Sunday Morning Jaunts with My Father

     Too many years, more decades that I care to count, have passed by since our father moved on to a different plane, but the memories are still sweet and fresh - of his easy and comfortable presence, the person he was, his actions and words, his life in flow, in constant motion and closely connected to the world around him. He was friendly, funny with a witty tongue but always kind, generous, helpful and, at his heart, one of the gentlest and most "real" people I have ever known, even after all this time .
     When I look back, I find that some of my most vivid memories of my father have settled around early Sunday mornings during my childhood. These were often times when, if we weren’t going on an already-planned visit to the zoo or the aquarium or the beach, or to visit our cousins in the suburbs, my father would ask if I would like to accompany him on an occasional errand or a spontaneous outing somewhere for some reason or the other. My sisters were little more than babies or toddlers during this period and usually stayed home with my mother and grandparents. So often it was just the two of us and our trips involved going to fetch something from one of the shops down our road and around the corner or going on a drive somewhere to pick up or drop off something.
     Almost invariably, there were unforeseen treats involved. An occasional bar of chocolate or nutties, a comic-book from a newstand, stopping by the park with the swings or the beach for a quick wade into the waves, hot roasted peanuts packed inside a twirled paper cone made from a recycled sheet of paper with someone’s neat calligraphy repeating a sentence line after line that I would turn around and around to try to read. Sometimes, I would make an impromptu friendship, some child who happened to be there in that place at the time, and we would launch into some shared and familiar childhood routine or game even though we had never met before, exchange stories from our school experiences or, when I was a little older, play “Name, Place, Animal, Thing” if we had more time. Sometimes, there would be a kitten or a puppy to play with and I would fantasize about having my own someday.
      Sometimes we would drive to Phillips Coffee and Tea, a compact but well-stocked shop where my father would sniff and select from different brands of roasted coffee-beans and the proprietor would efficiently measure and pour the beans into the automatic grinder to grind them down into deep-brown mounds of fragrant fine powder that he would then collect in small paper-bags, seal expertly and hand to us. As my father drove us home, I would hug the still-warm freshly-ground coffee bags to my body and smell them to my heart’s content. To this day, I love the smell of freshly ground coffee and when I shut my eyes, I am taken back to those years again.
     Once my sister #1 accompanied my yfather and me on a Sunday morning visit to the home of an aging film actress who lived in our vicinity. As I recall, the reason for the visit was to request her presence at some charity event that my father was involved in organizing. I was excited about meeting the famous lady but also a little nervous because she almost always played mean and nasty characters in the form of a mother-in-law, a gang-leader or some other criminal element. The set of her eyebrows and eyes gave her that bad-tempered evil or mean look, and even though I knew that it was just play-acting, some of the characters I had watched her play on the screen had rattled me and been the stuff of minor nightmares.
     We entered a palatial home and waited in a large domed lounge. My sister was about two then, just old enough to ask for - and then demand, single-mindedly - water to drink just as our hostess appeared. I felt embarrassed and tried in vain to dissuade my sister but she insisted, beginning to cry. Soon, someone brought water in a thin fragile glass tumbler that my sister grabbed with both hands and brought to her mouth. The next moment, she had bitten off a mouthful of thin glass and as everyone realized what had happened, there was chaos. I watched dumbfounded as between them, my father and the actress cajoled and finally convinced my sister to let them take the glass out of her mouth. I don’t remember if my sister had her drink of water eventually there or what came of that visit as far as the charity event was concerned, but she was not hurt in any way, we got back home and that story was told, much to my mother's chagrin and my grandparents' concern.
     Another Sunday morning, when I was about nine, my father and I drove halfway around the city to wait for a certain toy store to open so that we could buy a jointed padded doll to match the one that sister # 1 had received the previous night as a birthday present from my parents and that my sister # 2 badly wanted as her own. After the birthday party on Saturday, when all the presents had been unpacked and the guests had departed, the dramatic tussle over the doll had begun. My sisters, a year and a half apart in age, both instantly claimed the doll, each as her exclusive possession, a boy-doll with pleasant painted-on features and light brown painted on hair, wearing long satin pajamas and a shirt. My grandmother thought that they were just tired after the excitement of that day and that the doll was just an excuse for them to get upset and worked up over. Nothing would distract them, however.
     There was a good deal of bawling and even a wild tug-of-war until my mother took away the doll and placed it on top of her teak almirah. It was about 8 pm when my father suggested driving to this toy store that he had bought the doll from on his way back home from work to see if they had another one. He asked if I wanted to go with him and the two of us set out. Being the monsoon season, it had begun to rain. We drove through incessant downpour and reached the shop just before 9 to find that it had already closed. So we went back the next morning during a respite. My sisters had cried themselves to sleep the previous night and everyone was a little bleary-eyed. The toy store did have another doll fortunately, the pajamas were of a different color but when we got back home and both dolls were taken out, each of my sisters took one and looked very satisfied. The pajama color difference did not bother them obviously. In fact, they were both quite happy, cooed to each other, and even took turns playing with each doll. The dolls came to be called “Simon” and “Samuel” for some reason that I do not recall and accompanied us into the next phases of our collective lives.
     As the years went by, there were other Sunday morning jaunts, and other places. Idlis, coconut chutney and piping hot sambhar early in the day on the lawns of Ashoka Hotel in Madras (Chennai), impromptu trips to Khan Market (New Delhi), crackling large stuffed alu-matar parathas from a dhaba just outside Delhi on a cold bracing winter morning on the road to Gwalior. Invariably, several times every winter, my father would bring home paper-bags filled with walnuts, pistachio-nuts, badam (almonds) and gajak made of til (sesame) or peanuts, driven by tastes acquired during his own north Indian childhood spent in Delhi and Shimla. Sometimes he would take us all on picnics in one of the many parks around Delhi. One morning, he drove us to the old Safdarjung airport just so that we could watch flights take off and land. Another Sunday, some years previously, in the southern coastal city that had been home to us for a couple of years, we found ourselves visiting someone at their poultry farm where the three of us chased and got chased by several white hens.
     So it is that Sunday mornings in general have come to hold this somewhat special feel for me and I find myself doing something unusual to make them memorable in my own way, almost every week. And the memories keep coming back anyway.

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My Indian Childhood

(c) 2017

PRB