Missed Translations Read online

  Seven

  “Do you wish you were closer?”

  Shyamal’s apartment had a small sunroom off the living room filled with an array of potted plants, with other greenery peering in through floor-to-ceiling windows, not unlike the porch at Bishakha’s. Shyamal’s had a livelier view, though. There was the constant stream of tuk-tuks, cyclists, and foot traffic, but the pitter-patter of the rain against the windows made it sound almost peaceful.

  I spent some time immersed in the view from the second story before sitting down at the kitchen table. The white woven tablecloth was carefully covered with a protective layer of plastic, and there were plastic floral placemats on top of that. Freshly washed water glasses had been placed in front of each seat, upside down, waiting for our next meal. Wesley sat at the far end of the table, Shyamal at the other. I was in the middle. The room’s primary light fixture flickered on and off, plunging the flat into and out of the dark, a harbinger of the conversation about to occur.

  I placed a voice recorder between my father and me. Beep. A red light flicked on as I pressed the circular button in the center.

  Shyamal hunched over the table with his hands placed apart, palms down. I sat up straight, put my elbows on the surface, and interlocked my hands in front of my face. We were both wearing dark blue T-shirts.

  It was our second full day in Kolkata, but it felt like we had been there much longer. Over the next two days, interrupted only by visits to his brothers, I probed my father and asked him everything I didn’t know about him. I began the conversation impassively and inquisitive, with my journalistic instincts fully engaged, which may be odd for a child asking a parent questions.

  This trip had so far resulted in our first ever shared beer. Our first time touring a city together. Our first car ride in more than a decade. That was the fun stuff.

  This would, however, be a new type of first. Our kitchen table talks were frank and, at times, hurtful. I had come this far. I had to find out who he really was. And maybe—just maybe—it would shed light into who I am.

  After I hit the RECORD button, I remarked to Shyamal, “This is for the book I’m writing.”

  “You’re writing a book on India?” Shyamal asked. I told him no. Keep in mind, here, my answer to him was a source of much amusement and frustration. I had told Shyamal several times before the trip that I was doing a book about our family. I told him again during the interview. And immediately afterward. And when we got back to the United States. And in the following month. And each time, he’d remark, “You’re writing a book on India?” I’d have to correct him each time. I wasn’t writing some grand anthropological treatise on a modernizing, diverse democracy. I was writing about us.

  I started with the basics: “When were you born?”

  Yes, it was simple, but beyond an approximate guess, I didn’t know his age. My father leaned over the table to put his mouth closer to the recorder.

  “My actual year of birth is July 1943,” Shyamal said, but he didn’t know what day.

  “You don’t know your birthday?” I asked.

  “I know my official birthday, which is January 31, 1945,” Shyamal said.

  I thought he might have been messing with me. It’s what I would have done with a ridiculous question if I were him. But I played along: Why did he have two different birth dates?

  “Those days, things were different because parents were supposed to keep the age a little lower so they would have more time to look for a job,” Shyamal said. “Yes, it is customary to do a year or year and a half. Why? Because for every job or admission to schools and colleges, there is an age limit. So to put the child in an advantageous situation, they reduced the age. And there were no birth certificates at the time.”

  So officially on his documentation, my father was seventy-three years old. But in reality, he was about to turn seventy-five. And it was common, according to Shyamal, for parents to deflate their children’s ages for their advancement. It makes sense if you think about it: You’d rather be known as a wunderkind than normal in comparison to your peers.

  My father traced the birth year of his father, Sachindra Kumar Deb, to about 1889 or 1890, in Sylhet, a prosperous district known for its tea gardens. It was in a region that would come to be known as Bangladesh, and this is where Shyamal grew up. He moved to Kolkata as a young adult.

  If I may, here is a brief and possibly confusing history lesson: In 1947, the British ended their colonial rule over India and implemented the Partition, creating the territories of India and Pakistan. Pakistan, although constitutionally one nation-state, was geographically separated into West Pakistan and East Pakistan. The provinces of Bengal and Assam were reconstituted as three new provinces: West Bengal and Assam (without Sylhet) in India, and East Bengal, which, in 1956, changed its official name to East Pakistan. The district of Sylhet was singled out, and its fate was to be decided by a referendum. The referendum resulted in most of Sylhet becoming part of East Pakistan. So Shyamal, having been born before the Partition, was technically born in British India, in the province of Assam, and he’d grown up in East Pakistan.

  In 1971, East Pakistan splintered and became Bangladesh, after a civil war had broken out between both provinces of Pakistan. So when my father moved to Kolkata in 1959 to attend engineering school, Bangladesh hadn’t yet been created. After Bangladesh was established, the Deb family members began migrating to India, except for my grandparents and a few uncles, who remained behind.

  Education was of paramount importance to my grandfather. It was difficult to attain a satisfactory education when he was growing up—“a rare situation,” as Shyamal put it. My father said Sachindra still managed to get his law degree and went on to become a successful defense attorney. He was well known in the district, and he pushed for all of his children to become educated as well. Shyamal himself had two private tutors all the way through college.

  “Were you close with him?” I asked Shyamal.

  “No,” he answered bluntly. “I’m being honest with you. No.”

  During the conversation, whenever Shyamal tried to recall a memory, he would push down with his hands and tilt his head upward and his mouth into a slight frown, as if he was searching the clouds for an answer. Other times, he’d clench his fists, like he was a Heinz ketchup bottle and someone was trying to squeeze the last drop out of him. I, on the other hand, sat there frozen and expressionless. I was Lester Holt conducting an interview in prime time, throwing in the occasional nod of understanding. To an outsider, this may have seemed like I saw this as a clinical exercise.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Age difference,” Shyamal said. “The role of the father was different in those days. Everybody was afraid of the father. Mother was the one who raised us.”

  My grandmother’s name was Binodini.

  “Were you afraid of your father?” I pressed.

  Shyamal’s reaction to my question almost made me jump.

  “OH YESSSSSSSSSS! OF COURSE!” he exclaimed. We had been together for a couple of days and I still wasn’t used to the sudden crescendo of his voice. As Shyamal talked, his eyes widened through his glasses, which seemed to take up half his face. His hand gestures increased. He reminded me of someone acting out Shakespeare at their first audition. I worried that he might, in his excitement, knock over one of the glasses on the table.

  “It was not like this relationship,” he continued, beckoning to me. “All of us were afraid of my father, very afraid. He used to love us a lot.”

  He added: “But you used to avoid him. Because he used to stop our freedom, our movement. Discipline us.”

  It was not like this relationship.

  There was such a cognitive dissonance here. Shyamal said he was afraid of Sachindra and that they were not close. He then said this was different from his relationship with me. Meanwhile, I would say about my father what he said about his: We weren’t close, and I used to avoid him. I was never afraid of him, and he wasn’t the disciplinarian. B
ut then again, he was barely on my radar.

  Then there was the matter of his siblings. Shyamal said he wasn’t close to them either.

  “I was special, and let me tell you something about it: I was different than any of them. I had talents from a young age,” Shyamal said.

  “What kind of talents?” I asked.

  “People say I was a good-looking kid. I don’t know that. Everybody says that,” Shyamal said. I let out a belly laugh. This is the kind of thing Donald Trump would say: Many people tell me that I have the best smile. The biggest smile. I’m not going to say it. The polls say it. The polls that aren’t fake, that is. Which is all of them. Except Fox.

  “I could sing well,” he went on. “I acted on the stage. I was doing good at the school. So naturally I drew attraction from other people. There was not a single public function in our town where I did not perform.”

  A handsome, high-achieving academic who could kick it on the stage? If India had prom kings, Shyamal might’ve been a monarch. Shyamal said Sachindra was the one who encouraged him to pursue music. But when I asked him if his father was proud of him, Shyamal said no. “He was not proud, but he expected me to go somewhere, in the sense that I’ll reach some position,” Shyamal said. “I’m not average. I’m much above average. He knew that.”

  I’m much above average. Goodness, that would have been a great yearbook quote.

  My grandfather was also active in local politics, Shyamal said. Sachindra advised the Pakistani government on issues such as education, even playing an instrumental role in saving a local school from being closed. Though Shyamal didn’t say it, I imagined that he would have crowned himself prom king there too.

  Sachindra was roughly seventy-three years old when he passed away in 1962. Shyamal found out about the death through a telegram. Officially, he was seventeen at the time. But in reality, he was nineteen. He wasn’t keen on discussing his father’s death, only saying that it was of “old age.”

  “When he died, his body was being taken for cremation,” Shyamal said. “Hindu representative, Muslim representative, Christian representative—they all held his body on their shoulders for a long procession. He helped people so much free of charge. Hindus. Muslims. Christians. Everybody treated him as a second god.”

  “Do you wish you were closer with him?” I asked. It was a reasonable question, given how laudatory Shyamal was toward his father.

  “No,” Shyamal said, without skipping a beat. “I have a different personality, believe me. I will not hesitate to say that I think I have some superiority complex.”

  At least he was self-aware. He said this stemmed from being the son of a well-known community figure. As an example, he cited being a goalie when he played soccer. Sometimes his team would win needing very little from him, yet it was his name that was listed at the top in postgame accolades. He excelled in school and would routinely hear comments like, “He’s Sachindra Deb’s son! Of course he’ll be first!” He was used to receiving attention, even more so than his siblings. It went to his head, he admitted.

  “Did you feel your father knew you beyond your professional accomplishments? Do you feel he knew you personally?” I asked. Shyamal didn’t understand the question at first. He shook his head. The age difference played a role, he noted. Sachindra was almost fifty-five years old when Shyamal was born.

  “He had very high expectations for me,” Shyamal said, still not comprehending what I meant. It was like asking a goldfish if it likes cheeseburgers.

  I told him that there’s a professional side of us as humans and a personal side. “I’m a New York Times reporter, and then I have a personal side,” I said. “I like music and I like watching sports, you know, there are things that interest me outside of my résumé. Did he only view you in terms of how good your résumé was?”

  “He never looked at his children like that,” Shyamal said. “In those days, father means protecting the family, give them best education, raise them the best you can. That’s it. Those concepts are gone. Even in our time, when I was your age, much younger, we grew up under the shadow of the guardian.”

  Shyamal said that his father told him to go to engineering school, so he went to engineering school. Every decision ran through Sachindra before he died.

  “What if you didn’t want to be an engineer? You’re a musical person. What if you wanted to do that professionally? What would your father have said?” I asked.

  “Good question you ask,” Shyamal said. “I wanted to always become an accordion player and work in the movie industry. That is my passion, besides the accordion. I didn’t have the guts to open my mouth. I had to go to engineering, that’s it. Father says, ‘Go to engineering if you qualify.’”

  I persisted: But what if you did open your mouth?

  “No. You have to understand: You are only a sixteen-year-old kid, out of the question,” Shyamal said. “It was all what they say. So when my father passed away, my eldest brother, he became the guardian. He used to tell us, ‘Do this, do this, do this.’”

  He was referring to Sudhirendra. After Sachindra’s death, Sudhirendra, as the oldest brother, became the patriarch of the family. He was an engineer by trade. In a culture where the patriarch holds much sway over what you do and what you do not do, Shyamal said Sudhirendra was a source of resentment for him. He was a dominant figure and hard on my father.

  “He was a very brilliant man,” Shyamal said of Sudhirendra, who was separated by almost two decades from Shyamal. Or as my father put it: “Two decades by age, five decades by culture. Don’t tell anyone.”

  Shyamal poking fun at someone else for not being plugged in was high comedy. Nevertheless, when my father first moved to Kolkata in 1959, he lived with Sudhirendra, who had already been living there. Shyamal told me I had met his oldest brother when he visited the United States when I was very young, but I had no recollection of this.

  “Were you close growing up?” I said.

  “No! Never!” Shyamal said.

  “So he’s not an influential figure in your life?” I said. I was surprised at his honest answer.

  “The MOST INFLUENTIAL figure in my life!” Shyamal said, raising his voice and continuing. “He’s North Pole. I’m South Pole in every aspect.”

  It’s funny he said that because I sometimes think that about Sattik and me (though not in a negative way). The age difference, Shyamal added, was a big deal.

  I asked him whether it bothered him that he wasn’t close with his brother.

  “Maybe every second,” Shyamal said.

  It was remarkable: Shyamal had the same regrets about Sudhirendra that I had about Shyamal.

  “Close” in this context is an interesting word. Sudhirendra lived in “close” physical proximity to Shyamal, and Shyamal told me he saw him often. My father was helping to take care of his oldest brother as his health worsened. I even heard him set up a doctor’s appointment for Sudhirendra. But still they weren’t close in the way I thought of the word. I’ve always thought of the concept of closeness as being comfortable, emotionally in tune and familiar with the other person, able to read their mind like your own. But my father and Sudhirendra didn’t talk about feelings. To a stranger, they would still seem close because Shyamal was taking care of Sudhirendra. It was clear to me that Shyamal did so out of a blood obligation.

  “Let me tell you something,” Shyamal said. “Someday I’m going to die, and I’ll tell someone to read to my dear son: Once somebody grows up, human beings don’t change. Once my boss said to me: ‘He can change his dresses. He can change his shoes. He can change his glasses, but his personality doesn’t change. A human being does not change.’ And he was right. Everything I like, he hates; everything he likes, I hate. That’s the way it is.”

  He was being pessimistic, and I wasn’t sure I agreed with him. Maybe a person doesn’t fundamentally evolve. Maybe once you reach adulthood, your cap for how much of your personality traits you can reasonably address is lower. But maturation is a form
of change, and it’s why I was sitting adjacent to him at that moment, rather than an ocean’s distance apart.

  “But you don’t have to like the same things,” I said. “Did you guys clash growing up?”

  “Not face-to-face. We did not have the guts to do that,” Shyamal said. “But in my mind, yes.”

  I wondered: Sudhirendra was ninety-two and close to the end of his life. Did he still define his relationship with Shyamal as being the elder?

  “He is not only elder. He is the commander in chief,” Shyamal answered.

  “He doesn’t have many years left,” I said. “If you’re not close with him, is that something you think about at all?”

  I was pressing on this because I was still giving in to my instincts as a reporter: I wanted to dig deeper. But I was also indirectly letting my own thoughts about my connection with my parents seep into the conversation. My father said he wished his bond with Sudhirendra was “much better” and that it was “not even in the acceptable range.”

  “No, no, no! My relationship with him is purely mechanical,” Shyamal said. “Let me give you an example. When you landed at the airport the day before yesterday, the moment I saw Wesley, I became so thrilled. A great thrill. I had an affection for her then and there. I never saw her before. She was there for one minute and I was so thrilled by it. Why? Do you know how much I love you? Ultimately, it’s connected.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by “connected” or the word “mechanical.” He clarified: “Your relationship with the driver—purely mechanical. Your relationship with the hotel manager, it’s mechanical. No emotion involved at this moment.”

  Ah. He meant “obligatory” or, read another way, “transactional.”

  “But the driver is not my brother,” I countered.

  “What is a brother? What is a sister? What is a relationship? You’re my son. How long have we been disconnected physically? Eleven years,” Shyamal said.

  At the time, I really had no idea what he meant by this and was a bit frustrated. We had to leave to go meet Sudhirendra, so the conversation ended for the day. Shyamal wasn’t ready to divulge more.