(5)... Papa's Last Summer
“Try your best to help us, Maya”, he said, “We shall be eternally indebted to you.”
“Let him live his life, Rahul” , I said. “That would be the best for all of us.”
In the evening I went to meet Papa. He was sitting out with his friend in the tiny lawn of her flat. I yelled a loud “Hi there” from the gate. Papa exclaimed “Maya!” in surprise, and came running to the gate. He was quite overcome with emotions. He held me at an arm’s length and looked at me for a full moment before he could speak.
“When did you arrive?” he asked at last.
“This morning,” I replied.
One could say we were strangers, the way we greeted each other. Papa was still not himself when we reached the small tea table at which his friend was sitting. “Meenakshi, my daughter, Maya,” he said in a constricted voice.
I sat in silence. Meenakshi, the doe-eyed. I savored the name as I looked at her. She was staring at me frankly with large, brown eyes behind spectacles. As I met her gaze, she winked at me. I found myself grinning at her. I decided that I liked the vamp.
We said “hello” to each other simultaneously. It struck me at once that she was the exact opposite to what my mother had been. She had short brown hair compared to Amma’s long black plait. She was short, fair and plump, and had white streaks in her hair. Amma had been tall, dark and slim, her hair dyed a severe black.
I looked up and saw Papa standing with one hand on each of our chairs, looking down fondly at both of us. “The luckiest man alive,” he said. “Two beautiful women so near me...”
“...and one of them even willing to make some tea for the other,” Meenakshi finished for him, getting up to go inside. Papa pulled her chair for her and helped pile up the used crockery on the tray.
As Meenakshi went inside, Papa settled down on a chair next to mine. I looked at him keenly. He was vibrating with health and good grooming. He even wore his clothes with a difference that made him look ten years younger than he appeared when I last met him. In fact, he looked positively handsome and dashing.
Papa was watching Meenakshi go inside, oblivious of my scrutiny. I realized that I was intruding upon his privacy, and hastily shifted my gaze to a flower pot.
Nevertheless, I was excited. I had not expected such a manifest change in his countenance. And it was very gratifying.
Papa interrupted my silent thinking. “Maya, I am in love!” he said, softly and warmly. “And she is a professor in literature. Can you believe it?”
We laughed together at this. Papa’s aversion to literature, and anything even remotely related to it, was a long-standing family joke. Himself an engineer, he had objected to my studying arts on the same ground.
“She is a food and Shakespeare fan,” he informed me. “If-music-be-the-food-of-love,-serve-more type.”
I was awestruck by the polar opposites that Papa and Meenakshi were. But what was even more astonishing was that he was taking an interest in her preferences, quoting Shakespeare. Probably she was also doing the same.
“I was so worried that you might have had an accident, Papa,” I said, as I told him about the foreboding telegram that had brought me to Delhi.
Papa smiled at me, reassuring me without saying anything. Then he said slowly, “This is a sort of accident, bete, an accident of fate.”
We sat without saying anything till Meenakshi returned with the tea. There was so much to say that it was best not to speak at all.
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