Daddykins

by Kalpana Mohan

  ***

  My father always climbed the stairs to his apartment by holding the banister with his right hand. Following his stay at the hospital, he needed a little help to work his way up. But one day two months after his hospitalisation, I saw him overcome by such weakness that climbing a step proved to be a Herculean task, one before which we had to remove his sandals. He said later that they had felt like pewter beneath his feet. That afternoon, my father had experienced harrowing pain. Daddykins had been at work at his desk when he tried to catch the attention of his colleague before passing out. When Vinayagam called me on the phone, I left our apartment door wide open and ran downstairs. I saw the car turn into our driveway. I opened the door and held a hand out to my father.

  He was too weak to take it. He sat inside, unseeing, boneless in appearance, folded over like a wet rag; it seemed to me that he had been in a spin cycle inside the washer. His feet were bare, his pants and shirt patchy with splotches of wetness in several places. I reached out to touch his arm. It was cold.

  Vinayagam nudged him gently out of the car, shifting his legs out in slow motion. Daddykins was too weak to will his legs from the car to the floor of the little open garage. Together, the three of us inched towards the first four steps that led us to the short stairwell. My father leaned on Vinayagam, who seemed to bear all his weight on his body. I tucked my father’s arm in mine and we carried him up those eighteen steps, six inches at a time, until we saw the light of the day reflected from the Tanjore painting—The Teaching of the Bhagavad Gita—on the wall of Daddykins’ living room.

  In silence, we helped him out of his clothes. We eased my father onto his bed where he spent the next twenty-four hours in agony.

  10

  In a Little Crooked House

  In the middle of the night, I heard a sound that of a coconut hitting concrete. While aiming for the pillow in the dark, it seems Daddykins’ head had hit the headboard of his bed.

  I wanted to make sure that nothing had gone wrong. I did the obvious.

  ‘What’s 1 + 1, Daddykins?’ I asked into the night.

  ‘2,’ he said.

  ‘Good job. What’s 2 + 2?’

  ‘4.’

  ‘Great. Now what’s 1 + 3?’

  ‘7,’ Daddykins said. ‘You’re testing me so now I thought I’d test you instead.’

  ~~~

  And right when we all thought that Daddykins’ health had become so fragile that all our outings of a social nature would have to be folded and put away into our past, he tended to will himself, almost miraculously, back into shape, so he could attend daily concerts in the December festival season. One evening early in the month, my father was ready by 3.15 PM to leave for the inauguration of the music and dance season at Narada Gana Sabha. Vinayagam came up to my room and told me that my father was restless, that he was pacing the floor of the living room like a panther in heat. When I finally appeared in his circle of vision, Daddykins was perched on the edge of the old teak chair. He was sporting a white, full-sleeved shirt over grey dress pants. He looked pointedly at his watch.

  ‘I thought one of the reasons you were in Chennai was also to escort me to a few concerts around town during my convalescence,’ he said, adjusting his wristwatch. ‘We have two excellent front-row tickets and everyone knows me personally at the sabha.’ His eyes were cold. ‘And I happen to believe in and expect punctuality.’ Then Daddykins got up, turned around and made for the door. His chauffeur gloated behind him.

  At the venue, Vinayagam dropped us off at the porch and pick-up area that led directly into the best seats in the house. The staff at the theatre walked up to Daddykins and asked after his health. He introduced me to them. ‘My little girl,’ he said. Fifty-one years old, with hair dyed black to retain her youth and on supplements to stave off the onset of osteoporosis and peripheral neuropathy, his ‘little’ girl held Daddykins by the elbow and led him to their seats in the first row.

  At every concert, a half-hour into the performance, Daddykins would shrink into the seat, frozen to the bone. Air-conditioning in the theatre could not be regulated, according to the staff. Regulation of any kind in Chennai—of fans, air-conditioning, the size of road pavements, auto fares, the price of lentils—was often the exception, not the norm.

  When it got icicle-cold inside the theatre, I draped a woollen shawl that I always carried in my bag around Daddykins’ bony torso. The concert would begin. Daddykins listened keenly for the first couple of songs after which he slept through most of the performance; with the loss of hearing, my father seemed unable to recognise the nuances of the music. Although the melodies didn’t seem to nourish his brain anymore, I suspect they were seeping into his soul through his skin.

  ***

  I was embarrassed to be seen with my father. He dropped me off at Vidyodaya School every morning in his Lambretta scooter. I knew, even though I was only seven or eight, that though I had preferred to keep my father’s face a secret—to myself, to my family and my large extended family—it had leaked through the gaps of the thorny fence of our bungalow.

  On and off, I’d see a child distorting the mouth to match that of my father until the parent, embarrassed and apologetic, dragged the child away. Sometimes, children asked him why his mouth was ‘like that.’ My father would quickly reassure the parent; the mother’s relief was palpable. He’d turn to tell the child that he had suffered an illness called a ‘stroke’ and that at the time his cheek had gravitated to the left and that his mouth too moved along with it.

  The questions didn’t last too long because my father flung open his bag of tricks in the presence of children. First, he hypnotised them with his butterfly gig. The butterfly needed both a sleight of all his fingers and an accompanying whistle, as an imaginary insect soared into the air. For the subsequent trick that I called ‘Jack-in-the-box’, Daddykins tapped the top of his head and his tongue snuck out in the centre of his mouth. Next, he tweaked his right ear; his tongue careened right. Then he tweaked his left ear; his tongue swung left. Then he pinched the skin by his Adam’s apple; his tongue rolled back in. He had perfected this to an art over many years, and his sense of comic timing made kids gape and roar. Within minutes, they were slaves to his pranks, guffawing and rolling at his feet and begging him to please, please do it again.

  Even though my mother, Urmila and I scoffed at his standard bag of tricks, every time he played a prank, we found ourselves laughing hard. His relatives longed for an opportunity to visit, for while my father’s repertoire was old, his delivery of lines was refreshing—like a tonic for the soul—accompanied by a bracing whistle, in a two-tone, characteristic of his slyness. Sometimes, we heard a snatch of mimicry, too, or just a whacky point of view wedged into a topical factoid from current affairs or cinema. And there were always new laughs manufactured around his crooked mouth.

  My father let it be known to friends and family that he received favours and pity or a combination of both because, in his words, he very likely cut a sorry figure wherever he went, thanks to his crooked mouth. If he had to skewer through red tape anywhere, say, to buy railway tickets and it was known to be impossible to make a reservation at a busy season, he joked that he could wangle a few tickets because, after all, every clerk would take pity on him, a hapless man with a crooked mouth. Daddykins’ physical infirmity was a gradual manifestation of a skewed mind that diffused from brain into soul and chin. He attempted to wear his mouth with such panache on his person that he often joked about it as if it belonged below someone else’s nose.

  11

  The Guide

  One morning Vinayagam, who was helping Daddykins get dressed, was humming a raga, something he often did, especially around Chennai’s music season.

  ‘Saar, seems you don’t like me singing?’ he asked, buttoning my father’s shirt. ‘You’re not saying anything?’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why, Saar?’

  ‘I don’t want interrupt the flow,’ Daddykins said.
‘Just in case something really good should come out of you.’

  ~~~

  By the following March, Daddykins could not even swallow his pills. Vinayagam powdered all the medication using a stone mortar and pestle and then mixed the powder with water. Grimacing, Daddykins pushed it down his throat. Vinayagam also pureed his food to formlessness. For lunch, the young man cooked rice, vegetable and lentil in the pressure cooker, and ground it to a puree with salt and pepper. For a second course, he blended steamed rice and yoghurt. Daddykins succumbed to the new challenges of old age in a slow, measured way, inching towards the unknown as if by an infinite force, reducing his quantity of food from a plate one month, to a bowl the next, and then to a cup until he couldn’t subtract any more.

  Jeeva Park kept his mind sharp. I knew just how perceptive he still was on the morning an elderly gentleman reeking of alcohol came on to me. On the very first greeting, the man’s eyes flitted around my bosom like a bee on an Indian balsam and so I stiffened when the no-good who introduced himself as Daddykins’ walking acquaintance let his hand slide from my shoulder onto my back. I let it pass one time. But when the man was excessively affectionate for a second time during the course of our morning walk, I squirmed. Daddykins flinched. ‘I noticed that blackguard’s hand on you,’ he muttered. ‘Uncalled for.’

  So, the following morning when the man hung behind us during our walk, Daddykins flanked me on the right where the man couldn’t cut in at all. When the lech attempted to greet us both, Daddykins gave him an icy glare. Later, my father told me he couldn’t understand how anyone could be inebriated in the morning, a precious time for prayer and contemplation.

  He pointed out that he didn’t approve of my love of margaritas either. I reminded him about his rule of thumb in life: ‘Everything in moderation.’ But Daddykins said he didn’t believe it was realistic to achieve temperance in alcohol. ‘Drinking adulterates one’s sense of propriety,’ he said. ‘To be in complete control, you must shun alcohol.’

  ***

  Daddykins allowed himself the occasional cigarette during our years in the bungalow on Parthasarathypuram Road. As a little girl, I caught the glow of his cigarette when, sometimes, I looked up from the courtyard at our roof terrace. In another way, too, our bungalow’s rectangular courtyard made a profound impression on me as a baby of one. I was dropped head down on it, from a height of about three feet, by Urmila. My mother flogged her with a coconut broom for letting my head hit the concrete.

  When my father led me into a planetarium in my later life, I was not impressed. It was never that much different from standing in the middle of the courtyard of our bungalow at night, right after dinner, when all of us, my father, my mother, my paternal grandparents, my sister and I relaxed in our verandah with all the lights turned off inside the house. In the dark warm night cooled by the zephyr from the Bay of Bengal under the soft amber of an occasional streetlight, I would hold out my arms and look up, pirouetting, until the heavens swam rapidly over my head and I fell down. The sky shimmered with possibility.

  Visiting family loved our cool bungalow, from verandah to backyard, built in accordance with the traditional Hindu principles of good fortune. From the entryway into our home, we saw the tulsi plant rising in the middle of the backyard. In such a home, said an astrologer, Goddess Lakshmi would shower wealth, luck and peace. My father remarked that he saw everything in that home—other than money and peace of mind.

  We met relatives travelling from the north to the south, or vice versa—since ours were scattered in Delhi, Nagpur, Bombay, Calcutta, Rourkela, Ahmedabad, Cochin, Coimbatore—for they would come home before changing trains at Madras Central Station. Visitors called our home India’s other Mughalsarai Junction—a place where people could alight, eat, shower, change, shop, relax, laugh and transfer. Daddykins grumbled that his home was also Bedbug Central, thanks to all the luggage that rolled in and out.

  Our dining table was always too small. So the younger ones ate while seated on the cool mosaic floor right by a series of calendars that my father hung by a thread on the wall. One of those yearly calendars was a print of a Ravi Varma painting of a female deity. Another was a glossy calendar from Air India that everyone then coveted as if it were an original lithograph from the Picasso Estate Collection. My father strung all the calendars on a single twine, taking the trouble to show them off in the dining area.

  While many a marriage was brokered in our living room, all too often, it seemed our bungalow was a convalescent home. Madras was famous for its specialist physicians. Thus, Daddykins hovered over relatives with brain tumours, ulcers, gall bladder surgeries, hysterectomies, hernias, hydroceles and urinary complications. Some scenes from my childhood are etched in my brain, especially the vignettes of my uncle Babu.

  In the late sixties, Babu suffered a head injury when an auto-rickshaw he was riding in toppled over. For months, he received electric shock therapy—a line of treatment that was shunned in the latter half of the 20th century owing to its side effects—during which time Daddykins and my grandfather would ferry him to his sessions. The threesome returned home in a black and yellow taxi. My grandfather and Daddykins held Babu close between them, his glasses in one of their pockets. They guided him up the three mosaic steps from the courtyard into the verandah and then into the living room, turning right into the bedroom where a little mattress and pillow lay on the cool floor ready to welcome my uncle. He slept for hours, until the effects of the therapy wore off. He recovered from his trauma and went on to marry and have a beautiful family of his own. Our bungalow really did seem to swallow a passel of bad and spit out plenty of good.

  Like most homes of that period, ours too was cleaved in the typical mode of the day, a clear line demarcating the duties of my father and those of my mother at a time when women slogged in the home while men went to work. Daddykins was considerate to my mother in a Brahmin culture that upheld male chauvinism as a virtue. But every other day, he let it be known—in his wife’s earshot—that she couldn’t bear to see him sitting idly in our verandah. Whenever he sat down to read The Hindu after his morning coffee, his wife had to thrust another errand on him that had to be done right that second. She was demanding even after all her demands were met. For instance, every time Daddykins trudged back home from the vegetable market, my mother would empty the bags and wonder about the one item that he had not bought. ‘You didn’t buy drumstick?’ she would say with a petulant curl of her lip. ‘Now how do I make avial without drumstick? Just go back and get it!’ Daddykins protested. ‘Why can’t you make do with whatever I’ve bought?’ he asked. She retorted that his meal and his coffee would suffer greatly if Daddykins cramped her style. Cursing, Daddykins would rumble down the road again in his scooter to buy her drumsticks after informing her that she was peevish.

  One time, my mother remained inconsolable. She had been ailing from a dreadful fluid collection resulting from mosquito bites that she feared might render her leg forever gigantic as an elephant’s foot. Daddykins and my mother were en route to Doctor’s to get her condition diagnosed when Daddykins pressed the brake of his Lambretta much too hard upon seeing a cow in his path. My mother tumbled onto the road. My father vroomed off, oblivious.

  Later, when they returned home, my mother’s face was purple. She wept. She had fallen on the road in a most disgraceful manner. How could he have driven off? This dragged them both over a land mine. Any suggestion of her corpulence made her angrier still for while she was a woman of considerable proportions, she didn’t like to be reminded of it and asking why Daddykins could not have sensed that the vehicle was lighter was a direct admission of guilt about her impressive girth. Never again would my mother grace his scooter with the weight of her glance or the heft of her seat.

  ***

  ‘Like most of the men of his era, Daddykins used to smoke at least one cigarette a day for many years,’ I said to Vinayagam. But I wanted to verify with my father whether it was one or two or more. Daddykins, who was s
eated in his leather chair in the living room, did not respond. But he looked sideways and told me, in Queen’s English, that he was irked that I would have sought to bring it up for discussion at that moment, and that too when we were surrounded by a good-for-nothing like ‘this fellow’ by which he obviously meant Vinayagam, who, in his opinion, tended to blow everything out of proportion.

  ‘Saar!’ Vinayagam cried, barely able to contain his mirth and not caring a fig for the insult levelled at him in English by his boss. ‘You too were wild once, Saar.’ He stood behind Daddykins caressing his baldpate. ‘In any case, Saar, how many?’

  I jumped in. ‘One or two cigarettes a day, that’s all, for many years. Maybe one at work too, every day?’ Daddykins looked straight ahead into the black hole of our television. Vinayagam cackled while I elaborated upon it. ‘When we built the portion of our bungalow upstairs in 1970, he’d go up after dinner to hide and smoke. Until, one day, just like that, he dropped the habit. Isn’t that right, Daddykins?’

  As if in response to my question, my father picked up the remote to the television and pressed it several times, forcibly, while sending austere glances in my direction, murderous looks that informed me that I was thoughtless and irreverent to have brought up such a discussion in front of a certain rascal whose only business it would be to tom-tom it to the rest of the world in flagrant disregard of a man’s age and station in life. Vinayagam yanked the remote from Daddykins’s hand and increased the volume.

  My father leaned back in his chair. His favourite anchor, Barkha Dutt, was on NDTV along with five prominent panelists. In a few minutes, Daddykins’ irritation over the cigarette discussion quelled, he now began simmering over the mishandling of the Delhi gang rape case. He told me he prayed that the trial of the six accused rapists would move quickly to the date of execution. ‘Those men need to be hanged now. I really do not see a need for a trial!’ A man who wouldn’t crush a cockroach now favoured capital punishment. I believe my father often felt a physical pain as he watched the country of his birth putrefy. Seated in front of his Sony Bravia, Daddykins was now wondering aloud whether the prime minister of India had a cock.