the hood of the car. Why did the cow cross the road? Well, he didn’t really, because it was too late for our driver to stop. We crashed into the sacred animal at full speed, knocking it straight down.
The car stopped.
Thankfully, no one was hurt. Well, the car was hurt. The bumper was dislodged and the windshield cracked.
But a sense of panic quickly set in. Forget the bumper! Check the cow!
We had seen stray cows milling about, which didn’t surprise us, since cows are sacred in India. I mean, you know that. Everyone knows that. Surrounding pedestrians don’t really pay them any mind, especially because the vast majority of the population of India, roughly 80 percent, is Hindu. And since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014, cow lynchings, meaning the murder of human cow ranchers by vigilantes, have been on the rise. The majority of the states in India have laws that prohibit the killing of cows. That morning, just by chance, I happened to have read several articles about the subject. It had become a heated political issue in the country, an indication of rising sectarian tensions between Muslims and Hindus.
I was genuinely worried for our lives: Rajasthan, the state Jaipur is in, is one of those states which has a cow protection law.
People started emerging from the shops on the side of the highway to see what the fuss was about. I started breathing hard, mostly because, in the Indian criminal justice system, cows are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: gods and other gods. My father, meanwhile, didn’t seem the least bit concerned. Mostly, he seemed annoyed that he had been awoken from his nap by this cow who had the misfortune of jaywalking at the wrong time. I was this close to saying we should make a run for it, but I knew I would make a terrible fugitive. I used to pretend I was a lampshade when I played hide-and-seek, even if we were outdoors.
Miraculously, the cow got up on its own and ran away, seemingly unaffected. And we—after a couple of minutes of staring imminent death in the face—started driving again, although with a dislodged bumper and cracked windshield. Newton was right: Every action does have an equal and opposite reaction. My heart was beating too fast. I tried to get myself together in the car by taking deep breaths.
As Shyamal prepared to take another nap, he pointed his finger to the left side of the road: “Oh, look at this store selling marble sculptures over there.”
He then nodded off to sleep again. I threw my hands up in bewilderment. Was I the only one who realized the danger we had just escaped?
We made it to Jaipur without further incident, but our excitement for this leg of the trip was dampened knowing that it would be the last. There was no way around the fact that our stay in Jaipur was deeply sad. It had a different air than our other locations, even though, once again, we were touring palaces and forts.
I had been heartened in Kolkata to see my father so unexpectedly healthy and vibrant. I enjoyed pretending to play tennis with him and seeing his energy as a tourist, not to mention the sense of enlightenment I felt getting to know who he was as a person. But in the last couple of days before leaving for the United States, I was entirely filled with remorse.
Shyamal was a fussy traveler who didn’t like deviating from well-laid itineraries. It occurred to me that this was probably because he rarely had other people with whom to travel, so he liked to retain as much control as possible. Siddhartha, his youngest brother, told me that the two of them don’t tour together because they’re too different. It sounded like something I’d say about my father.
By Shyamal’s own admission, he had no friends in India. And it’s not like he had lost many. In almost eight decades, he never made them. Once a day in Jaipur, Shyamal would say, “This has been a dream for you to come here.” Or he’d be geeked about explaining the significance of a sight and say to Wesley, “I hope I’m not boring you.”
Sometimes the conversations exposed my father’s deep loneliness. While he was never looking for sympathy, Shyamal would matter-of-factly make throwaway statements alluding to his lack of companionship that would prompt Wesley and me to exchange glances.
The most striking example was during lunch on the