My Father’s Balloon

The pandit ties an invisible thread around my right wrist. I think that he could’ve been a mime if he was born in France or Canada, or if he ever met Robin Williams in a park in the States. The pandit says, ‘Walk down the stairs, across the verandah, step out of the gate, and wait for me outside the car. And remember, at any given point, do not look back.’ I think that he speaks too much to be a decent mime but I do as he instructs.

I walk all the way to the car, the toes of my forward foot peeping out of the dhoti with each step. I’m not allowed to cover my feet, wear chappals, nor even wash them. The floor transitions from plain cement to concrete to asphalt. The dirty soles of my dirty feet don’t burn at all.

I reach the car and stand behind the pandit’s cracked heels. Maybe I should ask Ma to give him an extra tube of Krack Cream along with his usual fees once everything is done. Or maybe not. What if that offends him and he curses us while leaving?

He tugs open the door behind the driver’s seat, points up at the invisible balloon of my father whose thread he had tied around my wrist earlier, and says, ‘Now sit inside the car keeping your wrist and hand outside the door. Then look up and ask your father to get in and take the seat next to you. Do not, and I can’t emphasise this enough, do. not. tug at him. We don’t want him to wake up. Got it?’

What’s the worst that could happen if he wakes up? Will he self-combust? Burst open and shower maggots over us? Tug at me harder than I tug at him, and eventually, make me fly along? That won’t be so bad, would it? But I don’t tell the pandit any of that. I nod and do as I’m told.

My father’s balloon descends of his own volition, squeezes itself across me and bobs in the seat next to me. I think it would have made more sense to ask the balloon to sit before me so as to avoid the whole awkward passing through me situation. Earlier in the morning Bhua had pleaded, ‘Just for today, Vaj, don’t ask any questions or cause a ruckus, please, and just do as you’re being told, okay? Promise me.’ So, despite every cell in my body shrieking at me to correct the pandit’s approach to rituals, maybe even his life choices, I keep my mouth shut.

The new underwear I’d wore in the morning had ridden too far up my butt. Not my usual brand, I’d thought, while picking it up from the pile of neatly folded new clothes. Ma had been in a state of delirium ever since my father suddenly decided enough is enough and turned into a balloon, so there was literally no one around who knew little details about our lives, or cared enough to know either. Who even wears white chaddis among my relatives, I thought, and landed on my father’s eldest sister’s eldest daughter’s husband as the one. How do you even describe that particular relationship directly? My cousin-in-law? Bland. My oldest first-cousin’s husband? Plebeian. In any case, it must have been that very cousin’s choice, so I ruled it out as being a prank and wore it. One size too small but I was not to protest today.

Now in the car I tilt to my right, pull the wedgie out, and let out a long fart. My father’s balloon doesn’t seem to mind. He’s been through far worse. The pandit is standing outside, holding on to the door. He says, ‘Now, take your hand inside, and make sure to rest it well across your chest.’

What next? Sing ‘All Izz Well’? I frown at him but he doesn’t notice. He shuts the door close, sits in the front passenger seat after circumambulating around the car thrice, and tells the driver, ‘Chalo.’

Even though I’m seated in the car, I’m not actually here. It feels like the weight that my father shed before transforming into a balloon, all one hundred forty-seven kilos of it, now rests on my head. It’s only a matter of time before my neck snaps. The doctor I’ll see in Mumbai a couple of months later will diagnose it as ‘an acute case of spondylitis,’ refer me to the physiotherapy department, and ask me, ‘have you been under a lot of stress lately?’ Instead of telling him anything, I’d start laughing hysterically. I’d laugh so much that my spondylitis would cure itself without needing any ‘mild electric shocks for the next few weeks.’ I’d laugh so much they’d have to administer a muscle relaxant, and admit me to the hospital to ‘observe if the condition worsens overnight.’ Before drifting off to sleep, I’d see the silhouettes of my bhua and the doctor standing outside the room. Her fingers pressed on her forehead, his hand covering the scar from her childhood vaccinations, on her upper arm.

*

We pass the boundary of our town across a newly built flyover. Pass through my father’s eldest brother’s sasural. I stare at my father’s balloon. He has nothing to say about it anymore.

We cross fields of sugarcane so matted together, one would think that they’re impossible to harvest. We drive across the next town on a newly built bypass with tolls. We cross the restaurant we used to halt at, for an early brunch, while taking the same route to Haridwar during our childhood. I ask the pandit, ‘Aren’t we going to stop?’

His black tinted Aviators don’t let any unwanted rays of light disturb his sleep. His 50NY Bluetooth headphones cancel out all unwanted noise. My stomach growls. I pout at my father’s balloon. He’s stopped bobbing. Even without wearing a seatbelt, he’s glued to the seat now, resting more comfortably than the pandit. I want to shake both of them awake.

We cross many other towns with many of these new bypasses I’ve never seen before and I miss the experience of going through the towns, of experiencing their microcosms: the traffic; the honking; even the abuses that follow the honking; people going about their day on their bikes or scooters or cars; rickshaw walas taking breaks on the side of the road, rubbing khaini in their palms with their craquelure thumbs; cows enshrined in the middle of the road like they are the ones who wrote the rules of the world and everyone else avoiding them by an arm’s length, so as not to hurt them but to be able to pat them while driving by; women frying coin-sized aloo samosa behind wooden stalls with gaudy flex boards and the wackiest font choices with always the wrong spellings, as if on purpose; old bus depots turned into homeless shelters turned into H-pop stars’ concert halls; new bus depots that could rival the look and feel of small airports but still stank of either garbage or year-old urine when we drove by them.

None of that now. Just these wide roads with farms stretched out on both sides. A cow masticates in the middle of the huge divider that cuts the six lanes, three on each side, surrounded by blooms of hot pink and white bougainvillea.

A car zips past us and I peek at our speedometer. 110. How fast must that Innova be going? 120? 130? Kmph. Aren’t they afraid of a stray dog trying to dash across the road? Or an invisible pothole? No wonder so many people die in car crashes in this country. People’s usual sense of self-preservation seems to turn to dust as soon as they hit the road.

The weight on my neck increases ever so slightly with each passing kilometre but I can’t say anything to alter our trajectory today. If it were any other day, I’d have told the driver to chill out a little, ‘We’re in no hurry, boss.’ But not today. Bhua’s words echo in my head.

Finally, after what feels like a millennium, we’re blessed with the gift of traffic. I rejoice, even let out a small hooray. Thank the gods that they’ve not made a bypass across Nagina. Maybe the Halwai Association’s lobby has opposed it – they’d lose out on so much business.

We inch towards Old Tularam Restaurant. I raise my eyebrows at my father’s balloon expecting him to say, ‘That’s not the real Tularam. That’s actually the younger brother’s branch. He just added the word Old to his registration to confuse the passers-by and the tourists. The real Tularam is across from it. Tularam Mishthan Bhandar – Since 1945.’ But he says nothing. He’s back to bobbing on his seat, touching the roof of the car with every jerk.

I gaze outside and there’s several more Tularams around those two shops now. Tularam with a small ‘THE REAL’ painted on the sign’s upper left corner. Tularam with an apostrophe s, looking suspiciously like the design and font of Haldiram’s. All of them selling the same damn thing: the softest melt-in-the-mouth gulab jamun.

Every time we crossed Nagina, regardless of the time, we’d make a brief stop at Tularam Mishthan Bhandar. Order one plate each of warm gulab jamun if we were headed towards Haridwar, a whole earthen pot full of them if we were heading back home.

I want to ask the pandit how my father’s balloon could let go of his worldly attachments without devouring his favourite gulab jamun for the last time? But the pandit’s still asleep. If it weren’t for his incessant snoring, I’d have thought he was dead. Maybe he’s not used to the AC’s chilled airflow directly hitting his face. It doesn’t help that my father’s balloon has been releasing cold into the car too ever since we sat inside. But I can’t tell the pandit that either. I turn my head around degree by degree as we caterpillar across the various crowds outside Tularam and his multiple mutations.

As the car reaches its highway speed once again, even I fall asleep.

I jolt awake when we jerk to a stop at the ghat. When did we cross the swerving roads across the National Park? I wanted to fling a two-rupee coin into the river while we crossed the bridge over it to reach Haridwar. Weren’t we going to stop at a lodge, walk across it to a Vaishnav restaurant, eat ghee-laden rotis and jeera aloo, before heading to the ghat? So many missed steps in this trip, it felt more like a corporate incentive vacation to Manali or Goa or whatever instead of our warm and slow Haridwar trips.

The pandit had already opened my door and was standing leaning on it with his right hand. He says, ‘Now, ask your father to step out of the car.’ The balloon, my father, floats out in the same awkward manner in which he’d squished in. The pandit continues, ‘Take your hand out, and only then, step out of the car yourself. Right-foot first on the ground, then left.’ I oblige.

The pebbles in the parking in front of the ghat are lukewarm and well-rounded. I brush my feet on them but they stay clean. I look inside the car and see the entire footrest is caked with dirt. I must have kept rubbing my feet on its acupressure wires without realising it. The pandit says, ‘Na-na. No looking back, beta. Come on, keep up. We’re at the final steps.’

I gaze at the ghat and it wasn’t the ghat we used to visit. There were thousands of other balloons floating around yet none releasing cold like my father’s balloon. Some were attached to other people’s wrists, others to trees, unable to drift away. If someone without the balloons saw the scene, they’d have thought it was a carnival and searched for the stalls with air rifles and splintered Sprite and Coke and Fanta cans nailed to a cardboard wall, maybe even won one of the balloons as a reward for hitting five in a row.

With every step that we take towards the ghat, the weight on my neck increases further like I’m being crushed by a hydraulic press. I knew I should have renewed my gym subscription. Worked on my upper body more while I still visited it. Someone should have told me that I’d need the neck of an ox for this task. But no one really talks about the admin of death, do they? Even now I can see through the schematics of it all, designed to make the griever go through the motions of ritual to keep them focussed on the method rather than on the weight of their own emotions. It must work well for those who still believe in all this – in the concept of an afterlife, in reincarnation and religion.

The pandit has hung his Aviators in his kurta’s front pocket and is now confabulating with other pandits who aren’t wearing any garments on their upper torsos, just plain deep-yellow dhotis, one side tucked at the waist so their hairy knees are visible to everyone, their dimples in an involuntary staring competition with the world. The pandit ambles towards me, says, ‘Chalo, beta. Now ask your father to walk along with you down the steps of the ghat.’

I do as he says but the balloon of my father tugs a little. Is he hesitant to leave? I turn my head to face him, afraid my neck will snap from all the tension. He’s stuck between a cloud of other balloons. Must be making small talk. Making sure others have a shoulder to cry on, a ear to pour all their aches into. A ear like a void who won’t suggest solutions until asked for. Then give the exact solution they’re looking for, that they didn’t even think was possible. I remember the echo of the pandit’s words, ‘don’t tug,’ just before I was about to yank him out of the other balloons. Like always, I let him take his time.

*

The pandit’s been standing in the flow of the river for half an hour now. His faded dhoti rolled until his thighs, the river lapping at his hairless knees. He peeks at his noir Fossil watch, clicks his tongue, and says, ‘Time of the mahurat is slipping away, beta. Come fast na.’

I want to tell him that my father’s balloon is stuck with the other balloons, that I can’t tug him as per his own instructions, but I say nothing. I just take one step at a time with my hand raised, and my father’s balloon somehow finds a way across the stoichiometry of other balloons, one gap at a time.

The pandit extends his hand and I hold it tight while descending the slippery steps of the ghat. He asks me to recite some mantras I don’t understand at all but recite regardless based purely on how they sound. Thankfully, at the end of the mantras the pandit apologises to the gods for any mistakes made during the recitation, in plain Hindi. That bit, I understand. I even repeat it in my own head even though he doesn’t ask me to do so.

He says, ‘Now, ask your father to let go. Flow with the river or with the air current, whichever he prefers.’

I gaze at my father’s balloon, the afternoon sun behind him like a halo, and tell him, ‘Pa, guess it’s time to leave. It won’t be the same without you but … I’ve held you back enough.’

Just like he’d entered the car, sat on the seat next to me, and got out, my father’s balloon descends to rest on the river’s visibly calm surface, and flows away in an instant. The invisible thread around my wrist unspools and flows along with him. Watching him float away, the weight on my neck evaporates, its aftereffects already deep in my vertebrae.

I take a sip of the river, rinse my head, wash the salt from my cheeks, and gaze into the downstream horizon for what feels like another millennium.

Once I get out, the pandit hands me a new set of clothes. A plain white kurta pyjama, a white vest, the same brand same size underwear as I wore in the morning. He asks me to leave the clothes I’m currently wearing in the changing room next to the ghat.

Back in the car, I stare at the seat where my father’s balloon bobbed just until a couple hours ago and feel my eyes well up once again. Finally, I think as I take a selfie in this state, the relatives won’t call me heartless anymore.

As we cross the bridge, I ask the driver to slow down and hurl a two-rupee coin into the river. As we reach Nagina, I request the driver to stop at the real Tularam Mishthan Bhandar, since 1945. The pandit doesn’t protest. His job is done. Now all he cares about is reaching home, getting his dakshina, and repeating the ritual for someone else. I step out of the car of my own volition, buy three of the largest available earthen pots of gulab jamun. I wolf down an entire pot before reaching home, their usual sweetness heightened by incessant streams of salt.