by Sopan Deb
I’ve never been much of an athlete. Freshman year of high school, I tried out for the basketball team. I didn’t make it—not an easy feat, considering how atrocious the Howell High School basketball team was. (I distinctly remember trying to steal the ball from a teammate during tryouts, which, while a bold strategy, did not bode well for my chances.)
Baseball wasn’t my sport either. Though I was dominant in Little League for one year in sixth grade, I found out it was because Bishakha accidentally placed me in the wrong age group. I was going up against third-graders and looked like the Indian Babe Ruth. The next year, the situation was rectified. I quit after a handful of games because I kept striking out.
Maybe I needed something more grounded. For a brief period in elementary school, my mother made me take up wrestling. This wasn’t the kind where I threw around pillows at home. It was actual competition requiring outmuscling other humans. When the other kids were horsing around and grappling before practice, I would jump in and act as the referee of the exchanges so I wouldn’t have to take part in the actual grappling. You get the point. There’s a trend here.
When I woke up at the crack of dawn the next day to prepare for my tennis match against Shyamal, I didn’t have high hopes. I hadn’t swung a racket in twenty years. Even though Shyamal was about to kick my ass, this was about showing up for him.
My father had fretted over the possibility that the game would be rained out, but the weather was perfect when we arrived at the courts. He had on a white polo shirt and a matching baseball cap, and he’d rented a racket for me to use for the day. He also hired a ball boy assigned specifically to our game. We took our places on opposite sides of the court and began. Wesley sat on the court right behind Shyamal. In many tennis matches, this might be a dangerous spot. Not in this case.
My forehands, if you could call them that, sent the tennis ball flying well outside the lines. Every couple of minutes, I’d put my hands up to signal “My bad!” which should have been “I am bad!” I was swinging my racket like a baseball bat. The poor ball boy was sweating profusely, as he was unexpectedly receiving the biggest workout among the three of us, having to chase after all my errant swings.
There was one other issue, though: Shyamal was terrible too. Really bad. I mean, so was I, but I had an excuse. This was not a grand display of tennis on either side. This was the opposite of Borg vs. McEnroe. It was more like two Muppets facing off. I stopped feeling bad for the ball boy once I saw him openly laughing at some of our volleys. Shyamal would trot from one side of the court to the other, flailing at my serves, which were surprising each time they made it over the net.
When Shyamal told me a day earlier that he wasn’t good, I thought he was trying to be polite. He wasn’t! He actually was terrible. What was his coach teaching him the whole time? Now I had some suspicions about my father’s claims of being a strong athlete when he was growing up.
If this experience was about searching for answers, I got the most concrete one this morning: Why wasn’t I good at sports? It was in the Deb family blood. Or, rather, talent wasn’t. After an hour, our clothes were damp with sweat. We mercifully ended our eyesore of a match. Neither of us kept score, but we didn’t need to. We both lost.
“If you’re out of practice, your focus is not right,” Shyamal said as we walked back to my hotel, to which I laughed. He was still beaming with pride. “In a few minutes, I found you getting your grip of it. Initially, the ball was going South Pole and North Pole. As you started playing, you’re getting the grip back. If you practice for one month, you’ll get the full grip back.” (He loved the pole analogy.)
Later that day, we returned to Shyamal’s flat one more time before leaving Kolkata. I didn’t know how he felt, but, for me, the time we spent together there had brought him to life in my story. I was consumed by the question of when—or if—I would see him again after this trip. I knew we would reunite in Delhi in a few days, but leaving his home had a sense of finality for me. He was more than my DNA now. He was my father. But what would Shyamal mean to my kids, if and when I have them? I didn’t want them to be surprised by a picture of their grandparents in our home in the way I was at his brother Siddhartha’s house. I want my children to have something from their grandparents that is theirs. The same goes for Sattik’s two children, who have never met him. I thought it best to let Shyamal decide what he wanted to pass on.
Shyamal walked into the living room and sat on the couch, asking how we were enjoying the scotch he had given us. Nearby, Wesley turned the camera on her phone toward my father.
“I want you to tape a message to your grandchildren. What advice do you have?” I asked Shyamal.
“Ah, yes, unfortunately I won’t see them. A few things here. You and Sattik are original Indian blood. Both parents are Indians. The next generation are mixed. It’s very natural,” he said. “They will look different. They will think different. But the combination of two genes will make them smarter. Yes! Science believes that.”
I laughed. I wasn’t looking for advice on genetic engineering.
“They may or may not experience some problems as they grow up with their peers. It’s your responsibility as parents to explain to them what is their background,” he continued. “For example, they must know the rich culture and heritage of India. One of the oldest cultures of the world. It is your responsibility to teach them.”
Perhaps he didn’t understand what I wanted him to do. “I meant, what is your advice to the kids?” I pressed.
“They must have that knowledge of both sides,” Shyamal said. He was referring to both Indian and American culture. His big worry was that the next generation of the Deb bloodline wouldn’t know anything about where they came from because they would likely be brought up in the United States.
“They should learn it positively, not be forced to learn it. They have every reason to be proud of the Indian heritage, which is more than four thousand years old. That is my only advice. They should not forget their Indian heritage,” he went on.
His advice, on its face, wasn’t about how to live life or how to treat people. It was about academics. It was about culture. I was a bit frustrated that this was all he wanted to say. Our disparate understandings of the question, though, were emblematic of the rift that had always been between us. It wasn’t malicious on his part or mine, but neither of us could understand how the other sees family and love.
The conversation moved slowly in a more helpful direction.
“You, for example, were excited to find out where I spent my student days,” Shyamal said. “This was not true ten years back.”
He was correct. Ten years ago, I would not have cared.
“But something came from inside,” Shyamal said.
“What about how they should act? How they should behave?” I asked. I was trying again. I wanted him to say something about kindness, respect, that kind of stuff.
“That’s the only thing I can tell them,” Shyamal said.
“What do you want them to know about you?” Wesley offered.
“Me? Simple man. Came to United States with eight dollars in his pocket. Self-made man. Determination. Never broke down. Went through a lot of struggle. Temperature minus-ten degrees. The very next day I went to look for a job. That’s how I started,” Shyamal said. “Why? Life of an immigrant. I had to climb a mountain with many obstacles in front of me. But I never got discouraged. I went forward.”
This is when it hit me. Right there, in that second, is when I realized what he wanted to pass on. It was himself. When he said that his grandchildren “should not forget their Indian heritage,” he wanted us to remember him. My father didn’t want to be forgotten as the Deb bloodline continued through the generations, which is what likely would have happened had we not seen each other again. This was his way of telling us that he didn’t want my children to think of him as irrelevant, in the way I did with his parents. And he didn’t want to outright admit it, perhaps out of shame or embarrassment,
so he disguised his explanation.
“Are you happy now?” I asked Shyamal. It was a loaded question, in part because happiness is such a vague concept, and one with which my father wasn’t intimately familiar. This query had weighed on me since our kitchen table conversations. Being at peace is different than being happy. He seemed at ease with himself and the decisions he had made. But I wondered if he was happy.
“That’s a very good question. Let me answer it carefully,” he said. “I’ve wanted to do a lot of things, especially learning in India. Indian civilization. The Mughals. Ancient Indian history. All these things. It was always in the back of my mind for the last fifty years. I want to learn these things. Time flies very fast. You want to learn Indian culture? You have to live in India.”
This was a question about visceral emotions, but Shyamal could only answer in the abstract; an engineer explaining his method.
“When I came to India, my first objective was to take care of my health. That took me at least two years. Then, believe me, I never wasted a minute,” Shyamal said.
He described becoming a tornado of activity: learning Indian vocal music, picking up the accordion again—something he hadn’t done in years. He started studying art at exhibitions, which piqued his interest enough that he began commissioning the paintings now on the walls of his flat.
“From that point of view, I fulfilled some of my goals coming out of the money-hunting days in America,” Shyamal said. “But the worst part was I remember the day I got on the plane. I cried for both of you. Every day, I used to pray. My first prayer was, ‘God, protect my two children.’” He paused a beat before continuing. “I really meant it. How Sopan looks at me now—that was my concern. And yet, when I saw you, a spark went through my body. Good thing you did, by coming. So I have some fulfillment. Some sadness in my life. But I am a strong believer in God. And both of you met my expectations.”
“So you’re religious,” I said. How does someone who dealt with such a difficult life still believe? I wondered.
“No,” Shyamal said.
“You just said you’re a strong believer in God,” I said.
“God and religion are two different things,” Shyamal answered. “Religion is made by human beings. God is God. Who is God? Nobody knows. Studying science, cosmology, the origin of human beings, and seeing the huge cosmos, it’s not possible that it is nature. There must be somebody, a supreme power.”
My father’s conception of God was really whatever you wanted it to be. He said that at any stage of life, one must believe in something. Work might be your deity in one stage, something else in another.
“In my case, yes, there’s God,” Shyamal said, pointing to his heart. “God is here.”
Shyamal and I had stumbled on something else we shared: our agnosticism. I’ve always been skeptical of organized religion. Heck, I’ve always been skeptical that there are any higher beings at all. What God would saddle my parents with this kind of life? Not to mention the millions who face worse fates. Skepticism isn’t wholesale rejection, though, and I’m with Shyamal here: This universe is too lush, too vast, and too wondrous for there not to be somebody pulling the strings. And in my darkest days, I’ve prayed, especially when I’ve felt helpless and needed the boost from someone (or something). Is that a lazy, convenient way of believing in a higher being? Welcome to agnosticism, where our Sunday sermons are just a bunch of us saying, “Eh?”
I imagine that my father has prayed way more than I have. Assuming that we really are alike when it comes to this and how much of his life was seemingly out of control, he must have needed to ask for more.
Shyamal was not a resentful agnostic, but he certainly had to be bitter about how some aspects of his life had turned out, especially his marriage to Bishakha and what he viewed as the lack of support from his family growing up. Right? I wasn’t so sure.
“Knowing what you know now, do you wish you picked a different way to get married?” I asked. “Regret,” as I learned here, was as foreign a word for my father as “choice” was.
“Marriage is something else. Don’t mix it up. Think of your case. Did anybody do a calculation for you that you would meet Wesley someday?” Shyamal said. “It just so happened. Wesley, in a short period of time, she impressed everybody in the family. But it so happened that you met and loved each other. It so happened that your love went deeper and deeper every day. Why? Dependence on each other. In my case, it never happened.”
But Shyamal didn’t think about regret in the way that I did, in that he didn’t think about it at all. I, on the other hand, have always replayed life decisions in my head, wondering if I made the right choice, lamenting when one led to a negative outcome. Even though my parents’ marriage was a failure, like many things in his life, Shyamal accepted it and didn’t dwell on the past.
“I’m an engineer. Could I be better off in the medical science or as a musician? I don’t know. Could be worse. Could be better. Marriage is like that,” Shyamal said.
“Do you wish that you had the chance to meet someone in the way that I met Wesley?” I asked.
Shyamal dismissed it out of hand. “There are people who have dated for five years who can’t survive marriage for one year,” he said.
I could see Wesley out of the corner of my eye. Of course, my father was right in a way. Wesley and I could connect right now and then disconnect emotionally years down the road. Even months.
But still, Wesley and I being together wasn’t as simple as picking a profession, as Shyamal analogized, or a matter of simple good luck (although there was certainly some of that). And contrary to what Shyamal said, it’s not as black and white as simply ending up with the right or wrong person. Wesley and I had taken the time to sincerely pursue each other. It took work and vulnerability. We chose to be together in a way my parents never had the opportunity to. And if we do drift apart for some reason, it will also be a choice to do so. Jobs don’t love you back in the way a significant other does. A long-term intimate connection has higher stakes compared to your career. One pays the bills. One keeps you warm.
I pressed on.
“Let me ask it this way. Given your history, do you resent the institution of arranged marriage?” I said.
“No, not at all.”
“You never thought about remarrying?” I asked.
“No, no, no, no, no. So many girls have approached me as of now,” Shyamal said.
My mind did a backflip. “Afterward, you mean?” I said, incredulously.
“Yes!” Shyamal said, clarifying that he meant in the last eleven years, not when he was with my mother.
“And you never considered it?” I said.
“No!” Shyamal let out another one of his high-pitched squeals.
“Why?!” This time I let out one of my own. He lived by himself in his old age. Finding companionship seemed like an ideal solution to me. In America, divorced parents remarry all the time.
Repeatedly, Shyamal said he had no regrets. About marrying Bishakha. About not remarrying. Really, about anything. It’s just not something he could conceive of. Life happens, and then you move on. But he did admit that he once briefly entertained the possibility of remarrying.
There was once a “very pretty” Bengali woman from New Zealand who moved to India three years prior and had “many good qualities.”
“She came here and sat down and talked to me,” Shyamal said.
“About getting married?” I asked.
The two had been connected by the woman’s relative, who happened to know him, and there was some courtship. My father said he played the accordion for her and that they occasionally went on dates together. He said that he brought her back to his house. This house. The woman was impressed by Shyamal’s paintings on the wall and their conversations, he said.
I was in disbelief. I had never really discussed dating with my father before. I didn’t count him meeting Bishakha as a date.
“What’s wrong with that?” he said, notici
ng my writhing face.
I stammered that nothing was wrong and immediately steered the conversation toward more specifics about the mystery woman. She had an extra sense about my father. According to Shyamal, she suggested he would get bored by her. Shyamal agreed. After about six meetings over the course of a month, the two broke it off. My father was back on the singles boat.
Shyamal attributed his loneliness to being picky and demanding of those he surrounds himself with, but I see it differently and I’m betting the woman did too: He can be an impatient, rigid man and a challenge to live with.
“Getting a partner for me was always difficult,” Shyamal said.
“So do you think there’s an equal chance of being happy in an arranged marriage as in a love marriage?” Wesley tried her hand at getting my father to engage on a specific topic.
But again, my father demurred. “Marriage is luck,” he said. “Marriage is luck.”
Before we left for the night, Shyamal insisted I play his piano one more time. He set up a tripod and a camera to shoot my short performance. I sang an out-of-tune version of one of my favorite Billy Joel songs, “Summer, Highland Falls,” and plinked some jazz tunes I knew. The Joel song, about manic depression, is one I’ve played since I was a child.
My father kept flashing the thumbs-up sign to show his approval. In some ways, the visit had come full circle. Sitting down at his piano was one of the first things Shyamal had me do when we initially arrived in Kolkata. Just like last time, I was playing a Billy Joel song. The Omar Sharif picture still hung nearby. But my father and I barely resembled the men who had reunited at the Kolkata airport. After traversing so much emotional ground, the same ground had shifted beneath us.
“Fantastic, very good. I appreciate it. Very proud of you,” Shyamal said, clapping his hands.
Wesley and I packed up our belongings and got ready to head back to the hotel for the last time. We would be heading to Bengaluru shortly for Manvi’s wedding, before meeting Shyamal again in Delhi.