I laughed and kissed Daddykins on his temple. ‘Of course he said that.’
‘Saar, Kalpana-Amma is a tattletale, a troublemaker. Don’t believe her.’
Late that evening after Daddykins and I had finished dinner, he called me to his room. He wanted to talk to me about increasing the tip for his manservant, taking into account the increasing chores. He warned me that the increase would be a recurring monthly cost. ‘From now on until the end of my life.’
I held his hand in mine. ‘Yes, it will recur monthly,’ I said, sitting down by him on the bed where the pages of his black diary and his investment papers rustled under the fan. ‘But even if you had to pay Vinayagam an extra 1000 rupees for the rest of your life, don’t you think you can afford it?’ I asked. I held my breath. ‘Daddykins, just how much longer do you think you are going to live?’ I asked, tweaking his shiny nose. Daddykins chortled. Both he and I began chuckling in the realisation that he was, in fact, hurtling towards ninety in a few days. Another 1000 rupees a month would hardly break the bank.
24
You are Lunch is Ready
Vinayagam announced, as he did every morning with the confidence of Grammar Girl: ‘Saar, you are lunch is ready.’
~~~
Vinayagam approached the prayer alcove a little after 8 in the morning. Old flowers picked off idols. New wick steeped in new oil. New kolam etched on black marble. Roses in red basket ready for an offering. Always, a braid of Arabian jasmine. Silver cup with water to sprinkle during prayer. Inside, rose petals floating. In a shiny brass uruli, cooked rice and tuar dhal, ghee-drunk, waiting to be fed to the gods. Chair inside puja alcove. Flame to wick, igniting another day, sooty with uncertainty.
Daddykins, bent now, sculpted in his father’s image, sank into the waiting chair. Hands together, like his father before him, Daddykins chanted in Sanskrit. A prayer for peace of mind.
shantaakaram bhujagasayanam padmanabham suresham
vishvadharam gaganasadrusham meghavarnam subhangam
lakshmikantam kamalanayanam yogibhir dhyana gamyam
vande vishnum bhavabhayaharam sarvaloka ekanatham
‘I salute the composed Lord Vishnu who is asleep on a snake bed, the lord of the gods, the support of the universe, the one who removes the fears of worldly life.’
Daddykins sprinkled holy water from his silver cup onto the offering inside the uruli. Our gods rarely partook of any of the rice and lentil. But the animals waited outside by the ante-room adjacent to the kitchen. Like my mother, Vinayagam fed the creatures after my father had finished his morning prayer and offered food to the gods. The squirrels and crows were restless to eat even as Daddykins braced himself for a meal.
‘Aieiiii, I’m coming!’ Vinayagam yelled towards the kitchen. He tapped the food in the uruli on to the terracotta-painted wooden slab on the ledge of the ante-room. ‘Come and get it. Caw, caw!’
Days away from his ninetieth birthday, Daddykins, now a pitted overripe mango whose juice had evaporated, tottered to his chair. He sat down at the dining table and stirred the contents of the bowl in front of him. Earlier that morning, Vinayagam had cut a carrot, six beans and spinach; these he had thrown into the pressure cooker along with washed moong lentils, rice, salt and turmeric. Then, he had blended them with a hand blender.
Daddykins lifted a spoon of the bland yellow puree to his lips.
‘Saar, do you like it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, pressing his lips together. ‘Tasty.’ Then he waited some more, his eyes timid and glassy. ‘I feel some graininess,’ he said then, clearing his throat. He looked at Vinayagam. ‘Did you grind it as smoothly as you could?’ Daddykins dipped the spoon and showed him an infinitesimal edge of a lentil that seemed to have missed the slay of the blade.
‘Yes, I did, Saar!’ Vinayagam’s voice grated a little. ‘Sometimes a few pieces may remain.’
Daddykins gestured for water. Vinayagam poured out a glass of hot water from the flask. My father sipped and waited, his lips pursed sharply into the air, his cheeks puckered as if he were trying to force down the water to push down the puree.
Vinayagam’s face was taut. He moved the glass of hot water away from Daddykins. ‘Saar, the doctor has barred you from drinking too much water.’
My father continued to feed himself, half a teaspoon at a time, demanding more hot water with every sip as we watched, frustrated. Vinayagam went back into the kitchen, added more hot water to the puree and brought it back to my father.
Vinayagam was taking my father’s inability to eat his preparation as an affront to his culinary skills. I explained to him that even if the lentils didn’t get stuck, they were dense, especially for a man with stricture. I told him we’d try another thing that Urmila had proposed. We’d use a heavy-duty mixer to mash up foods. And how about straining everything we gave him? Vinayagam balked at every idea of mine. As Daddykins’ health oscillated and as he grew more unstable and cantankerous, Vinayagam became testier. Urmila suspected Vinayagam was buckling under the pressure of multi-tasking.
On some days, Daddykins walked away with over half of his food left uneaten. I saw him once standing by the sink trying to force out a morsel of food that seemed to be stuck deep in his gullet.
As if they were on a daily schedule, two palm squirrels appeared by the window by 9 in the kitchen’s ante-room. They stretched their three-striped torsos towards the wooden block. Then they scampered up to the block and began picking at the cooked rice. Minutes later, two crows hovered on the top edge of both open window frames, eyes on the ledge below. In about an hour, the block was polished clean.
***
Now that he was turning 90, he was awaiting a ‘big increase’ in his pension—40,000 rupees, Daddykins said—and he demanded a weekly trip to the bank.
The morning Vinayagam accompanied Daddykins regarding the pension, no one at the bank had cared that an old man was waiting patiently for someone to address his concerns. They took the papers from his hand but did not cater to him even as he waited in the assumption that they were processing his papers. After a time, when he realised they were not prioritising his needs, he wobbled up to the counter and berated them for being inconsiderate towards an old man.
It turned out that the pension hike was 4,000 rupees—Daddykins had added a zero—a paltry sum indeed as far as the bank was concerned. Daddykins accused the staff of negligence given that he had sent his papers in writing many months before and had visited and telephoned the bank manager several times reminding him to follow up. Then Daddykins warned them that he would write a scathing letter to the Ministry of Finance in New Delhi. Daddykins’ histrionics embarrassed Vinayagam who yelled at his boss to compose himself. He tried to drag my father out of the premises. Daddykins then screamed abuse at Vinayagam, irate that his minion would insult him in that fashion inside the bank.
They didn’t speak for days following the incident but vented, long-distance, to Urmila until, one day, they began talking to each other again, first, in monosyllables, and then in actions, when, suddenly, it seemed as if the first ray from the summer sun had begun thawing the frozen lake of their communication. It was breathtaking how one kind gesture from one of them spurred the birth of wholesome sentences. Soon each man conveyed to the other how much he needed him for this or for that and the two, the old man and the young man, were bobbing together on a puffy life raft on a placid lake, paddling all the way to an endless horizon.
25
Old Number 20, New Number 90
Daddykins’ old city of Chennai remembered the old until the new became so old that it became the new old.
~~~
On a damp September morning just a couple of days before we celebrated Daddykins’ birthday at the office, Vinayagam and I took my father for a spin around all the places he had lived in until he built his bungalow in 1961. We helped my father into the car. As always, I sat in the rear to his left.
Vinayagam honked his way into the heart of the shopping district where Daddykins once us
ed to ride his Lambretta. In those days, he knew exactly where to turn to reach his destination but now he seemed lost and timorous. India was now no country for a ninety-year-old man. T. Nagar had become an unnavigable spaghetti of one-way lanes, alleys, roads, and flyovers. We cruised down the road skirting Panagal Park, right by Universal Stores where Daddykins treated us to biscuits and vanilla ice cream.
Daddykins read road names aloud as we drove. ‘G. N. Road!’ he said. ‘It was called G. N. Chetty Road. And Rangan Street. Used to be Ranga Iyer Street. The blackguards ruling us keep stripping roads of their caste affiliations.’ I waited for a castigation of politicians who had deemed it more important to overhaul the road names than the roads themselves. But none came.
Daddykins peered through the window at the spot that was his first home in the city. Doctor and Kunju’s colonial bungalow had once marked the statuesque entry to the lane. He had visited the childless couple often until their death, always unable to forget their kindness. Daddykins then spoke of the low wall of the house, the iron gate through which he would enter and the garage across the road. In my mind’s eye, I saw Doctor’s laugh, his eyelet of a mouth, his rabbit teeth, and the way he sucked in his breath as he bustled around in an office reeking of a compound of Dettol, tincture, chlorine and sterilising metal.
My uncle’s home had been replaced by a building with walls that soared like the limestone of the temple at Abu Simbel with a 12-foot tall iron gate flanked by Ionic columns, their capitals embellished by volutes, a tawdry ode to the white and black money spun on the loom of the famous Kumaran Silk Stores.
‘Doctor made a neat sum when he sold his house,’ my father said. ‘But he and his wife never traveled anywhere or did anything. Their cash multiplied and languished in the bank. After their death, relatives tussled over their money. What was the point?’
Unspoken thoughts of my father’s legacy hovered over us that morning as we reached an enclave where, seven decades before, my parents had moved into their first rental apartment—ancient West Mambalam, where Brahmin priests eked out a small livelihood. The pluckiest priests graduated to officiating at the celebration of milestones. The unlucky ones, who hadn’t sought to pursue advanced Vedic studies, served in the business of death. The smell of gloom pressed over the neighbourhood with its burning ghat.
Priests walked around that morning, Brahmin threads across their bare torso, cloth bag in one hand, umbrella in the other. The hunger in their stomachs welled into their eyes. My father and I watched a young Brahmin cross the road. Vinayagam slowed down. Daddykins looked at me. ‘We’re all at their mercy,’ he said. ‘Call one of these poor men and he’ll arrive at our home in his thin dhoti with all the things he’ll need for cremation.’
Vinayagam waved his hand. ‘Amma, every Brahmin priest, rich or poor, attends to all ceremonies, both life and death.’
He had a point. Judging by how Daddykins shifted in his seat, I knew that he too had heard.
‘If priests performed death rituals alone, they’d die in hunger while simply waiting for people to die, Amma.’
‘My priest does not perform death rites,’ Daddykins said matter-of-factly. The top rung of Brahmin priests claimed that they preferred to dissociate themselves from death. Clients like Daddykins preferred not to know.
‘Of course your priest does,’ Vinayagam said, swinging left. ‘He won’t tell you that, will he?’ He turned to catch my eye for a second. ‘Money talks, Saar. But death is part of life, after all. We all have to go one day.’
I sat between them, one ear to Vinayagam’s declarations and the other to Daddykins’ proclamations. In this ancient town, once a forest of sacred bael and bilva trees, Brahminhood had dug its roots so deep and wide that no man, Brahmin or otherwise, could untether the notion of caste, propriety and entitlement from the land that bred them.
Passing several one-room tenements advertising space for rent, we arrived at Subba Road—a road my father remembered as Subba Reddy Road—where it intersected with the alley he had lived in with his young wife. We looked for the first home at Kasi Viswanathar Koil Road. Daddykins could not recognise it anymore. It had traded hands. But he remembered the lay of the land.
Vinayagam helped Daddykins out of the car. For the rest of the way into the 400-year-old Shiva temple, I led him by the arm through the alley abutting the temple, a lane six-feet-wide where a car would not go. Bicycles and scooters skittered past. Motorcycles brushed against my sari palloo.
At the altar, Daddykins prayed. It had been many decades since he had stepped in. The temple gong sounded, sonorous with memories of people past. Daddykins said he could never forget the daily peals of that bell. Didn’t they say that sound was the last to go?
I asked my father if he remembered walking down the lane by the temple. Daddykins laughed. ‘What kind of question is that?’ he asked without exactly addressing my question. He did that a lot. There were many other questions I wished to ask but didn’t dare to. I wondered whether my father remembered his bride of sixteen, waiting for him to return home from work. Did thoughts of sex ever trouble the old man? Did the death of his spouse when he was eighty-three, extinguish the last cinders of amorousness? When did people actually die? When we stopped feeling the need to love? Or lust? Or procreate?
As we drove through old roads, typical Chennai addresses jumped out at us. The Madras of then mating with the Chennai of now. A zygote afloat from the fusing of the old and the new: Old Number 25/New Number 47, Hanuman Koil Street; Old Number 64/New Number 47, Ganapathy Street.
We reached Parangasapuram Street where Daddykins had once rented a portion from his cousin Sundari. An old neem tree arched over the road. My aunt Sundari, Doctor’s sister, was the fair, Cuticura lady, who walked in a cloud of talcum powder intimidating all who crossed her path. ‘I was so fond of Sundari and she of me. But she had her faults. I would just listen through one ear and let out through the other,’ Daddykins said. ‘That is the best policy in life.’
I wondered how I would feel when I was my father’s age, when every link of mine to my past was severed because all the stars I had orbited had lost their light, one by one. Did he feel alone, unmoored, as if he were afloat on a raft in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight?
I heard Daddykins chuckle by my side. He observed that he would not have known where he was had he been dropped blindfolded in Sundari’s neighbourhood. Today, in place of her expansive home, a Snack Shack sold pizzas, shakes and burgers.
We flew down the shopping souks of Pondy Bazaar, shooting past a row of garland makers and crossing Mount Road into the alleyways of Mylapore. Near Bazaar Road, Daddykins and my mother had eked out a life together for eight months by stores selling Ayurvedic remedies. Shops here still reeked of musk and incense. I inhaled. My breath filled with vetiver, coconut oil, ashwagandha, pippali, cardamom, nutmeg, and saffron.
We returned home through the side roads of Jeeva Park. Auto-rickshaws had lined up like languorous coaches at the railroad yard. The drivers were asleep, some spread lengthwise on their seat, head hanging upside down, arms slack, dead to the world, like demon Hiranyakashipu on Lord Vishnu’s lap.
Vinayagam rolled to a stop. As we led my father home up the eighteen steps into his apartment, I thought about everything that he still wanted to do even though he was turning ninety the following week.
He wanted to fly to Singapore to play with his four-year-old, great grandson as soon as his health stabilised. He wanted to see my overhauled backyard in California. He wished to live long enough to see my daughter married; if not that, he wanted to be present at her engagement, at the very least. Then he wanted a red T-shirt to wear to Jeeva Park, a striking one in carmine, he said, that would turn heads.
On the afternoon of his ninetieth birthday, Thalaivar and his staff ordered a cake that said ‘To Infinity and Beyond.’ Employees walked up to Daddykins and shook his hands. They hugged him. They teared up. Some fell at his feet. Daddykins was gracious throughout, although he
seemed preoccupied. I sensed my father’s foreboding. I knew that inside his ninety-year-old shell he still heard the echoes of a youth at twenty; he wasn’t raring to prove his mortality anytime soon. While driving back in the car after the party, he turned to my sister to ask her the one question that seemed to be giving him heartburn. ‘Was this a birthday or a sendoff?’
26
Die Another Day
Twelve weeks before Daddykins died, when the heat was rising to a broil, my sister told visiting cousins that she was considering hiring the services of a palliative care team to oversee our father’s care.
Daddykins cut her short with the knife-edge of his tongue. ‘Palliative care?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘But I don’t need that.’ Everyone fell silent. No one dared look at Daddykins.
‘Who says I need palliative care?’ Daddykins said. ‘That’s for people who are going to die.’
~~~
Following his birthday, my father resembled a mammal in estivation. Like a wombat in dormancy, he was in a state of suspension from the real world, rationing the use of stored energy. Except for the two hours when he seemed to will himself to go to work, he was simply going through the motions of existing. Daddykins’ diet had now been watered down to coffee, tea, clear soups and Ensure.
He still read the The Hindu in the morning after a 20-minute walk. The bank complained that his signatures didn’t look like his hand. He was irregular with jotting expenses in his accounts book. When the Three Roses and a few other friends and relatives called on the phone to talk, Vinayagam stopped handing the telephone to him. When they asked to hear Daddykins’ voice, my father talked to them in a disembodied fashion, speaking in euphemisms about his health.
I sensed his estrangement from the world in other things too. He didn’t listen to music; he stopped telling us what was going on at the office. He spent long hours in his room shuffling papers or looking for things. Daddykins seemed lost in his own home.
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