Palat
He was the product of faux reluctance and relentless persuasion. Eventually, all it took was a single-word line confidently delivered by Shah Rukh Khan, from an iconic Bollywood movie uttered softly yet confidently from his father’s lips for his mother to drop all pretences, turn her gaze off the peeling mint-green wall and agree to a night of lovemaking – inexperienced and bumpy. The couple had found it prudent to drape a cloth over the deities who sat snug in the one-room-kitchen apartment. Shankar had waited years to ‘become a man’, as he indelicately put it, and when he spent the first night with his new bride, Pratibha, little did he realise that in three glorious thrusts, he was to become a father too.
Nine months and a fortnight later, Milan came into the world crying, as if already aware of being entrusted with the burden of existing. In Sanskrit his name meant union and, as he got older, he thought it was rather convenient and a bit of an easy way out for his parents to come up with the name. One day in Geography class, he was not only excited to learn that a place in Italy was his namesake but also a tad bit disappointed when he discovered it was pronounced as if it had a double ‘a’, unlike his own.
He weighed a couple of pounds more than his tiny-framed mother’s lady parts appreciated. Pratibha’s mother, with six offspring of her own, had insisted her youngest daughter consume generous portions of milk, white butter and rice through her pregnancy to ensure the child was born both corpulent and fair skinned. She pointed out how her other grandchildren were born fair in spite of some of their fathers not being so themselves. Furthermore, she admitted craving groundnuts when pregnant with Pratibha and attributed her skin tone to it. However, even though he was a rather heavy infant, his complexion remained like his mother’s. His father was 17 on the Fairness Metre, which came with Pratibha’s preferred brand of fairness cream, and the pair of them were a solid 13. Had he weighed a couple of pounds less, the episiotomy could perhaps have been avoided, she thought every single time she sat in the first few weeks after her delivery. For years to come, Pratibha would remind her son of the pain she had endured so that he could be born. She would annoy him with tales of how she had refused a caesarean although the doctor had recommended one as Milan was in a breech position. This story, with minor adjustments, was doled out often, at times in the most uncomfortable of settings; once, for instance, when he was annihilating the first Alphonso mango of the season he was reminded that Pratibha had put her foot down, heeded her mother’s suggestion and brought life into the world ‘the way God intended’.
He was a boy of seven, when he first realised he possessed a unique power, the kind other people around him did not seem to know anything about. He became aware of it while he was walking through a packed Dadar market street during peak shopping hours, his mother’s fingers holding on to miniature replicas of her own. Their fingers had detached from one another and in one split second, Milan found himself jostled by the crowd, separating him from the woman he called Maa. His panic was so intense, he could feel his heart trying to crack open his rib cage. Moments later, he spotted the back of her head, searching frantically for him, her earrings following suit. At that moment he thought to himself, ‘palat’. Before he could even vocalise the word, she turned and spotted him.
There had been many times during the course of his life when all he had to do was think ‘palat’ and the person whose attention he was trying to get would, instantaneously, turn to look in his general direction. It happened one time too many for him to consider it to be a coincidence.
When Milan was in the seventh standard, he was extremely nervous about his mathematics exam. The introduction of the alphabet to numbers had made him want to weep, and weep he did. He listened but couldn’t for the life of him comprehend what was being explained. At times, he gave up and stared out the window. He had done poorly during the unit test exams, scoring a humble nine out of the fifty marks allotted. Although his mother hit him on the head with one of his books, his father patted him on the shoulder, saying that at least it was the highest single-digit number that existed. Milan had noted that his father often shared his true feelings about certain subjects when Pratibha was well out of earshot. The last time he had mustered the audacity to disagree with his wife especially in front of their son, there was more salt in his food and a fistful in his dessert too.
Milan had had the misfortune of being seated in front of Aditya. Every time the supervisor’s back was turned, Aditya stood up and tried to have a look at Milan’s paper [why would he do that if Milan was such a bad student?]. Annoyed but not wanting to openly rat out his peer, he thought ‘palat’ and the teacher, with no provocation, turned to look at Aditya, who was balancing on his toes trying to read an equation off Milan’s paper. Hearing the words ‘sit down’ from the supervisor had never felt so gratifying. Aditya was given a stern warning after being held by his ear and the teacher who administered the threat of speaking to his parents watched him like a famished hawk for the entirety of the examination.
It was not every day that the peculiar superpower he possessed came in handy but when it did, it was always in his favour. One such time, it resulted in his father severing a long-standing friendship. Shankar would sometimes give his co-worker and friend, Devilal, and Milan a ride in his employer’s car while running errands. They didn’t own a car of their own and Milan had always been fascinated by automobiles from a young age, so his father experienced the same joy parents all around the world feel when giving their children something they never had.
When his father picked the ten-year-old car enthusiast from school one day, Devilal, the cook at his employer’s house, was also sitting in the back seat. He often had a packet of lemon- or orange-flavoured sweets with him. He opened the door and motioned Milan to sit beside him. He fished out a lemon-flavoured candy from his shirt pocket and offered it to the boy. While running errands, Devilal made small talk with Milan, enquiring about school and such. He had his left hand under the boy’s grey half pants while he ruffled his hair with his right hand. Shankar was too busy driving to notice the predicament his son was in and his son too timid to respond. Milan could feel the long nail on Devilal’s little finger slide under the rim of his underwear. Squirming in his seat trying to move away, he looked at his father’s black-dyed hair and thought ‘palat’. His father turned just then and almost met with a tiny accident.
‘Kya kar raha hai? Haath nikaal saale! Why is your hand under my son’s clothes? Ruk, tu ruk.’
Shankar parked the car as soon as he could and pulled Devilal out of the car by his collar and began assaulting him. When his feeble explanations didn’t work on his attacker, Devilal began fighting back. Rage, however, makes lions of lemurs and Shankar had managed to tear his friend’s shirt, broke three of his fingers and threw a few punches at the increasingly dishevelled cook before passers-by intervened.
Milan had never seen his father this angry. He knew what Devilal did was wrong but didn’t understand what brought about this level of unbridled rage in his otherwise docile father. The incident had not been without consequence. His father’s employer, who came from a family of ardent Mahatma Gandhi followers – the boss’s father had participated in the Salt March with the Mahatma himself – let go of Shankar a few months later, citing unrelated reasons. Things were tough for a while; the family was forced to cut back on Diwali shopping. However, Shankar managed to find another job in a few months that paid just as much and also included a sizable bonus when his new boss fathered his first son after three girls.
Life went on. Milan’s gift resurfaced now and then, making him the benefactor of frequent blessings at different stages of his life. He grew up, graduated at the top of his class, bagged a job in a bank where he worked, climbing up the ranks for close to thirty years, married a woman his parents picked for him after courting her for six months, and fathered two children consecutively, one of whom did not make it outside the womb. The other, his wife lovingly named Mayank, which meant the moon, and surely enough he orbited around her as a child. Milan’s relationship with his son, on the other hand was like that of the moon to the sun, distant and one-sided. The sun provided. Moreover, Mayank was fair-skinned, much like the sphere of the night and his mother did not have to resort to eating white-coloured food to make him so. All he had to do was inherit her complexion, which he did. His face came with two dimples, one on each side of his smile. His mother often told him they were the consequence of the god’s thumb and index finger lingering too long at the time of final inspection before shipping him off to Earth.
Over the years, Milan had noticed that the word ‘palat’ had little to no effect on Mayank. He always thought it rather curious that his only living child was somehow unaffected by it, often wondering why it worked on so many people but not his son. The question gnawed at him.
One incident in particular stood clear in his mind. When Mayank was around seven, the trio made their way to Chowpatty. Maya, Milan’s wife, had been particularly insistent that a family outing was long overdue, and Milan was unable to conjure excuses strong enough to refuse her. So comply he did, and off to the beach they went, with sandals on their feet. Mayank spent most of his time clinging to his mother, occasionally freeing his hands to play with his sand toys and nibble on a piece of corn, its juices tricking down his chin, the tangy masala tantalising his tastebuds. The beach was awfully crowded. Children played with balloons, sand toys and soap bubbles, while vendors peddled chai, coffee, samosas, water bottles, and some of them even rented out mats for the evening for a few rupees. On a speaker, a man announced that a boy aged six, named Rudra, in a red shirt and blue jeans, was lost and looking for his aai.
‘I think I’ll get a gola for Mayank and me. Do you want one?’ asked Maya.
‘No, I can feel a sore throat around the corner.’
‘Maa, I’m coming with you,’ said Mayank getting up.
‘No, no, you sit with your father. It’s so crowded; children are getting lost.’ She then turned to Milan and instructed him, ‘Keep an eye on our son.’
Milan saw his wife disappear into the crowd and before he could turn his attention to his son, the boy was running in the direction of his mother. Milan lunged forward to grab a hold of his son but tasted sand instead. Leaving the mat unattended, a shoeless Milan began looking for his son frantically. In a minute that felt like an eternity, he spotted Mayank at a distance crying, and instinctively, he thought ‘palat’.
But think hard as he may, Mayank did not once look in his direction. He began shouting out his name and ran to the boy, who continued crying while calling out for his mother. Reaching his son, he forced him to return to their mat. Although he told the boy his mother would return, and she did so a minute later, the boy was inconsolable.
There were many occasions when Milan’s superpower fell short when it came to his son. He always thought it rather peculiar. Mayank, in turn, grew up, and like Milan, he too got married and had children of his own. However, as time passed, the pair had grown further and further apart. The conversations between them, with time, became monosyllabic. Eventually, they barely existed.
One day when Milan was an old man, his son told him that he was being sent to an old age home shortly. Days later, Mayank left an ageing and fragile Milan inside the home for the aged without as much as a few parting words. Milan didn’t ask not to be sent away – he was much too proud to do so. Milan stood by the gate, an old man, wiping tears out of his eyes, while he looked at his son entering his car.
‘Palat’, he thought to himself in a moment of utter desperation.
But Mayank did not turn.
As he stood there, allowing a girl barely old enough to be in college to help him with his luggage, Milan wondered if the superpower he possessed only worked on people who loved him. Perhaps, he thought, Mayank, his only surviving child, didn’t possess even a modicum of love for his aged father. However, he was not afforded the luxury of time to mull over it. At the age of 75, hours before his caregiver could wake him up for his bath, Milan breathed his last, the very first night he spent at St Jude’s, the home for the aged. He was found lying on his side, his mouth partially open and his eyes looking at the wall, exactly like his mother had prior to his conception, just before her beloved husband had lowered his voice and whispered ‘palat’.