Daddykins also wished to make it clear to Thalaivar’s parents that they needed to temper their expectations of how he would conduct the wedding because his coffers were not immeasurably deep. Daddykins walked up to their house one morning, eight weeks before the date of the wedding to request their understanding.
‘Sir, you are a jeweller, a diamond merchant,’ my father said to Thalaivar’s father. ‘If you have to spend a little extra on something, all you may have to do is take another purchase order and you’ll make the money you spent right away. The business world gives you the flexibility to make a little profit to adjust if you must. But in my line of work—remember that I’m only an indigent servant of the government of India—even if I were to work another ten hours a week, my salary would stay stagnant.’ Thalaivar’s father listened politely. A polished, soft-spoken gentleman with a comforting way about him, he assured Daddykins that he would have nothing at all to worry about.
Daddykins’ anxiety did not abate. Soon, however, he was swept away by the feverish excitement of a wedding in his home. A week before the big day, adirasam—sweetened browned discs of flour, cane sugar and cardamom—began frying in the makeshift shed in the back of our bungalow. Relatives hadn’t seen that size of adirasam. Murukkus aligned themselves in biscuit tins to be ferried across to the home of the groom. Chickpea flour shuddered through sieves and was roasted in iron woks as wide as the Aracibo. Laddoos rolled into steel plates. Cooks whipped up meals and snacks and the bungalow buzzed with the laughter of relatives who arrived from both sides of the family for several days. By night, the men in the home carted their pillows and grass mats to the verandah and slept there, even as mosquitoes buzzed about in the humid September sky.
Henna trees rambled along one side of our home all the way to the well in the back. Our maid picked leaves by the bucketfuls. She crushed them in my mother’s stone grinder in batches, making a tight, smooth paste. My aunts lined Urmila’s hands and feet with henna, like those of a dancer, making a thick coat all around the periphery. They capped each of her toes and her fingers so the dye coloured the nails and painted them a bright rust. My cousins and I painted our hands and feet, too, and when we grew impatient of waiting for it to dry, we hobbled to the tap by the well and washed our hands and feet, rubbing until the dried henna washed off. A rust-orange emerged. We took our hands to our noses and breathed deep the smell of leaf, soil and sun.
Days before the two-day wedding, a truckload of produce arrived by car from the town of Pollachi. Groceries arrived from the local Bombay Stores. At the end of the festivities of the first evening, Daddykins was caught totally off guard. The kitchen staff ran out of all produce and all other groceries; in exactly one evening, the cooks had exhausted everything planned for the three-event wedding. Panic ensued. At midnight, Daddykins’ siblings knocked on the door of the grocer to buy fresh supplies for the morning’s events.
My father needed cash overnight for the unexpected expenditure. He called the only person who would have that kind of cash under his pillow: Doctor. Daddykins accepted the loan of 9000 rupees with the tacit agreement to repay it over the next many years at zero interest.
When everyone had left for their respective hometowns after the wedding, life did not assume normalcy. I would stand in the last room of our home, on our concrete floor, looking through the grill at Thalaivar’s home, desperate for a glimpse of my sister. Her growing roots in another home felt like an abandonment of our own. In the meantime, Daddykins brooded over his new circumstances. He had been toying with the idea of working abroad. The stack of wedding bills firmed up his resolve. He accepted an offer to work as an auditor with the Tanzanian government in Dar-es-Salaam.
In December, Daddykins, my mother and I flew to a life in East Africa. Some of his siblings felt my father was shirking his duty as the first child and the first son to his aged parents. But it was a risk he had to take. Daddykins was stone-broke.
***
After his walk one morning, Daddykins stood grumbling behind the open door of his almirah. ‘I’m paying that bloody fellow so he will take me to where I bloody well want to go,’ Daddykins said. ‘That’s his bloody job.’
I found out that when Vinayagam had arrived that morning, his boss had greeted him at the door saying that he wanted to go to the bank. But whenever Vinayagam heard the words ‘the bank,’ his face assumed the aura of a bank vault—gray, steely, impenetrable. He hated taking Daddykins to the bank.
On the first of every month, Daddykins worried about all the payments that needed to be made. He worried about his income—work, dividends, pension—tiding him over for all the expenses that he would incur for the month. He would then go to the bank, check on his accounts and ensure that an entry, in pen, was made in his accounts passbook.
Little had changed inside the bank since the time it had opened in T. Nagar in the seventies. The building had hardly been updated. There was nowhere to park nearby. Vinayagam had rightly noted that Daddykins’ perception of levels was so poor that he would be unsafe if left to make his way on his own inside the bank in spite of my father insisting that Vinayagam was exaggerating.
Vinayagam’s monthly ire wasn’t at the trip itself, it was at the monthly insult of Daddykins not just letting Vinayagam do it alone. Everyone inside the bank had known Vinayagam for two decades. Daddykins could just give him the passbook, the check, the letter and Vinayagam would zip down in his two-wheeler, have any and all the work done and bring the passbook back, all neat and stamped.
Daddykins said, however, that he wished to be seen. And that he wished to oversee his own affairs. As long as blood purled through his veins, and as long as his two legs would ferry him to a destination and back, he would go to the bank himself, he declared.
The morning in question, all three of us made the trip. Vinayagam stopped right outside the entrance and I gave Daddykins a hand and led him in after warning him about the thick electric cables that snaked outside the pathway and crept into a hole in the wall that acted like an electrical junction.
‘Do you realise just how dangerous this is?’ I asked Daddykins. ‘Vinayagam was right. You cannot walk in here without an escort.’ Daddykins scowled.
I told my father to sit down in the waiting area, while I took his accounts passbook to the female officer, who would make an entry in the book and arrange for a withdrawal of 9000 rupees for his expenses—in hundred, twenty rupee bills—with the rest in hundreds and thousands. But Daddykins made a beeline to her desk, bantered with her, asked after her family and introduced me as his little girl from California.
Then, while my father sat, I took his passbook to the teller’s counter. I began waiting in a line that that ran straight across, like a chorus of Can-Can dancers in front of the man’s desk. The teller asked who was first in the queue, such as it was. Everyone extended their passbooks. Twenty minutes later, the gentleman handed over my father’s money to me. The bills tucked away in his black leather wallet, my father, Vinayagam and I headed home.
Home and eased into his teak chair, Daddykins began—‘That teller at the bank was such a slowcoach today,’ he said with a smile, extending a foot forward so his man Friday could unbuckle his shoe. Vinayagam told his boss that he was an uncharitable one. To label others as ‘slow’ when he himself moved slower than a snail? ‘How was that fair, Saar?’ he asked. And Daddykins, who couldn’t let that go uncontested, told him that it was one thing to be slow at the age of ninety and quite another thing to be wooden-headed when you were a strapping young lad of thirty.
Vinayagam snorted. Upon seeing the effect of his rejoinder on Vinayagam, Daddykins chortled into his right palm, as he always did, when he realised he had been an old hooligan.
Everyone was happy again. For a time at least, there would be peace of mind.
14
The Bwana in a Safari Suit
One morning, just as we were about to head out for our walk in Jeeva Park, I noticed that Daddykins had worn his walking shorts inside
out. The pockets flapped about like the ears of a pet dachshund.
When I brought it to his attention, he looked down in annoyance. ‘No wonder I couldn’t find my pockets,’ he said, cursing into the air because he had already worn his walking shoes and tied his laces and tucked them inside his shoes.
And then while he sat in the teak chair in his Crystal tighty-whities, I tore off his shorts and turned them inside out and slid them past his shoes again. He pulled them up his knees and thanked me, apologising for having embarrassed me by asking me to help him with mishaps of an intimate nature.
~~~
The first time Juma, our housekeeper in Dar-es-Salaam, winked at me, I was eleven years old. I had no idea until then that men tried to endear themselves to girls.
Juma was harmless, but that wink was the first of many jolts about my changing body. Prior to this, I had figured out something about sex from the Hindi movie Aradhana, gleaning that if a man and a woman were lying next to each other by the fireplace and they were attractive, things could happen right when the Hindi song came alive through the speakers.
Roop Tera Mastana
Pyar Mera Diwana
Bhool Koi Hamse Naa
Ho Jaaye
A cousin explained the meaning of the lyrics to me. She said that the male was so intoxicated by the female that something could happen between them that would be a very grave mistake indeed.
I spent many years in Dar trying to figure out what that something was. The research happened as I developed. I was helped further along by ‘uncles’ and other family friends, whose glances made me feel uncomfortable and so I began to avoid them. Avoidance marks the end of innocence, I suppose.
The greatest predator was Mr. Mistry in the flat downstairs. He spent his time trying to rope teenage girls in our building into massaging his legs and thighs. If he felt he could get away with it—and predators have an amazing knack for choosing victims—he would ask them to massage other parts of him too. I was spared that trauma, but I fell into the clutches of Kumar, the son of one of Daddykins’ friends who was a few years older than me, who tried to feel my breasts whenever our families met up.
At the time, I didn’t know how I should tell my mother or Daddykins that I was afraid of this boy. But the night Kumar tried to put his hands between my legs in his Renault while his father was giving our family a ride home, was the day the young man learned to never ever touch me again. I pinched him, twisting his fingers so hard that my nails must have drawn blood. That was also the day I learned that it was important for a woman to kick and fight back even if she couldn’t scream.
Many years later, long after we were back in India, I told Daddykins about how in Dar, I had lived as a voiceless victim, like many girls my age, in fear of being groped and torn by feelings of guilt when I didn’t even understand the significance or the consequences. Daddykins was apoplectic. He said he wished I’d told him then about what had happened and that he would have guaranteed my safety had he only known.
While I was peeling the layers of my womanhood in Tanzania, my parents were also learning to live a little. For the first time ever they found themselves in their own bubble, experiencing a life they’d not imagined before outside their rigid socio-economic strata and the constant reach of relatives. After years of financial hardship, they felt they had some respite.
We also became more aware of the things money could buy. Daddykins regretted that he could not send his father more than 300 shillings, a third of his salary, every month. Suddenly, he seemed resentful about staying in a job in the government when employees in the private sectors afforded more. Their homes were visibly better. I too saw the difference in the woodwork, the finish of the Danish-style furniture they owned, whereas ours were coarse hand-me-downs, bought second-hand from others, who were leaving town. Some families also had full-time household help. One gentleman in the United Nations pocketed twelve times the salary Daddykins made and did not pay taxes. He was given a car for personal use. His car, the latest Toyota, was soundless. Ours sounded like a sum of all its moving parts.
The flip side of it was that our family had never imagined that one day we would own a car. Weeks after we arrived in Dar, my father realised that it would be difficult to go about his life without his own set of wheels. He saved six months of Tanzanian shillings before he bought his first car.
In June 1973, a light blue sedan, a Vauxhall Viva with four seats—a bucket seat next to driver’s seat and two in the back—rolled into our building with Daddykins, sporting a grey safari suit, at the wheel. It cost my father 4000 shillings. There was no excitement greater than the arrival, into our home, of that secondhand car, basic box on four wheels, a not particularly handsome one. But it was a sign to us and to all the relatives back home in India, by means of photographs, that we had arrived. The thing that often brings us the most joy is the awareness that someone else is observing our enjoyment.
I’d lived in a small, conservative town before moving to Dar where, suddenly, I discovered so much, not just about myself but also about the world outside. As I observed life in Dar and the ways of local Tanzanians, I learned that independence didn’t always translate to freedom. The locals were a gullible, pious lot trodden upon by centuries of imperialists—first Arabs, then Europeans and finally, in the 20th century, business-minded Indians—who viewed them through selfish, greedy eyes. Daddykins observed that all around the world, the colonised invariably became colonialists. The side we were on depended on how history had treated us.
Poor natives like Juma, with his frizzy hair packed tightly around his head and his eyes spreading like melting butter over his ebony face, were simply trying to climb out of the well of their oppression. I’ll forever remember Juma standing outside the ramshackle servants’ quarters, rocking to That’s The Way I Like It by KC & The Sunshine Band, the radio’s shiny steel antenna catching the last rays of the evening sun.
***
When I flew back to Chennai from the San Francisco Bay area in the summer of 2013, my companion on the colourless flight was My Days, R. K. Narayan’s analysis of his own life—an objective and often hilarious assessment of his disappointments, his failures and his accomplishments.
Narayan’s struggles as a writer could have been the story of any writer in any decade. The reaction of family and friends to the penury that accompanied the journey of a writer in the 1920s resonated with me almost a whole century later. My Days connected with me in other ways too. In a poignant way, the book fused south India, the home of my birth, with the San Francisco Bay Area, the home of my growth. In 1956, Narayan spent several months holed up in an apartment in the city of Berkeley writing The Guide, his most memorable work of fiction, right by the Campanile under whose shadow my son now pursued his undergraduate degree. Narayan had been seventeen years older than my father and had risked everything he had to chase his dream.
I bought a large print version of his book for my father and he began reading two pages a day every afternoon after coffee. And even though, sometimes, he found sentences sliding off the page, as if a puppeteer were dragging each line away with a string, and therefore had to read a sentence several times to elicit the literal and the contextual meaning, my father did, in fact, finish the book by the time I returned to the United States in mid-September.
On one of those evenings while he was reading, he stopped to tell me how, in Tanzania, he did not pass an exam that would have fetched him both a promotion and a salary hike. A couple of his friends did, however. ‘But what I lacked in ability I made up for with my attitude. What helped me most was my diligence and my perseverance,’ he said. ‘I was confident and I worked hard, and thus I got an extension to serve another three years in the Tanzanian government.’ With the extra money Daddykins made in Dar, he paid off the loan from Doctor and celebrated my wedding without feeling the pinch. I believe my father recognised R. K. Narayan’s optimism, good humour and positive spirit in himself.
I would read him passages from
other books, too. He listened keenly to Gurcharan Das’ India Unbound, interrupting me to observe that Das was right or wrong or presumptuous or diplomatic—as if Das had given him the book in manuscript form to critique it. Sometimes, in the middle of it, he would apologise and tell me to stop and reread a section because his mind had drifted. At times, as Das detailed the circumstances of India’s independence, my father teared up. The people of his generation would never forget their fight for self-rule, he said. Daddykins had participated in a civil disobedience movement while at Victoria College, skipping classes for a day. But his college principal, Cambridge-educated S. R. U. Savoor, reported to a white man in the Madras Presidency and so, the following day, tail between their legs, Daddykins and his cohorts trooped back through the gates of their college.
When I read out Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech broadcast on the day of India’s independence, my father mouthed the words along with me, his voice thick with emotion, his face wrenched in nostalgia. ‘Long ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’
My father removed his glasses. He wiped his tears with the edge of his dhoti.
15
Hakuna Matata
Daddykins always observed how Tanzanians were inherently carefree, shrugging off misfortune with a ‘hakuna matata’-no worries, in Swahili—or a ‘bahati mbaya’-bad luck—and believing that another day would come and that money would come with the new day.
~~~
Such is the nature of illness that soon Daddykins talked about his esophageal dilation as if it were a condition requiring regular service, like a tyre replacement, an oil change, or a battery check. He would hound us until Urmila or I—whoever had flown down at the time—would call the doctor for a consultation and a procedure. By mid-year, Daddykins could not even eat a puree of steamed idlis with sugar and yoghurt. The stricture was so severe that at its most acute an endoscopy and dilation brought him relief for a few more weeks. We had fallen into a cyclical pattern of blockage and intervention. Vinayagam diluted the purees further. Now, on many afternoons, Daddykins could not swallow his biscuits with his evening coffee.
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