fact that I had just ruined my mother’s reputation and my apparent good name, I would’ve found it comical. It felt good, though, to have told her. I had stepped into the light, the light of truth, and it was a nice place to be.
I knew that even before I got inside my parents’ house, Mallika Murthy would be dialing the phone number of ten of her and Ma’s closest friends to inform them about my fall from grace.
I was smiling when I knocked on my parents’ front door. The power was still off and the doorbell was useless. I was fully expecting Nate to open the door and was surprised to see my father, red-eyed, looking slightly sloshed at his doorstep.
“Nanna?” I asked, and he sighed deeply.
“I was hiding, but everyone seems to find me,” he said, and stepped away from the door.
“Hiding in your own house, Nanna?”
Nanna shrugged. “Best place I could think of.”
“Have you been drinking?” I asked, as I smelled whiskey in the air.
“Not really,” he said, and pointed to Nate who was lying on a sofa sleeping, despite the heat. “We just drank a few pegs of whiskey last night.”
“A few pegs?” I picked up an empty bottle of Johnny Walker lying on the coffee table, surrounded with a few empty soda bottles.
“Well, after the first three pegs we lost count,” Nanna said and sat down by Nate’s feet on the sofa.
Nanna usually didn’t drink like this, maybe a peg socially and never with his own son. Looked like they were connecting on the alcohol level—a whole new kind of closeness?
“How’re you feeling?” I asked lamely.
“Hung over,” Nanna said, leaning against the backrest and closing his eyes.
Father of the Bride
When Nate was little he had lots of ear infections. They plagued him until he was almost four years old and caused him such pain that to this day he remembers the earaches with fear.
I used to sit with him when he was a baby and sometimes even cry with him. Once, when I was nine years old, I couldn’t watch Nate suffer and wished I could take some of his pain on me. I asked Nanna why we couldn’t share pain. He told me, “If we could share other people’s pain, mummies and daddies all over the world would die of pain because they would take all their children’s pain.”
Nanna always wanted to be a good father. I think it was one of the goals of his life. He probably had it written down somewhere:
Save enough for retirement at sixty years of age (two more years to go; clock is ticking, tick-tock, tick-tock).
Be a good father.
Avoid fighting with Radha.
Get Priya married before she becomes an old maid.
Die in a painless way.
Nanna was a meticulous man. When he packed something, it was done neatly and tightly. If he planned a vacation, he would plan everything, leave nothing to chance. He made notes constantly, and when I gifted him a PalmPilot for his fiftieth birthday, he had been deliriously happy. He never left home without the Palm and he always told anyone who’d listen that his daughter who was in America had given the wonderful electronic gadget to him.
He was very proud of me. Even when I was in high school and I would win silly awards for elocution or debate, he’d be on cloud nine, calling his parents in whichever country they were to tell them what a wonderful daughter he had. He would even call Thatha, who he rarely phoned, to gloat.
If I asked him for anything, his answer would always be “yes,” regardless of whether he could comply with my wishes or not. “If your Nanna doesn’t say yes, who’ll say yes?” he would say. A father’s job according to my father was to keep his children happy.
“When you were a baby,” Nanna once told me, “all I wanted to do was make you laugh. You liked pulling my moustache a lot and whenever you did I would yelp and that would make you laugh out loud.” Apparently, I pulled out several of Nanna’s moustache hairs when he and I were young.
Nanna ran a finger over his moustache, smoothing it, and looked at Nate’s lifeless body. He picked up Nate’s left hand and let it drop. It fell limply on the side of the sofa.
“The boy can’t handle his liquor,” he announced, and stumbled as he tried to stand up.
“So you both got nice and drunk. . . . Do you do this often?”