‘Saar, look inside,’ Vinayagam said, mopping the floor of the prayer alcove. ‘I put it there last evening.’
My father rummaged inside the bag again and fished something out claiming it didn’t look right. It was a long familiar stalk of holy grass. ‘This looks different.’
‘It’s the right one, Saar.’
‘No, it doesn’t look like the one for Sama Veda.’
‘But it is. I told the guy at the shop to give me the one for Sama Veda.’
My father stared at the grass stalk. ‘Then I suppose it is the right one, after all.’ He fixed it around the ring finger of his right hand and began praying.
‘You know, Saar, I might as well do all these prayers to your ancestors on your behalf,’ Vinayagam said. ‘I’ll simply let you get the benefit. Why are we pretending? I know most of these mantras now anyway.’
Eyes shut, Daddykins continued to pray.
An hour later, after Daddykins had finished his prayer, he said he felt weak. As per the ritual, he had begun his prayer observance with a fast from the morning. His body caved into his rust-orange sofa when he was done.
Vinayagam handed Daddykins a glass of whipped buttermilk seasoned with asafoetida and salt. My father sipped it eagerly.
‘I don’t understand why you must do this month after month and tire yourself out,’ Vinayagam said. I’d often heard my father wish that he had taken better care of his parents. For Daddykins, the observance was not just a ritualistic duty. Perhaps it was a redress, an act of expiation. But Vinayagam would never understand.
Daddykins looked up at his valet. ‘I have to do it in memory of my parents and all those who went before them. To all my ancestors. I’ve done it for over thirty years now.’
‘Saar, how old are you?’
‘Ninety. Very soon.’
‘See? That’s what I mean. You’re at that age when someone should be doing a prayer observance for you, Saar. You’re that old. Why should you continue doing this prayer for your ancestors now when ordinary things tire you out, Saar? I think you should stop doing these prayer rituals from the following month.’
Vinayagam approached me. ‘Amma, please tell your father it’s meaningless, at his age. He was the best son he could ever be to his parents.’
19
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness in India
Of late, Daddykins had become irritable. He was quick to rush to judgment. He couldn’t differentiate between levity and gravity.
‘Daddykins, you’ve lost your sense of humour,’ I said.
‘Yes, I have,’ he said, a little contrite.
‘Any idea what we can do? What’s changed?’
‘Just take me to America, I say.’
‘Why, Daddykins?’
‘Anyone can own a gun in America. You can just take me there and put a gun to my head for losing my wit.’
~~~
As his ninetieth birthday drew closer, my father’s focus grew more inward. He orbited around himself and his routine. He was no longer enraged by the news when he read The Hindu. He had no opinions. Reading had also become an effort.
Sometimes, especially in the mornings, after Daddykins was seated in the living room, shooting the breeze between his shower and lunchtime, Vinayagam conjured up tricks to snap him back to his own old self. A television junkie, Vinayagam soaked up travel shows. Now he had started watching Discovery channel with a voiceover in Tamil. It had opened up a whole new world for him. As he started acquiring knowledge, he began force-feeding it to Daddykins the way geese were fattened for foie-gras. Almost daily, he also shared snippets from Dina Thandhi based on which he found something to argue about. At other times he quizzed him.
‘Saar, do you know which queen reigned the longest? Who is that woman?’
‘Queen Victoria. Then, Queen Elizabeth,’ Daddykins said. ‘Victoria ruled for sixty-three years.’
‘Give me your hand, Saar.’ Daddykins extended his right hand, and Vinayagam shook it vigorously saying how much he was impressed by my father’s knowledge. He riddled him with more questions.
‘Saar, did you know that the first omnibus opened in Paris in 1819?’
‘Yes, I believe it was a horse-drawn double-decker bus,’ Daddykins said.
‘Saar, did you know one generation is thirty-three years? But you have seen four generations, Saar.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ my father said, nodding slowly in acknowledgment of something wondrous.We sat in silence for a few minutes. I saw my father as a young man of twenty standing on a hillock, scouting the many mountains he must still climb. And then, almost too soon, it seemed, I saw him standing now at the grand summit, the place I too might reach one day and peer down from not knowing how I ever made the climb. Vinayagam’s voice sliced through my reverie.
‘Saar, the paper says it’s raining now in Myanmar,’ he said, surfing quickly through the pages before folding up the paper and putting it away on the coffee table.
‘Oh. It’s raining in Burma. Really?’
‘Myanmar is Burma?’
Then, as Vinaygam listened at his feet, Daddykins told him Burma had been part of the British Empire when World War II broke out and how, in 1942, Japan invaded Rangoon, the capital of Burma. The Burmese had hoped to gain support of the Japanese in expelling the British. Then he told him about the plight of Indians in Rangoon who had very few options when the British suffered defeat. ‘Some escaped by boat. Some chose to stay back. Many returned all the way to India on foot. So many perished on their way through the forests.’ Vinayagam listened until Daddykins was fatigued and could talk no more.
***
It wasn’t until Mo and my parents had crossed several miles on the highway out of New York city that they realised that something had happened inside Macy’s on Herald Square in Manhattan. When Daddykins asked my mother for her diary, she discovered that she had lost just about all the contents of her handbag.
Four days into their trip to America, they had already been robbed by a retail theft ring operating inside the landmark store. Later, my mother said how while shopping, she had theorised that America was just about as crowded as India and that being at Macy’s was not different from being shoved and jostled at Ranganathan Street in Chennai. Daddykins and my mother never tired of narrating that tale.
They regaled the family with many stories of the year 1989, the most adventurous time of their lives, the year in which Urmila and Thalaivar took them, along with their two children, on a luxury bus trip through Europe. Daddykins would ride on a gondola in Venice, stand ashen-faced by Gandhi at Madame Tussaud’s, and marvel at the view of the Notre Dame from the boat on the Seine. My father would recount, as he and my mother packed to leave, that it was the year of wishful thinking and magical happenings. They arrived in Boston from London to learn that Mo and I were expecting our first child. Before their granddaughter arrived, something happened, however, that was another first for Daddykins.
In October 1989, I was driving my parents in our Toyota Camry. We had stopped at a red light when the car trembled for a few seconds. The three of us didn’t quite comprehend what was happening but we were experiencing our first earthquake. The road rose and buckled like a thick carpet. The lights on Almaden Expressway swayed like a sunflower stalk in a gale. We heard the grate and clang of metal.
I continued driving, instead of making a U-turn and heading back home. The parking lot of the store we entered was empty. Inside, we saw the devastation that 20 seconds had wrought in San Jose, 40 miles north of the epicentre in the mountains of Santa Cruz. All the glass had shattered. The clerks seemed frazzled by the cleanup that awaited them.
When Mo called us from Texas where he was travelling on work, he was concerned for our safety when the home phone went unanswered. In the era when landlines were the only means of communication, Mo was aghast that, instead of driving back home, we had actually sought to drive around to see which shops may be open in the vicinity after we had experienced an earthquake that
had registered 7.1 on the Richter scale, especially when, and this was a detail of some consequence, I was six months pregnant.
To this day, my husband’s story goes uncontested, but I do remind his listeners that out on the road it isn’t ever obvious how acute an earthquake is, especially when one doesn’t turn on the car radio, which, according to Mo, furthered proved my extreme foolhardiness and my parents’ culpability in encouraging their daughter’s thoughtless conduct. Daddykins believed it was a minor matter of a major earthquake blown to an order of magnitude greater than that of the earthquake itself by his son-in-law who, he was discovering, especially as the year of intimacy wore on, was gifted at finding fault with everyone other than himself. Daddykins could never understand his son-in-law’s apoplexy as he narrated the tale of three idiots gallivanting on a bad night. Daddykins found his reaction to be of a seismic intensity that Mo would be better off showing ‘in the chores that he should be taking up around the house.’ After all, we did get home in one piece, Daddykins argued.
That entire week, Daddykins sat in front of the television quaking at the immensity of the damage, thanking our fortune for not having been on a freeway where the upper level collapsed, crushing the cars on the lower deck. He marvelled at the emergency personnel, who demonstrated such a level of care and concern in getting the little details right, following such a catastrophe. In tears, Daddykins and my mother watched the rescue efforts, extolling the compassion of fire fighters and paramedic personnel.
My father was in love with America that month and even after that, especially as he passed the driving test on his first attempt and began driving on California’s roads. He admired the law and order and the respect for the pedestrian, and commended the law-abiding citizens who moved to the shoulder of a road whenever an ambulance blared its way through the streets. He told me how exciting it was to drive and feel the tires glide on satin-sheen roads, where people heeded red lights and showed mutual respect at four-way stop signs.
Mostly, Daddykins loved the freedom, a situation in which no one rang the doorbell, where others, like the milkman, maid, the paper boy, the watchman and roadside vendors, didn’t slice into the privacy of one’s daily life. On his morning walks, he liked to watch the progress of the building of a house around the corner. He was fascinated by how quickly a house rose up from wooden scaffolding—a house made to withstand earthquakes, in barely three months. America chugged along like clockwork, he said, as it should be, within specified timeframes and with minimal bureaucracy.
Yet, at other times, when he couldn’t just get on and off public transportation the way he could, say in Madras, or in London, or in Hong Kong, he said life in America was very isolating for active seniors and that the unnatural quiet of the American suburban life was the saddest and loneliest thing for a human being. After a whole year with us, he concluded, like many South Asians, that he found life in the United States daunting. He couldn’t fathom why the United States had to complicate the dispensation of care and drugs with the monstrosity called insurance. He began disliking how the field of medicine had been compromised by people’s litigious tendencies. There was also the matter of sports, he pointed out. Americans didn’t care at all about cricket. They didn’t care enough about soccer or tennis. One of his other pet peeves was that in America, he didn’t have access to The Hindu. The San Jose Mercury News, he decided, was a worthless paper for prioritizing the picture of a man hugging a dolphin at Monterey Bay on its main page on the very day that the Cold War ended in Berlin.
Coming to America raised an important question for my father. Where did he want to spend his last years? He believed that until the last day of his life every human being must own a space to call his own where he could live life on his terms. ‘In India, I can,’ Daddykins said. ‘There, I’m the king of my castle.’
20
The Boy who Came to Drive
Daddykins, Vinayagam, my sister and I were watching the colourful ‘Beating the Retreat’ ceremony, telecast live from New Delhi, on the occasion of the 64th Republic Day of India.
While watching the Indian President do the honours, Vinayagam turned to Daddykins and asked him what he would do if he were President of India for just one day.
‘First of all,’ Daddykins told him with a watery smile. ‘I’d hire you once again.’
~~~
I entered the apartment building in Trustpuram and an old security guard inside directed me to a relative’s flat on the second floor. The guard, my relative said, was Vinayagam’s father.
When I returned to the car, I accosted Vinayagam and asked him why he didn’t think to come up and introduce me to his father. He shook his head, ‘No chance, Amma. Please get in.’ He reached behind his seat to open my door. ‘I don’t talk to my father. Nothing left to say to him.’ I got in. He sped out of the neighbourhood.
‘My father is not going to be around very long,’ I said. ‘One day yours will be gone too.’ Vinayagam slowed down as a drove of girls spilled out of the gates towards the bus stop at Meenakshi College. ‘Just forget and forgive,’ I said.
‘You’ll never understand’, he said, glaring at me through the rear-view mirror. ‘And please don’t ever compare your father with mine. That’s unfair—to your father.’
We began climbing Kodambakkam Bridge. For a minute, we flew above a city snarled in the messy harmony of ancient temples, roadside flower-sellers, chai stalls and behemoths of glass and steel. Chennai spoke the truth. We could not bury the ancient landmarks of one’s past with spanking billboards to our present.
We hurtled down Periyar Road, past rows of mud pots. Petroleum cans molded into tandoori ovens lined the thoroughfare. Vinayagam told me he spent his early years a hundred yards from the potter’s colony. His family’s one-room tenement, which he shared with his parents and two brothers, stretched into a kitchen, living room and bedroom. Four bathrooms served about a hundred people who lived in the community. The thatched roof over their home protected them during the summer months but during the monsoons the dry coconut leaves didn’t shield them from pounding rain.
‘My mother would position vessels all around the room to catch the rainwater,’ Vinayagam said. ‘We’d have to find a dry corner to sleep in because in a downpour the ground would be sodden too.’
‘Do you know there are many days in my early years when I didn’t have the bus fare to go back home? So I’d leave your parents’ apartment, buy some roasted peanuts at Panagal Park for a rupee, stuff the paper cone in my pocket and trudge the nine miles to Porur. I was too proud to ask your father for three rupees.’
At the time, Vinayagam’s father could have afforded a better place for his family because he was making good money as a security chief for a hotel. ‘Spent it on booze and cigarettes’ he said, bitterly.
I said that at least he took care of the basics: food, shelter and clothing. Vinayagam rolled to a stop outside our gate. ‘Yes. And that is why I did not kill him, Amma,’ he said. ‘But beyond the basics, what did we own? Nothing. Not a speck of dust.’
***
Vinayagam was introduced to my mother on a day in June 1998 by Mr. Fancy of Fancy Ladies’ Tailor. My mother trusted Mr. Fancy’s attention to detail and fit. He tailored classic sari blouses that glided on like a second skin. Even though Vinayagam was employed by a dentist next door, he ran daily errands for Mr. Fancy, buying him lunch and tea and performing other little chores; the tailor had been impressed by the young man’s efficiency and he recommended Vinayagam for the job of a chauffeur.
The following morning, his driver’s license certificate in hand, eighteen-year-old Vinayagam rang the doorbell of my parents’ apartment. When Daddykins asked him if he would be able to drive his Maruti van, Vinayagam told him that he had driven many different cars, although the one that he had been most familiar with was the 86-model Fiat that belonged to the dentist at whose office he was an assistant. What he did not tell Daddykins that day was that he had taught himself to drive while washing ten
cars, at 75 rupees a pop, monthly, from 6-9.30 AM at Majestic Apartments in the neighbourhood of Vadapalani. That he had been unable to afford the 500 rupee fee to apply for his driver’s license. That a benevolent gentleman whose car Vinayagam used to clean offered to lend him that money. That he had mastered the art of vehicle management while moving cars around in the Majestic parking lot and fiddling with the brake and clutch as he cleaned the cars. That his knowledge was mostly theoretical as when he rode the city buses while seated close to bus drivers to watch how they handled traffic. That he also held down another job driving a milk van, a Tata 207, nightly, from 9 PM to 4 AM.
Handing back his certificate, Daddykins explained his duties: Vinayagam would need to reach the house by 9.30 AM, wash the blue Maruti van, then drive him to the office by 10.30 AM. Vinayagam would bring him home from work by about 4.30 PM after which he was free to leave. Daddykins would pay him by the hour for overtime. His salary would begin at 1600 rupees a month.
Sometimes, Vinayagam would come back home in the morning after dropping Daddykins off and then ferry my mother around on her errands. At other times, he would run errands for her on his bicycle. Vinayagam’s expanding duties found him folding into the hollows of my parents’ lives. Every week, after a grocery shopping spree, Vinayagam offered to put the vegetables away in the fridge. My mother taught him to wrap winter melon in newspaper sheets before storing it in the fridge drawer. She showed him how to choose cabbage: small, tight, heavy. She supervised him as he cleaned the fridge with soap and water. She taught him how to roast ingredients in the heat of the sun to make sambar powder. She shared her recipe for the spice; he bought the ingredients and carried them upstairs to the terrace in enormous brass trays. Then my mother warned him about crows eating the lentils. She taught him to place weights all around the net covering the raw spices. Later, when he brought them back downstairs after a few hours, she crunched the curry leaves in her fist to show him how they had been baked in the sun.
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