tall man but stooped by years of tap-tapping at a desk in a faceless government office, who supplemented his existence as a clerk with passionate literate articles in the left-wing press, which he composed on his daily walk to the market for fresh vegetables. And my Dadima, an ocean of goodness contained in a loosely wound sari, a carefree grin belying the suffering that had touched all of that generation.
Papa had got the best of both his parents: Dadima’s generous mouth and affectionate eyes, Dadaji’s pride and cheekbones. And while papa spoke copiously about his mother, her sweetness, her courage, her patience, his references to Dada were less frequent and always more surprising. Once, after we had watched footage of Russian tanks parading past some half-dead leaders on the TV news, papa said casually, ‘Your Dada was a communist. That’s why I never learned any of the prayers, but I can tell you what the GNP of Kerala is …’
I did not understand all of this, though it made mama laugh until she cried, but I did gather that it was somehow Dada’s fault that we did not have a homemade Hindu shrine with statues and candles on top of our fridge like all my other Aunties.
On another occasion, another mehfil, after papa had just finished a song to rapturous Vas!, my Auntie Shaila leaned over to papa and squeezed his arm playfully, her breasts hanging over the harmonium so that they brushed the keys and played a discordant fanfare. ‘Kumar saab,’ she shouted, ‘you should have been in films!’
‘I was offered a contract, when I was younger,’ papa smiled back, ‘but my father refused to let me go. Mindless rubbish, he said, give people politics not songs …’ There was a brief pause and then papa laughed uproariously, cueing Auntie Shaila to join in, turning a father’s edict into an anecdote.
Oh but in that pause, what possibilities hovered! Papa could have been a film star! There was no doubt he had the looks; even then the Aunties would waggle their heads appreciatively when he sang, enjoying his noble profile and almond eyes in a proud, proprietorial way. Mama would sigh at the framed photograph of the two of them which hung above their bed, taken in some small Delhi studio where they looked as if they had had their picture taken through vaseline. ‘Look at your beautiful papa,’ she would say. ‘What did he see in a dark skinny thing like me?’ Funnily enough, papa would often ask me the same rhetorical question about mama. I presumed that this was what love meant, both people thinking they were the lucky one.
But once I had heard about Dada’s film ban, I became obsessed with what I had missed out on, being the daughter of a famous film hero. Maybe I would have grown up in a palace, had baby elephants as pets and held my papa’s hand as he Namasted his way through crowds of screaming fans who pressed forward to garland him with marigolds…But if I was disappointed, I could not begin to imagine how papa must have felt. Maybe this was why he never talked about what he did for a living, all I knew was that he went to an office every day and came back with a bulging briefcase full of papers covered with minute indecipherable figures.
But whatever he did to make money was not what papa really was; whilst my Aunties and Uncles became strangers when listening to him, papa became himself when he sang. My tender papa, my flying papa, the papa with hope and infinite variety. And then one day I made a connection; if my singing papa was the real man, how did he feel the rest of the time? This hurt me unbearably, and I stopped hanging around the adults to see him perform. I somehow felt it was my fault and not Dada’s, that papa never got into the movies.
Mama and papa were holding hands now, the tension in the room had somehow abated and I began to breathe a little easier. It struck me suddenly how mama and papa had somehow managed to retain something I did not see in most of the Aunties’ and Uncles’ marriages, an openness, a flirty banter which both fascinated and embarrassed me. I knew everyone began this way, I’d seen the same dance of hands and eyes going on between the big boys from Sam Lowbridge’s gang and their interchangeable girlfriends. They would occasionally invade the local park, which conveniently began at the end of our communal Yard, taking over the swings or roundabout, equipped with bottles of cider and endless cigarettes. The boys would begin by teasing the girls, always loudly, aggressively, more for the benefit of their mates than the girls themselves. The girls would feign indifference, sulkily dodge the boys’ attempts to grab them and corner them, but always would end up sitting in between the boys’ lanky denim legs, sharing drags and slurps, rolling their eyes at the boys’ exaggerated swearing and spectacular gobbing in a fond, possessive manner. Their commitment seemed infinite, so it was always a surprise to see the same boys with completely different girls the following week, playing out the same rituals of devotion with the same apparent conviction.
I always watched them from a safe distance, hiding in the hollyhocks and nettles around the old pigsties at the far end of the yard. Their intimacies unsettled me. I knew that nice girls should not behave in this way. (I got scolded for showing my knickers when I did handstands, and sitting between a boy’s legs was presumably much worse.) But despite the fuzzy commas of bumblebees hovering around my ears, and the tall nettles pricking my bare legs, I always had to watch Sam’s gang and their girls. They looked so complete, in on a secret which I worried I might never discover.
I got this same feeling looking at the photographs of mama and papa when they were first married, and living in Indian government quarters in New Delhi. Papa had completed a college degree in Liberal Arts and Philosophy (when I asked him what these were exactly, he had said, ‘A damn waste of time in this country as it happens’ and I did not ask again), and was doing something clerical for the government. Mama had just begun her first teaching job and they lived in a whitewashed single-storey flat-roofed house. I knew this from one of the photos, where they are sitting on a bed in a courtyard, a low bed strung across with hessian mesh which bends under their weight. Just visible on the stone courtyard floor is a dull stain the size of an orange, which papa told me happened when he squashed a passing scorpion under his chappal. Papa sits behind mama, has his arms around her just like Sam Lowbridge with his ‘wenches’ in the park. They are both in white cotton which catches the sunlight and emphasises the nutty brown of their skin. They are laughing, they are at that moment exactly where they want to be.
What I did not understand was why this yearning had not worn off yet. Other parents did not behave like they did; if any of the Uncles attempted to put their arms around their wives in public, this always provoked a chorus of shrieks and mock-naughty-boy slaps from the Aunties. ‘Sharam Tainu Nahin Andi hai?’ the women would laugh, demanding to know why their men had no shame and were admitting in public that they sometimes touched, despite the fact that all of them had at least two kids each and therefore must have touched a few times before, even if it was in the dark. They contacted each other through their children, their hands met as they hugged their sons, tickled their daughters, their fingers intertwined as they ate chapatti from the same plate. But I never saw any of them volunteer kisses and hugs like my parents did, contact which I knew had nothing to do with me.
As for our married English neighbours, I sometimes had difficulty matching up the husbands to the wives as their lives seemed so separate. They were the women, like the Yard women, who stayed home whilst their menfolk slipped out to work, too early for me to catch them. And then the others like the Ballbearings Committee, whose men waved them off to work and then gathered together in the evenings in the local pub, the Mitre, or the Working Men’s Club, leaving their wives to create havoc together at the rival female venues, the bingo hall, or the Flamingo Nightclub near their factory.
The Flamingo was a converted chapel with tinted windows and screaming pink paintwork, which I had occasionally glimpsed through the car window on my way to school. A big neon sign above the door declaimed, ‘Ladies Only Nites, Free Cocktail Before Ten O’Clock!’ You’d always know when the women had been ‘down the ‘mingo’, because you would hear them piling off the night bus on the corner of the crossroads, shrieking with laughter and cursing as they negotiated the potholes in their slingbacks. ‘Yow dirty cow, Maisie! I seen ya eyeing that fella up!’ ‘I never! He was gagging for it any road, he had his hands in his pockets all bloody night!’ ‘Oh me head…Malibu’s a bloody killer, innit?’ ‘Don’t yow chuck up near me, Edie! This wet-look top ain’t waterproof, ya know …’ ‘I wonder if my Stan’s up…probably not. Our chaps are never up when yow need em up, know wharr-I mean, girls!’