Missed Translations Page 8

  I wasn’t sure what she meant.

  “What do you need me to do?” I said.

  “Change the voicemail with a new number. Please?” my mother said.

  Bishakha’s home phone voicemail was my voice talking about an old phone number. She had never changed it because I don’t think she knew how. We did it for her. Bishakha insisted that Wesley’s voice should greet her callers now. So Wesley, along with a plethora of other talents, became a voiceover artist.

  “It’s a little spicy, isn’t it?” Bishakha said, doting on Wesley as we began to eat in her dining room. Wesley and I sat on one side of the table, with my mother on the opposite.

  “It’s really good,” Wesley said.

  “You like it?” Bishakha beamed.

  “Mmhmm.” Wesley nodded.

  Bishakha kept bringing out plates of food. There was enough to feed an entire Little League team in one sitting.

  “He doesn’t come at all. So, you know, I want him to eat something I cook,” Bishakha said, referring to me. “Of course, you’re coming and I want you to eat too. I wasn’t sure if you’d like the food I cook. I don’t cook these days at all. I’m by myself. I really don’t have to cook.”

  “It’s really good, Mom. You haven’t lost your touch,” I answered, looking down at my plate.

  At first, lunch was a bit like those Saturday Night Live sketches with Will Ferrell, where he plays a middle manager who yells at his family about owning a Dodge Stratus. One of the brilliant comic bits of the skit is that there are long pockets of silence punctuated solely by the sound of utensils loudly clattering against plates. The rest of the sketch is filled with mundane small talk.

  Wesley and I told Bishakha about a recent trip to Charleston to visit Wesley’s family, when I went fishing for the first time. We talked about Wesley’s cooking skills and how she sets off the fire alarm every time she makes a meal. Bishakha said she knew her next-door neighbor who was “very nice.”

  “Rest of them, they aren’t very friendly,” she said.

  More clattering. I sampled the shrimp.

  “You should come time to time to have my food. Then I can cook again,” Bishakha said.

  Wesley and I took another serving. I was going to need another run in the morning.

  “So you have an iPad?” I asked.

  “I like it. My computer is gone,” Bishakha answered. She said her laptop had stopped working about five years ago. But she didn’t like reading books on the iPad because she liked physically touching book pages.

  Bishakha glanced at Wesley. Her next question made me flinch for a split second.

  “Can I ask a personal question, if you don’t mind? How did you meet Sopan?” Bishakha said.

  She had never shown this level of interest in a significant other of mine. Recall that when I approached her with my sixth grade romance, she laughed it off and then we never discussed women again. She had met Michelle, my college girlfriend, once over a similar lunch in 2011. It was awkward. They didn’t click, through nobody’s fault. No one really knew how to act, including me. Neither of us were ready to open ourselves up. I didn’t realize until now that introducing parents to a significant other does require willingness, acceptance, and transparency.

  Here Bishakha was, in front of someone with whom I’m romantically involved, asking her questions about that romance.

  Wesley recounted how we’d met through Twitter.

  “Do you know what Twitter is?” I asked Bishakha.

  “Mmhmm. I don’t tweet but I know what it is,” Bishakha said. Talk about an evolution: from not knowing how to turn on a computer to understanding Twitter—though, really, who can ever understand such a thing?

  “She has an iPad, babe,” Wesley said. A fair point. I began to wonder if my mother was about to ask me what my favorite hashtag was. We told Bishakha that Wesley was finishing up law school when we met, which I had mentioned on the phone.

  “Oh, you’re a lawyer?” Bishakha said, her eyebrows raised. “Good.”

  We moved on to discussing politics, something my mother and I had never done.

  “These days, I don’t enjoy politics at all,” Bishakha said. “I used to enjoy watching what’s going on. It’s not news anymore. I used to love Charlie Rose. I used to watch every day.”

  No longer. She added that she never liked Matt Lauer from the start. My mother, the media critic, said that the news had become too gossipy.

  I told Bishakha that Trump had tweeted at me because he wasn’t a fan of a story I wrote.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Bishakha said, with the belly laugh I hadn’t heard in years. “Oh my, you’re on a hit list! I remember that he made a very nasty comment about Meryl Streep.”

  We finished lunch and cleared the dishes. I was feeling more comfortable than I had been when we first arrived. There was some chatting in my mother’s living room as we ate the cookies we’d brought. Bishakha asked if we wanted to take the piano, adding that she had no use for it, but there was no way we could give it a home in our small Manhattan apartment.

  I had never seen my mother this happy. She insisted on taking a picture with Wesley. She took one with me too, but honestly, Bishakha seemed more excited about Wesley. I wasn’t complaining. I was just happy lunch went well.

  On the car ride back, I had this gnawing feeling that I couldn’t shake. It made me grip the steering wheel harder.

  “She lives a very sad life,” I said to Wesley, as we cruised the highway back to New York. No amount of one-off lunches would reduce my guilt about her having been by herself this whole time.

  “She seemed really happy to have us there,” Wesley countered. She was right: Bishakha was happy when we were there. She was warm and embracing toward Wesley. And now Wesley’s voice was Bishakha’s phone greeting.

  “I’ve never seen her like that around any of my friends,” I said.

  “Do you know when her birthday is?” Wesley asked. I didn’t. I must’ve known at some point. I didn’t know Shyamal’s either.

  “She doesn’t strike me as someone who sees value in things anymore,” I said. “The place is empty pretty much.”

  When you visit someone’s home, you learn a lot about their biography just by what’s on their walls: the art they like, the family trips they’ve taken, their diplomas—even the very color of the wall symbolizes something. Bishakha’s walls were a pasty white, mostly bare, save for a smattering of muted paintings. Her home was a blank slate that would tell a stranger nothing about the occupant.

  At some point, I’d have to learn what was supposed to be on my mother’s walls. And most important: Why wasn’t I on them?

  Six

  “To them, he is a common man.”

  Do you have a goal in front of you? What you want to do next?” my father asked. We were strolling outside the complex of Belur Math, a sprawling forty-acre area located near Kolkata on a distributary of the Ganges River.

  Shyamal, as I discovered on this trip, had a particular fascination with old temples and forts and was intent on showing us every one of them, along the way explaining their significance. It was monsoon season in Kolkata, meaning every second outdoors was hot and humid, ideal for long lectures about old Mughal invasions. All about the Mughals, this guy.

  This series of striking temples, conceived by Swami Vivekananda, was stunning. Vivekananda, born Narendranath Datta in Kolkata in 1863, was the son of a lawyer and eventually became a famed monk. Known for his acceptance of all faiths, he delivered a notable speech in 1893 at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, an interfaith assembly in Chicago, where he extolled the virtues of tolerance and truth.

  I could see why Shyamal would find this place an object of fascination. It emphasized agency. You can be who you want, whenever you want. It was unfamiliar territory for a man who, I would come to learn, was given little choice his entire life.

  “What do I want to do next?” I repeated his question back to him. “I don’t know, Dad. I’d like
to . . .”

  I didn’t have a good answer. At that moment, my only goal was to make it to dinner without melting from the heat. In the long term, my future is something I’ve thought about every day for years and have never come up with a satisfactory answer. I have always gone from job to job, figuring it out as I go. And short-term goals have sometimes been sidelined, orphaned by layoffs and my own impulsivity. I get easily attached and invested in side projects: I am going to write a play and stage it Off Broadway. And then easily detached a short time later: Eh, who goes to see plays nowadays?

  “I might go into comedy more after this. Maybe write a television show,” I volunteered.

  “So you’re a comedian?” He smiled. “I find that you have two qualities of mine that you have inherited. One is music. The other is comedy.”

  “Yeah? You think I inherited comedy from you?” I said, dubious.

  “Of COURSE!” my dad squealed. “Whenever I have gone to the parties and all these things, I am the main focus. Even now.”

  “Is that right?” I said.

  “EVEN NOW! Telling the jokes. Making people laugh—that is my hobby.”

  If you’re wondering about my skepticism, it was because the father I knew growing up was the least funny person I had ever met. He never once made me or anyone around me laugh. I have little memory of him even smiling or making anyone else smile. He was more likely to be the class frown than the class clown. If I had inherited my comedy from him, it would explain the number of times I’ve bombed a set. So, thanks, Dad.

  Off in the distance, we could see the central Ramakrishna Temple, a grand building combining several different architectural styles, as if to adhere to Vivekananda’s vision of inclusiveness. There were domes of different sizes scattered across the top of the elegantly designed structure, made up chiefly of marble and wood. It was roughly a hundred feet tall and had a pinkish-red color. Monkeys roamed the grounds, crisscrossing among delighted tourists and locals who ignored them.

  Wesley, Shyamal, and I took our shoes off and went inside the temple, where it was nearly silent, save for the shuffling of feet and the occasional whisper. Several visitors were on their knees with their eyes closed in front of a marble carving of Ramakrishna, the celebrated nineteenth-century spiritual figure who spent his life contemplating the divinity of several religions and his belief in the Supreme Being. I found the atmosphere inside the temple peaceful rather than spiritual, perhaps owing to my agnosticism. Shyamal took delicate steps around the temple, separate from Wesley and me. I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking, whether he was recalling Ramakrishna’s teachings himself or not.

  Finding myself in a contemplative state, I briefly considered that maybe I had dismissed Shyamal being one of my unwitting comedic influences too quickly. After all, as an engineer, part of his job was to try and use logic to overcome complex puzzles. It required an analytical mind to excel at solving them. That’s not too far off from comedians who point out logical fallacies and search for the right punchline.

  Maybe that was a stretch.

  Shyamal had one more sight to show us after we had left the temple. He beckoned us to follow him to the banks of the Ganges as the sun went down. For forty-five minutes, we stood on the water’s edge, taking in the beautiful landscape as the sky became darker. We watched as several locals dove into the water for a swim. We weren’t inside the temple anymore, but we remained silent. It was peaceful. It was perfect.

  The trip to Belur Math offered a window into my father and his idiosyncrasies. But it took a while after we first arrived to find our rhythm. Those first two or three days felt like weeks. On our first morning, Shyamal picked us up at our hotel. We didn’t get much sleep the night before; I had woken up at about four in the morning and gone for a run to reduce both my anxiety and that weight gain my father kept pointing out. Shyamal took us to the tennis courts where he played three times a week, where he could quickly show us around and show us off. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, he woke up at six o’clock to go play. I met his coach, who has worked with him for the last ten years. There was a nice bit of irony here: I grew up obsessed with sports and grew distant from my father because he and I couldn’t bond over it. He moves to India and spends a decade trying to become Pete Sampras.

  We got back in the car as instructed with little idea what would be on the day’s agenda. Shyamal had it all carefully planned, but we had difficulty convincing him to reveal his plans more than five minutes in advance.

  We pulled over on a shady residential street, and a familiar face jumped into the backseat with me and Wesley: my cousin Susmita. I didn’t know she would be here and I hadn’t seen her in roughly twenty years. She is married to Shyamal’s nephew, Somnath, and the two live in Connecticut with their two children, both of whom were attending the University of Connecticut.

  Susmita and Somnath had an arranged marriage in 1992, although their relationship is a healthy one, the ideal for what my parents’ was supposed to be. Trisha and Ron, their well-adjusted children who grew up in the United States, come to India regularly.

  So to recap: Shyamal, my father, has an older brother, Sudhirendra. Sudhirendra’s son, Somnath (Shyamal’s nephew), married Susmita. (There are lots of names that start with S in my family.) Don’t worry, I couldn’t yet follow the branches of this family tree, either. I had always assumed that my father was Somnath’s uncle in the colloquial sense, just a family friend.

  “I can’t even—that same face!” Susmita said, greeting me.

  It turned out she happened to be in town for the summer because Somnath’s father was in poor health. There was a contrast here right from the start: My father told me he had been sick, although I didn’t know with what, when I told him I was coming to India. I hadn’t known he was sick. And even if I had, what would I have done? When Somnath and Susmita found out about Somnath’s father, Susmita made immediate plans to come to India. I could not imagine rearranging my life to look after Shyamal.

  Shyamal and Susmita took Wesley and me to the shop of a local tailor. Before our arrival in India, Shyamal had bought Wesley a cherry-red lehenga and a turquoise sari to wear to Manvi’s wedding. He had Susmita pick them out because he didn’t trust his own fashion sense. They had made arrangements to get Wesley fitted—in the clothes she hadn’t ordered!—in case alterations were needed before the wedding.

  Over and over again, Shyamal said to us, “You cannot imagine what the wedding in Bengaluru will be. HUUUUUUUUUGE!”

  I sat in the lobby of the tiny store as poor Wesley went to the back to disrobe and be poked and prodded and tugged at by strangers speaking in a language she didn’t understand. She said they handed her a small, well-worn scrap of fabric and gestured for her to put it on as they measured her mostly naked torso. The process was, in her words, sticky and unpleasant.

  Afterward, we went to the mall, and Shyamal made it clear that he intended on spoiling us. He bought me a black pyjama for the wedding and then took us to a jewelry store. He asked Wesley to pick out a pair of earrings and matching necklace.

  It reminded me of when I was really young and we lived in the two-bedroom apartment in Randolph. My father had a spoiling tendency then too. Sometimes Shyamal would go out for errands. Maybe my mother sent him or he needed to pick something up, or maybe he just needed to get out of the house. Occasionally he’d take me, and whenever he did, I’d run right to the section of the store where they had computer games. I was a huge fan of science fiction, and I still am today. I’d spend hours in the aisles staring at the screenshots from games on the back of the case, dreaming of being able to play them at home. In particular, I’d look for Star Wars and Star Trek games and ask Shyamal to buy them for me. He’d say no. But I was ten. I was smart and persistent, and he didn’t like disappointing his son.

  “Come on, Baba. Please?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, Baba.”

  Ten minutes later at the register:

  “Okay, Baba, I brough
t the game to the register. It’s here already. Let’s just buy it.”

  “Okay.”

  If it wasn’t a computer game, it was baseball cards. I collected thousands of them through middle school. It would infuriate Bishakha, who thought I was wasting too much time and money on playing computer games or on collecting baseball cards and not spending enough time studying. She wasn’t wrong. I don’t know where those cards are now. They weren’t at my mother’s apartment when we visited.

  After shopping, Shyamal and I would often go to McDonald’s, where Shyamal would buy me a McChicken sandwich. He would get one too, but one time, I remember that he also ordered a cheeseburger without cheese.

  The baffled cashier said, “So, you want a hamburger?”

  “No,” Shyamal said. “I want a cheeseburger without cheese.”

  He was overthinking it. Sometimes he did that.

  At the jewelry store in Kolkata, Wesley picked out a small set of rhinestone and pearl earrings, with the matching necklace. They were small. Shyamal didn’t think this befit Wesley, whom he couldn’t stop showering with praise.

  He asked the owner of the jewelry store if he had bigger, more expensive jewelry he could buy her. Wesley and I explained to Shyamal that the smaller pieces were just fine. He wasn’t convinced but eventually relented. He wanted everything to be perfect for us.

  We finally went to visit Shyamal’s home that afternoon. We pulled past the pink façade and into a carport of sorts. Up one flight of a winding staircase, and he stopped us. We sat on a bench outside his door and took our shoes off.

  “Have you read The Da Vinci Code?” Shyamal asked Wesley. What an odd question to pose out of nowhere.

  Wesley paused and answered in the affirmative.

  “Here in India, we have a Da Vinci Code,” Shyamal said. Wesley and I traded confused looks. Shyamal had Wesley stand up. The key to his apartment was buried underneath the bench.

  Ah, a dad joke. I’d never heard him tell a joke before.