Father’s Art

I offer a correction and an elaboration here: cows are dichromatic organisms and can only see yellow and blue, so that Braunvieh never registered my brown skin. And, as it happens when you conduct these fact-checks on the internet, you feel like opening your Instagram. Before you know it, you are looking at a picture of your father. Pa has so many black moles on his face that it feels like his skin is a sheet held up by the nimble hands and toes of innumerable tiny black flies. Over the years, I learned, much too slowly, that Pa thinks he’s ugly. Not just that he’s ugly, but he also suspects he is made of what he calls “Dalit blood” (those Pa-judgements, “Dalit blood” and “Olive green”, that’s the way he saw the world; there is very little I can forgive him for). Because the internet will distract you from even this painful knowledge, you open a video titled, “How do Cows Perceive the World”. They have panoramic vision (the video said), meaning they can see everything except what’s directly behind them and what’s right in front of their nose. I wonder if Pa knew what was right in front of his nose. Did he see me? I was so tired of faking an interest in art to be close to my father. Did he see me? I dangled right in front of his nose.

Once, I had a dream that I was pulling on jeans in a trial room. They were tight and stuck to my thighs like black duct tape. I walked out of the trial room, and Pa was outside. “You look fat,” he said. From another trial room, the Girl With A Water Jug stepped out wearing the same stick-on jeans and carrying her jug of water. “You look magnificent,” Pa exclaimed.

She smiles at him like in the painting, as if somebody’s asked her to, and then she walks up to Pa and empties her jug of water on him. Pa disappears behind a rainbow-colored waterfall, but he’s calling to us, asking for help. The Girl With A Water-Less Jug turns to me and says, “Knowing your father will not help you survive. He doesn’t see you with the clarity with which he sees himself.” I woke up feeling like I’d swallowed a gray cloud, pain stuffed like condensed rain in my woolly belly. All those years Pa tried to improve my hair, nose, math, hips, and “that stupid look” on my face. But he didn’t do all that “to make me a better person.” He was just unhappy, and he let that feeling spill over me like paint over an empty canvas.

When Pa received Anand’s postcard from New York, he looked like a cold creamsicle was trailing down his spine, and I think his brain did that ahhhhh haa. He rose in the middle of breakfast and went to the frame shop.

“Growing up, Anand and I were the only ones who cared about art. He brought me paints and good, thick paper,” Pa told us.

“Maybe this year, when he visits, we can meet him as well,” Ma said pointedly. She avoided looking at the postcard and even gave it her infamous side-eye, the harbinger of its inevitable disappearance. My holey yellow pajamas went that way – one mom-side-eye and it was never to be seen again. But she wouldn’t do that with Anand’s presents because she knows Pa would give her a good kick.

A week after the postcard arrived, Pa took Ma and me to Cubbon Park, and we picnicked opposite the rose gardens, eating rolled chapatis with sugar and butter. This was not something we did because Pa hated public parks. But that day, Pa carried an umbrella and squinted off into the coppery yellow woods, miming a nobleman assessing his properties. A secret little smile played on Pa’s face as he pretended to read his open newspaper, thinking we couldn’t see him. Was this Pa happy? Was this me happy? Was this me happy because Pa happy? Was this we happy because Pa happy? Was this happy? In his head, Pa must’ve been on the Island of La Grande Jatte with Anand, and that’s when I realized what a great big secret other people’s happiness was. You only ever managed a glimpse of it, and then, of course, you forgot all about it because other people’s happiness – even your father’s, especially your father’s – was never quite as memorable as your own.

Later that day, I crept up to the closed door of Pa’s room and listened to my parents fighting.

“Do you even like me?” Ma was asking. “You don’t look at me, we don’t talk, and you think I’m a maid who cares for your daughter and keeps the house for you.”

“That’s what you deserve, you bevarsi,” said Pa. I imagined his red-veined eyes when he shouted.

“And what do you deserve?” asked Ma. “Anand is not here. He has a wife and family in another country. But you can’t stop yourself from dreaming about Anand, can you? You’re the one who’s trapped in a delusion about love, not me.”

There was a loud thud against the door, and I ran back to my room and sat at my desk, pretending to study. I heard the thuds again and again like as if he was beating her against a table, and then, I heard the door open. Ma was thrown on the floor, and the door snapped shut. I waited for Ma to come to my room, but she didn’t. She went back into the kitchen to make lunch and didn’t bring it up, not later, not ever. I sat there sweating, watching my last few illusions flee: when it came to my father, I couldn’t help my mother, and when it was my turn, she wouldn’t be able to help me either.

It was strange for Pa to bring home an idol since he loved to parade his atheist personality around the house as Ma did her rituals in the puja room. He didn’t take part in our daily prayers, he never made the weekly temple visit with Ma and yet, he brought us our Nataraja. He was perfectly cast, with a cinched, curving waist and in secret, I licked the whole iron length of him, begetting my first shivery pre-adolescent orgasm. My father, on the other hand, pointed out, “He was the Hitler of the Gods, you know that?”

One day, Pa and I were going to the market next to the temple to buy some groceries, but there was nowhere to park except in the temple car park. Pa quickly pulled into one of the free spots, and we saw a sign on the wall: No parking except for temple visitors. Pa ignored the sign even though I pointed at it. When we returned from the market with our bags of groceries, a security guard was standing by our car.

“This is only for temple visitors, not a parking spot for the market and the movies and the whatnot,” he said. “Did you visit the temple as well?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“You’ll have to pay a fine.”

“What kind of fine?”

“You’ll not be forgiven by the one up there,” said the guard, pointing to the sky.

Pa touched the top of his head as if he had felt a raindrop. “Did you feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“He’s dancing on our heads right now.”

“Get out of here and don’t park here again. It’s only for temple visitors,” the security guard shouted.

Pa laughed like a maniac and took up a Nataraja dance pose, with all our grocery bags hanging off of him and giving the illusion of four hands holding a bag of pomegranates (“after-dinner-snack”), rat poison (“for unwelcome visitors”), Lifebuoy soap (“to keep our cosmic power clean”) and some cucumbers (“to deal with our ignorance with a cool head”). I rushed into the car and closed the door, pretending not to know the Nataraja man, but I was torn between fear and laughter by my father’s little Delphic thrills.

Later in life, when I was visiting my parents for a three-day weekend but still doing meetings on Zoom calls, Pa came into my room and asked me to review his CV. He told me he had emailed it to me. I indicated wordlessly to the crowded video-on Zoom call. He looked angry about having to wait, but it was only a few minutes to the end of the call.

“I have another one in ten,” I said, opening his attachment. It was a long CV, but instead of work experiences, he had put in a list of well-connected people he knew. “They’ll want to know about you, not the who’s-who you know.”

“But isn’t it all about who you know?” he asked. “What will they ask me? I don’t know how to talk about myself.”

“You had a successful business for many years. Talk about that,” I suggested.

He grunted sarcastically, “Like I can sit there and talk about my failures. At my age? Looking for a job? Nobody will want me.” He searched my face for reassurance, but I had another call to join. Pa stood there looking up at the Swami Vivekananda portrait, proclaiming, Be Fearless!

“You don’t know what it’s taken me to get here,” Pa said. “You’ve never had to take risks the way I have. If I had your education and this booming tech industry, I would’ve done more than you could ever do.”

I indicated to my screen, and Pa got angrier. “Yes, yes, Madame Remote Worker has to get back to ‘Remote Working.’

Why don’t you try opening a business at eighteen and feed a family on those earnings? It’s not as easy as joining a fucking Zoom call.” With that, he took the Swami Vivekananda portrait off the hook, secured it under his arm, and left the room, slamming the door behind him. I thought I heard Pa cry on the other side, but I couldn’t be sure. I turned my audio and video off and sat with my head bowed over a truth: how difficult it was to be happy with my slender wisp of life when all it did was remind my father about his failures.

On Sundays, I made Pa coffee. I added a little ghee to the milk, mixed it with the thick chicory decoction, and served it in a whiskey glass. I looked at Pa’s face in greeting and saw his right eyeball schlepped to the left white corner. I pointed at it and said, “Something is wrong.”

Pa looked insulted. Touching his face, he said, “What’s wrong with you?”

His eyeball lay like a dead rat in one corner of his eye. I pointed at it again, wordless. I was scared; I didn’t want that eye looking at me. Ma came up behind me, peered into Pa’s face, and let out a little squeak. Pa got even angrier. He threw the coffee cup against the counter, the glass shattering all over the kitchen floor. He rushed to the bathroom mirror and looked at his reflection. Ma and I gathered behind him, and all three of us looked at Pa’s dead right eye.

Later, we found out that Pa had had a stroke that left everything except his right eye unscathed. It was slotted between 1 and 4 on the NIH scale, and it was so delicate that Pa had brushed his teeth and watered the plants without knowing he’d had a stroke. He didn’t speak for days after we came home from the hospital. I watched Pa wash his face and look up at the mirror hopefully, as if all it took was a little soap water to fix it. He looked like that from then on, dead-eyed, some youthful symmetry in his face destroyed.

A few weeks after the stroke, Pa had his portrait done (which he later hung in his bedroom). He asked the painter to give him a “regular” eye, and he had Ma and me do his makeup. He kept asking us if we could cover it up.

“Not even with magic,” Ma muttered under her breath so only I could hear.