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The evening after the funeral, after everybody had gone, my father shut himself into his bedroom, and I left the house and walked. Between the two of us, we had finished several pegs of rum and a quarter bottle of whiskey. I found myself standing on a busy main road with no recollection of having arrived there. People flowed around me, shops and bars glittered and trembled, and I tried to think of the future. In a few days, I would return to college; my final-year exams were just weeks away. After that? I would pack up my things and return to Bangalore. After that? Nothing.
A bus rattled past, mostly empty, only a few tired heads lolling in the windows. A waiter in a dirty banian dumped a bucket of chalky water onto the road in front of a restaurant. Earlier that day, while a gangly priest droned on and on, my father had overturned my mother's ashes into a scummy green concrete tank, and then he had continued, somewhat helplessly, to hold on to the clay urn. Without thinking, I snatched it from his hand and dropped it onto a rubbish pile. It was something my mother herself might have done. The look on the vadhyar's face was of shock and faintly delighted disgust. I waited for my father to bring it up later, but he didn't.
*
I stood in the same spot until the waiter, now with two other men, emerged from the restaurant. They were dressed to go out, in closefitting shirts lustrous as fish scales. They passed right before me. I heard a scrap of their laughter and tensed, ready for a fight, waiting for the leer, the catcall, the line from a love song. But instead they crossed the road and were gone.
*
Though he insisted on all the right rituals for my mother, my father claimed to have shed god and Brahminism long ago, in his own youth, finding a substitute in engineering, Simon and Garfunkel, The Wealth of Nations, and long-haired college companions who drank late into the night, filling the room with Wills smoke and boozy rants about politics, both of which eddied and went nowhere. Three years of a master's degree at Columbia left him with a fondness for America, especially her jazz, her confidence, and her coffee, which, he liked to say happily, was the worst he'd ever tasted. When he returned to India, he worked for a few years; then my grandfather, as had always been the plan, provided him with the capital to start a factory manufacturing construction equipment, and, when that foundered and fell apart, more capital for a second factory, which flourished.
My father, in those years, liked to speak of rationality and pragmatism as though they were personal friends of his, yet it was he who inevitably rose to his feet at the end of our dinner parties, who raised his glass and declared, blinking away tears, "To you, my dear friends, and to this rarest of nights." He had the intelligent man's faith in the weight of his own ideas, and the emotional man's impatience with anyone who did not share them. As he grew older and more successful, his confidence did not change; it merely settled and became wider, a well-fed confidence.
Only my mother could make him falter. She had, apparently, made him falter the day he arrived on a brand-new motorcycle to inspect as a potential bride the youngest daughter of a mid-level Indian Railways employee. He saw a woman standing barefoot on the street, wearing a shabby cotton sari. He asked if he was in the right place, and my mother replied, "Certainly, if what you're here to do is look ridiculous." My father used to love to tell this story, and also to tell how she had rejected suitor after suitor before him, one for asking about her family's dental and medical history, one for inquiring whether the dowry would be paid in gold or cash, one simply for smiling too much. I have no way of knowing if any of this is true, since my mother never told stories, least of all about herself, but I've heard they went on a walk, during which my father outlined his plans for his life: grow the company for a couple of years, have a child in three, maybe another child the year after. At the end, he paused for my mother's reaction. "Well, you do talk a lot," she said thoughtfully. "But if you're going to be working all day, I suppose I won't have to listen to most of it."
From The Far Field. Used with permission of Grove. Copyright © 2019 by Madhuri Vijay.
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