If this was to be my last meal, I was headed to the afterlife on a full stomach.
When we sat back down, Shyamal looked intently at me. Speaking softly, he said that he understood why I reacted the way I did to what Gary said. But he also said that I was wrong, that I should never have laid hands on him. No matter what Gary said. At the end of the day, a racist crack from a thirteen-year-old wasn’t more dangerous than a sucker punch to the face.
He said all of this without a hint of malice in his voice. He wasn’t trying to guilt me. Instead, he took on the soft demeanor of a professor. Shyamal was trying to use this as a teaching moment, yet all I felt was confusion. He should be angry at me. Why is he downplaying this? In a very Admiral Ackbar voice, I said to myself, It’s a traaaaaaaap.
Several minutes passed, and my mind-set realigned. I went from puzzlement to shame. Instead of being angry, Shyamal was empathetic, a side I rarely saw. I realized he was right, and the school administration was wrong. Gary shouldn’t have been suspended after getting punched in the face and then telling a teacher about it. I was wrong. There was no excuse for my behavior.
Shyamal put that in perspective for me right away. He was calm, which did not give me the opportunity to get defensive. He was soothing, but stern. It was his greatest moment as a father, although, like many things he did, it went unappreciated at the time.
Weeks later, I walked upstairs from my basement and I watched my father getting into a police car. It was the last time we lived together.
Seventeen years had passed since that buffet conversation, and there was a piece of the puzzle still nagging at me. Sitting at my father’s kitchen table in another hemisphere, this was my chance to clear it up.
I needed to find out why he’d left the country—but it was he who began.
“Let me ask a simple question,” Shyamal said. “Last ten years, I’ve been in India. How many phone calls have I made to you during this period? It’s a very important point. I’ve made more than two hundred phone calls to you. Did any one of you bother to give me a call to find out whether I’m dead or alive? No.”
Shyamal said that one year prior to our visit, he had come down with dengue fever, an epidemic that was spreading through Kolkata at the time.
“I was in the hospital,” Shyamal said. “I could’ve been dead. If not for my brother, I would’ve been dead.”
“I think you don’t understand that when you left for India you did not give any information as to why you left,” I said. “You just left. We kept calling.”
Shyamal kept trying to protest, but I wouldn’t let him.
“You’re going to let me finish,” I said, uncharacteristically firm.
I recounted the exchange of emails, from when I woke up one morning weeks after his visit to my college campus to an email saying that he was sick and had to leave the country. “And then I asked when you were coming back. You said you didn’t know, and then you never came back. And you expect me to just drop everything for a father that I barely know, that I grew up in an unhappy household with, that barely knows anything about me?” I said. “I’m watching my friends grow up. They’re having their dads coach them in baseball. My dad wasn’t doing any of that stuff.”
“Correct,” Shyamal answered.
“You expect, after everything that I saw growing up, for me to just drop everything I was doing, when I had to really fend for myself for a lot of my childhood?” I said.
“The only reason me and your mother stayed together—only one reason,” Shyamal said.
“To have children?” I said.
“My children must have love, care, and affection and then grow up,” he said, wistfully. “Within my human capacity, I’ve done everything I could.”
When Shyamal moved out of our house in Howell, he got an apartment about thirty minutes away. I remember visiting it once: It was almost entirely empty. There was one dingy couch placed across from a small television in a living room with a hardwood floor. There was a desk. I remember thinking it was the embodiment of sadness. Those walls told a tragic story about my father. I didn’t want to visit again.
In describing his