by Sopan Deb
“Relax, relax, relax,” Shyamal said as we entered the flat. That was another one of my dad’s vocal quirks. Sometimes it was never enough to say a casual thing once. He’d have to say it three times. Instead of, “Come on, let’s go,” it was, “Come on, come on, come on. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”
Once inside, Shyamal offered us a beer. Fuck yeah. It was the most important thing I did with Shyamal on our first full day together. He strode confidently across the room with ice-cold Kingfishers, a popular Indian lager brewed in Bengaluru, in hand. I had never shared a drink with my father before. If I played my cards right, we’d be playing beer pong soon. Shyamal, my liver, and I had some catching up to do.
Wesley, Susmita, and I sat down on his living room couch, as he poured the Kingfishers for us, then one for himself. I heard shuffling in the kitchen. It was Suparna, the woman my father had hired seven years before to help him around the house.
“Do you like my flat?” Shyamal said.
“Yes, Dad, it’s very nice,” I answered.
“Good. Did you know that you’re the owner?”
Shyamal meant that literally. This was when he told me that he was going to leave his flat in my name when he passed away. I came to India to reconnect and would be leaving with property.
“Today’s lunch is vegetarian lunch,” Shyamal said. “You’ll have salad. You’ll have poori and a special daal. Special vegetarian curry. And then some puddings.”
“That’s great,” I said. I was already buzzed. I may have consumed the Kingfisher a bit too quickly, given the heat, exhaustion, jetlag, and anxiety.
We discussed the plans for the next three weeks in excruciating detail. We would spend a few days in Kolkata before flying to Bengaluru for Manvi’s wedding. Then we’d link up with Shyamal again in Delhi. From there, we’d go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and then to Jaipur. For most of the three weeks, my father would serve as our tour guide. No hour was left unaccounted for in Shyamal’s itinerary.
Susmita suggested that Shyamal should take us to the Qutb Minar in Delhi, a thirteenth-century minaret, 240 feet high and made of sandstone. Susmita said it was to signify the first Muslim invasion of India.
“Did we win?” I quipped, filling the nervous lull.
My father really was—true to his word—very disciplined. He told us he had one beer and one glass of scotch a week, no more. His daily lunch was very simple, usually rice with daal and some salad. And he kept himself busy, constantly attending lectures and concerts and traveling around the country when he could.
I remarked to Susmita that Shyamal seemed really active.
Susmita said, “Well, you know, he has to pass the time.” Did he ever.
Wesley pointed at a picture on the wall. It showed a young boy and a baby.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“That’s me. And my brother, Sattik,” I answered. I was a bit astonished, since I had never seen this picture before. My brother and I don’t have many shots together, and I wasn’t sure where this one was set. Sattik had his arms around me. He’s completely bald now, but in the photograph he had thick curly black hair. I had fat cheeks and wasn’t using them to smile.
To its left was an older picture of Shyamal golfing. “I am losing my hair, you see it. But I am old enough to lose it,” Shyamal said, eyeing the picture. He said it so clinically. He wasn’t upset about losing his hair or wistful for his younger days. It was a fact of life. Me? I’ve got a bald spot that’s growing in proportion to the federal deficit. And the bald spot bothers me more. I don’t care if the country can’t pay its bills. Just let me keep my hair. Don’t let me follow in Sattik’s footsteps.
During the apartment tour, Shyamal briefly mentioned his brother Sudhirendra to Susmita. I realized she had mentioned him that morning too. My ears perked up. What brothers? I have never heard of any. I soon learned that my father had nine siblings growing up, Sudhirendra being his oldest. Six of them were still living. There were nine aunts and uncles that I knew nothing about. Sudhirendra was Susmita’s father-in-law, whom she was here to visit. Part of the Kolkata itinerary, Shyamal said, was to go meet Sudhirendra and another one of my uncles, Siddhartha. Both lived near my father’s house.
I asked my father later to tell me more about his siblings.
“I have seen nine of them,” Shyamal said. He was the second youngest.
“Seen nine of them? What does that mean? Do you have more that you didn’t meet?” I said. What an odd way to describe siblings: “seen them,” as if they were the Lord of the Rings franchise in theaters.
“Yes. One or two miscarried babies and more who died,” Shyamal said.
I felt foolish asking this next question: “What do you mean, ‘died’?”
“Died at the time of delivery or died through childhood,” Shyamal answered. “Delivery or early age. Very common in those days. I have since seen nine of them.”
The Deb children are listed here—dates and years are estimates, according to Shyamal:
BROTHERS:
1. Somorendra Kumar Deb (died at twenty-three in 1948)
2. Sudhirendra Kumar Deb (Somnath’s father)
3. Hitendra Kumar Deb (died at sixty-eight in 2001)
4. Amal Kanti Deb
5. Arun Kanti Deb
6. Shyamal Kanti Deb
7. Siddhartha Kumar Deb
SISTERS:
1. Satadal Deb (died at seventy-six in 2005)
2. Basanti Sarker (died at seventy-eight in 2011)
3. Anjali Dutta
I must have always known Shyamal had brothers and sisters. Where else could Somnath have come from? But as my family splintered, I didn’t put much thought into the deeper connection, which seems silly in hindsight. The only sibling who moved to the United States was Shyamal.
“So, show me around,” I said. “Give me the tour.”
“Pardon me?” Shyamal said.
“Tour! Tour!” Susmita said. “Dhekye-dhou!”
“Come on! It’s all yours!” Shyamal said.
The apartment had one bedroom, an office, and another room featuring an upright piano. Each room was largely devoid of personal effects but littered with art, books, and small figurines on every surface. He took us into the office, which was simple, cozy, and just bigger than a closet. Here my father quizzed me more about my comedy career. I told him I had performed several shows at the Magnet.
“On Broadway?” Shyamal asked excitedly.
“No, it’s not Broadway. It’s Off-Off-Off-Off-Off-Off Broadway,” I said, lowering expectations as much as I could.
“But you’re known,” Shyamal said.
“I wouldn’t say I’m known,” I responded.
Shyamal said that while Googling me, he had found an old picture of me onstage. But how had he known it was old?
“You looked skinnier,” Shyamal said, matter-of-factly.
This guy: Maybe he really was the class clown.
In the room with the piano, Shyamal sat me down and made me play. He hadn’t heard me play since high school, when I used to perform in the pit band for Howell High School’s musicals. I ripped through Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” and then made my way through some improvised jams on the slightly out-of-tune piano. He used an old point-and-shoot camera to meticulously shoot video of me playing.
“Wow,” Shyamal said. But he said it in his Shyamal way. “Wowwwwww.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a photo with a familiar face hanging on a wall next to the piano. I knew I had seen that face before. Maybe a relative? Another uncle I hadn’t heard of? I couldn’t quite place it. Who was it? I thought as I blasted through another improvised bit. It was of a man with a striking, confident look. After I had finished my made-up progression, I pointed toward the hanging frame and asked Shyamal who it was. He scoffed, as if I should’ve known: It was a picture of the actor Omar Sharif, who died in 2015. He was a lead in Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, and during the 1960s and 1970s he w
as one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Many prominent actors, particularly in Egypt and around the Middle East, have cited him as a seminal influence.
Here I must make a disclosure. I’m about to tell you the story of why my father hung this photograph in his flat. It is so out of character that I don’t actually know if it’s true. But I’m going to tell you anyway because I want to believe it’s true, and I don’t have any reason to think otherwise—other than, of course, its sheer ridiculousness.
Shyamal, in talking about his past, is very unemotional. His stories read as a recitation of facts and figures, devoid of spirit and sentiment. Even the way he described his siblings earlier, including the ones who had died during childbirth, was so unemotional. My father never cared about meeting celebrities. Shyamal was more interested in chemists and their work than actors. He was always unplugged from pop culture, so it’s something we never really discussed when I was younger. We had never once discussed our favorite movies or music.
In eighth grade, he did take me to see Zoolander. He said afterward, “I didn’t understand some of that stuff. Like where they were swinging around.”
Shyamal was referring to the orgy scene.
In spite of his apparent lack of interest in celebrity, the reason my father hung the Sharif picture on his wall is that he’s a fan and wanted to honor him after he died. This isn’t the surprising part, though. Many people hang up photos of people they like, though, by my estimation, many of them are not also grown adults. The weird part was told to us over more drinks.
In 2007, when my father abruptly decided to move back to India, the cheapest flight he could get was one that would take him through Cairo and then on to Mumbai and finally Kolkata. When he arrived in Cairo, my father was in ill health, the specific nature of which I’d find out about later. The airport had a doctor who examined him and told him he should rest for a couple of days before continuing to India. As my father told me this story, I didn’t press on the nature of his ailment. He had a habit of drifting off topic, and I was determined to hear this.
Though he wasn’t well enough to travel, he was apparently well enough to entertain fantasies. Shyamal had heard that Sharif lived in Cairo. He flagged down a cabdriver and asked him if he knew where Sharif lived. My father wanted to touch Sharif’s feet, a show of respect for Hindus.
“To them, he is a common man,” Shyamal told me in his apartment, as if he was answering for the absurdity of his question.
The cabdriver did indeed know and said he’d take my father to see him. According to the driver, if Sharif was in a good mood, he would accept my father as a visitor. But most of the time, he was in a bad mood.
Shyamal arrived at Sharif’s house and knocked on the door. Imagine walking up to Jack Nicholson’s mansion and asking to be let inside so that you could give him a fist bump. A man who wasn’t Sharif answered and asked my father who he was, where he was from, and what he wanted. The man paused and looked Shyamal up and down. My father wondered if his gambit just might work.
“He said, ‘Okay, wait. I cannot give you a guarantee.’ And then he went back inside,” Shyamal continued. It turned out that on this particular day Sharif was in a bad mood. He would not invite my father inside.
“It was a dream of my life. I only wanted to see him for a second.”
My poor father. He had gone all that way for nothing. But even in rejection, Shyamal was moved. “I was very lucky,” he said. “I love this man. Omar Sharif. Doctor Zhivago is one of the best movies of the world.”
There is a part of me that wonders if the cabdriver, seeing my father’s trusting naiveté, took him on a long ride to his cousin’s house for the high cab fare and an amusing prank. Maybe the cabbie had no idea where Sharif lived. But I’d rather believe that Sharif peered out his window that day to see my father and that his day was brightened by Shyamal’s presence, even if he wasn’t feeling up to entertaining strangers.
I also wondered, after Shyamal finished telling the story, whether he had become delusional before leaving the United States, and that’s why the doctors told him he shouldn’t travel for a bit. In this scenario, some sort of grandiose sense of confidence pushed him to stroll up to Sharif’s front door.
But my biggest takeaway was the surprise of learning my father was that sick when he left the country; that he was too ill to even get on a plane. In his first email to me after arriving in India in 2007, he had said he was too sick to live in New Jersey by himself, which sounded like nonsense and just added to my confusion and anger. Hearing the Sharif story helped me understand. The premise underlying the story is that he was unable to even get on a plane for so long that he found the free time to track down Sharif. More than a surprising tale about one man’s quest to meet his idol, Shyamal’s story made me realize that his illness hadn’t just been a weak excuse for him to abandon his kids. It was real.
As Shyamal finished his story, I decided I wasn’t yet ready to ask what he meant by being sick.
We walked back to the living room, where there were several paintings hanging on Shyamal’s walls that he was excited to show us. My father, besides being a tennis player, a cosmologist, and a celebrity spotter, was also an art collector. Not just any kind of collector, though. These were specifically commissioned paintings, indicative of his obsession with history. By his estimation, a lot of historical paintings were incorrect. He told us that he had an artist deliver paintings that, in his eyes, were more historically accurate.
In a phrase, he was fact-checking famous paintings.
One was Shyamal’s take on The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, originally by the British artist Robert Alexander Hillingford, depicting the Belgium battle that ended Napoleon’s empire. Hillingford’s version shows the duke triumphantly on his horse in the center of the frame, trying to rally his troops in the midst of battle. In the lower right of the painting, there is a kneeling soldier with white hair.
“Who would send this old man to a battlefield?” Shyamal said incredulously. “So I changed his hair.”
The white-haired man was probably just wearing a powdered wig, but Shyamal had said it took eight months to have this painting completed. I didn’t want to ruin it for him. Additionally, he felt that the painting didn’t have enough dead bodies around the duke, since Wellington was giving his speech in the middle of the battle. So he added more casualties of war. In Shyamal’s version, there is a snare drum on the grass by the duke’s feet, left by a poor drummer who lost his life to Shyamal’s fact-checking.
This was nothing compared to Shyamal’s version of The Last Supper—yes, the da Vinci piece.
“We did a lot of research,” Shyamal said, adding, “I did not like certain things about the painting. I have full respect for Leonardo da Vinci.” I was picturing my father at home stewing about da Vinci and angrily calling an artist to say, “Get me the RIGHT version of The Last Supper! Not that there’s anything wrong with da Vinci!”
Shyamal told us that around the time of the Last Supper, Jesus and his apostles were in hiding. Because of that, my father felt that wherever they were eating wouldn’t have a fancy tablecloth, like the one Shyamal said that da Vinci painted in his version. So he had the artist change the tablecloth to a simpler white one.
Shyamal knew the story about Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper, an indication of humility.
“After cleaning of the feet by Jesus Christ,” Shyamal said, “nobody would wear sandals. I wouldn’t allow it! No matter what the truth is!” The apostles in Shyamal’s The Last Supper are all barefoot.
Thank goodness Shyamal didn’t live in Jordan. At the end of 2018, journalists at a publication called Al Wakeel News posted a version of The Last Supper with Salt Bae, the Turkish celebrity chef who is best known for creatively seasoning meat, into the background. The Jordanian government arrested the journalists responsible.
I had a great laugh about Shyamal’s peculiarities when we got back to the hotel that night, particularly
his saying “No matter what the truth is!” This is the exact kind of shit I do—pointing out plot holes in movies, television shows, and plays. It is unbearable to binge watch anything with me. I nitpick it all. I still don’t get why Buzz Lightyear froze when adults walked into the room in Toy Story if he didn’t know he was a toy. Don’t get me started on any movie involving time travel.
Maybe Shyamal and I were both more alike than I realized. Maybe I’m a nitpicking asshole about art because of him. And, more frighteningly, after what he told me about Belur Math: Maybe I have my comedic sense because of him.
Yikes.
We all had dinner at the flat, which consisted of a fish curry and potatoes. Suparna was an excellent cook. Out of tiredness, we munched in silence.
After dinner, we said goodbye to Susmita, and Shyamal had a driver take us back to our hotel.
Shyamal and I had spent the day together. I was thirty, and we’d never done that before. It was a nice day, but a little bit like being thrown into the deep end of the pool.
In the car, I stared blankly out the window. The constant honking of cars had become white noise now. I wasn’t processing the sights or much of anything at all on the car ride back.
“If we had never come, and you had found out about all of these parts of him after he had passed away, I think it would have been so bad,” Wesley turned to me and said.
“Yeah.”
I didn’t have much to say.
“One thing I kept thinking about today when we were driving around is: What if you had been born here? What would your life have been like?” Wesley said.
“Yeah.”
“You wouldn’t be you.”
“I wouldn’t be me,” I repeated in a low monotone.
“I never would have known you.”
“Never would have known me.”
I looked out the window, hearing but not registering what Wesley was saying.
“It’s just your circumstances: You were born in the United States because your dad was an engineer and all of those things. But for any of us, it’s circumstances,” Wesley said. “You could have been someone else.”