was smart and persistent, and he didn’t like disappointing his son.
“Come on, Baba. Please?”
“No.”
“Okay, Baba.”
Ten minutes later at the register:
“Okay, Baba, I brought the game to the register. It’s here already. Let’s just buy it.”
“Okay.”
If it wasn’t a computer game, it was baseball cards. I collected thousands of them through middle school. It would infuriate Bishakha, who thought I was wasting too much time and money on playing computer games or on collecting baseball cards and not spending enough time studying. She wasn’t wrong. I don’t know where those cards are now. They weren’t at my mother’s apartment when we visited.
After shopping, Shyamal and I would often go to McDonald’s, where Shyamal would buy me a McChicken sandwich. He would get one too, but one time, I remember that he also ordered a cheeseburger without cheese.
The baffled cashier said, “So, you want a hamburger?”
“No,” Shyamal said. “I want a cheeseburger without cheese.”
He was overthinking it. Sometimes he did that.
At the jewelry store in Kolkata, Wesley picked out a small set of rhinestone and pearl earrings, with the matching necklace. They were small. Shyamal didn’t think this befit Wesley, whom he couldn’t stop showering with praise.
He asked the owner of the jewelry store if he had bigger, more expensive jewelry he could buy her. Wesley and I explained to Shyamal that the smaller pieces were just fine. He wasn’t convinced but eventually relented. He wanted everything to be perfect for us.
We finally went to visit Shyamal’s home that afternoon. We pulled past the pink fa?ade and into a carport of sorts. Up one flight of a winding staircase, and he stopped us. We sat on a bench outside his door and took our shoes off.
“Have you read The Da Vinci Code?” Shyamal asked Wesley. What an odd question to pose out of nowhere.
Wesley paused and answered in the affirmative.
“Here in India, we have a Da Vinci Code,” Shyamal said. Wesley and I traded confused looks. Shyamal had Wesley stand up. The key to his apartment was buried underneath the bench.
Ah, a dad joke. I’d never heard him tell a joke before.
“Relax, relax, relax,” Shyamal said as we entered the flat. That was another one of my dad’s vocal quirks. Sometimes it was never enough to say a casual thing once. He’d have to say it three times. Instead of, “Come on, let’s go,” it was, “Come on, come on, come on. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”
Once inside, Shyamal offered us a beer. Fuck yeah. It was the most important thing I did with Shyamal on our first full day together. He strode confidently across the room with ice-cold Kingfishers, a popular Indian lager brewed in Bengaluru, in hand. I had never shared a drink with my father before. If I played my cards right, we’d be playing beer pong soon. Shyamal, my liver, and I had some catching up to do.
Wesley, Susmita, and I sat down on his living room couch, as he poured the Kingfishers for us, then one for himself. I heard shuffling in the kitchen. It was Suparna, the woman my father had hired seven years before to help him around the house.
“Do you like my flat?” Shyamal said.
“Yes, Dad, it’s very nice,” I answered.
“Good. Did you know that you’re the owner?”
Shyamal meant that literally. This was when he told me that he was going to leave his flat in my name when he passed away. I came to India to reconnect and would be leaving with property.
“Today’s lunch is vegetarian lunch,” Shyamal said. “You’ll have salad. You’ll have poori and a special daal. Special vegetarian curry. And then some puddings.”
“That’s great,” I said. I was already buzzed. I may have consumed the Kingfisher a bit too quickly, given the heat, exhaustion, jetlag, and anxiety.
We discussed the plans for the next three weeks in excruciating detail. We would spend a few days in Kolkata before flying to Bengaluru for Manvi’s wedding. Then we’d link up with Shyamal again in Delhi. From there, we’d go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and then to Jaipur. For most of the three weeks, my father would serve as our tour guide. No hour was left unaccounted for in Shyamal’s itinerary.
Susmita suggested that Shyamal should take us to the Qutb Minar in Delhi, a thirteenth-century minaret, 240 feet high and made of sandstone. Susmita said it was to signify the first Muslim invasion of India.
“Did we win?” I quipped, filling the nervous lull.
My father really was—true to his word—very disciplined.