attain a satisfactory education when he was growing up—“a rare situation,” as Shyamal put it. My father said Sachindra still managed to get his law degree and went on to become a successful defense attorney. He was well known in the district, and he pushed for all of his children to become educated as well. Shyamal himself had two private tutors all the way through college.
“Were you close with him?” I asked Shyamal.
“No,” he answered bluntly. “I’m being honest with you. No.”
During the conversation, whenever Shyamal tried to recall a memory, he would push down with his hands and tilt his head upward and his mouth into a slight frown, as if he was searching the clouds for an answer. Other times, he’d clench his fists, like he was a Heinz ketchup bottle and someone was trying to squeeze the last drop out of him. I, on the other hand, sat there frozen and expressionless. I was Lester Holt conducting an interview in prime time, throwing in the occasional nod of understanding. To an outsider, this may have seemed like I saw this as a clinical exercise.
“Why?” I asked.
“Age difference,” Shyamal said. “The role of the father was different in those days. Everybody was afraid of the father. Mother was the one who raised us.”
My grandmother’s name was Binodini.
“Were you afraid of your father?” I pressed.
Shyamal’s reaction to my question almost made me jump.
“OH YESSSSSSSSSS! OF COURSE!” he exclaimed. We had been together for a couple of days and I still wasn’t used to the sudden crescendo of his voice. As Shyamal talked, his eyes widened through his glasses, which seemed to take up half his face. His hand gestures increased. He reminded me of someone acting out Shakespeare at their first audition. I worried that he might, in his excitement, knock over one of the glasses on the table.
“It was not like this relationship,” he continued, beckoning to me. “All of us were afraid of my father, very afraid. He used to love us a lot.”
He added: “But you used to avoid him. Because he used to stop our freedom, our movement. Discipline us.”
It was not like this relationship.
There was such a cognitive dissonance here. Shyamal said he was afraid of Sachindra and that they were not close. He then said this was different from his relationship with me. Meanwhile, I would say about my father what he said about his: We weren’t close, and I used to avoid him. I was never afraid of him, and he wasn’t the disciplinarian. But then again, he was barely on my radar.
Then there was the matter of his siblings. Shyamal said he wasn’t close to them either.
“I was special, and let me tell you something about it: I was different than any of them. I had talents from a young age,” Shyamal said.
“What kind of talents?” I asked.
“People say I was a good-looking kid. I don’t know that. Everybody says that,” Shyamal said. I let out a belly laugh. This is the kind of thing Donald Trump would say: Many people tell me that I have the best smile. The biggest smile. I’m not going to say it. The polls say it. The polls that aren’t fake, that is. Which is all of them. Except Fox.
“I could sing well,” he went on. “I acted on the stage. I was doing good at the school. So naturally I drew attraction from other people. There was not a single public function in our town where I did not perform.”
A handsome, high-achieving academic who could kick it on the stage? If India had prom kings, Shyamal might’ve been a monarch. Shyamal said Sachindra was the one who encouraged him to pursue music. But when I asked him if his father was proud of him, Shyamal said no. “He was not proud, but he expected me to go somewhere, in the sense that I’ll reach some position,” Shyamal said. “I’m not average. I’m much above average. He knew that.”
I’m much above average. Goodness, that would have been a great yearbook quote.
My grandfather was also active in local politics, Shyamal said. Sachindra advised the Pakistani government on issues such as education, even playing an instrumental role in saving a local school from being closed. Though Shyamal didn’t say it, I imagined that he would have crowned himself prom king there too.
Sachindra was roughly seventy-three years old when he passed away in 1962. Shyamal found out about the death through a telegram. Officially, he was seventeen at