Daddykins

by Kalpana Mohan

  ‘But they are the only thing that I can still relish by chewing,’ Daddykins said to Vinayagam one afternoon, when he suggested it might be time to stop them. My father flung his newspaper down on the coffee table. It landed in a crackling heap, its crease awry. ‘I should have just had that surgery in the first place last August.’

  Vinayagam who had been reading Dina Thandhi set his paper down on the floor. ‘Saar, you don’t understand,’ he said, walking over and picking up Daddykins’ paper and folding it at its crease. ‘If you had elected to have surgery on your digestive tract instead of having a stent put in, you would have gone upstairs a whole year ago.’

  While Daddykins continued to sulk into space, Vinayagam carried on in his somewhat tactless fashion. ‘In which case we’d be celebrating, right now as we speak, your first year in heaven away from us.’ I glared at him.

  My father turned to Vinayagam now. ‘Fine, take those biscuits away from me too.’ He pointed to me and then to Vinayagam. ‘All this speculation that you both do. I hate what you and this fellow say. ‘Look, it’s getting stuck. It’s because you ate this. Or you ate that.’ I’m tired of your accusations. Sick, sick to death, of your theories!’ He sat in his rust-orange sofa, indignant and churlish, until, a few minutes later, he picked up his newspaper.

  Despite Vinayagam’s manner, his persistence saw us through many challenging meal times. On one such morning, Daddykins had taken barely four spoonfuls of soup when he felt the puree wasn’t descending as it should. Water didn’t help either. He looked at the two of us and fed himself from the tip of a spoon. That morning, Vinayagam found a way to get Daddykins to finish his food while standing by his side—teasing, laughing, threatening, goading, cajoling and relating gory news stories to entertain him while he ate.

  ‘The problem is you and your sister let him go. I don’t,’ he said, describing Daddykins’ escalating problems in layman’s terms. ‘He just cannot afford any more endoscopies.’ Vinayagam moved back and forth between the dining area and the kitchen busying himself with my lunch, while Daddykins paused to drink hot water. Between sips, Daddykins also stood up and paced the room so the liquid would be forced to drain into his stomach.

  ‘Remember that his throat pipe is like the plastic tubing under our sink, Amma. How many times can I take out that plastic attachment and blow air into it and clean it? Every time I force it and expand it, it will tighten all over again. I assure you there will come a day when we will not be able to do anything about it.’

  ‘Amma, because you have money and we have all this comfort of the car, we have been going to Apollo Hospitals to try to get a procedure to dilate his throat pipe. You know what we would have done in homes like mine and Saravanan’s? We would have just brought the person home and resigned ourselves to the fate that the throat pipe had become too constricted to allow anything to pass through. We would have put the person on a milk diet. The person would have steadily lost weight. Because of that, there would likely have been other complications too. After three or four months, the person would have become too weak to move. He would have passed away. And we would have accepted that too.’

  Our plumbing guru was right. When my mother’s cancer fanned out into her brain, the doctors informed us that radiation of the brain was an option but that the quality of life, or whatever remained of it, would deteriorate rapidly. A better alternative was to halt all treatment, take her home and let her go gently. At the time, Urmila and I had heard our father say that he wanted to do everything within his means to keep her alive. We had the money. We had the help. We had the privileged access to a team of doctors. My mother underwent radiation therapy for a few weeks. Her face changed. She stopped speaking altogether. We had zapped her brain into immediate inaction because we’d had the resources to do so. Money could buy comfort for our family but it failed to guarantee even a modicum of health for our mother.

  We were adopting the same route with Daddykins. With every procedure we attempted to buy back his health. But like a faulty pipe that torqued over time, his system too would implode one day.

  ***

  Like me, Daddykins used to love gorging on Mrs. Nigam’s mean tapioca bites which she served with mint chutney. Our neighbour in Dar-es-Salaam, Mrs. Nigam was a spirited woman with a booming voice that reverberated through the walls of our apartment building. By the time we landed in Dar, a story floated around about Mrs. Nigam and her friend Mrs. Rai who were attacked on the beach at Ocean Road one night. She bit her attacker’s wrist so hard that all he wanted was to be let go of in one piece. Mrs. Nigam said later that it wasn’t heroism, that she simply did what her body told her to do.

  She was a woman of the world who spoke good English and managed to have an easy, open relationship with her four daughters. She was the mother I wanted to be for my daughter decades later, a mother with whom no subject was taboo, not even the penis-toting Mistry in the apartment downstairs.

  In Dar, I felt a whole new me emerge. When you live elsewhere for a time, you begin rebuilding yourself, cell by cell. I remember a girl called Julia in fifth grade at Bunge Primary School, a black girl with an afro who was sparky and dynamic. She spoke her mind. She snapped at the boys. When she walked into the classroom, a frisson of fear crested through the room. I wanted to be Julia.

  Julia acted out the verses of a rhyme I would read to my children years later in the United States. Like most black women, Julia was already endowed—with rhythm and style—and she used all of her body and soul in the enacting of Going on a Lion-Hunt.

  Goin’ on a lion hunt.

  Goin to catch a big one.

  I’m not afraid.

  Look, what’s up ahead?

  Mud!

  Can’t go over it.

  Can’t go under it.

  Can’t go around it.

  Gotta go through it.

  And Julia would shuffle, and splash, and slither, and pound, and whisper and thump, as she faced all her obstacles on her lion chase. I remember the lot of us in the class begging her to do it over and over, and each time she would rustle up something new and make us roar. In Dar, as opposed to Chennai, I was among classmates, each of whom was a character, not another cookie-cutter nerd.

  While I was being reassembled, my parents were learning to socialise with people who didn’t always conform to their values. Many of them loved a good, spiked drink. Most were younger than my parents by at least a decade. When our friends came to our home, which was dry, they made sure they were already sufficiently drunk on beer. The volume would run high. They would be loose-lipped. They tried to ply Daddykins with the merits of drink. Daddykins’ blood alcohol content always registered 0.0, but he entertained our friends of many stripes in our home, playing cards, making off-colour jokes, and tolerating their occasional libertine swagger with a cordial spirit. My mother crossed the moat separating her kitchen from the rest of the world. She made friends and laughed uproariously with them in the living room.

  Daddykins would narrate many tales of derring-do after those years—of trips to safari parks, Mombasa, Nairobi, Lake Manyara, Mount Kilimanjaro, Zanzibar and Mauritius. I remember many all-day picnics with family friends at Kunduchi beach resort that always ended with watching the Indian Ocean swallow the boiling sun. Towards the end of our stint in Dar, one of the scariest incidents of Daddykins’ life took place at sundown a few blocks from our home.

  The sun hung low over the waters as he set out on his daily walk down Ocean Road with a friend. That evening, Daddykins didn’t realise that he had no money in his pockets. He always remembered to hold on to some change, at least ten shillings, because muggings and petty crimes were rampant about town and an empty wallet was known to have nasty consequences. Realising that it was twilight and that they had straggled into unsafe territory, they turned around and began hurrying towards home, when two men ambushed them. One of them closed his palms around my father’s neck and began pressing hard. Under his chin, Daddykins noticed the dull sheen of a knife blade.
The other man tugged at Daddykins’ empty pockets. Meanwhile, Daddykins’ friend begged them to let my father go, waving his wallet at them. Seconds later, they grabbed it and fled.

  When my father got home, he couldn’t talk. It wasn’t clear if it was the pressure on his gullet or the shock of the experience that plugged up his voice box. In a few days, when Daddykins realigned himself, he began recounting a good story of having survived a mugging though it never made as much of a splash as Mrs. Nigam’s tale of having chewed up a part of her mugger.

  ***

  Daddykins was surprised how, after a few days of struggling, he suddenly seemed to be able to eat easier at lunch. He told Vinayagam how much he enjoyed his soup. ‘I wonder why it’s all going down my throat without any problems today?’

  ‘That’s life, Saar. Some days are good, some bad. We never know what can happen to us at any given time on any given day, Saar.’

  My father guided another spoonful into his mouth. His man Friday came out of the kitchen holding an orange bowl of curd rice beaten to pulp. He set it in front of Daddykins.

  ‘By the way, Saar, in today’s Dina Thandhi, there’s a photo of a man who died last night.’ Daddyins glanced up and then continued to work on his food. ‘Of a brain aneurysm. He was just forty.’ Daddykins expressed shock.

  ‘Saar, did you know that all your other spare parts work—even when you brain dies?’

  Daddykins looked up, motioning him for some hot water in a cup. Vinayagam handed him the cup.

  ‘Saar, they’ve taken out spare parts for seven different people from this man. They took out his kidney, his liver, his pipeline, his heart, his eyes. Two of those items flew down to Chennai early this morning under police supervision. Apparently, a transplant has to take place within twelve hours after the parts are removed. Did you know that, Saar?’

  Daddykins shook his head. He set his hot water down and waited for the spoonful to make its way down his gullet while digesting what Vinayagam was telling him.

  ‘And in five hours they took out all the spare parts. That guy may have died but he has made seven people live.’ He tapped Daddykins on the shoulder blade. ‘Seven people, Saar! Imagine that.’

  Daddykins nodded, his brows raised in wonder at the singular news briefing from Dina Thandhi.

  ‘Any more questions, Saar?’ Vinayagam asked in English.

  Daddykins shook his head. My father who had asked only one question of Vinayagam—why things went down more easily on that specific morning versus all the other days in the recent past—continued to apply himself to polishing off the bowl of curd rice puree.

  16

  In The Doghouse

  Daddykins walked up to me. ‘Just look at this,’ he said, turning his head to the right so I could examine his face. ‘Doesn’t this look like skin cancer to you?’ he asked, pointing to the dry patch between his nose and his left cheek.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Isn’t this how cancer is supposed to look?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t the Doctor say I might have cancer a year ago?’

  ‘Maybe. But they were suspecting cancer of the pancreas. This is your nose. The locations are far away, like Delhi from Chennai. And the pancreatic tumour was benign.’

  ‘But this patch has been there for months now. What if?’

  ‘Well, you haven’t gone away yet, have you?’

  ~~~

  After Daddykins read about the concept and design of the heritage hotel in The Hindu, he was intrigued and so, on a Sunday afternoon in September, Vinayagam drove my father and me into the gargantuan hotel complex inspired by a 1000-year-old temple built by a Chola king. The ITC group had bought a whole quarry in Italy, mined it for marble and shipped sheets of stone to Chennai. I had tried persuading Vinayagam to park the car and join us inside the coffee shop at the Grand Chola but he declined saying he felt awkward. ‘Please don’t force me, Amma,’ he said. ‘That five-star stuff is not for me.’

  When we stepped inside the lobby, Daddykins sucked in his breath. Awash in marble and fragrant with the scent of fresh roses, orchids and lotuses, the Grand Chola was incongruous in a city where several historic monuments were hidden behind mounds of garbage. We stopped to take in the chandeliers in the stunning lobby, the friezes along the stairwell and balustrade and the gargantuan pillars of which there were reportedly almost 500 across the complex.

  While my father’s clear vision through one eye made life easy around the house, inside the lobby of Grand Chola I had to hold his hand and help him watch his step. He could not see the glass. I steered him through the place, sounding like a sports commentator: ‘Oh no, watch for that glass, Daddykins, you’ll lose your nose. And coming up in front of us is the escalator. Right there, yes! Don’t stub your toe!’ During that hour with my father I realised how much we relied on Vinayagam’s alertness when we were in an alien environment.

  Before we left Grand Chola, we stepped into the coffee shop by the main dining room. ‘I want a cookie,’ Daddykins said, pointing to a pink confection in the glass shelf by the counter. I wasn’t going to deny him the pleasure.

  He bit into a macaroon, a gleam in his eye, the sweet tooth, now in bliss. While I held my breath, he swallowed it very slowly, between hot sips of coffee. If it got stuck in his gullet, it would take over an hour for him to wash it down or bring it out. A few nights before, he had forced himself to go to bed with something stuck in his food pipe. The feeling had persisted until the morning when he awoke; we discovered, later, that the feeling of fullness was also the result of severe acidity and gas in his stomach. But that afternoon, at the coffee shop, bits of the macaroon seemed to slip into his stomach without undue fuss.

  ‘Thank you, baby,’ Daddykins said at the end, taking a sip of hot water. He raised his right hand in a small salute to me. ‘Thanks for bringing me to this fantastic place.’ Then he caught the eye of the girl in the toque who had brought us our coffee. ‘Excellent coffee, madam,’ he said, smiling, when she came around wondering if she could get us anything else.

  ***

  Our black and yellow Ambassador taxi rolled down Parthasarathypuram Road in May 1978 as we returned, now a cosmopolitan family, from Tanzania. Three things would dominate the next two years of Daddykins’ life: the state of our house, the decline of his mother’s health and the matter of human excrement.

  Recently vacated by its renters, our bungalow looked unkempt. It wore the look of a child in an orphanage. It smelt different too, reeking of a film of dust, brittle shoes, aging potatoes and bone-dry dishtowels. The trees around the courtyard were overgrown and straggly. In six years, it seemed that a shroud of indifference had also blanketed the homes on either side of the road.

  In the years we had been away, the slums just beyond our home had multiplied as people came into the city looking for work. Right outside our compound wall, with its barbed wire top, the slum dwellers beyond our colony came for their morning ablutions. But Daddykins was determined to drive them away. My father did not attempt to help the slum-dwellers by first talking to them about why they were doing what they did. Instead, he chose an offensive strategy.

  He went up to the terrace of our home to find out what time the ‘squatters’ came to do their thing. When he found out that they arrived as early as 4 AM, he set his alarm and walked up and down his yard to chase the folks who came to plop themselves by the wall. For this, Daddykins set up lights that lit up the entire side yard. The squatters didn’t really care if the light shone down on their rear ends. They went ahead. Then Daddykins began walking up and down with a torch right about the time people used the streets. At one point, he lined the sidewalks with glass pieces just to prevent people from walking into the area. But they were a step ahead of him; they began wearing sandals to protect their feet.

  One morning a few weeks later, when my father set out to unlock the main gate into the courtyard, he was greeted by a smell that was far closer to him than it should have been. The slum dwellers had decid
ed that if my father was going to give them shit, they would return the favour. Our courtyard was littered with various shades of yellow and brown, a scene that remains etched in my brain as the crappiest day of my late teens.

  My father was one of the few in the colony who made an attempt to clean up the neighbourhood while most residents had resigned themselves to the immutability of the situation. I admired his feistiness and perseverance, even though the scatological warfare ended on a violent note. One morning, when my father, dhoti folded halfway up to his knees, was patrolling the streets with a torch light, a stray dog bit him on the shin. For a period of twenty-one days, Daddykins needed a round of painful shots right around his navel for rabies. He lamented that he was in the doghouse at this point and began reckoning that in the land of his birth some things would not go away.

  While my parents returned to their old lives, my father’s mother fell ill in her home in Palakkad. A few weeks later, my grandmother came to our home to die. I remember the look on Doctor’s face as he told my father to disconnect the oxygen supply. My aunt Samyukta motioned for me to bring the brass pot of water in the prayer cabinet. I watched my father pour the water from the sacred Ganga into his mother’s mouth. It was the first death in our bungalow.

  The verandah resonated with the mantras of death. My father, wet from head to toe, sat with his mother’s head on his lap, mouthing them as dictated by his priest. My mother, frozen stiff by the shock of death, seemed to relive the end of her child in her arms. Samyukta wailed, hair cascading down her body: ‘No, don’t take her away. Don’t burn my mother! She cannot stand the fire.’ As we consoled one another at the gate of our bungalow, my grandmother’s body was carted away by Daddykins, Anandan, Babu and Krishnamurthy to the burning ghat in West Mambalam.