrush, purple jacaranda, and frangipani.
Daddykins didn’t know if it were the calm of lawns and sandalwood trees, but in Bangalore, he found himself uncovering new things about himself. He discovered, for instance, that his father’s skill came naturally to him. He began to tutor students on accounting principles.
When a minister’s son began stopping by for lessons, Daddykins gathered the courage to visit the minister in his home to ask him if he might be able to help his youngest brother enroll at Vishweswarayya Institute of Technology. Daddykins had never before imagined that one day he would be in a position of authority or that he would have a skill to offer in return for approaching someone for a favour. A certain worldliness dawned on Daddykins in Bangalore. It was a long way away from the boy who walked barefoot to school. In 1952, Krishnamurthy landed in Bangalore to live with them and pursue a degree in civil engineering.
That year Daddykins learned his first lesson in impermanence. By the time Parvati and the two children disembarked from the train at Alwaye station one day in early May, Nirmala’s body had begun wilting from high fever. The three of them had traveled to attend a wedding in the Parur house.
As the four-day wedding festivities rolle
d to a close and relatives began taking leave, Nirmala’s fever did not break. The first of the pockmarks bubbled into view on her face during the hottest month in monsoon country.
Days later, when Daddykins, unshaven and haggard, arrived at Parur upon receiving a telegram, he discovered his twenty-one-year-old wife in the corner of a dark room, sobbing softly, helpless against the wrath of Goddess Mariamman. Parvati told him that she had given the child coconut water, buttermilk and curd. When Nirmala seemed to recover and when her scabs had fallen off, she had bathed her frail body in water that had been warmed by the morning sun. But the child had suffered a relapse.
Daddykins escorted Parvati and Urmila back to Bangalore that July. In accordance with tradition, no one in the family enquired after the victim of smallpox. No one wrote letters of condolence or solace. Daddykins and Parvati would never heal. They would carry on.
***
In early December, we were watching the grand lighting of the holy hill at Tiruvannamalai temple, 120 miles away from Chennai. Shiva’s force was believed to manifest every year as a massive column of fire on its peak where, on the evening of Karthikai, a huge lamp was lit. Visible for miles around, the flame burned at the end of a long, heavy wick dipped in a seven-foot crucible of clarified butter.
‘The first lighting of lamps began at dawn inside the main altar of the temple,’ Vinayagam said as we sat around the television on the evening of Karthikai. ‘Watch how the holy hill and everything around it is deep black just before the big wick is lit.’
At 6 PM, just as he said, the peak of the hill came alive with the column of fire. Daddykins turned to Urmila. ‘Now you may light the big lamp in our altar.’ My sister laid two wicks inside the old brass lamp that my mother had lit every day for fifty years. She held a flame to it.
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