by Sopan Deb
Shyamal was expressionless. Instead of turning toward our house, he drove toward Route 9, the local highway, and he kept driving. I thought this was the end of my life. He was going to murder me. After about twenty-five minutes of driving, he turned right onto an exit ramp. We entered a parking lot I knew well in Freehold, a neighboring town. This shopping plaza had the Freehold Grand Buffet, a bloated Chinese restaurant and one of my favorite dining establishments. Shyamal exited the car and walked toward the restaurant. He was still quiet. I followed him.
Maybe this is the last meal before the execution, I thought.
The restaurant was mostly empty, since most folks were at school or at work. After the waiter took our drink orders, we went to the buffet to get food. I loaded up my plate. If this was to be my last meal, I was headed to the afterlife on a full stomach.
When we sat back down, Shyamal looked intently at me. Speaking softly, he said that he understood why I reacted the way I did to what Gary said. But he also said that I was wrong, that I should never have laid hands on him. No matter what Gary said. At the end of the day, a racist crack from a thirteen-year-old wasn’t more dangerous than a sucker punch to the face.
He said all of this without a hint of malice in his voice. He wasn’t trying to guilt me. Instead, he took on the soft demeanor of a professor. Shyamal was trying to use this as a teaching moment, yet all I felt was confusion. He should be angry at me. Why is he downplaying this? In a very Admiral Ackbar voice, I said to myself, It’s a traaaaaaaap.
Several minutes passed, and my mind-set realigned. I went from puzzlement to shame. Instead of being angry, Shyamal was empathetic, a side I rarely saw. I realized he was right, and the school administration was wrong. Gary shouldn’t have been suspended after getting punched in the face and then telling a teacher about it. I was wrong. There was no excuse for my behavior.
Shyamal put that in perspective for me right away. He was calm, which did not give me the opportunity to get defensive. He was soothing, but stern. It was his greatest moment as a father, although, like many things he did, it went unappreciated at the time.
Weeks later, I walked upstairs from my basement and I watched my father getting into a police car. It was the last time we lived together.
Seventeen years had passed since that buffet conversation, and there was a piece of the puzzle still nagging at me. Sitting at my father’s kitchen table in another hemisphere, this was my chance to clear it up.
I needed to find out why he’d left the country—but it was he who began.
“Let me ask a simple question,” Shyamal said. “Last ten years, I’ve been in India. How many phone calls have I made to you during this period? It’s a very important point. I’ve made more than two hundred phone calls to you. Did any one of you bother to give me a call to find out whether I’m dead or alive? No.”
Shyamal said that one year prior to our visit, he had come down with dengue fever, an epidemic that was spreading through Kolkata at the time.
“I was in the hospital,” Shyamal said. “I could’ve been dead. If not for my brother, I would’ve been dead.”
“I think you don’t understand that when you left for India you did not give any information as to why you left,” I said. “You just left. We kept calling.”
Shyamal kept trying to protest, but I wouldn’t let him.
“You’re going to let me finish,” I said, uncharacteristically firm.
I recounted the exchange of emails, from when I woke up one morning weeks after his visit to my college campus to an email saying that he was sick and had to leave the country. “And then I asked when you were coming back. You said you didn’t know, and then you never came back. And you expect me to just drop everything for a father that I barely know, that I grew up in an unhappy household with, that barely knows anything about me?” I said. “I’m watching my friends grow up. They’re having their dads coach them in baseball. My dad wasn’t doing any of that stuff.”
“Correct,” Shyamal answered.
“You expect, after everything that I saw growing up, for me to just drop everything I was doing, when I had to really fend for myself for a lot of my childhood?” I said.
“The only reason me and your mother stayed together—only one reason,” Shyamal said.
“To have children?” I said.
“My children must have love, care, and affection and then grow up,” he said, wistfully. “Within my human capacity, I’ve done everything I could.”
When Shyamal moved out of our house in Howell, he got an apartment about thirty minutes away. I remember visiting it once: It was almost entirely empty. There was one dingy couch placed across from a small television in a living room with a hardwood floor. There was a desk. I remember thinking it was the embodiment of sadness. Those walls told a tragic story about my father. I didn’t want to visit again.
In describing his life there, Shyamal repeated his line from when he described his dengue fever: Nobody checked to see if he was dead or alive. I certainly rarely did. But despite this, Shyamal vowed to keep supporting my brother and me, at least from his telling.
“I’m the head of the family. I did my part. I didn’t expect anything in return. That was my attitude,” Shyamal said.
He continued: “After coming to India, doctors said I couldn’t do anything about it.”
“Do anything about what?” I said.
“That’s the problem. You never knew what was going on in my life,” Shyamal said.
“I don’t understand why you had to come to India,” I said.
I felt like I was opening the vault of our family trauma. For years, I thought I’d never get an answer. And here I was on the precipice. Shyamal hesitated. Again. He said it was a story he had never told anybody.
The last time I saw my father before he left, his health had been deteriorating from various forms of stress. At one point, unknown to me, he was hospitalized for almost a week with a fever that wouldn’t come down. There was severe financial strain from being laid off the year before from AT&T, and the prospects of future employment, given his age, were grim. What also contributed to his physical and mental health struggles was the fact he was living alone, with no one to look after him and no other family around. Both his sons, already distant from their father, were focused on their own lives.
Amid this, and just after our visit, Shyamal got into a car accident. When he was driving, he said, sometimes he’d black out. In this instance, there was a crash, but airbags saved his life. He called Somnath, his nephew, to come pick him up at the hospital. But this was a disastrous move, as it turned out. When he got home that night, he passed out in his bathroom and woke up there several hours later.
“I stood up and said, ‘From home, I’m going to live. And from home, I’m going to die,’” Shyamal said. “I had to make a choice: either a graveyard in America or come back and take the help of your family and survive.”
So he left, a broken man unable to see a life for himself in America anymore. He needed to be home with the family he had in Kolkata for his own mental health. He thought I would never look out for him. Once again, Shyamal would leave family behind against their wishes to go abroad.
“Listen carefully: When you board an aircraft, the steward gives the lecture. She explains if something happens in the aircraft, what do you do? You put the oxygen mask on your mouth. And then what does she say? Before you help the child, you must put the oxygen mask on your mouth first. Because if you’re dead, you cannot help anyway,” Shyamal said.
My father leaned forward ever so slightly and squeezed his fists. But his tone was stern. It pierced through the hum of the running air-conditioner. He did not equivocate in letting me know how alone he felt at the time.
He was describing his decision as an altruistic act. But I would argue it had to do as much with self-preservation as it did with selflessness. My father, if I were to guess, has a deep desire to take control of his own destiny. Growing up in India with a domineerin
g father and, after he passed, an equally strict eldest living brother didn’t make that easy for him. Coming to America, a land of what he saw as limitless opportunity, was his pathway to fulfillment, but so was leaving it. Shyamal felt like he was dying in the United States. The depression he was feeling from a lifetime of disconnects, in combination with the financial stress, weighed on him like an anchor. He needed a restart.
“If I died there,” he said, referring to the United States, “none of you would come perform my last rituals. None of you! The best decision of my life was to get out of this.”
I never knew about the car accident. But Shyamal asked the same piercing question again. “Did anybody care to know? Including yourself?”
“When I didn’t hear from you for a couple of weeks, I was very worried,” I said quietly, inwardly ashamed. It was like we were at the Chinese restaurant all over again after I punched my classmate. How could I, as a son, ever let our relationship get to that point? As an adult? As a human? My own father didn’t think anyone loved him enough to care if he died or not. The bare minimum that a father (and a mother) should expect from a son is to feel cared for; to live the back half of your life knowing that you aren’t alone. As I thought about this, I didn’t look away from Shyamal’s face. For the first time, I noticed his wrinkles. They seemed to etch out a map. When I first arrived in India, my father’s unexpected youthfulness stuck out. In this moment, I was reminded that he was older, that he was mortal. But even still, I remained defensive. This wasn’t just my fault. It couldn’t be. Could it?
“I think it’s totally reasonable for a nineteen-year-old to be surprised that his dad just moved to another country out of nowhere,” I said. That’s when, for the first time in my life, I decided to take some responsibility for my part in our family’s disconnect. “I will say that when I was in high school, I should have called more.”
“Should have what?” Shyamal said.
“I should have called more,” I admitted.
“Called?” Shyamal said. He seemed like he didn’t understand what I was saying, like he couldn’t comprehend this contrition on my part.
“I should have called more. You. I should have called you more,” I repeated.
He seemed taken aback. “Every day, after the end of our dinners, I used to hug you. I am your father. Every day, I wanted to do my duty more because now he’s a helpless man. I used to go and attend your high school performances. I loved it. I was so proud of you,” Shyamal recalled, adding, “I cannot hug you every day. I miss it very much. But I was concerned about your future very much. I didn’t know what to do.”
I brought up the story of going to the Chinese restaurant with him after I punched Gary. I said it was my fondest memory with him (though the pinewood derby comes close). The Chinese restaurant wasn’t a happy memory. It wasn’t pretty. But it was my father being a parent.
“Yes, yes. Very good, you remember it, yes?” Shyamal said. He softened his voice and looked away. For a split second, I thought he might have disappeared into his own recollection of that lunch.
“Of course I do. But I wish we had more moments like that. We didn’t have many of those,” I said. “I should have reached out to you more growing up.”
“But you were a small kid,” Shyamal interrupted.
“Let me finish. When you guys got divorced when I was in high school, you have to understand that all I associated with you and mom was negativity,” I said.
“Naturally,” he said.
“Just anger and sadness. I just wanted to separate myself from it. That was probably irresponsible of me, but I was young.”
“No, no, no. You were very young. Everybody is confused. I am confused!” Shyamal said. Watching my father try to lift the blame off me was touching, but I wasn’t going to let him do it.
“When I got to college, I had to handle a lot by myself. After college, I agree. I should have checked in more,” I said.
It wasn’t enough, but perhaps it never would be. I should’ve apologized for being so petulant during the time he took care of me in eighth grade. Or for all the missed calls. Or for not knowing he was in a car accident.
“My dearest son, I have no regret,” Shyamal said.
That much was clear. After more than a decade in India, he had peace of mind. He was at home in Kolkata.
“There were a lot of times that I wish you were still there,” I said. “I wish you had been there when I graduated college. I wish you had been there to see me do stand-up comedy. I wish you could be there to take a tour of the New York Times.”
He nodded, though his face remained expressionless. If I was to guess, he had those same thoughts himself when he was alone. But he also deserved better from me too. No one should ever feel they don’t matter.
Shyamal had never mattered to me as much as he did right in that second. His gaze once again drifted away. I could tell his mind was traveling, but to where I wasn’t sure. Maybe through time. Maybe he was picturing me as a child. Or maybe he was picturing the last time we saw each other before I came to India, when I was a rail-thin freshman eating Thai food at a campus restaurant.
“I feel guilty. Guilt feeling was there,” my father said. Clearly, he had some regrets, contrary to him saying he had none. “Particularly somebody is growing up without a father, which I hated. I hated it from the core of my heart. I wanted to do more for my children but I couldn’t do it.”
I was done. I had asked all the questions I needed to get through, and we both needed a reprieve. He walked into the kitchen and cracked open a Kingfisher, pouring glasses for the three of us. Half a world away from where the fissures between he and I had formed, they began to heal. I sat on my father’s couch, sipping his beer, forgiving him for everything. I didn’t realize I was doing so, but in the minutes before falling asleep that night, I felt a new sense of tranquillity. I had begun to let go of my anger toward him. It was time.
Twelve
“The lights of my life are not around me.”
With our days in Kolkata running short, Shyamal wanted to show us every inch of his home city and giddily share the historical significance of each stone, statue, and building. Ever set in his routine, he mapped out to the minute what our schedule would be. Sleep, rest, sanity, and flexibility be damned.
The rainy season didn’t offer ideal sightseeing weather, but it provided a nice respite from the heat. The museums were indoors, but finding a room with air-conditioning was rare. In the Indian Museum, I stood by an enormous painting of British colonizers for an extended period, staring up, just basking in . . . the breeze from a nearby fan. A Jain temple made entirely of carved, sun-drenched marble was breathtaking, as was walking on said marble as it scorched our bare feet. Our stop at the Marble Palace, a two-story colonial mansion dating back to the 1800s with an odd hodgepodge of junk, valuable art, and an aviary, required the car to wade through two feet of standing water to get us inside.
We went back to the Queen Victoria Memorial in the daytime. Much like our previous nighttime visit, we spent more time posing for pictures for Shyamal than looking at artifacts. Walk! No, keep walking! Good, good, good, good, good. As tired and balmy as we were, neither of us could burst his bubble. He was pure joy.
But I was most interested in a simple building that wasn’t a landmark. This one had two blue doors that swung open as we drove by. There were multiple clotheslines hanging outside, with sheets currently being soaked by the steady drizzle. Grated windows surrounded the front entrance, and there was a lone wooden bench directly outside the doorway. Two men stood in the doorway working with a cloth of some sort. It seemed to be a shop, with a sign hanging above with Bengali lettering on it.
I had requested a slight detour to stop by this place. My father grudgingly obliged. It had been Shyamal’s home in Kolkata when he first arrived from Bangladesh. He didn’t offer a walk down memory lane, but I was there, watching my father as a young man walk out those blue doors to make something of himself.
When we realized his game was at six in the morning, I reflexively told him that it was not doable. His gracious response couldn’t hide the twinge of disappointment in his voice. I quickly rescinded my answer and said that Wesley and I would try and make it. Of course, that conversation happened in the middle of the day. When the time came, we overslept and missed his game.
On our penultimate day in Kolkata, Wesley suggested we make it up to him. We may have missed out on watching his tennis match, but could he and I play together?
When I popped the question, Shyamal’s eyes widened. “You want to play tennis with me?” he said.
I answered in the affirmative. This was an item that had been on my list for a lifetime: to bond with my father over a sport. The anxieties of my childhood were mostly in the rearview mirror, but it wasn’t too late to find common ground on the clay court. I knew Shyamal was well trained at this point, having had a coach and playing three times a week for the last decade. The last time I played was in elementary school, and even that was brief. This would be a blowout.
“Oh boy, I’ll tell you, Sopan. I’m thrilled that I’ll play tennis with you,” Shyamal said, followed by his crisp chortle. He kept saying, “This is the dream of my life!”
“Yeah, it’ll be great,” I said warily. “I’m not very good. I haven’t played in many years.”
“All right. To play with your father, you don’t have to be any good,” Shyamal said. “I’m not good either.” He was being nice.