Daddykins

by Kalpana Mohan

  Two years after he began working for my parents, Vinayagam told Daddykins that he had finally amassed enough money to get his mother a cooking gas cylinder for her kitchen. He also wanted to buy a television. Until then, the only possessions of note in their rental home were three things: an old bicycle for local transportation, an almirah for storage and a mini cassette recorder for entertainment. Daddykins drove with him to Vivek & Company at Bazullah Road to sign him up on their monthly installment programme, paying the first installment towards his television.

  ***

  Vinayagam was cagey when I asked him to drive me to his home in Porur, but he acquiesced when I told him that I wanted to get an idea of his daily commute. We set out one morning after dropping Daddykins off at the office. We rolled down G. N. Chetty Road and traced the southeastern edge of Panagal Park until we reached Usman Road where Saravana Stores, Nalli’s, RMKV, Thanga Maligai and Kumaran Silks coalesced into a confluence of retail sinfulness. Vinayagam pointed out my cousin a few cars ahead of us in the pandemonium of vehicles. ‘There, that’s Mala-Amma’s car, see?’ I was astonished he could even tell from several cars away but when we caught up with them, I spotted my cousin in the back of her vehicle.

  ‘Amma, once I’ve seen a car, I remember the plate number and something unique about it—a dent or decoration or something that may be special to it. I’ve never made a mistake. Yet.’ I discovered a freakish wisdom in him that made me question the value of a college degree.

  He pointed to the bus stop right by Nalli 100 as we shot past the store. ‘That was where I caught my 11A bus home every evening—until the office gave me my first motorbike—a TVS Champ, TN09L0017. I still remember the license plate number. See?’ He smiled at me in the mirror. ‘Aiyo, for the first time in my life, I flew home. In half an hour.’

  At Ashok Nagar, we crossed timber stores. Planks, beams, and bedposts were trussed up on the sidewalk in veneers of dust. This was the Chennai of the bourgeoisie, the cacophonic city of hope for denizens like Vinayagam, who were often mortgaged up to the hilt for a space of their own. We inched behind a swarm of share-autos at the bottleneck leading to Arcot Road. ‘At least we’re moving today,’ he said. ‘Some days, it’s a parking lot.’ We sailed past billboards and effigies of chief minister Jayalalitha and her opponent Stalin.

  Every few years, Thalaivar helped him upgrade to a more powerful two-wheeler. ‘You know, sometimes Thalaivar can be unforgiving and he gives me a great deal of grief over inconsequential matters. But he is the only one, other than Saar, who ever cared to ask questions about my personal comfort.

  We exited off Arcot Road, rattling past fields. ‘In 2010, I got upgraded again, to a 125cc Honda Shine.’ Four years later, he waited several months to get one with the registration ‘AP’ in the license plate: Honda Unicorn TN10AP2340. ‘AP’ stood for my parents’ initials.

  For the last stretch to his home, the road was unpaved. The car clattered. I reached for the hold by the window. Canna plants and banana trees dotted the roadsides. I told Vinayagam that there was no need for us to go inside his home and embarrass his wife. ‘Just show me your place from the outside.’ Through the rear-view mirror, Vinayagam mocked my bobbing head. ‘If you’re coming all this way, you must come inside.’ We swerved to skirt a pothole. ‘They’re going to improve the roads but it won’t happen that soon. Unless we grease the palms of our politicians.’

  His wife Devi was a tall, broad woman with a ready smile. ‘A good woman,’ he said to me, calling her a scaredy-cat. ‘She won’t take the city bus from one stop to another. I’m working on her.’ While I chatted with her, Vinayagam ran out to buy me a cold Fanta.

  Then, he walked me through his small, one-storey house, an 800-square-foot living space laid out with almost no wastage of space, every corner of it functional—a porch, a living room, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, an alcove of a kitchen.

  ‘The day I brought the plan for this land to your father, he asked me to take him home early from work. Then he shut himself up in his room. When he opened the door an hour later, he had redrawn the plan to scale and come up with the alternate layout that you are walking through today.’ Daddykins had been appalled to learn of the usurious rates of his moneylender when Vinayagam began building his home. He told Vinayagam to take him right away to the bank; he withdrew several lakhs of his own money to close Vinayagam’s loan. Then he loaned him the cash at zero interest and subtracted the money monthly from Vinayagam’s salary, waiving a year’s payment in the end.

  ‘Saar said that to make optimal use of the space, all the rooms had to be on one side. He subtracted space from my proposed living room and squeezed in another bedroom. He considered my future—marriage, kids, joint family, everything,’ he said, walking me down a hallway, painted a neon green, that my father would never have endorsed. Vinayagam said now that in so many ways, his dream home also belonged to Daddykins. He took the empty Fanta bottle from my hand. ‘His layout worked out perfectly for us, see?’

  21

  Annapakshi

  Daddykins and I were going out on an errand with Vinayagam at the wheel when we noticed that a white van marked SPCA was blocking the driveway of our apartment building. Vinayagam sniffed around the van for a few minutes, and then slid into the driver’s seat and released the parking brake. He pushed the vehicle with all his might. It moved a few feet, clearing the way for our car. Daddykins was amused by the scene.

  ‘Little wonder that Vinayagam is named after Lord Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles,’ he said, with a chuckle.

  ~~~

  The day my mother had a seizure and lost consciousness, Vinayagam carried her across the living room, down the steps into the Maruti Zen, and all the way into Adayar Cancer Hospital. During her three-year fight with peritoneal cancer, Daddykins deflected my attempts to talk about her imminent demise. Discussing it was tantamount to resignation. My sister subscribed to his philosophy, too, while I insisted on using the word ‘death’ even as they winced.

  A year after their vacation in Paris and in Singapore, my mother woke up one morning with a purplish blotch above her eyelids, the first overt sign of an internal malignancy. While he cared for my mother through her terminal illness, Daddykins also watched his youngest brother waste away, between blood transfusions, until, one day, his niece called Daddykins to tell him that it was time to make a decision regarding life support. Daddykins wept. He hoped that when his day came, his little brother would light his funeral pyre. Instead, in September 2002, Daddykins watched him burn.

  One smoggy April afternoon, my mother’s brain began to swell. She could not tell the time. She forgot names. She did not recognise most people. Her speech slurred.

  The Three Roses brought her the sweetest mango slivers. My mother relished them although she looked at her sisters-in-law too with suspicious eyes. She became hostile towards her husband of sixty-two years. ‘There he comes, the miser,’ she would whisper to Urmila, when Daddykins drove down with Vinayagam from the office to visit her at the hospital. When Daddykins held her close and kissed her forehead, she would glare at him. Disdain turned the corners of her mouth.

  One evening, Daddykins asked her why she recoiled when she saw him. ‘He loves you so much, can’t you tell, Amma?’ Urmila said, prodding my mother for a little more compassion towards a thoughtful husband. ‘He has been so caring all these years.’ Daddykins held my mother’s hand in his. ‘Yes or no?’ Urmila asked in her gentlest tone. My mother nodded, slowly, tears brimming in her eyes. She stared at the clock in the middle of the wall. I saw my mother now, lost in a labyrinth, the door leading out locked shut, the key forever lost.

  On a blazing afternoon in June 2005, when my mother returned home after four weeks of brain radiation, she couldn’t tell the difference between a blender and a spoon. A week after that, she didn’t recognise the urge to relieve herself.

  Her maid of many years sobbed over my mother’s indifference. ‘She used to stand outside the bathroom watching me a
s I scrubbed. I got precise instructions every day of the week. I want that person back.’

  We too wanted perfection back in our lives. Perhaps wheeling our mother into her durbar would spark that desire to rule, again? My aunt steered her excitedly out of the bedroom, into the court where once my mother presided from dawn until dusk. ‘Parvati, don’t you want to see the kitchen?’ Vijaya asked, pushing the wheelchair. ‘Don’t want kitchen,’ my mother grunted, her voice hoarse, her eyes glassy and distant. She wanted to lie down.

  So Vijaya, my mother’s oldest friend, led her out of her old den where she once fussed over tiny scratches on her pots and pans, past the Electrolux refrigerator that Daddykins had bought her the August prior, past the dining table with two red HotSpot silicone pot holders from Bed, Bath & Beyond (heat resistant to 675 degrees F), past a two-ply paper towel from Singapore that poked into its holder, past walls of photographs of my mother in the 1960s, when she wore her glossy black hair in a heavy, snake-like braid.

  We lowered her gently onto her bed and set her barren scalp on a scrawny pillow covered by a thin cotton towel. Daddykins sat at her bedside, talking to her. My mother stared at the ceiling.

  ‘You used to love collecting beautiful things, Amma,’ Urmila said. ‘You don’t care for any of your things anymore?’

  ‘No,’ my mother said, shutting her eyes. ‘I don’t want anything. Nothing at all.’

  During their years of marriage, my mother’s material impulses were the butt of many of my father’s jokes. My mother’s almirahs burst with jars of Yardley powder, Parker pens, elegant copper-bottomed cookware, stone casseroles, pewter cups, silverware, leather bags, glass beads, and saris, each of which would tell a tale of acquisition, return and exchange.

  My mother exchanged whatever she had bought at least twice. She strutted into grand retail showrooms with my father, her ‘bodyguard,’ as Daddykins liked to call himself. She clucked at sari clerks. Soon, the entire inventory was out of the shelves and on the glass counter. She tugged and tsk-tsked at their samples. The sari clerks began talking sideways in hushed tones. Daddykins would dab at the beads of sweat speckling the bridge of his nose. He peeked at his wristwatch. He would run his hands through his hair. Presently, he would begin grumbling.

  All the while, my mother surveyed the sari wreckage about her and watched the clerks like a hawk, informing the fellows that of course, a store of that gravitas had more stock in the back that it reserved for its elite clientele and that she being a loyal customer, albeit one of middle-class pedigree, the store definitely owed her and that the clerks had better just go and get the new bundle that they held in reserve. Having said that, she proceeded to install herself on one of the store’s wooden benches like a 7th century stone sculpture in the shore temple of Mahabalipuram. The clerks padded back from an inner sanctum in the back of the building, another cumulus of saris in hand.

  In her last years, my mother found the perfect ally in Vinayagam. She swore him to secrecy; the sari exchange missions happened after Vinayagam dropped Daddykins off at work. Her eye missed little by way of quality and thus when she said from her bed that she didn’t care for anything at all, we knew that she would not be with us much longer.

  At sunrise on a Saturday, just as Daddykins finished tightening his shoelaces before his morning walk, Urmila told him not to leave. Daddykins straightened up from the shoe cabinet on which he had been resting. He held on to the door frame of his apartment, leaning against it for a few moments before Urmila led him to the side of our mother’s body.

  Every day for the next year, Daddykins spoke only about his life with her. ‘Did you know that even though your mother was not educated beyond the elementary years, she possessed an innate acuity about people? Did you know she took in everything around her like a sponge?’

  Condolence letters drizzled into my father’s life that summer—expressing love, sorrow and nostalgia. A condolence letter is one of life’s sublime expressions of what one human being means to another. It’s a final reflection of a deep dependence, of the ultimate break of a bond, a celebration of what was, and regret at what would now never be.

  I remember the glow on Daddykins’ face after he received them, his need to share them with Urmila, myself, Vinayagam and his sisters. He gathered them all in one corner of his almirah.

  We talked about our mother’s candor. The Three Roses chimed in too. When mother did say something, it resembled clotted cream, a blob of unshakeable truth about the world. The Three Roses wondered how she could have flown away, just like that, leaving everything she had collected with so much care. All of us laughed over Daddykins’ long-running joke: had it been as easy to exchange a man in those days as it were to exchange a sari, Parvati would have returned him several times for many different men over the course of their marriage.

  When my mother had lain in her final resting state, we had swaddled her in a Kanjeevaram silk sari in mango yellow, bordered in red and green threads, with annapakshi birds, mystical white-winged creatures that obviated sorrows and multiplied good fortune. Now she reached out to us from her almirah, in tiny whiffs, through the saris that had lingered closest to her skin. We remembered the annapakshi yet again, that celestial bird that had nursed all our woes between her heart and her wings and graced us with the bounties of her lush plumage.

  My mother’s evanescence marked the fading of countless fragrances from my memory, beginning with Chanel 5; the faint scent of Cuticura talcum powder commingled with coconut oil; vanilla potpourri, fresh jasmine, holy ash and sandalwood. I could take a smidgen of all these, boil them together, stir the pot and pour the concoction into a flacon. But how does anyone bring back a mother in a bottle?

  ***

  On a Sunday afternoon, while Daddykins slept, Vinayagam turned on the television and absently began switching channels. STAR Movies was playing Titanic. ‘Aiyo, not Titanic,’ I said. ‘Not again.’

  Whenever Titanic played, Vinayagam became distraught as if he was standing out on deck with Leonardo Dicaprio, staring at the murky waters, gearing up for yet another visitation of the enormous tragedy about to befall himself, the ocean liner and all 1500 people in it.

  He sat riveted, taking in Kate Winslet’s rising and falling breasts as Dicaprio tried to kiss her inside the steaming car. ‘But Vinayagam,’ I cut in as a cold knife might impale baking bread. ‘Just how many times are you going to watch these people kissing and making out and dying anyway?’

  He looked up at me, his eyes glazed. ‘Amma, I have watched Titanic at least fifty times,’ he said, one eye still on the car window on which I now saw the sweaty imprint of Winslet’s palm. Her hand glided down the window of the gleaming red Renault. ‘But every single time, I’m transfixed.’ As we watched, he told me that when the movie hit the screen in Chennai in 1998, Daddykins went alone.

  ‘Your father saw it at AVM Rajeswari theatre. Your mother did not go with us because she didn’t like to watch English movies. Saar got himself a ticket. Only for himself, Amma, and I waited jealously for him outside. The man was gone for many hours. But I made sure to see it with friends a few days later.’

  Vinayagam said he fell in love with the movie because it was, first and foremost, a ‘nalla kadhai,’ a great story. But he loved it for another reason. ‘I like any story about things that move.’

  He never got over the last scene. ‘Especially at the end, Amma, it’s gut-wrenching, when both need to escape but Jack tells her to lie on the door and keep afloat while he just holds on to it, tries to paddle and stay alive in the icy water with just one hand over the door. After some time, she calls out to him. ‘Jack’, she says, softly. ‘Jack!’ she shouts again with all her might. When he doesn’t respond, she knows deep inside that he is dead, Amma. His hand is frozen, like a shard of ice. Then Rose lets his hand go. He crackles off from the door, you know, like a twig from a dead tree and sinks slowly into the blackness. That scene, Amma, is so gripping, even after a million reruns. It churns my stomach. Every singl
e time. Amma, Titanic is an example of true love,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘Real love knows no money or class, you know.’ He got up and pressed the switch by the television. Silence diffused into the living room.

  Some time after my mother passed away, he and Daddykins watched the movie on television. He said that in the end my father’s face was twisted in grief. ‘Parvati and I were like this, you know, Vinayagam, he said to me.’ Vinayagam’s voice was heavy. ‘He was in tears, Amma. I don’t watch Titanic anymore when your father is around because I don’t want to upset him.’

  22

  Once Derailed by the Butter-Cutter

  When Daddykins wrote to Urmila and me, he often enclosed newspaper cuttings of concert reviews, health columns and humour pieces that he had enjoyed in The Hindu. In one of the health advice columns that he sent us, the author—a nutritionist and food writer—had advised readers to do the following test.

  “Stand upright and look down. You should be able to see your toes without turning your head or bending forward.” The author claimed that many test-takers would not pass it. In the article, Daddykins had made sure to mark up the lines for his daughters, making a note on the side of the column about his own experience with the test: “I could just about manage.”

  ~~~

  In the summer of 2006, exactly a year after we bid farewell to my mother, we got together—Daddykins, Urmila, my children and I—for train travel to Kerala, in the monsoon month of July. We were to attend a cousin’s wedding on my father’s side of the family, in the coastal city of Kochi. But just as we made our way to our designated platform, we saw our train hissing and snaking its way out of the dock. Daddykins or Vinayagam had made a mistake with respect to train names and timings.

  My son, twelve, took aim at his grandfather as we watched the disappearing train, our mouths agape. ‘That was our train leaving the station,’ he said, narrowing his eyes. ‘And you, Thatha, are a butter-cutter.’