In October 2015, a few months before I turned eighteen, my sister and I snooped through our father’s wallet and found lottery tickets. I didn’t look at them for long. The only thing I remember is that they were yellow. For the most part, it was my sister who examined them, snapped a photo of them, and put them back into his wallet.
My father used to be a gambling addict. I must note here that “addiction” is my assessment of him. I suspect it’s not a word he might use for himself. But for years at a stretch, after office hours, he entered dingy gambling bars, downed a couple of pegs, and hurled all of his money on lottery tickets. Like most people who compulsively bought them, he hoped to win, but never did.
I didn’t have much of a reaction to the lottery tickets we found. I went along with my sister as she chiselled away at his wallet, his pant pockets, and then his phone. She seemed determined to end his gambling rut. I, on the contrary, had a quickly growing exhaustion in me.
These were the last couple of years of dad’s spirals, before he would finally quit. The nights in our cramped ground-floor Bombay flat would follow one of two templates. On the days he showed up for dinner on time, we would be a regular family that ate and slept at a decent hour. The rest of the days, food would grow cold on the table. He’d show up at midnight or later, bringing with him a staggering amount of guilt and grief. Amma would pointedly ask questions, my sister would yell. I rarely participated in the interrogation or the yelling. I was an observer, functioning from a strange state of languish, sitting through fights and confrontations like a large empty vessel filling up — simmering, but silent. My therapist and I now call it being a “container.”
*
Moments from that year are difficult to summon, still stuck on the fringes of memory. My sister was back home after almost six years. I was twelve when she moved cities for a job and had morphed into a disinterested 17-year-old when she returned.
I didn't do a whole lot of studying back then. I spent hours by the sea armed with cups of chai and a large appetite for gazing into nothing — sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend. Everyone I knew planned on staying in Bombay for the rest of their lives. It is a city that offers most things that people want: jobs, money, status, and a contagious mix of escapism and hustle.
I remember waking up to grey-coloured skies in July, waddling through the puddles with an umbrella hanging around my wrist, and marvelling at the huge string of women in their night suits who had lined up early morning at the milk booth. I remember eating donuts at Juhu, riding back home on the train with my face buried in a book, and empty juice tetra packs collecting in my bag. I know I stuffed an umbrella in my bag long after it stopped being monsoon.
In retrospect, I could easily be the nameless protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, “The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider in all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what — some freak accident? It seemed implausible.”
*
The worst of dad’s episodic stints happened when I was about 11 or 12, still getting used to my sister not being around. Those days, I spent many nights glaring at the clock, and repeating the five times table in my head. For a while, I’d tell myself that he probably had to work late. Eventually, I would pick up amma’s phone and call the last-dialled number. When he answered in his slurred speech, he would say he was almost home – just five minutes — that’s what he always promised.
One night after he told me he’d be there in five minutes, I tore open a new set of pastel colours and pressed them robotically onto my sketchbook. He hadn’t arrived home in time for three days in a row. At midnight, when the doorbell finally rang, I was on my fifth page of colouring — trying to draw a sunset, even though I had never really observed one consciously or well enough. The yellow and blue pastels looked blunt and ugly. I continued scrubbing the yellow pastel as he walked in and burped rather loudly. Back then, I didn’t know what alcohol was, but I knew that on some days my father smelt different, burped a little more than usual, and amma insisted that he eat something before sleeping a lot more than she normally did.
I couldn’t focus on my colouring after he arrived. The house was suddenly filled with noise — he moved from this room to that, placing his wallet on the side table, unbuttoning his shirt, eyeing himself in the mirror every now and then. Perhaps it is tough to encounter a grown man in the mirror when you are still prey to the child in you. When he came and sat at the dining table, he uttered a loud helloohowareeyou and made some small talk while mixing the curd rice and mango pickle with his hands. He said he ran into some old acquaintance – “arey woh aadmi” – who made him have one drink, then another one, and another one. He made a few jokes that I didn’t really pay attention to.
It wasn't out of character for him — a man born with the urgent urge to own and charm every room he entered. An emotional ambition and skill that he passed down as a treasured inheritance because over time he had emptied out all the credit cards and exchanged most of amma’s gold jewellery for the wretched lottery tickets. There wasn’t much else he possessed to pass on to us.
*
Amma and him never really spoke a lot during those nights. She would ask a few obvious questions about his whereabouts, but he never attempted specific answers. He did not wish to bore us with what we already knew. He would light his cigarette and lean on the bedroom window. She would go back to work. They could fight, but they rarely would. She could ask him why he wouldn’t stop gambling. He could yell back and tell her he was an addict, struggling to be in control of his actions. But all they would do is comply with a troublesome silence, while I sat on a small chair, cross legged, in the huge space between both of them.
That particular night though, I got up after a while and pinned my sunset drawing on the soft board in my room. Then I looked at it. I could tell that the colours were all wrong, there was too much blue, and hardly any orange or pink.
*
I think if I’m tasked with drawing a sunset today, I’d do a much better job because from 4 to 6pm, every day, my one-bedroom apartment in Bangalore gets flooded with sunlight. A year ago, when my father visited me in this same apartment, he poured two cups of chai for us. I looked at him closely as my cat jumped on to his lap and began purring.
At this point, I feel like saying that my father is actually a very kind person. In the week that he spent in my apartment, he made me tea twice a day. He cleaned all my dishes. He bought me new kitchen towels, an idli-maker, new cups, pots, pans, and a month-long stock of dishwashing soap. Back home, he spends most of his days tending to and watering his garden — growing chillies, brinjals, tomatoes, and occasionally, radishes.
I’m prone to say more about him than myself; to focus on his story instead of mine. To some measure this is because it’s tedious to assemble all the pieces of mine from memory. But mostly, I’m just plagued by the prospect of taking up any kind of space, especially in the story of my home. All through those years of silence and simmering in Bombay, what I learnt was the terrible art of stifling. Now every time I revisit the past, I encounter a protagonist diligently writing herself out of the story.
My father’s visit left me both delighted and unsteady. One night we walked on the road across my house because he wanted a cigarette. It was a cold, silent night. Our walk lost its purpose quickly — soon, we forgot about the cigarettes and were simply wandering. I have little memory of the shops and roads we passed by. I entered and settled in this city with ease. On any of the roads we walked on, I could have run into friends who would invite us for dinner, or join our walk. But it was just the two of us. Even the stray dogs, who usually persistently followed me, seemed to have fallen asleep.
I eyed my father as he tugged at his sweater. I could imagine us finding a sutta shop, and making small chit-chat while he smoked. Maybe, I thought, I would tell him how I had forgiven him. Or I could tell him that he hadn’t wasted his life. He would possibly nod, with a pensive look on his face — unable to entirely believe me — but also, I hope, glad to hear me say these things.
These are not unsaid things, versions of them have been spoken, and articulated many times. But that night, the city — in all its lingering unfamiliarity — opened up to me. I don’t have much to say about Bangalore, except that it has made me finally feel that I too can belong to Bombay. It feels like a blank, inviting canvas on which I can finish painting the sunset. With each brush stroke, I escape the weight of memory.
*
We didn’t find an open cigarette shop on that walk. I can’t claim to know exactly why my father quit his addiction, but I gave it quite a lot of thought that night. It might have been the crushing debt, or a particularly wretched fight at home, or sight of his ageing face in the mirror. It could have been all of these things. Or it could have been none of these things. There are pieces of this puzzle that will always remain unsolved.
*
I went up to the roof a few days after dad left Bangalore, and saw flocks of white birds with yellow beaks were flying towards a medium sized banyan tree. They were Egrets, I googled. The tree suddenly felt alive, with a couple dozen white birds resting on it. As the sun went down, the birds too moved to the lower branches and went inside the tree.
I thought of my father. I thought of my life as forever oscillating between two cities — in the comfortable, rich space between grief and memory.
As that strange evening collapsed, the sky had dashes of pink — it looked nothing like my old drawing.