Daddykins by Kalpana Mohan

Author:Kalpana Mohan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

15

Hakuna Matata

Daddykins always observed how Tanzanians were inherently carefree, shrugging off misfortune with a ‘hakuna matata’-no worries, in Swahili—or a ‘bahati mbaya’-bad luck—and believing that another day would come and that money would come with the new day.

~~~

Such is the nature of illness that soon Daddykins talked about his esophageal dilation as if it were a condition requiring regular service, like a tyre replacement, an oil change, or a battery check. He would hound us until Urmila or I—whoever had flown down at the time—would call the doctor for a consultation and a procedure. By mid-year, Daddykins could not even eat a puree of steamed idlis with sugar and yoghurt. The stricture was so severe that at its most acute an endoscopy and dilation brought him relief for a few more weeks. We had fallen into a cyclical pattern of blockage and intervention. Vinayagam diluted the purees further. Now, on many afternoons, Daddykins could not swallow his biscuits with his evening coffee.

‘But they are the only thing that I can still relish by chewing,’ Daddykins said to Vinayagam one afternoon, when he suggested it might be time to stop them. My father flung his newspaper down on the coffee table. It landed in a crackling heap, its crease awry. ‘I should have just had that surgery in the first place last August.’

Vinayagam who had been reading Dina Thandhi set his paper down on the floor. ‘Saar, you don’t understand,’ he said, walking over and picking up Daddykins’ paper and folding it at its crease. ‘If you had elected to have surgery on your digestive tract instead of having a stent put in, you would have gone upstairs a whole year ago.’

While Daddykins continued to sulk into space, Vinayagam carried on in his somewhat tactless fashion. ‘In which case we’d be celebrating, right now as we speak, your first year in heaven away from us.’ I glared at him.

My father turned to Vinayagam now. ‘Fine, take those biscuits away from me too.’ He pointed to me and then to Vinayagam. ‘All this speculation that you both do. I hate what you and this fellow say. ‘Look, it’s getting stuck. It’s because you ate this. Or you ate that.’ I’m tired of your accusations. Sick, sick to death, of your theories!’ He sat in his rust-orange sofa, indignant and churlish, until, a few minutes later, he picked up his newspaper.

Despite Vinayagam’s manner, his persistence saw us through many challenging meal times. On one such morning, Daddykins had taken barely four spoonfuls of soup when he felt the puree wasn’t descending as it should. Water didn’t help either. He looked at the two of us and fed himself from the tip of a spoon. That morning, Vinayagam found a way to get Daddykins to finish his food while standing by his side—teasing, laughing, threatening, goading, cajoling and relating gory news stories to entertain him while he ate.

‘The problem is you and your sister let him go. I don’t,’ he said, describing Daddykins’ escalating problems in layman’s terms.

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