Nine Letter Word

Old unforgotten objects clutter a mantlepiece that had been bought from Thailand. It's white marble top is covered with haphazardly organised Swaroski figurines and a jade ashtray my father had picked out specially from an old antique store in Turkey. The dining room walls, now slightly chipping here and there, bulbous with green seepage in the corners of the ceiling, have numerous family portraits lined on both sides. My great-grandfathers, with swords and large turbans and great grandmothers with delicate saris and ear lobes stretched to the point of tearing from wearing heavy jewelry, look out from their sepia frames. Their blank morbid expressions are silent witnesses to a family slowly bringing about its own destruction.

A hundred year old house in the small city of Satara, its crumbling walls hiding three forgotten widows of my great-grandfather’s generation, all who outlived their alcoholic spouses. Grand-aunts and uncles, still clutching their old almirahs and Persian rugs, still talking about that one time when the British Chancellor visited our home with his pet panthers. I back away from the pictures and glance nervously at my blank phone screen. I was waiting for a phone call from my father who should have arrived in Mumbai by now.

There’s an old story that Amma used to tell me and my cousin, while depositing round balls of buttered rice and aamras into our open mouths, sitting crosslegged on the floor at dinner-time. Stories were the one thing she left me before she passed away. Sinbad the Sailor, with his giant ships and sidekicks, crossing thunderous seas to a land filled with treasure chests, gold, rubies and sapphires. Twelve dancing princesses and their old worn slippers. Stories of all kinds that I absorbed, open-mouthed and pictured in all their vivid details behind shut eyelids, curled between Amma and Dadu as they snored their loud grandparent-y snores. Her favourite was Amritbai’s story of the Shiva temple, which goes as such -

A night swept with pouring rain, inky black sky, and the thin figure of your great great (and many more greats) grandmother, Amritbai, making her way to a Shiva temple near our house. Her sari transparent and drenched, loosely braided hair clinging to her wet skin and bangles tinkling loudly as she rushed up its steps, frantic and dazed. Her faith in Shiva was so strong, obsessed with her prayers and charity that she had had a calling. One that had dragged her through the rainswept streets in the middle of the night to the temple, where in a miracle of the heavens above, Shiva had appeared and blessed her and her family with prosperity and wealth for seven generations.

My cousin and I would gaze at each other, completely hypnotised by Amma’s voice as she reached this part of the story, for both of us were the doomed seventh generation.

Phrases from the story leap out of Amma’s mouth and ten years later find permanence in the coils of knotted hair and pale blue skin of Shiva that is tattooed on my father’s arm. The ugly blotch of the small pox vaccine branded on the arms of most of us born before the 2000s, and especially large and ugly on my father’s arm, was covered by the crown of Shiva’s head. “This reminds me of Amma. And it gives me strength,” my father would keep saying to himself, slurring, as he lay in a drunken haze on our living room couch, while a tattoo artist painstakingly and clumsily left a half finished portrait of the “deity of our family” on his arm.

The base of the tattoo had slightly faded and stretched now, its blue wasn’t as bright, blending into the tan of my father’s skin. I remember closely watching the outlines of the serpent coiled around Shiva, peeking out from underneath my father’s sleeves, as he emerged out of an auto in front of my apartment building in Juhu. I was already on my way for drawing classes, thirty minutes ago. I can distinctly remember the Doors’ songs blaring into my ears, cutting off the jarring traffic noises and the loud droning of the auto as it sped and interwove through cars expertly. My phone had started ringing. A song was cut off midway. It was my grandfather. I knew something was up because he rarely called.

“Hello, pranam Dadu. What’s happened?”

“Anupama, are you busy?” his tone was thick with practised diplomacy and disguised nonchalance. “No. I mean, not exactly. I’m in an auto going—”

“Turn it around immediately! Something has happened. Your father has escaped from his rehab and is coming to your apartment building.”

“What do you me—”

“There’s no time. He doesn’t have money or a cellphone, because obviously they take everything there. But he’s a bit hurt, apparently they were violent. He didn’t speak too much, he was quick, called from an autowala’s phone. He’s on his way, about to reach you. Oh and do you have any money? He doesn’t have slippers on…don’t be scared…”

Everything was blurring, why was it blurring? My face was burning, salty tears streaming down dry cheeks. There was a large drop on my phone screen, I wiped it away with a shaking finger. I remember yelling at my auto driver, telling him to turn around. We swerved and raced backwards into the traffic we had emerged from. The driver, who understood better in my shaking body language than any words

could have explained it, didn’t ask any questions. I hopped out, shoved some crumpled bills into his hand. He paused and met my eyes, as if wanting to ask if everything was alright, before speeding away, a blurred bee of black and yellow.

A frenzy of thoughts filled my mind and sent chills down my body, like someone had cracked an egg on my head and the yolk was running down, giving me goosebumps. Absently, I fiddled with the strap of Amma’s old leather watch that clung to my wrist, tracing the familiar crack on it’s dial with my finger as I waited. “It’s an expensive one. And her favourite,” my grandfather had said as he handed over a blue velvet box, containing the only other thing my Amma ever left me, before she passed away. That and her obsession with stories. My palms smelled of metal from tightly clenching the auto’s railings and were very cold, which was odd because the humidity, suspended thickly in the air, was stifling. I craned my neck towards any auto that crossed me, and finally, dressed in a smock of all black, like a widow at a funeral, the one bearing my runaway father screeched to a halt.

Like a forgotten newspaper ball that had been crumpled, the six foot tall figure of my father unfolded itself from the tiny crevice - the one behind the passenger seat, and returned the driver his phone.

“Thank you,” his voice came out hoarsely and meekly.

“Don’t mention it sir. What a journey we’ve had. You don’t know the kind of speeds I had to reach to escape those rascals, I tell you! And sir? He had to hide from them, they were chasing us for a good halfways!” The auto driver’s over-friendly voice stabbed me like a shard of ice.

“How much?”

“That’ll be 4000 rupees Ma’am. We had to take many detours along the way,” he said, patting my father on his shoulder apologetically.

I handed him the money without a word and stared at the ground as he drove away. The crusty and flaky skin at edges of my father’s sole, usually bleeding because he was in the habit of constantly peeling it off, was creased and streaked with black mud. His nails were long and caked with dirt and in places where his skin should’ve been a darker brown, it was white and powdery. Dark moon-shaped pits creased under his eyes, haggard unshaven beard hanging limply from his chin. A plain grey t-shirt with a small hole on its sleeve. Shiva tattoo peeking from underneath.

“Can we get something to eat. I haven’t eaten."

“Let’s get you some slippers first,”

“Okay"

“Dadu called me. I was just heading to class,” I watched him, shuffling on the stairs slowly. Slipper-less feet on dark speckled tiles.

“Yes, the auto guy gave me his phone. Your’s and Dadu’s numbers were the only ones I have memorised. I called him first, and then there was no balance left. Where can we eat?”

We had reached my apartment on the seventh floor. Without entering the house, I shoved our cook’s blue Bata slippers that were placed outside the door in my father’s direction. He wore them. We headed downstairs again.

“There’s a Starbucks just across the road. Will that do?” He nodded.

“How are your classes going?”

I cast him a sideways glance. We were walking on the main road, crossing large suburban houses with enormous Gulmohar tress, blooming pink and white through the dark purple sky. The pedestrian lights were just coming on, casting a low, warm glow on my father’s sickly face. I glanced at Amma’s watch - seven o’clock, peak traffic hours, the road was swollen with vehicles whizzing left and right, chaotically breaking, honking, brake lights turning off and on.

“Shouldn’t we talk about what happened first?”

I ignored the pinkie he was in the habit of sticking out for me since I was six while crossing the road. The Starbucks we approached was buzzing with activity. The hiss of frothing milk being poured into a cup, the lone call of a wrong name being bellowed over the amiable drone of small-talk chatter. Over- worked office people in loose ties and sweaty pits sneaking in a shot of caffeine before heading home for the day. College students, milling about in the free air conditioning, their faces a-glow from laptop screens, earphones jammed in to tune out unwanted noise. Someone conducting a business meeting.

Chainsmokers’ “All We Know” blaring on the speakers. No one noticed my father’s blue Bata slippers as we slipped in unnoticed, and made our way to the only available lounge chairs in the back of the cafe, secluded behind a pillar. With him seated on the chair, I ventured into the queue and ordered the quickest available thing on the menu - a chicken club sandwich and a hibsicus lemonade, both his favourites. Piling up extra packets of ketchup onto the tray, I made my way back to him. I quietly watched as je unwrapped the sandwich entirely before placing it neatly on his plate. Bursting open the straw from its paper cover, he pierced it into the plastic lid of his chilled pink lemonade. Twisting the ends of one of the Delmont ketchup satches , he tore open the packet and squeezed a good amount of thick red sauce, in a pool strategically placed away from touching any of the bread.

“Are you hurt?” I didn’t look at him, a large lump had slowly begun to form at the base of my throat. My fingers had made a hole in the padding of the lounge chair I was sitting on, fiddling and puncturing the mattress foam with my nails. I didn’t want him to answer. The blue Bata slippers were small for his feet, making his toes awkwardly stick out. I looked up with scared eyes. He had slowly begun working his way to the first bite when, in a sputtering sound, a bubble of snot formed in his nostril. He wiped it away noisily. My throat lump was no longer a lump, instead it was a boulder that had exploded. Him wiping away streaming tears and a streaming nose, me trying to hand him tissues clumsily blinded by my own angry tears. I watched him finish his chicken club sandwich, his lips puckering, chin wobbling as he ate and cried and wiped his mouth simultaneously.

“This tastes so good.”

My phone’s ringtone jarred me back into the dining room. It was my father calling to tell me he had reached Mumbai. I realised I had been staring at the crumbling walls, tracing the leaks and seepage with my eyes. I couldn’t wait for these last few days in Satara to end, so I could head back to college. “Hello, you’ve reached?” I asked. “Yes yes,” he said, then off-tracking to talk about an old man sitting next to him on the plane whose head kept lolling onto one side and finding support on his shoulder.

“I was wondering if you wanted to play a game of Boggle. For old times’ sake?” he asked.

I smiled, “Sure, let me get some paper and a pen.” I got up from the dining table and began looking around. The chairs were covered in plastic because no one used them anymore. The sky had started to turn a deep pink, the light first reflecting on the glass frames, then the Swaroski figurines on the marble mantlepiece. Dust swirling in slow motion. Amma’s watch read six o’clock. Somewhere far away, I heard Dadu asking for his evening chai.

With the phone stuck between my ear and shoulder, I shuffled around and grabbed a notebook. I began drawing a 16x16 square and dividing it into rows and columns. He was doing the same with his piece of paper.

“Okay start naming the letters now,” I said.

“Alright, so t, s, o, p, r, a…Make sure you start on the upper-right hand. Because I am writing down the letters from that side.”

I followed his instructions, and wrote down each letter in a square until we had a makeshift board of Boggle created in front of us, him with the exact same square of letters on the other side of the phone.

“Start the timer?”

“This board is really good. I think I’m going to win this time. I even made a nine letter word,” he laughed. We silently worked around our makeshift game, stringing together different letters and forming words, writing them down, until the timer rang.

He was my favourite Boggle player because he always knew how I liked to play, with just the right amount of competitiveness and playfulness, unlike my mother who got too serious, too fast. This was our tradition, all through boarding school and Canada. Our version of the game that we had learned to play over the phone. I imagined him in his deep yellow shirt and upturned pink cuffs, the one that made him look like an oversized flower, sitting on the chair opposite me. I could picture him scribbling words noisily using his favourite thick nibbed pen, brows knitted together, his gaze on the orange board of Boggle. And a pronounced aroma of a familiar cologne on his clean shaven face. Happy bright eyes, laughing at an inside joke or a ten letter word he had found that he was sure would make him win the game.