Daddykins
Page 16
One evening, I found him in that state in front of his open almirah in his bedroom. He couldn’t find the salary envelope for Vinayagam. He hobbled over to the bed and sank into it. ‘Please pardon me,’ he said, looking helpless.
I sat down next to him and stroked his head, feeling a few errant white hairs beneath my fingers. I hugged him. In my arms, he felt like a seashell on Marina beach. I heard his heartbeat in the hollow of his chest.
The night before, Daddykins had counted Vinayagam’s salary several times. He had given me the recycled window envelope with the money. I had verified the amount, marked it ‘Vinayagam,’ shown him the envelope and then put it away, in Daddykins’ presence, in the left side of his drawer.
I got up and walked over to his almirah and pulled out the envelope. His face flushed with relief. ‘You know, sometimes I do want to die,’ he said taking the envelope, frustrated about his increasing dimness. He looked up at me. ‘But then I realise I cannot leave this world.’
‘What’s holding you back?’ I asked.
‘I have two girls. They are still young,’ he said. ‘They need me. I cannot die.’
In most countries, my sister and I would now qualify for retirement. On application forms, Urmila, who had three grandchildren with a fourth on the way, had almost reached the ceiling on age checkboxes. I was fighting to stay at the checkbox marked ‘Age 55 and below.’ But Daddykins believed we could not take care of ourselves. I kissed him on his forehead.
I wondered why humans couldn’t be like the African wildebeest that moved on, sometimes leaving its injured child to be eaten by the lion. The faces of my two children swam up towards me for a second. Articulate. Stubborn. Mature enough to trounce my opinions. Old enough to live on their own. Possibly bold enough to buy condoms and get drunk. But my daughter and my son would be my babies until the day I died. That night, I understood exactly what my father meant.
Daddykins suffered several setbacks the week of his birthday but we managed to ferry him on a day trip to the shore temples of Mahabalipuram, forty miles away. Vinayagam drove us. A flask of hot milk, a diaper, some Ensure powder in a Ziploc bag, a few towels and a box of tissues and water, and we were ready to drive off one weekday morning after commute traffic thinned on the roads.
Miles of brown casuarinas separated the spanking highway from the Bay of Bengal. Urmila told me how in the tsunami of 2004, those casuarinas had buffered the coast from extreme damage.
The grizzly tree reminded me of Daddykins. He had planned ahead for most emergencies. His small investments had paid regular dividends so he could live his life in his way without having to depend on his girls. The day after our mother passed away, my father transferred his apartment to us. He had returned home after the paperwork, his crooked smile belying his sadness at having entered a new phase in his life as a widower. ‘As of now, I’m truly homeless,’ he had declared, even as my sister and I reprimanded him, crushing him between the two of us.
I imagined myself returning to an apartment still charged with the exoskeletons of his life—his T-shirts, his favourite pair of walking shoes, his belt, his handkerchief, his glasses, his pen, his watch. I would witness his smile once again through his dentures, those beaming bridges to a lost youth that would never let the shape of his laughter dissolve. I felt alone. When my mother passed on, she gouged out parts of me to take with her. Daddykins’ death would carve out yet another chunk of my being.
We began seeing signs for Mahabalipuram. All around us, palmyra and coconut trees poked into the sky, silhouetted against wisps of white clouds on the powder blue yonder, just as they lined every highway from Kanyakumari through to the Deccan Plateau. From birth to death, these were omnipresent in our home in many forms. Woven palmyra baskets had lined my mother’s pantry for years. She’d used them for storing tamarind and rice; she dried spices in the sun in palmyra sifters. As long as she had lived, coconut flesh presented itself on our dining table daily as both garnish and gravy. The scent of coconut oil lingered on her skin. It was Daddykins’ aftershave.
The palms fell away behind us. Stone statues took my breath away, preparing me for what awaited us by the waters. On either side of the road, Ganeshas danced. Elephants guarded the pack of gods and dancing maidens. Seated Buddhas waited under jacaranda trees, in eternal recline, battling the exhaust from diesel and the heat from the tropical sun.
‘Amma, you know that stone Ganesha in our puja alcove to which your father offers a chrysanthemum every morning?’ Vinayagam said. ‘Your mother bought it here, on this road, after haggling with the sculptor.’
Crows cawed. Water crashed against the sand. The scent of salt clung to the edge of a light breeze. Daddykins retired to the stone bench a few feet away from a young couple in love.
Mahabalipuram had been a bustling seaport during the time of Ptolemy. We walked towards the ruins. In the distance, the temple pagodas rose, stenciled in muddy-brown. The rocks had transcended the bids of kings and the moods of the sun, their youth forever locked in the elephantine memory of ocean and sky.
I turned back to look at Daddykins on the bench. His shawl fluttered in the wind.
27
Email Me at Yamalokpatam.com
Daddykins maintained that when he passed away, he would land up in another city, Yamalok, the Hindu equivalent of Hell, whose ruler was the Hindu god of death, Yama. He followed the naming conventions of the British Raj in his regular references to this city of the afterlife (as in Seringapatam and Masulipatam).
Everyone in his circle of family and friends knew that should we ever wish to contact my father in the afterlife, Daddykins’ email would be his formal name, with both his initials, of course, @Yamalokpatam.com.
~~~
Daddykins went back to the hospital for another endoscopy to dilate his esophagus. A few hours after the procedure, he complained of feeling cold. He told Urmila that he felt an odd sensation in his left arm. The water he was drinking dribbled down the left side of his mouth. He could not swallow. He became too weak to move.
Once again, my father had suffered a stroke. This time, he lost the use of his left arm and leg. His mouth drooped even lower. A seesaw gone awry. A once-smiley, its whistle broken, its lip teetering to the floor of its face.
In the few seconds that the light in his brain flickered, my father spiralled into a vortex of darkness. The doctors didn’t believe he’d survive the stroke at his age, given his medical complications.
In November 2013, for yet another time I flew across the Pacific not knowing what would await me at the other end. In the nine weeks I’d been away, my father had lost more weight. He was ashen. His left arm was in a cast. A catheter and an IV unit anchored him to the mortal world of unnatural living. His chest was congested. When he moved half an inch, an oxygen monitor beeped. Apollo Hospital was to Med-India what the Airbus wide-body, double-deck jetliner was to the Wright Brothers’ Flying Machine. Daddykins was cocooned in the Platinum wing.
I couldn’t quite understand my father’s speech anymore but he certainly had a lot to say as I sat in the leather chair by his bed. ‘I was telling your sister that I’ve had a great life, that it’s time to go and that you both should let me go.’
‘She told me,’ I said, caressing his palm. He kissed my hand. My sister and Thalaivar had warned me that he would only talk about Palakkad.
‘And I would like to donate money to my village in Palakkad for a new chariot for the temple to Lord Gopalakrishna. It’ll be a gift from our family. Thalaivar said he would arrange for it.’ Daddykins told me he also wished to talk about his cremation rites.’
‘Urmila and I discussed it last year,’ I said, touching his chin. ‘When you were sick last October at Med-India.’
‘You did? Then?’ Daddykins seemed taken aback that his daughters had already talked about bundling him off to Yamalokpatam. Dribble always drained at the edge of his lip now. I wiped his mouth with a tissue.
‘I told her Thalaivar should perform the rites,�
�� I said to him.
‘Do you think my sisters would mind?’ he asked, coughing, waving his hand vehemently to signal that there was gunk in his lungs. Vinayagam, who was reading Dina Thandhi by the window, dashed over to the bed with a box of Kleenex. As I held the kidney tray below my father’s chin, Vinayagam wiped the inside of his mouth and discarded his tissue in the tray.
‘I think it should be what you want, given that you have the choice in making these decisions. How many of us get the chance?’ I asked.
He laughed, appreciating my candour, I guessed, in matters concerning his mortality. He lay back. Then, in a sudden move, Daddykins slid his torso to the edge of his bed. ‘Can you just get me out of here?’ he shouted. His right leg was on the floor. ‘I have to get back home. I need to go to the office.’ Monitors beeped. Vinayagam shouted. I yelled. We pinned him down to the bed. A nurse rushed in. Daddykins sank into his pillow in sullen resignation.
Three days after the stroke, Physio-Saar, a physiotherapist, arrived at my father’s bedside. My father told him he needed to go to his village in Palakkad as soon as possible and Physio-Saar reassured him that, yes, of course, he would have him walking in no time. He lifted Daddykins’ left arm and counted for a few seconds before he brought it back to resting state.
Every morning and every evening, Daddykins walked the length of the Platinum wing with Physio-Saar. Daddykins was now identified by a number on his wrist—a wisp of a ninety-year-old male in white stockings and blue polka-dot gown open down the length of his back. While Physio-Saar held him on his left and Vinayagam on his right, Daddykins began learning how to walk again.
When Daddykins was stronger, Urmila and I would run over to the other end of the corridor. From thirty feet away, we would cry out to him to look up, look ahead and try. And he would lift his chin and look into the distance and smile his crookedest smile, seemingly wonderstruck when he reached where his girls stood. Slowly, he and his walking companions traced their way—left, lift, place, right, lift, place, look up straight—back to his room and his bed.
My father would need a full-time nurse to care for him at home, someone who would be extraordinarily patient with him. Someone who would sleep in his room, change him and keep him comfortable and dry, someone who would listen, who would absorb like charcoal, who would take everything in and let nothing out. For the first time in his life, my father would not be able to climb the stairs into his apartment, or walk to Jeeva Park, or walk to and from the bathroom.
We found her—a girl, Bindu, three months younger than his youngest grandchild. She held his hand.
‘Thatha, I can look after you, no problem,’ she said, calling him ‘grandpa’. She said my father reminded her so much of her grandfather back in the village. Bindu was dark. She was darker than Vinayagam. She was darker than Saravanan. She had long eyelashes and a dimple on her left cheek. At nineteen, there was composure on her pretty face. Bindu’s life had hardly begun but it had already been marred by endings. In her last job, she had nursed a cancer patient through the last six months of his life.
On sleepless nights, Bindu sat up with Daddykins. He would tell her stories about his life. One night I overheard him admitting his faults. ‘But I want to tell you that I’m not a bad man. I don’t lie,’ he said from his spot on the bed while Bindu sat on the floor with her chin resting on his bed. ‘I don’t cheat. I don’t molest women. But I admit I have a caustic tongue. I suppose I can hurt people because I’m short-tempered. But that’s about it.’ Bindu laughed and touched his cheek. ‘That’s perfectly okay, Thatha,’ she said.
One morning, after taking his last sip of coffee Daddykins motioned to Saravanan. ‘Could you please bring me my coffee? I am waiting,’ he said. He had forgotten. I had just heard the inaudible snap of a cord mooring him to our world.
The great symbol of hope was Physio-Saar. When Physio-Saar arrived for therapy, Daddykins’ mood altered. If, on some evenings, the therapist called to say that he was held up at the hospital and would not be able to visit, my father became dour. ‘Irresponsible man. He has no idea how he’s affecting an old man’s recovery,’ he grumbled. ‘Does he know he’s impeding a man’s progress? I need to get back to the office. And I have such important business in my village in Palakkad.’
Daddykins concentrated hard during his hour of therapy. My father’s greatest challenge, Physio-Saar explained, was to tell the brain to teach the left hand to lift it high above the head. Daddykins would lift his right hand instead. My father was learning to build a link between his left arm and brain; he was using the code between his right arm and brain to apply it to his left. Daddykins’ neurologist was astonished by his patient’s focus. ‘I’m yet to see another man—even one who is in his seventies or his eighties—with your father’s optimism and fighting spirit. No one in the medical community will believe he’s doing this at ninety.’
A few weeks later, Physio-Saar brought equipment that began reactivating my father’s nerves. Little by little, Daddykins began to feel life in his fingers although he never recovered sensation in his index finger. After a few weeks of physiotherapy, he was able to lift his left arm high above the shoulder. But his forearm flopped. He was permanently damaged by the stroke in countless other ways. When presented with the newspaper in the morning, he’d stare at it for a few minutes, reading the same lines again and again before losing interest. He didn’t ask about Jeeva Park.
He stopped enquiring about his family or the world outside. He was lost in his past, in himself, and Palakkad was the only thing he felt any zeal for. Sports drew out his old self for a time. We prayed for one-day cricket and tennis on TV. Late in January, on one evening during the Australian Open, Daddykins became his sprightly old self, watching Roger Federer play against Andy Murray. A Federer fan, Daddykins claimed that he didn’t like Murray because he was Scottish and they were ‘all so arrogant.’ That evening, as always, Vinayagam played the role of the sports commentator.
‘Aiyo, Federer, don’t hit a fault!’ he yelled at our Sony Bravia. He turned to me. ‘The problem is our man always hits the net.’ Vinayagam knelt by Daddykins’ black recliner. ‘Look, it’s 30-15, Saar, are you following the game?’ Daddykins nodded and continued staring at the television screen. Bindu sat in her usual spot on the diwan on my father’s right. I lounged on a rattan chair a few feet away from Mo who sat at his usual spot on the rust-orange sofa, his computer open on his lap.
At one point during the match, Daddykins told us not to breathe. Federer’s going to hit the ball, he said. Federer slammed the ball. The house came down in Rod Laver Arena.
Vinayagam shot up and screamed. ‘3-2 for Federer!’ He clapped. And Bindu clapped. And I clapped. And Mo clapped. Then Federer thwacked another point. ‘Yes! 4-2 now! Yes!’ Daddykins could not clap. But he lifted his right hand high into the air over the top of his recliner. ‘Yes! 4-2. Federer, enough! Stop!’
Vinayagam turned to talk to me. ‘Amma, your father and I watched every game—Australian Open, French Open, US Open and Wimbledon—together. He taught me the rules. We used to set our alarm clock to get up in the middle of the night to watch our favorite games. FIFA World Cup. Grand Slam. World Cup Cricket. We used to be crazy like that.’ For years Daddykins bought himself the best seat at the Nungambakkam Tennis stadium to attend a whole week of Chennai Open.
Then, as we went into commercial break towards the end of the game, Vinayagam called out to Mo who was tapping away into his keyboard. ‘Saar, my boss has taught me everything there is to know about tennis. But now he doesn’t even know the rules anymore. Saar, do you know that this is much like a banana plant giving birth to its sapling?’
Fully in the spirit of things that day, Daddykins cheered for Federer while insulting Murray. Perhaps it worked because at the end of a tense match, his beloved Federer emerged the victor. Now Daddykins was delighted to have a semi-final between Federer and Nadal to look forward to. But he was angry because Federer didn’t show the grit of his old game.
‘Thatha, but you didn’t play,’ Bindu said, hugging his frail shoulders. ‘They played.’
‘Yes, I know. But it’s so easy to tire out when you’re watching tennis. Especially a game like this where it took that mutta payal took two hours to win one silly point.’ Daddykins patted her head. She laughed. Her white teeth sparkled against her pretty black face.
‘Anyway, all this has made me hungry,’ Daddykins said, looking at Vinayagam and Bindu. ‘And I need to celebrate this victory with some Ensure.’ His face now wore a woebegone look. ‘Please?’
One morning, Daddykins walked again. Physio-Saar and Bindu stayed close on either side of him but they did not hold my father as he walked towards the dining area from the living room. ‘There, let me walk towards her,’ he said to me, pointing to a laminated photograph of my mother on the living room cabinet. ‘She was my inspiration to resume walking.’
Daddykins lifted his left leg consciously and walked with his arms up and down, as if he were a soldier in an army regiment enacting a drill. ‘Walk normally, Saar,’ Physio-Saar reminded him. Daddykins continued to walk as if he were part of a military unit.
‘Great! Now let’s walk towards mother’s other photo, Daddykins,’ I said as my father walked past me. ‘Look, she’s on that wall too,’ I said, pointing to the collage of our family out on the dining room wall.
‘Yes, there she is, my inspiration,’ Daddykins said to Physio-Saar, stopping at the wall to point to a photograph, in black and white, of my mother in a pensive mood. He stood there with Bindu and Physio-Saar, staring at another photograph of himself and his wife taken a few months after their wedding. Daddykins, twenty, in a formal western suit. My mother, fourteen, in a sari. Both looked timid, a little anxious, perhaps, as news about the end of the World War and the allied troops readying for D-day came in through the wires.