12
Cary Grant of Parthasarathypuram
Daddykins would not listen when Samyuktha, his youngest sibling by a whole twenty-three years, told him that he need not attend a famous singing duo’s four-hour concert at Tapovan Hall.
‘Haven’t you heard them perform often enough?’ Samyuktha asked. ‘I say there’s no need for you to go!’
‘So what if I heard them a few months ago?’ Daddykins retorted, grimmer than a coconut tree in the Tundra. ‘Don’t you eat every day?’
~~~
Thalaivar rarely arrived at Daddykins’ apartment unannounced, calling ahead to ensure no visitors were home, preferring to talk to his father-in-law in private. The telephone call was a sign for Vinayagam to turn on the air-conditioner so the room would be cool upon his arrival.
In early February, I had called Thalaivar in Singapore to convey my father’s anxiety about maintaining a retinue of household staff as his illness progressed. I felt Thalaivar would be able to stanch his insecurities and a week after our chat, Thalaivar landed in Chennai.
The morning of Thalaivar’s phone call, Vinayagam rushed into the living room to turn on the air-conditioner. Then he scampered into Daddykins’ bedroom to fetch his hearing aid so that they could both avoid receiving a lecture from Thalaivar on why Daddykins must always wear the earpieces from dawn until bedtime.
Thalaivar strode in at the appointed time, dressed to kill, as always. A sharp trail of expensive perfume now clung to the living room. Daddykins awaited his son-in-law in the farthest corner of the room, right by the television, away from the cold blast.
Years before, Urmila and Thalaivar had installed air-conditioners in several rooms in my father’s apartment to ensure that my parents were comfortable in their old age in Chennai’s mercury-melting heat. But Daddykins never turned it on saying it didn’t suit his chest. I knew it didn’t agree with his wallet.
On the day of his visit, my brother-in-law got to the point after dispensing with basic niceties. His manner often verged on the brusque. ‘Don’t imagine that Vinayagam takes care of you simply because you are special to him,’ he said. ‘You may well be, but please know that his future is secure. I am taking care of him too. And I’ll take good care of him even after you are gone.’ Daddykins leaned forward and patted him on the arm. ‘I know you will. Thank you.’ Thalaivar looked at Daddykins with the intensity typical of him when he was having a one-on-one conversation. ‘I want you to know that more than his monthly salary and all the little things that you or I have bought him, you have taught Vinayagam a lot of things that will stay with that fellow through his life. You cannot put a price on that.’ He touched my father’s wrist. ‘You have taught Vinayagam to manage his money. You have taught him to be meticulous. You have taught him discipline. You have taught him diligence. You have taught him to believe in the divine. You have taught him so much about life. Do you know what those things mean to a man like him—to someone who came to you when he was a boy of eighteen—when he was a nobody?’
My father wiped the ends of his eyes with the edge of his dhoti. I know he had not heard his somewhat dry son-in-law address him like that before. Thalaivar laughed softly and he looked at Daddykins for a time. His demeanour switched back to his business-like self. ‘You know, your problem is that you look at life as checks and balances. You keep accounts of everything. You go by the book.’
I caught Daddykins stealing a glance at the clock.
‘Do you know that I’ve never worried about who will take care of me in the future?’
‘Really?’ Daddykins asked, startled. ‘Why not?’
‘I’m taking care of many people now, especially those in my employ,’ Thalaivar said, ‘and so I believe that there is a supreme power up above that I can trust implicitly to take care of me when I’m old and infirm and I need help.’
Daddykins gasped out loud. I sensed both awe and incredulity in my father’s reaction. I doubt he was convinced that such an assumption on Thalaivar’s part was safe in the long term.
I too believed in karma in my present life, like Thalaivar. He was generous. In turn, of course, he expected loyalty, especially from his staff. Whenever Thalaivar was about to leave our home, the help in our house stood around, a trifle sheepishly, out of respect for the big boss. Thalaivar then slipped a finger into his pocket and fished out a crisp bill with the soundless grace of a cheetah, and pressed the tip into the helper’s palm. Though he never referred to it, Thalaivar had educated several disadvantaged children through the years. Long after Thalaivar left our apartment that evening, I sat in the lingering cloud of Hugo Boss. I had been allowed a peek into his soul, if only for a fraction of a second.
***
My father’s Lambretta roared into the romance between Thalaivar and my sister. Over time, Daddykins’ two wheels staked out the venues of their clandestine meetings. As the young sweethearts got bolder, Thalaivar would await my sister in his clunky Ambassador car at the bus stop at the intersection of Habibullah Road and North Usman Road. On occasion, Daddykins waited at the stop, along with my sister, just to make sure she boarded the city bus to college. But sometimes, before he knew what was happening, she would slip away into the waiting Ambassador and Daddykins would just watch in utter disbelief, jaw dropping, before turning around to go back home.
My parents were aghast that in an era of arranged marriages, their child would choose the man she wished to marry. Daddykins may also have been concerned that his daughter’s name was linked with a boy who seemed to be a Casanova in a neighbourhood of stodgy Tamil Brahmins. Thalaivar wore loud shirts. He walked with a swagger that suggested that he might own Parthasarathypuram Road one day.
However, this Cary Grant of Parthasarathypuram impressed a betel-chewing college principal and another math professor, both of whom lived across our bungalow. They told Daddykins that he needed to have a better reason to prevent him from marrying his daughter. Thalaivar was an academic star from a decent family. He had degrees in physics and electronics. His job prospects were excellent. Just what more did a father want for his daughter, they asked.
Thalaivar lived in the bungalow diagonally across from our backyard. For the longest time, a short barbed wire ran throughout the perimeter of our bungalow to deter burglars. The first thing my father did when he came into more money in the late sixties was to erect a brick wall in place of the barbed wire that separated us from passers-by. It’s possible that Daddykins just wanted to prevent unwanted romance.
On some days, while walking past our house and almost always when our parents were out of the house, Thalaivar bounded across our courtyard, entered our verandah and slipped a book to me through the window to be handed over to my sister. For a time, I thought that an exchange of books happened between a man and a woman when they were intellectually engaged. But I missed the other exchange—the exchange of looks. At a time when almost no one we knew owned a telephone in their home, I had become the clueless go-between of neighbourhood sweethearts.
At five or six, I hadn’t yet worked out human cunning but looking back at it all now, I remember dropping my full ice cream cup on a day the ice cream man rode into our street. Thalaivar ran across the road to pacify me with a new one even though my parents felt no such compulsion.
Thalaivar summoned every resource into his courtship. I suppose my brother-in-law’s goal-oriented approach in business was tested first in his acquisition of a wife of his choice. He also roped in one of his sisters for a business partner. The oldest of the girls in the family, she became my sister’s confidante. She invited her for family outings. Without knowing what was happening right under his reading glasses, my father was aiding and abetting a romance at a time when courtship was objectionable.
The road separating our home from Thalaivar’s bubbled over with the Hindi and Tamil melodies of the late sixties: Mere sapnon ki rani kab aayegi tu; Jeena yahan marna yahan, Iske siwa jaana kahan; Aaayiram nilavey vaa. While Thalaivar stood in the open terrace le
ading out of his room, the lyrics from his blaring radio upstairs filled the road as he looked diagonally across into our backyard where his heroine stood strategically, for way longer than necessary, combing her luxuriant tresses, reminding him, perhaps, of the doe-eyed glamour queen of Bollywood, Asha Parekh.
For those of us who blossomed into adolescence in the late sixties, nothing rivalled the innocent romance of the Bollywood screen—even though Bollywood borrowed heavily from Hollywood, imitating the plastic roses, the ribbons, the bows, the white gloves, the cat-eyes and the bullet bras. Everyone then was in love with the idea of being in love. Thalaivar and Urmila were the little stars in my firmament, a young couple of twenty-three and twenty-two, whose marriage immortalised the notion that all love—not just the one seen on the silver screen—had a fairy-tale ending.
In a dramatic turn of events that was evocative of all the Hindi and Tamil movies that Thalaivar himself loved to watch, the debonair hero in my sister’s life suffered an acute attack of typhoid during which he extracted a promise from his mother that she would get him married to Urmila if he recovered.
In June 1972, my sister was formally engaged to be married to Thalaivar and their wedding in September, at Hemamalini Kalyana Mandapam, was an opulent affair even though, it was orchestrated by an ordinary man who, by his own constant admission, was nothing more than an inconsequential bean counter working for the government of India.
***
My father’s pants had begun flapping around his limbs like laundry on the drying lines. His rate of atrophy was alarming. The evening before Thalaivar flew back to Singapore at the end of January, he called Daddykins at home to tell him they were going shopping for clothes.
Thalaivar had decided that his father-in-law also needed a luxurious leather chair—one at home for watching television and a more comfortable leather chaise-longue for work in the office—on which he could stretch out and rest. He ferried Daddykins and Vinayagam to two furniture stores before arriving at Raymonds at Pondy Bazaar where they didn’t find pants in Daddykins’ size. My father was so slight that the store suggested looking in a shop for boys. They went to Mahaveer a few doors away where they found pants in a size that would work, with some alteration.
Halfway through this outing, Daddykins was exhausted. Vinayagam tried to call this, in vain, to Thalaivar’s attention. By the time Thalaivar dropped off Daddykins at 9 PM, at least three hours after the mission began, my father was winded, hungry and crabby, and sporting a brand new shirt in sky blue, fitting his shrunken frame to perfection.
In Vinayagam’s hand was a booty: four new pants, six new shirts and two swanky sandals, a closed shoe with a buckle that would be light on Daddykins feet, especially as he climbed the stairs to his house, and another light, open pair, for casual wear. A leather recliner would be arriving the following morning.
My father was sour. ‘The man gets something into his head that has to be done now and we all have to follow his orders.’
I sat down by my father’s side. ‘Don’t crib, Daddykins,’ I said, hugging his frail body. He proceeded to sulk. He felt cold to the touch. I told him his son-in-law wanted him to look good and feel good. ‘He bought you pants for 2500 rupees a pop. Whoever does that?’ Apparently, no one inside the car had cared that an old man could not take the blast of air-conditioning. ‘But there’s a limit, I’m almost ninety,’ he said.
Vinayagam looked exhausted too. He had tried telling Thalaivar that Daddykins’ energy flagged by early evening. But he had been too nervous to press the case. ‘Amma, you don’t understand. Thalaivar talks. We never talk. Especially not underlings like me.’
I insisted that Thalaivar was not unreasonable and that he should have been more forceful. But Vinayagam shook his head. ‘Amma, there was no way to get through.’
Daddykins sat down to eat. He spooned his dinner into his mouth in stony silence. At the table, Vinayagam opened Daddykins’ pillbox and picked out the capsules.
‘Thalaivar didn’t intend to do so many things, Amma. You know how he is. He’s a perfectionist. He believes in finishing everything that he thinks of right at that given minute. He doesn’t postpone anything.’
I looked at Daddykins. Now that his stomach was a little full, he seemed to have become more composed. Vinayagam set the stone mortar and pestle on the table and turned to me.
‘Amma, in your story you must say that when your father became too skinny and began looking like a scarecrow in a sugarcane field, his son-in-law decided to take him shopping one evening.’
While Daddykins continued to slurp the white puree of curd and rice seasoned with salt, Vinayagam began pounding the pills, one by one, in the stone mortar. He looked up and pointed the pestle in my direction.
‘And you must say also that your father is too miserly and too old-world and too principled to spend money on himself. And that he still calls himself a penniless clerk, even after all these years. All that should appear in your book, Amma, for your story to be honest.’ He stopped to glare at me, brow raised, as if he had just had another epochal realisation. ‘At this rate, I think I might as well write the book for you, Amma.’
13
Really Broke
Daddykins griped that his wife didn’t ever walk at Jeeva Park. The few times that my mother strolled in the park under hardship and duress, she began her walk with a pleasant enough face but always returned home with a glower. She even went about making herself a pair of leather sandals for the purposes of her walk—snug ones with a strap and buckle—at Mylapore’s National Leather Works. But she made excuses about heat, or wind, or sun, or noise, or dust, or sweat, or cold, or rain.
One evening, while he was pottering about the house after work, Daddykins’ eyes happened to fall on my mother’s leather sandals. He turned to his valet in the presence of his wife.
‘Vinayagam, do you know what kind of sandals these are?’ His chauffeur shook his head.
‘These, young man, are the kind that never go walking.’
~~~
As we approached Jeeva Park in the morning, Daddykins stopped at his usual spot, where Sambasivam Street met our street. Hands folded in prayer, my father looked to the left where a Ganesha stared out of a sconce in the wall. He sought the blessings of the deity behind the bars inside the alcove. Then he looked to the right to seek the blessings of the Ganesha idol at the far end on Raghavaiah Road.
I touched his arm as he paid obeisance to the deities. ‘What do you ask of your god every morning?’ I asked, guiding him past potholes that got filled up by the road workers every few months only to cave in with the next downpour.
‘Peace of mind,’ my father said. ‘You can have everything in the world. But it isn’t always easy to have peace of mind.’ I had heard my father use the term a lot around our house. As a child, I’d thought it was something like milk or sugar, kept in the larder perhaps.
As we reached the park, I told Daddykins to watch out for the thin, black pipe that had surfaced again, out of the mud, for the nth time in weeks. We began with my father stepping onto the track to announce, as he did every day, that he felt better than usual. After a few minutes on the track, Daddykins ran into his two walking friends at which point he told me that I was free to walk on my own.
As I wandered away, a Carnatic aria floated in from the speakers and I thought about how for years my father had sought peace of mind in classical music. When Daddykins was composed, we heard it in his whistles, in his jokes, and in his daily banter. However, my father succumbed to stress and morphed into his antipode on at least one day in a month.
On the days leading up to that unfortunate moment, my father would tell my mother that she or someone else was draining his peace of mind. He’d then spend twenty hours in agony, cotton cloth wound tightly around his head, thrashing about in bed in a migraine that siphoned him off into an alien world of turbid and one-sided pain, nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light.
Daddykins suffered many such migraines in
the months leading to the milestone event of our family—Urmila’s wedding to Thalaivar. The wedding robbed my father of all peace of mind even though, in 1972, when he finally got over his disapproval of his daughter falling in love, he felt that her marriage to a smart young banker was the highest point of his life. Unfortunately, his happiness was marred by his realisation that it would also spell the lowest point in his bank balance.
For a man who took stock of everyone’s spending every night, the first wedding in his own family was bound to come as something of a shock to his system. When he opened his black accounts diary, he became fearful that everything he had worked for would vanish overnight. It would dissolve at the pillars of ostentation erected by the women of his house. This was, after all, a man who lived with two pens, four sets of underwear and six shirts and three pairs of trousers.
He drew up a plan of expenditure. He informed my mother and Urmila that they had to stay inside the circle he had drawn for them. He allotted my sister 2000 rupees for her trousseau from which she would have to buy a total of five Kanchipuram silk sarees. My sister was concerned that the amount he had assigned for her purchase was inadequate for what she wanted: at least two grand silk saris. My father suggested that perhaps she could buy one grand sari, and four ordinary saris. Thus, one of her saris had an imitation gold border and not real silver thread coated in pure gold, a sartorial choice many brides would have balked at in the 70s.
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