Urmila and I had heard many tales about the Karthikai tradition in Palakkad from the Three Roses. The women of the village would take a lamp from their home and light it from a wick of the enormous lamp inside the temple of Lord Gopalakrishna. Then they would carry the fire into their homes, lighting the lamp in their prayer room with it, joining each home to the community, drawing from the energy of the temple to power up their homes.
Outside our father’s apartment, firecrackers punctured the quiet of dusk. My sister and I lit two lamps at the foot of a bronze elephant lamp, brass lamps with deep, broad crucibles that were gifts that year from our father, one for each of us. We lit two terracotta oil lamps and set them out by our front door, on either edge of a kolam outside our front door. In our old bungalow, our mother would line up lamps along the walls and the verandah and the lights outlined our house by night, assuring us of a place where we could be ourselves again, a place that would be a beacon to us no matter how old we were.
While Vinayagam made us pose with our father, shooting a photograph to record the day, the three of us stood together, our watery smiles giving way to the deepest fears about the transience of our lives. I had begun my own life with one truth, as the first hand rocked my cradle, that the life of siblings too was fleeting. And I realised, in that moment, that the day was not far away when Urmila and I would have no one to call our mother or our father and one less of a home to call our own. When that day arrived, we would be lonelier than two green coconuts bobbing in the vast blue of the Indian Ocean.
8
The Things They Carried to Lahore
Vinayagam called my father’s night watchman a humourless clod and hissed at him at every opportunity. ‘I don’t see why we need Watchman, Saar,’ he said to Daddykins one morning. ‘Just last Monday, when I returned late after dropping off Urmila-Amma at the airport, Watchman was snoring. I jiggled the gate and the padlock and cried out his name. Then I simply climbed over the gate. Watchman lay there like a roll of carpet, Saar. Nothing will wake up Watchman. Not even a bomb from Pakistan, Saar.’
~~~
On a hot summer afternoon in 1956, when India and Pakistan were still grappling with the catastrophic fallout of partition, Daddykins carted his family and their twenty-two belongings in a taxi from Amritsar to Lahore to take up the position of accountant at the Indian High Commission. The family travelled for three days by train from Madras to Delhi, where they had boarded a train to Amritsar. By the time they reached, the train to Lahore had already departed. Daddykins engaged a taxi.
As they barrelled past flat farms dotted with haystacks, oxen and wooden plows, Daddykins knew his wife was anxious both about the missed train and about the prospect of life in an alien town where she would not understand or be understood. In the train she had accused him of being hasty in accepting the assignment.
Two years after returning to Madras from Bangalore, Daddykins had become restless again and had requested work in a different part of the world. When he received word that he had been assigned to Lahore, of all places, he was apprehensive but also intrigued. He would have to coax and cajole Parvati first about life in what everyone considered enemy territory. The day he showed Parvati the letter that described his posting with the Indian High Commission, Daddykins had tried to convince her by saying that Lahore was once the most cosmopolitan city in the Indian subcontinent. Parvati had shrugged him off. She would not step out of Madras, she said. He told her that Lahore had once been the subcontinent’s centre for education. Parvati said she did not wish to hear any more. Daddykins then told her about a certain Punjabi saying—that ‘a person who had not seen Lahore had not really lived.’ Just imagine, he said. But when at last he told her Lahore was the Paris of the East, her ears had perked up. ‘Will I be able to buy those transparent, slippery saris in Lahore?’ she had asked, to which he had quipped, ‘but of course, fashions have always brewed in Lahore first.’
Now, sitting in the dusty car, he realised he knew less about how fashions percolated through the eastern world than Winston Churchill knew about how to drape a dhoti. The continuing acrimony between India and Pakistan gnawed at him.
The driver prattled on. ‘This road—over 2,000 miles,’ he told Daddykins in pidgin English, waving his arm through the window. ‘From Kabul straight to Chittagong. Built by Sher Shah four hundred years ago. Aap ko pata hai?’ Soon they began seeing the signs for the Wagah border. The man braked as he saw the line of vehicles slowing down.
Daddykins fretted about what would happen at the border when he presented his passport. What if the border guard asked him something in chaste Hindi? Most of all, he worried about the expensive radio that had been squeezed into the trunk with all their other things.
The Marconi radio wasn’t the only precious thing they carried. They had the Rukmini cooker Parvati couldn’t do without. They carried a hold-all that bundled up all the bedding they would ever need and two small cloth bags, one each of rice and tuar daal. They carried their only clothes inside two metal trunks, lockable in front: Parvati’s seven saris, her four petticoats, her blouses in cotton in ten different colours, Urmila’s five cotton frocks, her favourite coloured ribbons, her school satchel, Daddykins’ six white work shirts, four dark pants, a formal business suit in grey and a Nehru jacket in black. They carried their toiletries besides a brass holder of homemade kajal, a silver container of sindoor for Parvati’s forehead, for who knew what they would get in a Muslim nation? They carried their doubts about personal safety. They carried their biases. They carried their sorrow and their hope of finding solace.
Daddykins snapped at the customs officials when they refused to allow his radio into the country. They would not release it, they said, without a permit from the Indian High Commission. Leaving the radio at customs, the family trundled back into the taxi. Parvati, her face taut, sat in the back. Urmila lay pressed against her mother. A metal trunk and several bags were piled up high on the seat to Parvati’s left. Daddykins sat immobile in front. The driver clammed up. Neither the driver nor passengers reacted to the sights that accosted them on all sides on Mall Road en route to their quarters at Anand Road.
That night, as they lay down on their charpoy outside the house to stave off the heat of the Lahore summer, Parvati told Daddykins that she didn’t get a good feeling about their assignment. Daddykins told her to be patient. ‘Don’t judge Lahore in a day,’ he said and asked her to look up at the stars above. ‘They’re the same ones we saw over Madras,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ The following day, Daddykins took a bus and procured the radio after he produced a permit from the High Commission.
They would encounter other obstacles. When Daddykins began seeking the friendship of those who were different from them, who spoke a different language and, in some cases, embraced another religion, Parvati told him she was uncomfortable around people whose language she couldn’t speak. He told her she must change, that there were other ways to communicate—with one’s eyes, with one’s hands, with a smile. But when Parvati refused to join him and Urmila on picnics with colleagues, Daddykins let her be. She was happiest inside the house.
There were many other things Daddykins could do nothing about. Every Indian working in Pakistan was considered a spy. One morning when they jumped into a tanga to visit Badshahi mosque, a man remained in the shadows watching them while they got off the tanga and slipped inside the mosque; on their return, he was still outside on his motorcycle, waiting. Soon they noticed they were being followed everywhere.
Then there was the problem with letters. Every letter they received had already been opened. Parvati told Daddykins that sometimes it was impossible for her to appreciate the beauty of Shalimar gardens or the Lahore Museum when they were like prisoners in a glass cage. On some evenings, he too felt low, like Parvati, when thoughts of Nirmala seeped in and leached all joy out of their day. On other evenings, his work weighed him down, especially when he had just spent a day with the families at the rehabilitation centers
of Hindu refugees to be transported to India. He told Parvati the stories he heard from people—of massacre and loss, of men and women trying to locate relatives after they had lost them during the migration following partition.
On some nights, as they lay looking up at the stars with Urmila curled up by their side, he told her of infants left to die on the road to freedom, of the rape of women in villages, of Sikh fathers slaying their daughters to save them from the dishonor of rape.
But the novelty of the town soon drew in Parvati, too. Daddykins discovered that she was enchanted by the hullabaloo of the two-hundred-year-old Anarkali Bazaar where she loved to haggle. Inside the souk, Urmila begged Daddykins to tell her, just one more time, the story of the slave girl named Anarkali, who was buried alive three centuries before by order of the Mughal emperor Akbar for her love affair with the Emperor’s son, Salim.
Political tensions spilled into their homes, too, on occasion. At the Indian High Commission one evening, while the crowds shouted slogans over their frustrations about the détente over Kashmir, Daddykins and all the Indians in their quarters sat inside locked homes fearing an escalating situation.
When their assignment came to an end at the end of two years, ironically enough, Parvati didn’t want to leave Lahore. Isn’t it strange, she said to Daddykins one night, that even though she had never ever wanted to venture out of south India, she would so miss their visits to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the food at the gurdwara, the parks in Lahore, the beauty of the winter season up in the north and the taste of dried fruits and, oh, the sweetest grapes, apples, oranges, plums and apricots. The quality of fresh produce up in the north, especially in winter, had elevated her cooking to new heights, Parvati said. Then she told him how fluent their child was in both Hindi and Punjabi, arguing like a local with Soshi and Ganju and her other friends. They couldn’t let her forsake all that, could they? And where else but in Lahore would one see such exquisite phulkari and chikan and resham work on fabric? Why go back at all, Parvati asked Daddykins. Most of all, she said, with a smile meant to entice, she would forever miss sleeping on a charpoy in the silence of a moonless summer night.
***
Vinayagam complained about every one of my father’s retinue of household help. The cook was always under surveillance. He snooped on Ganga like a hawk although she snipped his tail when she got the chance. Another young man known to our family, Saravanan, cared for my father at night just so Daddykins didn’t fall and hurt himself. Vinayagam supervised him too.
Vinayagam was just always on high military alert. Now, his eternal vigilant state was impinging upon my father’s need for privacy. Following Daddykins’ return from the hospital, Vinayagam expected to be informed about every minutia of my father’s alimentary health because he varied the old man’s diet depending on how his stomach was doing on a given day. Vinayagam was trying to help but Daddykins lamented that he had become a prisoner in his own home. I sensed his vexation. He was being stripped of his dignity by the people closest to him just because he wasn’t as physically agile as he used to be. Aging and ill-health had made public the most private of his bodily functions.
I remember the morning Vinayagam followed him to the bathroom door asking him what he was going to do inside.
‘I will not know,’ Daddykins shot back, ‘until I see what exactly I go.’ He banged the door shut behind him and fired verbal artillery from inside. ‘I don’t have the freedom to go to the bathroom in my own damned house?’
Vinayagam parked himself right outside the bathroom door. ‘What are you doing, Saar?’ he asked once again.
He asked Daddykins whether his boss had done ‘the small job,’ 1, or ‘the big job,’ 2. When at last Daddykins came out of the bathroom and his Man Friday accosted him yet again, my father poised himself, for a few seconds, on the bathroom mat. ‘One-and-a-half,’ Daddykins shot back, as he pulled the bathroom door shut and marched through the bedroom door to his rust-orange sofa in the living room.
9
Bungalow in Chennai
It could be hard to tell the rare manoranjitham blossom from the leaves of the creeper by sight. It was the scent —a sickly sweet rush, like the first stab of love—that cast its spell on everyone who passed by the tree. One morning when street urchins, rod in hand, lusted after a manoranjitham flower, my father crept up from inside our courtyard. He pulled the other end of the rod, not letting go until they gave in and fled.
~~~
On every visit to Chennai, Vinayagam would drive me down to where my father built our first house in 1961. In T. Nagar, where Daddykins had always lived, were world famous jewellery houses and silk sari institutions, kitchen stores, flour-mills, roadside jasmine vendors, one-stop grocery kiosks peddling sundries and people. And people. People crossing right where they might flatten, like papad. People chasing buses on which humans hung, like leeches to skin.
To arrive at the bungalow, we cruised away from Jeeva Park and turned left at the TASMAC wine shop outside which young men peed into the early hours. Our Maruti Swift hurtled down Habibullah Road, once a broad, shady road with vast homes set behind wide porticos. We made a right turn down North Usman Road, passing Shine Drug House whose manager, Balakrishnan, had prescribed antibiotics over the counter for my father and our neighbours until he sold the pharmacy a few years ago.
To locate our first home, we veered left into the lane called Parthasarathypuram Road abutting Uthra Photo Studio, which hadn’t pulled down its shutters even though the business must have dipped into the negative after the invasion of digital technology. I held my breath as our car propelled another fifty feet, approaching the six-storey high-rise, slathered in pastel pink and secured by a tall black iron gate, its rails tipped in gold, as if it were guarding the inmates of Buckingham Palace. It was once where my father’s humble one-storey bungalow grew.
***
In August 1958, in the month actress Nargis Dutt graced the centerfold of Filmfare upon winning the best actress title for Mother India, Daddykins returned to Chennai from Lahore, a man on a mission. He was suddenly seized by the desire to own a home.
He purchased a 4,400 square-foot tract of land in T. Nagar for 3,200 rupees from a coconut orchard owner. A mile due north of Panagal Park, the property was not more than a fifteen-minute walk to Doctor’s home en route to which they often stopped at Panagal Park. There, Daddykins bought Urmila hot, roasted peanuts in a paper cone, a treat without which she never left the park.
With a cash gift from his father-in-law and a housing loan adding up to 25,000 rupees—when he had never spent a paisa more than he could afford—Daddykins began building their dream home in 1960. A truck arrived, carrying teak and kino wood from Palakkad, a father’s gift to his firstborn from his lands by the river.
Daddykins began noticing that everything in life cost exponentially more than what was originally assumed. Moreover, his wife, who never compromised on quality, wanted something done a certain way and that precise way was much dearer for him.
She craved a long window at the landing that would let the sun in. She needed shelves under the stairs for shoes and sandals. Soon enough it began to sound very good to him too, Parvati’s dream of an expansive attic over the kitchen, measuring four feet by ten feet by eight feet, a vast one where she would house old trunks, fans, bedding, brass lamps, all her Navarathri dolls, bronze vessels and gigantic copper urns.
While my mother would not renege on her principle that if she had to do something at all, she had to do it well, Daddykins made it clear that he could not stretch himself with a second loan. While they were caught in that tug of war between the sweetness of a dream and the soreness of reality, Daddykins began to feel the pull of the material. He too wanted something for himself, especially after a childhood of nothing.
Daddykins wanted a sit-out in the verandah where he would read The Hindu. He imagined a mosaic slab-bench—about eight feet long, two feet wide and four inches thick—for which Parvati had chosen, in her mind
, a reddish pink colour with white chips. Daddykins had just bought a scooter, a Lambretta, that he wished to park under a cantilevered shade and so, he designed the shade on paper and had it built with help from a cousin. But in the end, he was most vain about the conversation piece in his verandah—a massive concrete pillar painted in red oxide implemented by a creative engineer. For the next thirty-three years, the red pillar buttressing the slab-bench distinguished Daddykins’ home from the others on the road.
When the house had swollen from imagination to soil, he and his wife, now expecting another child, climbed up to their terrace and breathed in the salt air and the tanginess of lime and mango swaying far into the horizon. They saw their own ripened garden shooting into the sky, flushed with Banganappalli mangoes and coconuts. They heard the train rumble into Kodambakkam station a quarter mile away. Here and there, among paddy fields and coconut groves, a bungalow with a verandah and a courtyard blotted the green vistas all the way from Panagal Park to Parthasarathypuram Road. They saw how, soon after the blazing summer days of April but just before the southwest monsoons broke in June, cotton pods exploded at the seam, dotting kapok trees in white fluff. Sticky white fuzz floated down, lining roads, windows and leaves.
Daddykins would always talk about the inscrutability of the year 1961. Unexpectedly, he had been promoted to the post of an assistant accounts officer at a salary of 600 rupees. Parvati gave birth to a baby girl—me—in Parur in October. He wondered, sometimes, if Nirmala had been reborn in my form. Fate is strange. In that lucky year, my father’s face was also marred for life.
One morning, while Daddykins was riding his bicycle to work, a bolt of weakness thundered through the left half of his body. He crashed to the ground. A stranger, who had seen him lose consciousness, brought him back home. When Daddykins showed up at Doctor’s after the incident, his cousin examined him and pronounced him well. A few years afterward, however, a dentist told Daddykins that he noticed a distinct warping on his cheek that suggested that he’d had a mild stroke on his left side. Doctor was mortified about the misdiagnosis. Daddykins learned, too late, that he could not undo the damage of that morning. He would forever be the man with the crooked mouth.
Daddykins Page 6