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And suddenly, I hear myself and my self-absorption
dissolves and then I feel a pain so sharp, so piercing, it takes my
breath away. Mehroo had suffered this magnificent wound and I had
known nothing about it. I am living in the same home as a woman who
has been felled twice by the death of love and yet she is the one
tending to me, nurturing me. I am twelve and old enough to know what
the end of love feels like, how it rises before you like a brick
wall, cutting off all visions of the future.

When we get home, I want to ask Mehroo questions
about Rumi, want to tell her how sorry I am, want to at least tell
her I know about Rumi. And that I understand. But I remain silent.

I'm not sure why. There are no explanations
for my silence.

Except for maybe this self-serving explanation:
For whatever reason, I had learned at a very young age to protect a
certain deep part of myself, to not reveal even to those who loved
me, a certain core, a certain nerve that was too raw and too
vulnerable. The deeper and more intensely I felt things, the more
guarded I became. The more silent and introspective I grew from the
inside, the more smart-alecky and verbal I felt compelled to be.
There was a white space inside me that I was too scared to share with
anybody. The irony was that my wretched hypersensitivity, my thin
skin, my terrifying capacity to be easily hurt, I knew I had
inherited from Mehroo. I knew in the instinctive way that children
know things that Mehroo's eyes hid a raw sadness that echoed
mine.

And so, I go up to her that night while she sleeps
on her single bed and kiss her forehead. She opens her liquidy, brown
eyes. ‘What is it, Thrituma?' she asks.

I shake my head, trying to keep the lump in my
throat at bay. ‘Nothing.' But that doesn't feel
enough. So I pay her the highest compliment I know. ‘Your eyes
remind me of an old horse. Kindest eyes I know.'

She smiles.

The second revelation comes the next day when dad
and I take Ronnie, my golden cocker spaniel, to the vet. We pull into
the large, spacious grounds of the animal hospital and despite my
worry about Ronnie, I find myself breathing easier in this tranquil,
beautiful place. But Vishnu, the assistant, informs us that our
regular vet is away for a month and another vet is taking his place.
We are a little annoyed by this but take our place on the hard wooden
bench and await our turn.

The door opens and the new vet introduces herself.
My jaw drops. It is the Ovaltine lady come to life. The vet's
dark hair is tied in a bun and her cheeks are not dimpled but her
gentleness, her soft, low voice, her graceful hands as she scratches
Ronnie's head, tell me it's the Ovaltine lady just the
same. She wears a light pink chiffon sari with silver earrings and
she smiles at me tenderly, pats my head and tells me not to worry so
much, my dog will be all right. I am enthralled. I want to tell her
that she is my real, long-lost mother, I want to tell her that I am
adopted and had been raised by wolves and had been awaiting her
arrival all my life. But then I suddenly remember Mehroo and her
devotion to me and the sad story I had heard yesterday, and I am
confused. It occurs to me that I already have too many mothers and
that one more, no matter how pretty and graceful and loving, will
only complicate matters. I think of all the mothers I have and I know
I should feel grateful and sated but I can't shake this broken,
empty, bereft feeling I have inside me.

There is something else that's confusing me
and that's the way the Ovaltine lady is talking to my dad.
There is a searching, speculative look in her eyes that I recognize
but do not yet understand. They are talking softly and she is patting
my dog all the time that she is chatting with my dad. I hear him say,
‘Not his usual appetite,' and ‘Did potty inside the
house,'

but I am barely listening to him. Because what
grabs my attention, what transfixes me, is the look on my dad's
face. He looks smitten and lonely and wistful and it takes me a
minute to recognize his expression as mirroring my own. It takes me a
full minute to realize that my dad and I are hungry for the same
things—kindness and love and beauty and grace—and that
neither of us has found these things in my mother. It makes my eyes
sting with tears, this realization, so that I turn away and mumble
something about going outside to play with the other animals.

I don't know how much time goes by but then
dad is outside with Ronnie straining at the leash as usual. The
Ovaltine lady is by his side and when she sees me, she smiles. Half
crouching toward me so that our eyes are level, she tells me that
Ronnie will be fine and not to worry at all. My dad smiles in
gratitude and extends his hand toward her. ‘Thank you,'
he says softly.

‘No problem,' she replies. ‘It
was nice to meet both of you.'

Dad puts his hand around my shoulder as we walk
toward the car. As we pull away, the Ovaltine lady is walking back
toward the clinic. Her pink sari glistens like a halo in the
mid-morning sun.

We are both quiet on the way home, lost in our own
thoughts. Then, I hear my dad sigh, a long, heavy sigh and I feel
compelled to say, ‘She was nice, wasn't she? Actually, I
liked her a lot better than our usual vet.'

‘Yes,' he says, ‘she was very
nice.' Then, as if he cannot keep the words to himself any
longer, he adds, ‘This is how I'd always dreamed it would
be—that the woman I would marry would be like that, soft-spoken
and caring.' I wait for him to say more but he falls silent.

I want to tell my father that I understand
him—understand both, the dream and the betrayal of that dream.
I want to tell him about my Ovaltine lady fantasy and how, today, for
the first time, I saw the fantasy made flesh. I want to tell him that
we want the same things, him and I, and that I understand how the not
having it has left a hollow, numb spot in each of us. I want to tell
him what mummy does and says to me when he is not around, how scared
and alone I feel, I want him to turn around and drive back to the
animal hospital and ask the Ovaltine lady to run away with us and I
want the three of us to drive somewhere, drive far far away, away
from the edge of our lives and into a freefall of dreams and
possibilities.

I say nothing.

I watch Ronnie, his head hanging from the window,
his golden ears flapping in the breeze and I remain silent. I swallow
the lump that forms in my throat, I look out the window and blink my
eyes until the tears disappear.

But from this day on, I will carry another's
grief and longing along with my own, so that my sorrows will no
longer be just my own. I will be connected to my father in ways
deeper than the accidental geography of birth and blood. From now on,
I will see my dad as a fellow traveller, a comrade scarred and
betrayed by the same unattainable ideal. My father, I will realize,
had his own Ovaltine woman.

For years we will talk about that day at the
vet's, talk about it casually at times, wistfully at others. It
will become our own private shorthand for what is missing in our
lives, for the incomplete parts of us.

And it will mark us, this unfulfilled desire, so
that we will recognize each other in the dark, so that we will be
more than father and daughter. We will be confidants; I will console
him, bear his cross, spend decades seeking permission from the
universe to be happy in my own life, in the face of the knowledge of
his grief.

And we will both forever be seeking our way out of
the greyness of drab reality—he out of the cobwebs of a ruined
marriage, I out of the entrapment of the mythologies of
motherhood—and we will spend our lives looking for our way back
to the shining celluloid fantasy of the Ovaltine lady.

M
AD PARSI.

The nickname is given to me by a fourth-grade
teacher and it sticks, follows me like a shadow through school.

It is a formidable reputation to live up to.
Fuelled by the caricatures of Parsis in Hindi movies, the Mad Parsi
tries her best to live up to her billing. No stunt is too outrageous,
no feat is too daring. Suddenly, she is the custodian of the
reputation of an entire group of people whose eccentricities are
already the stuff of legend. It is up to her to carry on this proud
tradition.

Her reputation is sealed in sixth grade when she
comes to school on a Monday and tells her friends she has discovered
a new hobby—smashing windowpanes with her bare fists.

(Let the record show that she has done this only
once, and that too, on a pane that was already cracked, thereby
escaping any injury. These details, needless to say, are left out of
the retelling of the story.)

But by sixth grade, there is another contender for
the title of Mad Parsi. Anita Khalsa is a tall, gangly girl with a
wide, infectious grin straight out of a Billy Bunter novel. Her
mother is a mild-mannered, stately woman whose characteristic
response to her daughter is a bemused shaking of the head, as if she
still can't believe she has given birth to this funny,
giraffe-like girl.

For a while, Anita and I run neck to neck but on
the Day of the Blue Tongue, she inches past me and she is now the
mad-dest of the mad Parsis. What happens is this: in biology class we
learn that writing ink is made from fish oil.

The next day, Anita arrives at school with a brand
new bottle of Parker's blue ink. Since we are allowed to use
only fountain pens in school, we carry at all times, a fountain pen,
a bottle of ink, and sheets of pink blotting paper. And so, Anita's
bringing a bottle of ink to school arouses no suspicion. At my
school, the nuns looked at ballpoints with the same suspicion and
contempt they reserved for condoms. ‘Disgusting contraptions,'
Sister Hillary would say if one of us was caught with a pagan
ballpoint pen. ‘Ruins people's handwriting. Girls from
good families use fountain pens.'

Shortly before lunchbreak, Anita makes a dramatic
announcement. After lunch, she will drink the ink.

We hurry through the hot lunches that are
delivered to us by the tiffin-carriers. The carriers are thin but
muscular men who every morning pick up hundreds of hot lunches packed
in three-piece metal containers from individual homes and then
deliver them to schools and offices all across the city. My
particular tiffin-carrier appears at school balancing a long wooden
box the size of a small boat, on his head. I often fantasize about
skipping school and following him as he navigates his way into a
crowded train with this wooden plank on his head.

After lunch, we make our way back to our classroom
on the second-floor as discreetly as we can. If the teachers get wind
of Anita's scheduled performance, they will stop it. This is
the first year that we have a classroom with a door and we make the
most of the privacy this affords us. A month ago, there was the
infamous shoe fight, where for some mysterious reason none of us
could later remember, we removed our shoes and threw them at each
other. Outside, it had been raining hard, turning the grounds into a
soggy, mucky, mud field. At one point, as the fight grew more
boisterous, somebody's shoe went sailing out the open window
and landed in the mud two storeys below. We

cheered the shoe's landing until Zenobia, a
fair-skinned, placid girl with a sweet nature, offered to go rescue
it. We watched from the window and clapped as she retrieved the
mud-covered shoe, holding it up triumphantly for us to see. But just
as she was about to return to class, somebody had a brilliant idea.
As long as Zenobia was down there, we may as well throw more shoes
into the mud. And so we did.

When Mrs Pereira walked into class that afternoon,
she was greeted by forty giggling girls sitting at their desks with
wet, mud-caked shoes. But we had Mrs Pereira well-trained and she
never engaged in conversation with us if it could be avoided. Who
knew what could happen? A question about wet shoes could produce an
answer about a tunnel to China, if she wasn't careful. So she
ignored the puddles of mud on the floor, flipped opened her book and
began to read to the class.

Indeed, we had turned Mrs Pereira into a master of
avoidance, an accomplishment that we were proud of. Day by day, week
after week, we had systematically broken Mrs Pereira's spirit
so that she now jumped each time one of us spoke and winced when one
of us raised our hands.

‘Miss, miss, miss,' Roxanne would say,
waving her raised hand frantically.

Mrs Pereira would look up from her copy of
David
Copperfield
warily. ‘What is it, Roxanne?'

‘Please miss, something you just said that I
don't understand.

Please miss, what is a rubber band? Can you
explain?'

‘A band of rubber. Now be quiet.'

The rest of us were delighted at this interruption
and Mrs Pereira's obvious irritation. ‘That was
brilliant, yaar,' someone whispered to Roxanne.

Two minutes went by. Henrietta raised her hand.
‘Excuse me, miss. Miss?'

Mrs Pereira looked distressed. ‘Yes?'

‘I just wanted to know, miss. Can I eat this
apple in class?'

The rest of us gasped. Eating in class was taboo,
a sin along the lines of writing with a ballpoint.

But Mrs Pereira was flustered. ‘No. Yes. I
mean, do what you want. Just be quiet, all of you. No more questions,
now.'

‘Yes, Mrs Pereira. Thank you Mrs Pereira,'
the entire class said, in that sing-song way that we knew drove her
crazy.

Henrietta took a loud, crunchy bite from her apple
and then passed it on to the girl sitting next to her. We passed the
apple around as if it were a joint, timing our bites to when Mrs
Pereira started a new sentence.