Daddykins

by Kalpana Mohan

  ‘Palakkad.’

  The next day he was drowsy all day and all night. We made his feed. 6, 8, 10, 12, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. Even feeds in. Odd man out. Peptamen milk. Sweat. Fever. Chills. Panadol. Heat. Air-conditioning. Pan 40. Strocit. Stator. Diaper. Wet wipes. Peptamen milk. Sweat. Fever. Diaper. Wet wipes. Heat. Air-conditioning. Wet bed.

  The nurse lifted her mask. Vinayagam opened the balcony doors. He turned the fan on high. Saravanan tied the garbage bag. ‘Let’s dump it right away.’

  Was it green?

  It was dark green, almost black.

  The smell of death.

  The day after, Daddykins could not stand. His feet buckled. When we sat him on the chair, his torso and his head caved to the right, unseeing, like his wife’s nine years before. He sat there in his white cotton vest on his white diaper—almost dead in life but a newborn in death.

  The scent of a newborn. Vertically opposite in the circle called life.

  ***

  On Saturday, the day before Father’s Day, Urmila, Thalaivar and the Three Roses flew in to be at his bedside. Daddykins floated in and out of two worlds, neither here nor there, in the lair of the living and in the den of the dead. He was at the threshold, the place where no one may linger, the place where strokes made his body thrash, where entrails could be pulled and twisted even by a god so kind as Lord Gopalakrishna.

  I still had so much left to say to my father. I longed to tell him how excited India was about a new prime minister. I hoped to tell him that Nadal won the tennis grand slam for the fourteenth time. I yearned to tell him how we had missed watching FIFA’s opening in Brazil. I wanted him to realise that no one in the house turned on the television any longer—not even Vinayagam, with his penchant for old movie songs in which mustachioed heroes cavorted with women with cone-shaped breasts. I wished to give my father the day’s unopened newspaper. ‘This, here, is fresh off the press,’ I wanted to say. ‘Take in the smell of the paper. Feel its crease.’

  On Father’s Day, forty minutes after midnight—while we paced outside his room, worrying about his breathing—Daddykins drifted away, like cotton from the kapok tree, through the air-conditioning unit, the balcony, or the bathroom window perhaps. A few hours after his final exhalation, the late Daddykins’ kitchen scissors with the orange handle severed in two.

  ***

  Muniyamma, from the nursing home around the corner, had visited Daddykins two days prior to nebulize him. She had arrived in a starched white uniform, stiff skirt, white stockings and cap. Florence Nightingale with a red bindi on her forehead.

  In the wee hours after Daddykins’ passing, Muniyamma again schlepped in, bleary-eyed, in an orange nightie.

  Daddykins’ body was warm to the touch. Muniyamma pressed on his eyeballs, as if she were kneading dough. She grabbed his wrist. She clipped the oxygen monitor to his thumb. She fit the blood pressure cuff around his arm. When she was done, she let his hand crash onto the bed.

  At the dining table, she heaved her body into the chair.

  ‘What was the old man’s name?’

  I wrote it down.

  She showed me a menu of illnesses. ‘And how did he die?’

  I pointed to one and handed back the paper. ‘I believe he died from a cardiopulmonary arrest.’

  She nodded. She told Vinayagam that the death certificate would be ready at 9.30 AM.

  ***

  ‘I cannot tell Urmila. She will be upset,’ Daddykins had said to me. ‘But you I can tell. I don’t want anyone to see my crooked mouth. On that day, tie my face.’

  ***

  They cleaned the body. Vinayagam tied his boss’s face tight at 1 AM. ‘Tighter’, Thalaiver said. Vinayagam hesitated, holding the cloth in his hands. Thalaivar gestured as if to say, ‘You can.’ But the mouth stayed crooked. By 5 AM, with plenty of time to spare before visitors started arriving, Daddykins was no more the man with the crooked mouth.

  ***

  The priest told Urmila and me to stand under running water. Then he bade us wash our father. Urmila the eldest, from his head to toe. Me, the younger one, from his toe to head. Then the late Daddykins lay on a wooden cot as Thalaivar prepped him for his last journey through town to the burning ghat in West Mambalam. Now draped in a new dhoti with a zari border, looking most regal, the late Daddykins was carried, past his rust-orange sofa, out of his living room. Out past his door. Out beyond the shoe cabinet on which he used to sit when he returned from Jeeva Park. Down the eighteen steps. Down the verandah by which a Honda motorcycle always stood. They loaded him into the back of a van, legs first.

  Tutenkhamen in a dhoti. Leaving behind his wallet. Leaving behind his glasses. Leaving behind his dentures. Leaving us behind.

  The late Daddykins’ hearse turned away from Jeeva Park, past Nalli’s where the missus exchanged everything at least three times, past Panagal Park where he bought Urmila roasted peanuts in a cone, past Universal Stores where he bought me butter cookies, past the 11A bus-stop where, daily, Vinayagam once awaited a bus home to Porur, and then once again past the ghost of Doctor’s old bungalow where he learned to start a life.

  At the ghat, Thalaivar and Daddykins’ girls fed him rice, curd, honey and milk. Thalaivar set a burning cow patty in the middle of the late Daddykins’ chest.

  A fire now where once a flame burned.

  ***

  Into the open-mouthed fire.

  To the chant of Govinda, Govinda, Narayana, Narayana.

  Who is none but Lord Gopalakrishna.

  Burn. Splutter. Rage. Old Man Frying. Young Man Crying.

  A man Friday fleeing the fire, back turned to the Sunday pyre.

  Sobbing. Once a boy of 18. Now a man of 35.

  A young man who then led an old man to the bank.

  A young man who now led an old man to the other bank.

  Bones. Ash. The Remains of the Day.

  Little bones. Gravely bones. Big bones.

  Water over baked bones. Cool bones.

  Pick your bones. None left to pick.

  ***

  ‘Madam, you don’t know me. I just saw the obituary in The Hindu this morning. Your father was my boss from 1956 to 1959. I’ll never forget his encouragement and his kindness. One tiny remark from him set the tone for my career and the rest of my life, you know? I was typing up a report that morning. He passed me by. He said, ‘Srinivasan, you know typing too?’ How can I ever forget that word ‘too’? I suppose it was a small observation on his part but in the way LV-Sir—we all called him LV-Sir, you know—said it, he did not ever behave as if typing were an ordinary thing. He looked upon it as a valuable skill and he appreciated me for the talent that I possessed. I was just a superintendent then but sixty years later I still remember how special he made me feel that day. He’s the sole reason I set high goals for myself and excelled even after I left the A. G’s office. I’m so sad today. Please accept my heartfelt condolences. He was a great man.’

  ***

  On the fourteenth day after Daddykins’ passing, the sun charred the ends of gulmohar blossoms turned upwards. Vinayagam wondered when the heavens would quench the earth.

  The air conditioner whirred in the bedrooms and in the living room. Vinayagam admonished me. ‘Have you considered the bills we’re going to get, Amma?’

  ‘It hardly matters,’ I said. ‘Daddykins isn’t ever going to turn on the lights in our house anymore, is he?’ Vinayagam’s face fell. He turned around and marched back into the kitchen.

  The sky brooded that evening. We ran upstairs to the terrace to recover our drying clothes. A zephyr hissed through our manjadi tree. Raindrops clattered on our terrace.

  The next morning, Daddykins’ two friends and I walked together round and round Jeeva Park to the chant, over the speakers, of the Gayatri mantra that my father had recited every morning and every evening.

  Om buhr bhuva swaha tat savitur varenyam

  bhargo devasya dheemahi dhiyo yonaha prachodayat

  We meditate on the effulge
nt glory of the divine Sun,

  the god of light; may he illuminate our minds

  I walked back to Daddykins’ apartment. Up in the kapok tree, cotton balls hung pendulously now, their ends pointy. Water bags, about to birth something new into the air. A squirrel sprinted down a cable TV wire. Pigeons tap-danced on our neighbor’s roof. Manjadi pods had exploded inside our building, disseminating red beads all around.

  At 7.30 AM, Vinayagam walked up to the framed photograph from inside which Daddykins now surveyed everyone who walked into his house. ‘It’s June 30, Saar,’ he said to him. ‘That paper is sitting there unfolded, unread. Where are you, Saar?’ Daddykins stared out from his ‘8 by 10’ window, looking dapper in his blue cotton shirt and, as always, sporting his crooked smile.

  Later, oats made, prayer alcove cleaned, at 8.30 AM, Vinayagam crossed the living room to sit down on the cool marble floor by the side of Daddykins’ rust-orange sofa right behind the glass table. ‘Amma, enjoy The Hindu today. Remember, from tomorrow we won’t be getting the newspaper anymore. You’re flying out too, remember?’ He disappeared behind the day’s Dina Thandhi.

  ***

  Vinayagam came into the kitchen on a July morning. He told me his wife had dreamed of Daddykins and that he too had been thinking of him so much the previous evening.

  ‘But you have no idea how I feel when I return home in the evening. I feel I have no one to turn to for a solution to the challenges in my life. I would come to Saar for solace. We all need one person like that in our lives. Someone we go to that we trust, who has the experience, who will not talk down to us, who knows us well enough to give us simple, practical solutions to our life problems. He was that person for me.’

  He washed the rice under running water. ‘It didn’t hit me upon his death. There were the logistics of the cremation, the people pouring in to talk to us, the rites for thirteen days, the conversations with you, Thalaivar, Urmila-Amma and the Three Roses, the phone calls and all that running around.’ He shut off the tap and set the rice container down.

  ‘But now I’m hurting.’ I could hear the wetness of his tears in his voice. ‘From here on, I have no one like that in my life.’

  He wrung a washcloth dry and began wiping the counter.

  Then he paused, turning to me. ‘Amma, just where do you think he is? Like, right now?’ He didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘I bet he’s out there somewhere in the universe being reborn. You know, two days after he passed away, my friend at the office told me not to worry. ‘Saar will be reborn,’ he said. I’m telling you. Saar will be reborn. As your child.’ He laughed. He wiped his eyes.

  ‘You, mister,’ I said, stirring in two spoons of ghee into the bubbling pot of water, ‘you are going to be my father’s boss—even in his next life?’

  All of a sudden, my mind spawned ideas like tadpoles in an algae-filled pond. ‘Aieiiii, on the other hand,’ I said in a volte-face, turning to look at him, my arms akimbo. ‘If Daddykins were reborn as your child, you will be slave and he will be master!’ I said, with a shriek. ‘Finally!’ Vinayagam and I began cackling like a pair of laughing hyenas. The late Daddykins’ home returned to its temporary state of a contrived normalcy.

  ***

  In December, Vinayagam drove our family to the shore temples at Mahabalipuram. We ambled about the old rocks that had been chiseled by the passage of time. From the doorway of the main temple, I urged my children to look at the stone bench on which their grandfather had sat many moons before. Daddykins had cut a slight figure against the sun and the sea. For a second, I thought I caught the flutter of his shawl. I told my children then about the ancient stone lion that had roared in from the sea after the last tsunami. An old truth seemed to wash up over and over among these ruins, that a force infinitely larger than us shaped the stories of our lives.