his gambit just might work.
“He said, ‘Okay, wait. I cannot give you a guarantee.’ And then he went back inside,” Shyamal continued. It turned out that on this particular day Sharif was in a bad mood. He would not invite my father inside.
“It was a dream of my life. I only wanted to see him for a second.”
My poor father. He had gone all that way for nothing. But even in rejection, Shyamal was moved. “I was very lucky,” he said. “I love this man. Omar Sharif. Doctor Zhivago is one of the best movies of the world.”
There is a part of me that wonders if the cabdriver, seeing my father’s trusting naiveté, took him on a long ride to his cousin’s house for the high cab fare and an amusing prank. Maybe the cabbie had no idea where Sharif lived. But I’d rather believe that Sharif peered out his window that day to see my father and that his day was brightened by Shyamal’s presence, even if he wasn’t feeling up to entertaining strangers.
I also wondered, after Shyamal finished telling the story, whether he had become delusional before leaving the United States, and that’s why the doctors told him he shouldn’t travel for a bit. In this scenario, some sort of grandiose sense of confidence pushed him to stroll up to Sharif’s front door.
But my biggest takeaway was the surprise of learning my father was that sick when he left the country; that he was too ill to even get on a plane. In his first email to me after arriving in India in 2007, he had said he was too sick to live in New Jersey by himself, which sounded like nonsense and just added to my confusion and anger. Hearing the Sharif story helped me understand. The premise underlying the story is that he was unable to even get on a plane for so long that he found the free time to track down Sharif. More than a surprising tale about one man’s quest to meet his idol, Shyamal’s story made me realize that his illness hadn’t just been a weak excuse for him to abandon his kids. It was real.
As Shyamal finished his story, I decided I wasn’t yet ready to ask what he meant by being sick.
We walked back to the living room, where there were several paintings hanging on Shyamal’s walls that he was excited to show us. My father, besides being a tennis player, a cosmologist, and a celebrity spotter, was also an art collector. Not just any kind of collector, though. These were specifically commissioned paintings, indicative of his obsession with history. By his estimation, a lot of historical paintings were incorrect. He told us that he had an artist deliver paintings that, in his eyes, were more historically accurate.
In a phrase, he was fact-checking famous paintings.
One was Shyamal’s take on The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, originally by the British artist Robert Alexander Hillingford, depicting the Belgium battle that ended Napoleon’s empire. Hillingford’s version shows the duke triumphantly on his horse in the center of the frame, trying to rally his troops in the midst of battle. In the lower right of the painting, there is a kneeling soldier with white hair.
“Who would send this old man to a battlefield?” Shyamal said incredulously. “So I changed his hair.”
The white-haired man was probably just wearing a powdered wig, but Shyamal had said it took eight months to have this painting completed. I didn’t want to ruin it for him. Additionally, he felt that the painting didn’t have enough dead bodies around the duke, since Wellington was giving his speech in the middle of the battle. So he added more casualties of war. In Shyamal’s version, there is a snare drum on the grass by the duke’s feet, left by a poor drummer who lost his life to Shyamal’s fact-checking.
This was nothing compared to Shyamal’s version of The Last Supper—yes, the da Vinci piece.
“We did a lot of research,” Shyamal said, adding, “I did not like certain things about the painting. I have full respect for Leonardo da Vinci.” I was picturing my father at home stewing about da Vinci and angrily calling an artist to say, “Get me the RIGHT version of The Last Supper! Not that there’s anything wrong with da Vinci!”
Shyamal told us that around the time of the Last Supper, Jesus and his apostles were in hiding. Because of that, my father felt that wherever they were eating wouldn’t