Daddykins seemed to fall ill frequently that year, suffering a second recurrent hernia. I saw him cry often. He wept for his mother sometimes. At other times, he shed tears for Nirmala, especially when he heard her favourite song on the radio. His mother’s passing seemed to have shaken many stones loose in his foundation.
***
I called Vinayagam on his phone as I walked out of the large glass doors of the Grand Chola holding Daddykins by the arm. My father pulled out his wallet from the right pocket of his pants. He fished out a ten-rupee note. ‘For the guard,’ he said, gesturing towards the uniformed guard opening and shutting doors as cars drove up and guests alighted or entered the vehicles. ‘They expect something, the poor things. Just a little something.’ Daddykins hadn’t revised his tip since India adopted major economic reforms in 1991. When Vinayagam drove up, the guard opened the door for Daddykins, who slipped the note in his palm and thanked him.
Our car reeked like a sewer. Vinayagam had spent two hours in the parking lot in the basement with the windows down. He apologised for the bad odour and said that the blowers and the air units had vomited out all the junk from the inside of the massive Chola operation and entered the car and soaked into the seats. We opened all the windows. In a few minutes, we forgot about the smell as I began describing how luxurious the property was inside and how much Daddykins had enjoyed walking through it with me.
I told Vinayagam about the marble quarry, the pillars, and the walls of marble wherever we turned. He listened. But in a soft voice that was rather uncharacteristic of him, he told me his side of the story.
‘You see only the beautiful things above ground, Amma,’ he said. ‘All the ugliness, the wires, the blowers, the machines that hold everything up? Folks like me are forced to see those. Amma, all those fancy pillars you saw up above? I never got to see any of them in the underbelly of the hotel. Because which hotelier will spend on aesthetics down in the pit?’
He told us how most of the time the parking facilities even in upscale malls and theatres were very poor. ‘The restrooms for the use of drivers are disgusting even in the fanciest 7-star hotel. There’s no seating area. We’re forced to stay inside the car. Often it’s warm, humid and lonely. Many times, mosquitoes kill us. There’s no activity for the lot of us who vegetate in our cars unable to go anywhere, do anything, because hoteliers and others want us to remain underground, unseen, unheard. Sometimes, granted, it’s a practical concern. They need us to stay close to our cars just in case our car numbers are called over the speakers.’
He pointed out that deep in its pit, the Grand Chola wasn’t that grand after all: leaky faucets, dirty floors, urinals with no privacy and, worse, no water; innumerable wires hanging loose, and sections of the ceiling needing immediate repair.
‘And I had no tower for radio. I like to listen to the radio while I’m waiting,’ Vinayagam said, looking at me through the rear-view mirror. ‘But at least I had cell-phone reception, Amma, now that was a good thing. I could at least talk to my wife.’
In the days that followed, a column I wrote about the seamy side of deluxe hotels like the Grand Chola made the rounds on the Internet. The ITC group contacted me right away and informed me that they would improve the facilities for drivers.
Thereafter, Vinayagam began stewing over his personal safety. ‘You know, Amma, you’ll go back to America-Kimerica. But what about me? With all the things you write, there may be a hit man out there who has been commissioned to kill me. Who knows?’
On our subsequent visit to the Grand Chola, the marketing head of the ITC group walked out of the premises and apologised, in person, to Vinayagam and asked him about what he thought of the now updated parking garage.
‘Much improved, Saar,’ Vinayagam said in Tamil, blushing, shaking the hand of the suave gentleman in business attire who extended his hand warmly to him.
17
Grab that Rooster!
Daddykins was cold when the temperature fell below 29°C. His sons-in-law seemed to spontaneously combust when the barometer surged over 18°C. Daddykins observed how whenever they visited, their old father-in-law froze to death in his own home in the tropics.
~~~
My husband decided to fly down to spend a few weeks with us. The night before his arrival, my father counted the money Vinayagam would need for the airport trip: 120 rupees for parking and also a tip of 100 rupees that Daddykins always gave him for overtime when he ran airport-related errands. That evening, Daddykins had also left behind a 20-rupee note for flowers for the prayer room for the following morning.
In the days leading up to Mo’s arrival in Chennai, Vinayagam had been singing a romantic Tamil song from the movie Veera Pandiya Kattabomman. He crooned it as he bustled about between the kitchen and the living room. Sick of hearing the same song for days on end, I asked Vinayagam if he was oddly excited at the thought of meeting the man to whom I had been married for over twenty-nine years. He shook his head.
I had been married long enough for the flames of desire to have been doused somewhat by folding laundry, burping babies, visiting emergency rooms, unloading dishes, fixing plumbing, going under the knife for two caesarian sections, packing school lunches, attending violin and dance recitals, stopping and restarting the newspaper before and after a vacation and opening the mail every evening. Marriage had supplanted the quixotic with the neurotic. A good friend had once remarked that her marriage was built on trust, not lust. I could see why. Housekeeping and childrearing eroded sexual desire as steadily as methane carved a hole in the ozone layer.
I begged Vinayagam to please stop singing on my account for my husband. Vinayagam giggled. ‘But, Amma, you’re seeing your man after two months!’ he said, and then he burst into song again shutting the living room windows one by one so he could turn on the air-conditioner in readiness for Mo’s arrival late at night.
When Daddykins awoke at 5 AM, his stark home had been converted into a Google Data Centre. Green lights burned. Red lights blinked. Units beeped. A camera lay, its maw open, its battery charging in a manmade hole in the wall. A black wire lay coiled under the rust-orange sofa. Another crept from the telephone pit to the dining table. A cell-phone rattled.
‘There! Your husband’s here, I see,’ Daddykins said flatly with a cursory look at his upgraded, cockpit-like telephone centre. ‘The snakes are out.’
My father worried that the people of the next generation were so tied to technology that they had lost touch with the simplest gestures of human connection, the art of a conversation. However, he also complained that his second son-in-law talked too much as opposed to his first one who talked too little. Still, Daddykins accepted both men the way they were and learned to get along with both by talking to them about the things each of them loved to discuss.
He really listened to them. His first son-in-law was pious and believed that life was dictated by a supreme force; Daddykins had long conversations with him about temples, miracles and the office. The younger son-in-law subscribed to Boolean logic—to 0 or 1, True or False, Black or White—and believed that everything in life was dictated by the availability of broadband; to him Daddykins talked about the next big thing in Silicon Valley, India’s strides in high tech and the developments in Mo’s company.
The morning of Mo’s arrival, when they met in the morning near the bed where Mo lay, they hugged for a long time. My husband was shocked that his father-in-law had shrunk so in less than a year. Daddykins was shocked that his son-in-law had greyed so in less than a year.
Daddykins teared up. ‘Thank you so much for coming to see me. And thank you for sparing my daughter so she could be with me,’ he said to Mo. ‘But, say, can we both leave this room? I can’t talk to you standing here in Antartica, can I?’
***
On my first day at Meenakshi College, I told the staff at the office that an error had been made and that what I really wanted to do was to pursue a degree in English literature and not one in Physics as desired and paid fo
r by my father. Daddykins believed, like all the educated elite in India at the time, that there were only four academic fields in the world worthy of consideration: engineering, pure sciences, medicine and chartered accountancy. The rest constituted incidental byproducts, as pit and peel to mangoes after pulp was extracted.
My decision to enroll in a degree in the humanities was one of the two best decisions I ever made. The other decision that I made I owed to my father, although I was far from grateful for it because it presented itself with so much sound and fury.
In the year 1979, I sat under the leafy canopies of the Alliance Francaise with a young man. The two of us met often, before or after college, on College Road in this breezy bungalow with high ceilings, a dramatic porch and a garden area with seating. The young man, an engineer, and I believed we were meant for each other. When my parents happened upon our clandestine meetings, they were livid. Daddykins and my mother were sure that he and I were as unsuited for each other, as a parakeet to a peacock, save for the fact that we were both from the same Tamil Brahmin community.
My father did not believe in love before marriage. All love was infatuation, he theorised, until it was buffeted by the trials and tribulations of marriage. Daddykins accused me of losing my head. ‘You decided to go on and get infatuated with the very first male your eyes alighted on,’ he said. The minute we landed from Tanzania.’ He hollered about all the privileges he had given me. I pointed out that disallowing his daughter from dating someone was not exactly giving her freedom of choice.
My mother, on the other hand, turned barbaric. She told me that at eighteen, I was far too young to know whom I should marry. Reminding her that my sister had likely chosen her partner by the age of fifteen, made my mother angrier still. When stripped of her dignity in any way, she lashed out at her victim with a tongue that could curdle milk. She told me I dared not compare Thalaivar with my paramour. She compared me to all the cousins who were my age and told me to consider bottling and inhaling their gaseous emissions so I could fix my addled brain.
One day, at the height of our detente, I told my father that he was a hypocrite for permitting one romance but snuffing out another. That evening, Daddykins snapped.
‘How dare you?’ he cried, looking around for something while moving swiftly about the living room. ‘I’ve taught you to be feisty,’ he shouted. ‘The fellow you seem to be enamoured of will quash your spirit. I know his family.’ And, suddenly, in a move that took me as well as my mother by complete surprise, Daddykins picked up a cane chair and raised it high above his head.
His face was contorted with rage. ‘You listen to me!’ Daddykins roared, moving towards me, while my mother continued to tug at him to calm him down. I accused him of simply wanting control. What he really wanted was to be able to choose a husband for his daughter, at least the second time around, I ranted.
‘If you say one more word,’ Daddykins yelled, still brandishing the chair, the look in his eyes menacing. Teeth grinding, he lunged in my direction. Red-eyed and teary, my mother ordered me to stop provoking him. Daddykins broke out in a sweat. His body shook.
While I was furious with my father for his rage, for his attempt to control me, what he said did bring to mind something that I had earlier tried to ignore in the man I was dating. The gentleman had disapproved of my excelling at college. ‘If you continue to ace your classes, your parents will imagine that you don’t care enough about us,’ he had said. I couldn’t express it adequately at the time but I too felt in my gut that the man I married should be an unconditional champion of my achievements. My relationship ended soon after the showdown with my parents.
I embraced the reality of an arranged marriage even though I was distraught and felt unhinged in the ensuing months. Half way through the year 1983, I had already met nine men, all of them introduced by my father, who tirelessly responded to matrimonial advertisements in The Hindu, week after week.
Sometimes, it wasn’t clear who the future bride was—myself, or my mother. She had reservations about every potential groom the second he sailed out of the door. One of them was too short. One had a finger missing. Another was old enough to be my father’s brother. Another was so morose he didn’t seem to own facial muscles. Yet another had a mother who demanded a dowry of 10,000 rupees, for starters, right in our living room, even before I met her son.
A tenth man came along as the year drew to a close. My parents and my grandfather liked the family on sight. Over the course of the year, we had met and talked to many members of his family before we met him in the last week of December. There was a disarming quality about this man that came through within seconds of the meeting—a direct manner and a candour that made him stand out from every other young man who had crossed my path in the past.
Minutes before the gentleman walked into the room to meet me for the very first time, my father slunk into my room to air his views about him. Daddykins had talked at length with him and he had been impressed. He had felt, instinctively, that the lad was just right for me and our family. My mother seemed to feel the same way, he said, adding that if I were bright, I would trap him ‘like one would a rooster’ and simply never let him out of my sight or my life.
18
Uttarayanam in Palakkad
After each of his many long visits to my home in America, Daddykins returned to India and told tall tales to Vinayagam about a life of “torture.” ‘As soon as you land, my daughter will chain you to a chair. You cannot move this way or that. She keeps her house so clean that the people who enter her home cannot breathe, every object has an allotted place, and every place has an allotted object. If something that is supposed to be here is moved elsewhere, you’ve had it. Vinayagam, I’m warning you, don’t go to America.’
~~~
In the rising heat of April 1993, Daddykins escorted his father to his home in Palakkad, where my uncle Babu lived. Daddykins had protested before the trip. ‘Why this obsession to die in Palakkad, when your old house in the village is not even large enough to hold you and Babu’s family?’ His father shrugged off his son’s comment with a weak smile. He told his son that he would not understand now: his soul was in Palakkad.
Whenever I asked my grandfather about his fascination for his ancestral village, he explained it to me thus: he said he loved to read a newspaper sitting on his thinnai watching the world go by. He was happiest when he visited the sanctum sanctorum of Lord Gopalakrishna at the temple every morning and every evening, returning home with a little tulsi leaf tucked behind his right ear and some sandalwood paste smeared on his forehead. He dreamed, he said, of dying in Lakshminarayanapuram—during those six consecutive months of the year when the sun appeared to travel north of due east, in uttarayanam.
Daddykins’ father died, instead, in the latter half of the year, unfortunately, when souls were believed to crash headlong into the land of demons. I know that there, my grandfather —who had never passed judgment on anyone other than a politician— would have been a sweet seedless grape among pineapples.
Daddykins’ father stopped breathing on a day in early October, before the nine-night festival of Navarathri, right as vendors began rolling carts of painted mud dolls down the village roads. As he took a first sip of tea, his spirit slipped away, possibly through the tavaram where his late wife used to stand picking head lice or braiding her daughters’ hair, and out through the thinnai where he spent many waking hours debating Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s dictates, and perhaps up Double Street gliding, in a straight line, into the jasmine-scented home of Lord Gopalakrishna.
Daddykins found out later that on his deathbed, his father had no regrets but one. ‘Like all my children, you too deserved a college education,’ he had said to Vijaya, apologising for his negligence. In 1945, he had listened, instead, to the sentiment of the village—that educating a woman after she turned sixteen would endanger her prospects for marriage.
My grandfather left behind some small patches of land and the contents of a metal trunk. A
few shirts in colours that wouldn’t stand out in a doorway on a bright day. Five cotton dhotis. Four undergarments that were just long pieces of cloth—a cotton loin cloth that hung over a cotton string, a watch, a belt, one pair of sandals, his hearing aid (as good as new), a walking stick, a walker, teaching awards, several diaries, his glasses, a plastic box of holy ash, a fountain pen, several prayer books and his own copy of The Ramayana and The Gita.
***
On the morning of a new moon, my father skipped his walk. He showered early to perform a prayer for his ancestors. When Vinayagam rang the doorbell, Daddykins, clad in his dhoti and bare-chested but for his Brahmin thread, was seated on a wooden plank out on the balcony floor. Vinayagam was annoyed that his boss had rushed to begin the observance.
My father told him how he needed to get to the office by 10.45 AM because he had so many important cheques to sign and Vinayagam retorted that he was going overboard and that all this sweating the small stuff was not good for him at all, given his acidity and stomach problems.
Daddykins opened his prayer book to the pertinent page. Vinayagam brought out specific brass vessels and placed a brass pot filled with water by my father’s side on the floor.
Before offering sesame seeds to his ancestors, Daddykins prayed to Lord Vishnu and Lord Brahma for the power of the prayer to be absorbed by the black sesame seeds. Then, Daddykins offered the charged sesame seeds to his ancestors by releasing water slowly over the seeds placed in his palm. The seeds fell into the plate.
He stopped, between reciting the mantra, to rifle through the plastic bag that Vinayagam had placed next to him.
‘Vinayagam, I don’t see any dharbai here.’ In seconds, he would begin his chant wearing a dharbai on his finger. The holy grass absorbed radiation. When used with a mantra, it was powerful.
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