Daddy Come Lately by Rupa Gulab

Author:Rupa Gulab [Gulab Rupa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353058746
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2020-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

My maths tutor lasted just one day, well twenty-seven minutes to be precise—I had my eye on my watch. The worst thing about him was that he had garlic-pickle breath and I couldn’t concentrate on anything because I was gagging. Then he slurped loudly when he drank his tea (which Dad the Bad made, of course) and that disgusted me beyond belief. But I didn’t dump him; he dumped me instead, which made my life easier; that way I wasn’t to blame.

Dad the Bad had asked him to start me off with the basic principles of maths and we had this huge argument over zero. What I didn’t understand was that why, for example, should seven into zero be zero, why should the seven totally vanish, it was already there, right? He said, think of it as adding seven zeroes and that floored me even more because I already had the number seven to begin with. We had this massive row over that, in fact he even said I shouldn’t accuse him because he didn’t invent maths, and he stormed out of the room telling Dad the Bad that I was absolutely impossible and undisciplined and I didn’t understand rules.

‘How can they call maths an exact science if it’s based on rubbish? It’s not even logical,’ I fumed after Dad the Bad had soothed him out of the door.

‘Never mind, my undisciplined one,’ Dad the Bad said, sounding mildly exasperated. ‘Just pretend that the person who started it was right and go with the flow. Must you question everything?’

Adults are weird. When you’re small, they buy you fat boring books called Tell Me Why and such like and they’re always begging you to ask them things, and when you do ask them questions, they slime out of answering them. Mum, for example, always remembers that she left food burning on the stove or the iron on when I ask her difficult questions.

And then Dad the Bad said something that made me quite fond of him for the next five minutes.

‘Anyway, he just wouldn’t do, he had garlic-pickle breath,’ he said, looking disgusted.

‘Why Mr Sarkar, do you prefer mango-pickle breath?’ I teased.

Dad the Bad roared with laughter and hugged me. He smelt quite nice, I thought. I kind of liked the tobacco he put in his pipe, it had a nice dark chocolatey aroma.

So I learnt maths with Dad the Bad and I learnt to like him quite a lot in the process. He was much better than that annoying Ms Murthy at any rate, and explained things so much better. Also, he promised to buy me a guitar of my own if I managed to scrape through in maths so I really tried harder.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I met Sanju in the lift one day and he was nice to me again. I mean, he said this friendly hello and asked how far I’d got with the guitar.

‘I can play Dido’s Don’t Believe in Love,’ I bragged. Well, I couldn’t play the whole thing, just a bit, but I would learn it soon enough anyway.

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