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A few weeks after my father returns from Japan, he
takes me to the Parsi-owned Paradise Café for lunch. The
Paradise, with its funky paintings of a naked Adam and Eve in the
Garden of Eden, is one of my favourite restaurants. We each order our
favourite dish—chicken steak for me; chicken lollys for him.

As we eat, dad tells me about Japan, the elegant
restaurants that he dined in, the grand reception he got from his
Japanese hosts. I listen for a while but then my mind wanders.
Suddenly, I shush him into silence. ‘Daddy, please. Just be
quiet for a moment.' He looks at me quizzically but obliges. I
close my eyes and bow my head. After a few seconds, I look up again.

‘Okay,' I say. ‘Now you can talk
again.'

‘What were you doing, Thrituma? Why did you
tell me to be quiet?'

‘I was just imagining that I was having
lunch with the Emperor of Japan.'

My dad tilts back his head and laughs, a laugh
that climbs up and down an entire octave scale. Overhearing my dad's
laughter, Jimmy, the restaurant owner, looks over from his place
behind the cash register and beams. Every time we leave Paradise
together, Jimmy always tells me how happy it makes him to see the
closeness between me and my daddy.

Now, dad takes my hand in his and kisses it. ‘God
Bless.

May all your dreams come true. May you someday
really have lunch with the Emperor of Japan and other important
people.'

I beam. I love that I can make my father laugh. I
love that he revels in my flights of fancy, love the boyishness in
him that makes him share my appetite for large dreams.

Much like a Polaroid photo, my dad has come into
focus for me since his trip to Japan. Before that, he was an elusive
figure in my life, someone who flitted in and out of my life, the
dual pressures of a demanding business and a fraying marriage
conspiring to drive him out of the house. Occasionally, he would play
‘Driver, Driver' with me, where we would each take turns
sitting behind the other on the raised threshold to his bedroom and
pretend to drive a bus. But the picnics and summer vacations and
swimming lessons that my classmates took for granted, had eluded us.

Still, he was immensely popular with my friends,
this madcap man who once drove through a park with me and two other
friends riding on the hood of his car. After one of my birthday
parties, he took all my friends downstairs to feed milk to every
stray dog in the vicinity.

But what most charmed—and bewildered—my
friends about my dad was his insistence that he was my older brother
and not my father.

‘This is my dad,' I'd begin on
those occasions when he'd drop me off at school after I missed
the school-bus.

‘No,' he would say in a loud voice,
frowning a bit. ‘I'm not her dad. I'm her older
brother.'

My classmates would stare at me and then at the
dark-haired, youthful man who had just bounded up the stairs two at a
time. ‘Uncle, please, tell the truth, no,' someone would
finally plead and then he'd give in with a grin. Drawing me
close to his side, he'd say, ‘Yes, I'm her daddy
but she's also my best friend.' I'd squirm in his
grasp, embarrassed and proud at the same time. And the other girls,
remembering their aging, grim-faced, stern fathers, would sigh.

For my seventh birthday, my father had declared
that rather than trouble my friends' parents, he would drop
each one of them off to their homes. We piled on top of each other,
eight or nine giggling girls in his old black Hillman. ‘Okay,'
he had asked. ‘Who wants to be dropped off first?' But
there were no takers. Nobody wanted to go home yet. ‘Drop her
off first, uncle,' Anita said, pointing to Roxanne.

‘No, not me first,' Roxanne squealed.
‘Pick someone else.'

Dad caught my eye in the rearview mirror and
raised his eyebrows slightly to alert me to what was coming.
Whistling tunelessly, he headed for the nearest traffic circle and
drove around it once. ‘Okay, we'll keep going round and
round the island until someone volunteers to be dropped off first,'
he said. The carload of girls giggled when he went around it a second
time. By the fourth round, they were looking at each other
uncertainly, glancing at me for direction. But I looked resolutely
ahead. By the sixth round, there was much shuffling and whispering,
broken by an occasional tentative giggle. By this time, dad was
singing, ‘It's a hap, hap, happy day,' and somehow,
this broke the ice, convinced them that they were in the company of a
madman, albeit a funny madman. ‘Okay, uncle, me first,'
someone said. ‘You can drop me off first.'

‘Done,' dad replied. ‘Now, who's
next?'

The next day at school, the classroom teacher
stopped me in the hallway. ‘Sounds like the girls had a good
time at your house. But tell me, is it true that your dad drove
around the same traffic island fourteen times before he dropped the
first girl home?'

‘Nobody wanted to be the first to be dropped
off,' I explained. ‘And anyway, he only went round a few
times.'

The teacher shook her head. ‘I see. Maybe I
should call your dad and get some tips from him about how to
discipline my class.'

Like me, my dad doesn't have a practical
bone in his body.

This trait distinguishes us from the rest of the
family. If we bring home flowers, Mehroo lectures dad on wasting
money.

‘Bring home some fruit or vegetables,
something we can use,'

she says. ‘What good are these flowers
that'll die in two days?

I can't feed the children flowers.'

The same ethic governs the gifts I receive from my
family.

For my birthday, I get polyester blouses and
gabardine pants.

I only want to wear jeans. Nobody buys me any. I
long for a pair of suede shoes but the adults tell me they will get
dirty in the Bombay dust. So I get yet another pair of black patent
leather shoes. I have such a hard time finding shoes that fit my
requirement for comfort and my family's requirement of
elegance, that every shoe salesman at Metro Shoes in Colaba hates my
guts. I am convinced of this.

Everybody knows that I devour books like chocolate
cake, that I love music with a passion. Yet, no adult ever buys me a
book or a record as a gift. Besides, it's probably just as well
that they don't buy me the kind of gifts I want. Seeing how
little they know my taste in books or music, I'll probably end
up with polyester books and gabardine records.

My father broods.

It is an old family curse, this brooding. My
grandfather was a brooder also. That's how my dad refers to
himself, as a brooder. He ruminates and worries and thinks
obsessively about the past. He remembers slights and insults and
embarrassments, collects them the way other people collect seashells.
He is what the nuns in school have labelled me—hypersensitive.
He considers himself an unlucky man, a man whose achievements have
not measured up to his talents.

He works harder than anyone I know and yet the
family business is like the old B.E.S.T buses that ply the streets of
Bombay—spluttering, working in fits and starts, running well on
some days and breaking down on others.

We are alike, my dad and I. I have known this
since his return from Japan because after the incident with the
teaset, we have been spending a lot of time together. We have taken
to going to the seaside at least once a week. Sometimes mummy
accompanies us and those times are different than when it is just dad
and me. Mummy complains continually about dad's driving, asks
him to slow down and nags at him until I feel myself stretched as
tight and taut as a guitar string.

I may look like a younger version of my mother but
under the skin I resemble my father. We are alike in all the
important ways. I see his face on gloomy, rain-heavy days, see how
the wind and the rain makes him melancholy-happy, how it propels him,
this kind of subdued weather, and I see my own soul reflected in him.
I, too, love weather like this when the skies are grey and heavy with
rain. Like him, I love the sea more when it is rough and in turmoil,
than when it is calm and orderly. I, too, understand well that
complicated melancholy feeling, because that's when I write my
poems and my stories.

It's a feeling I dread and welcome, at the
same time. Bad weather frees something within me, makes me feel large
and grand and as big as the world itself, ready to take on the
roaring ocean with a roar of my own. I despise the ordinary,
cloudless, sunny Bombay sky because it makes me feel small and
ordinary and just—me. It doesn't take me outside of
myself, doesn't make me feel powerful and capable of anything,
the way a tumultuous day does.

We never discuss any of this, my dad and I. In
fact, I'm not even sure that he knows how I feel, only that I
‘like' rainy days, also. But I sense all this in him and
it makes me feel close to him. I already have a well-honed radar for
spotting loneliness in others, or so I fancy. I figure I can
recognize them anywhere, that something about the way their faces
search the skies or that hollow look in their eyes, tells me who my
people are.

My father happens to be one of my people, even if
our mode of expressing ourselves is different. My father is dually
cursed—although he feels the same lonely-crazy feelings that I
do, he is not a writer. So the outlet that lets me express myself on
paper, that keeps me from going insane, is unavailable to him.
Instead of writing, my dad hums. On wet twilit evenings when the city
streets are bathed in gold and orange light, when the Bombay sky
bleeds red and purple blood, my father hums.

We are driving down Marine Drive, on our way to
Nariman Point, and my father is humming a mournful, sad song. Next,
he starts singing although he inevitably does not know more than six
lines to any song. His voice is slightly nasal and rich and deep. It
is a beautiful voice although he is totally unaware of the fact for
the simple reason that no one has ever told him so. Because my father
mainly sings in the car, as if he needs movement in order to free his
voice. He never asks me to join him in the singing and even if he
had, I wouldn't. I have a terrible voice and am deeply ashamed
of the fact. Also, I am too shy to sing out loud. This is one of the
things that amazes me about him—how easily and
unselfconsciously he sings, as if it is merely an extension of
speech. I am used to school outings and birthday parties where the
girls who are good singers have to be coaxed and cajoled into
singing. Even then, there is much squirming and giggling and general
embarrassment.

When I was younger, my dad used to sing the
lullaby to me on nights when I'd lie awake soaked in sweat,
running a high fever. Invariably, he would run his hands through my
hair when he sang and the rhythmic stroking and the timbre of his
voice would create a nest in which I could sleep. Now, I beg him to
sing that song and he readily obliges. As always when he sings this
song, he pulls me closer to him, so that one of his hands rests on
the steering wheel while the other cradles me in the crook of his
arm. His voice gets more nasal and plaintive and he stretches out
each note to give it even more of its sad power. I feel the
inevitable goosebumps on my arm. If he notices, he doesn't say.

Luckily, this lullaby does not affect me as
strangely as the other songs do. From the time I was an infant, I
have reacted violently to certain songs and sounds. There was an old
woman who used to wander through our neighbourhood each morning with
her emaciated cow and a bag of hay. Passers-by and folks from the
nearby apartment buildings gave her coins for feeding the cow. That
was how she earned a meagre living. But it was not the appearance of
the rail-thin woman or her bony animal that aroused my pity. As an
infant, I saw neither. Rather, it was the long, lingering, trembling
wail with which she asked folks to feed her cow, that upset me
dreadfully. Every morning she passed from under our balcony, her thin
voice floating two storeys upward. Every morning, I lay in my crib
and burst into tears when I heard that voice. This continued for
months until Mehroo hit upon an idea. She approached the cow-owner
and promised her a fixed monthly sum of money in exchange for her not
wailing under our window.

The cow-woman's wail is just the first of a
series of sounds that fill me with dread and sadness. Certain songs
that everyone else thinks are happy and cheerful elicit the same
response in me because of a certain minor key. My response to them is
so strong that listening to those songs becomes unbearable.

‘Turn off the radio,' I beg my cousin
Roshan but she just looks at me strangely. ‘It's a hit
song,' she says. ‘It's my favourite.

Leave the radio alone.'

Sometimes, I leave the room in tears. Other times,
I grit my teeth and try and get through the song. Occasionally, I try
to explain my feelings to Roshan or one of my mother's
students, who are listening to the radio during lunch. ‘It
makes me feel all bad, this song,' I say. Almost all of them
are older than me and already, they have that uncomprehending look
that adults get on their faces when you're trying to tell them
something really important. ‘If you don't like the song,
just leave the room,' one of them says. Mostly, they just
laugh. ‘Mad, che mad,' I once overhear one of them say to
the other. And they turn the volume up.