The Hope Factory A Novel - By Lavanya Sankaran Page 0,80
said, finally stopping the hair massage. “How come? What happened? My god!”
His mother had maintained a studied carelessness over the phone, as though this arrangement was standard operating practice between them: she was to go nurse her mother, who was teetering, aged ninety-three, on her deathbed in Anand’s maternal uncle’s house. In the interim, could Anand please take care of his father. “Come to Mysore,” she said, “this very week and pick him up and take him back. I will keep everything he needs packed. Good, very good. And don’t forget that he has to take his blood pressure pills. He does not like to and he pretends to forget.”
I won’t forget, said Anand.
He recounted his mother’s conversation to Vidya very briefly, and something about his demeanor altered the multiple hasty comments that rose to her lips.
“I’ll get the guest bedroom ready,” she said.
“Will he be here very long?” she couldn’t help asking.
Anand did not answer.
HIS FATHER SPENT THE DRIVE from Mysore to Bangalore with his eyes closed, sleeping or otherwise. He emerged from the car and confronted the bulk of his son’s house, representing as it did the fruits of a path he had always opposed. Anand kept silent, embarrassment warring with the pride within him. Would his father see his house as an affront? As a repudiation of his own strictly austere, lower-middle-class brahmin lifestyle? Why couldn’t Vidya have agreed to a smaller house? Happily, the house did not suffer its supersize alone: every home in this neighborhood seemed to suffer from architectural avoirdupois. And, at least, thank god, it wasn’t showily encased in sculptured white marble like the house opposite. The garden flowers were nice. And the house, though overly large and gleaming, was considered, by their friends, to be in good taste. Would his father recognize that?
His father turned to him. “Where is my bed? I hope,” he said, “it is not too soft.”
Years before, when Anand had told his father about his choice of profession, the conversation had not proceeded successfully. “A factory? But you are talking of becoming a businessman!” his father had said. “That is no sort of profession for us.” A businessman. A profit maker. Someone who spends the day counting money and then holding out his hand for more. That is who you wish to be? There is no respectability in such a work. What learning does it require? Tchi-tchi. Anand’s family had agreed.
“Child, you do not come from such a tradition,” said an uncle. “Leave it to those who do.”
“One cannot maintain sound moral and spiritual outlook in the face of the temptations that such a choice of work will bring,” said a grandfather, before passing away.
His father, of course, knew where he had erred: in letting Anand go, at the age of eighteen, to Bangalore to study; and in compounding that mistake by not forcing him to choose between the serious-minded Venkata Iyer Engineering College and the Sri Guru Sevak Engineering Institute, both with excellent academic reputations and very suitable, but allowing him to opt for the Jesuit-run St. Peter’s Academy of Arts, Sciences, Commerce, and Engineering.
Like Mysore, Bangalore might be in South Karnataka but, alarmingly, it prided itself on being “cosmopolitan.” Anand’s parents had had no illusions as to the meaning of this word: an influx of people from the farthest reaches of the state, well beyond the influence of Old Mysore. Worse: people from North India, as bad as foreigners in their habits. The very brahmins of Kashmir were rumored to eat meat—and when you said that, you had said everything. His father had inspected the two-page cyclostyled college prospectus dubiously. “Studying engineering? In this place? They are also teaching science, and your marks are good enough to register for either. One may say that science is a good subject, one can obtain a Ph.D. and become a professor, good, good, but,” his father said, forcing himself to practicalities, “an engineer has more scope.” Medicine or law would have done just as well; Anand’s father had a classical respect for all three. Later, when Anand’s mother was absent, he had given his son advice that embraced the nonacademic as well. “They drink,” he said, with a vague notion of Christian mores derived entirely from the cinema. “In church. They drink wine to show that they are good Christians. Please don’t drink.”
VERY QUICKLY, ANAND’S FATHER settled into a daily regimen indistinguishable from his routine in Mysore—establishing himself on the sitting room verandah mid-morning, cross-legged on a divan, a