Old Man, Take a Look at My Life

Old Man, Take a Look at My Life

by Sanjiv Bhattacharya

Photo by Ryan Hafey

I watched him on the Arrivals curb at LAX, standing there in his jacket and slacks. He’s of the generation that still dresses up for air travel, only today he looked even older, staring into space as people streamed past on either side, expressions flickering across his face like ghosts. His inner life was spilling over. A look of concern, a faint smile. Just surface tremors, in the end, things unsaid that surged within, as they would for me too one day. Isn’t that the way things work? I’ll end up like this, old and emoting to thin air like a crazy person. Who was I kidding? I was doing it now, staring at him.
        “Dad!” It felt weird to say it out loud.
        “Oh Sanju!” Nervous chatter tumbled out. “Yeah, flight was OK, quite good actually. They put me in aisle, not window. That’s better so I can go to toilet. I’m old now.”
        We don’t hug in our family, so we just stood there for a moment.
        “I’m parked over there,” I said and dragged his suitcase to the cross walk. He followed along behind.
        “What about you, Sanju, how is your health?”
        “I’m fine.”
        “Good, health is most important. Oh, you drove here is it? Where did you park?”
        “Over there.”
        “You don’t have to pay your ticket first? Sometimes you have to pay.”
        “I know how it works, Dad.”
        This was his idea. As though he’d sat bolt upright in bed one night and realized that I’d been in LA for four years, his oldest son, and maybe I wasn’t coming home. Maybe I was done. We scarcely spoke as it was, except for the occasional phone call, a brisk, factual exchange about health and weather, and then silence would fall like a curtain and he’d hand over to my mother.
        But this last year, even those calls had fallen away. I’d stopped speaking to my parents, I had to. My dad, I’d barely talked to since I was boy, and as for my mom, her pessimism ran me down like a freight train. Just seeing her number flash up would have me googling the Samaritans, so my therapist suggested I “limit the calls.” Like the old joke— ‘Doctor, it hurts when I do that’ / ‘So, don’t.’ And it worked, a weight was lifted. Only now, I felt like a monster for not calling my mother.
        Then, an email out of the blue: Dad in a fluster. He’d picked some dates and he wanted to book the flight soon, or the price might go up, so could I confirm I’d be around? I called him back, and I was deliberately clipped and cold. Can’t do it, I said. Busy. My flat’s too small for guests. And my schedule’s unpredictable because I’m freelance, so a work thing could come up at any time. I knew he wouldn’t stand in the way of work and money. If there was one thing he had right about me, it was that both were in short supply.
        But he insisted.
        “You can work, that’s OK,” he said. “I’ll just keep you company.”
        That’s how we ended up here, in my Ford Focus, inching along the 405 at rush hour. After a brisk Q&A about monthly payments and insurance, it went quiet, the silence filling the car like fumes. The sound of home, only this time, punctuated by Dad reading out street signs and billboards.
        “Yield,” he said. “Howard Johnson. Gay-co.”
        “It’s Geico. Car insurance.”
        “Pollow Loco.”
        “Poyo.” Ten days of this. “You’ve got to pack a bag tonight, remember?” I said. “That job in Las Vegas tomorrow.”
        “Oh yes, the boxing match.”
        “Not a match, just an interview. Floyd Mayweather. I told you about this.”
        “He’s a boxer, isn’t it?”
        “Our rooms are booked, that’s all fine, but like I said, I’ll be working in the day, so you have to wait in the hotel. And I don’t know how long I’ll be, and you don’t have a cell phone, so I’ll leave a message in your room. But you have to go back and check, otherwise I won’t be able to find you.” I’d put all this in an email already, and it stressed me out then. I could just see him wandering about the hotel, lost. Vegas was no place for a conservative pensioner from India. Seventy-two years old. Not ancient, but old enough to drift onto the Strip and look the wrong way as he crossed the street.
        I’d made a CD of Motown oldies he might recognize—not that he likes Motown, especially. I don’t know what he likes, my own father. And for an hour, we had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide like Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. But between Gayco and Marvin Gaye, we made it to my little apartment in Sherman Oaks where Tawnya was waiting, the American daughter-in-law he’d never met before, the light-skinned Latina I married without telling anyone. She hugged him, which was awkward, as was the small talk that followed, the rictus ritual of “how was the flight” while my worlds collided, my alien halves, here in my living room. I hadn’t dared imagine this moment, my wife and father face-to-face, contemplating their foreignness first to each other, and then to me. Now that it was happening, I was utterly unprepared.
        We gave him a brisk tour like realtors in a rush, then I chivvied him out of the door, back to the cooped silence of the Focus, the tick tock of the turn signal. I felt the snap judgments click into place like seatbelts in that predictable brain of his, all the way to a motel around the corner to dump his bags, and then to the Baja Grill where we ate, father and son under the Sunbrellas. It was just the two of us; Tawnya thought we should have time alone “to bond.”
        “So, Sanju,” he said, clearing his throat. “This freelancing. Is it working?”
        “What do you mean?”
        “If it is working, OK, but you are still young. You can always come back to London and get a job.”
        “What job? I’m doing all right.”
        He looked skeptical. “Your mum is worried. Every day she says, ‘Why is he struggling in LA? Tell him to come home.’ You know how she is. But I tell her, ‘No, let me go first and see his condition. Only then I will decide.’ Otherwise how will I know?”
        “So, you’ve decided, is that it?”
        “Not decided, just discussing,” he said. “It is important to discuss.”
        I’d seen this act of his so many times—Dad, the voice of reason, Mr. Objectivity. As though he’d been sent by the government, the Department of Impartial Assessors, to survey the facts and dispense his verdict. He was tapping his little clipboard right now—let’s see, your apartment is small, the car is cheap, and your wife appears to be unemployed, so according to my charts…
        “Mum always worries,” I said.
        Dad chuckled. “Mothers do worry, it’s in their nature!” He clasped his breast, overdoing it as usual. “People come to our house, you know, our Bengali circle, everyone talking about their children. And they are all working in big banks and management consultant. They ask, ‘Oh, how is Sanju, what he is doing,’ and she doesn’t know what to say actually.”
        “Just say I write for magazines!”
        “That’s what I tell her! Just say what he is doing, who cares what other people think? I don’t care about these things.” A shake of his head to further dispel the notion. “But one article here, one article there. Is it really working?”
        “This is about money, isn’t it? I’m not earning enough.”
        “Not just money!” Dad snapped. “You always say money, money, money! But you haven’t taken a proper line. Like Sumit, he is management consultant in Coopers. Big company. He is on a track. And Bobby Mukherjee, he’s your age, and he is barrister now!”
        I stood up, scraping my chair on the concrete, a child again, throwing a tantrum. “Is that why you came? To say you’re ashamed of me?” My voice was shaking. People were looking. “I should just leave you here. You can get a taxi back to the airport.”
        I’d panicked him, the old bully, I could see it in his eyes. But the longer I stood there, the more my threat frittered away.
        “Sit down, Sanju,” Dad said, quietly, his face reddening. But I couldn’t, not now. I needed some kind of exit. Then it came to me.
        “I never asked you to come here,” I said, like a guy on a daytime soap. Then I pushed my chair away and marched angrily into the restaurant to wash my hands.

*

        

Meet at the lion, Derek had said. The giant golden one in the lobby. And sure enough, there he was, leaning against its paws, watching the revolving doors of the MGM Grand spin tourists into the hotel like a turbine.
        “Listen, my name’s Mark for this one,” he said, masking the subterfuge with a fixed grin. “Just let me do the talking. Have you told your old man?”
        I had. We’d been mostly monosyllabic since the Baja Grill—or since I was about ten—but when the plane banked and Vegas tilted into view, I pointed to the oasis of casinos sprouting preposterously from the desert and explained that the green one was ours. My friend Derek had wangled us a couple of free rooms. He was a professional gambler, mostly blackjack and poker, and casinos gave big players like him free stuff. Only Derek had won too often, so some places had banned him, which explained the fake ID which, yes, was illegal. Dad accepted all of this without protest.
        We hung back while Derek checked us in at the VIP desk. Dad took pictures of the lion on his little Olympus. “So big!” he kept saying. Then we headed for the nearest bar. I had a couple of hours before work beckoned; a pint was in order. Dad found a nearby toilet and Derek lined up a couple of pilsners.
        “So, what’s the plan?” Derek said, eyes full of mischief. I’d only met him a couple of times before, through a mutual friend, but we clicked. Another Londoner, portly and jolly, he had a few years on me and a rascal’s grin, the kind where his eyes almost close and you can’t tell if he’s winking.
        “Well, I’ve got that interview in a bit,” I said. “Today and tomorrow. I’m going to his house, you know.”
        “You taking the old man?”
        “God no, he’s staying here. No idea what he’s going to do, though, it’s not his scene, this place.”
        “Rubbish, he’ll love it here.”
        “He’s so straight-laced, though. Doesn’t gamble, doesn’t spa or whatever. And he hasn’t got a cell so if he gets lost, I’ll never find him.”
        “Get him a hooker and an eight ball. Job done!” Derek giggled.
        “You can’t talk like that when he’s around, I’m serious. He’s super conservative.”
        “Yeah, but he’ll have a drink, won’t he?”
        “A beer at lunchtime. Helps him nap.”
        “Hmm.” Derek stroked his chin. “OK, here’s what you do. On your way to see Mayweather, drop your dad off at Sapphire. The cabbie will know.”
        “What’s Sapphire?”
        “Biggest strip club in America!”
        “Derek.”
        “I’ll bet he’s never even had a lap dance, has he? It’s a crime. His generation, they worked hard all their life.”
        Dad returned from the bathroom in a state. “Sanju, I think we should check the room key first, because who knows if it doesn’t work? Sometimes it happens. And then what? I will be stuck, isn’t it?”
        “Pops, you want a beer?” Derek said.
        “Oh no, it’s too early!” Dad looked at me, concerned. “You have to work.”
        “Exactly!” Derek said. “He has to work, so you’ve got no excuse!”
        “OK,” Dad said, cheerfully. “I’ll have a bitter.”
        Derek bought a round and pulled out his phone. “There’s someone you two should meet, I’ve been thinking about this.” He leaned back to make a call and moments later, a dapper Indian man in a black suit came chuckling over to us from the craps table just a few meters away.
        “I’m standing here only!” the man said, in a ripe accent. “Such a coincidence! That is a good sign, heh Derek?”
        Arjun was in his 30s, like me, but he looked older and more distinguished. He had a thick beard and big gentle eyes, and he spoke in a rich tenor. He spoke to me in Hindi and I had to apologize.
        “Ah, you are an Englishman!” he said, disappointed.
        But Dad spoke Hindi, and they went back and forth for a while, delighting in the sound while Derek and I watched it like tennis. At the end, Derek said, “That’s easy for you to say!” and we all laughed.
        We ate at a noodle place, happy in the froth of first meetings. New people offer a fresh start. They smile and encourage. Arjun enquired about my life as an “intrepid journalist,” as Derek described me. Had I met Mayweather before? What were the odds of a knockout? As we talked, Dad slurped his soup. “Tell him the pimp story,” Derek said, about the pimp convention I covered in Chicago. And I would have but Dad hadn’t yet heard it and neither of us wanted to advertise just how little we spoke.
        Arjun had a colorful background. A Jain from Gujarat who worked as a diamond dealer in Antwerp, he said he’d come to Vegas a few months ago, “just for fun, like everyone, no?” He met Derek through a poker player they knew, and he had no particular plans, he’d stay as long as he wanted. It sounded glorious, the life of a playboy. When he learned that Dad’s mother tongue was not Hindi but Bengali, he spoke some himself, which made Dad so happy, he giggled, a high-pitched sound I hadn’t expected. Then Arjun signed for it, telling Dad to put his money away. “Let the MGM pay, Baba.”
        Afterwards, he invited us up to his suite. It was a thing to see. A lofted two-story apartment in an exclusive wing for high rollers, accessible only through locked glass doors and a separate elevator. It gleamed with chrome and glass and floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the mountains.
        “Oof, look at this!” Dad gushed, reaching for his camera.
        “Come, Baba, see the bathroom,” Arjun said. “There is a television in the mirror!”
        He called him Baba, as I should really. It was an endearing Indian convention to address elders as Baba and Ma, whether they were your parents or not. Dad certainly enjoyed it. I’d never seen him so happy.
        “So, what is your program?” Arjun asked. “Must be you are going to shows. O show is very good.”
        “We can probably get you Cirque tickets,” Derek said.
        It sounded perfect. An evening of Cirque de Soleil, free of charge, with no talking, no risk of a fight, and a little story for Bobby Mukherjee’s mum at the end of it.
        But Dad frowned. “I don’t need all these shows,” he said. “If Sanju wants, we can go.”
        “What about Grand Canyon?” Arjun said. “Now that is a must!” He twisted his wrist with an Indian flourish, screwing in an imaginary light bulb.
        “That is a natural wonder!” Dad exclaimed.
        This time, I made the face. “That’s a longer trip, we’re only here a couple of days,” I said, eyes on the horizon. It was the first note of tension.
        Derek looked at his wrist. “I should get going actually.”
        “Me too,” I said.
        “OK, but your Baba can stay, no?” Arjun fiddled with the sound system and suddenly Hindi film music filled the room. A slippery flute, a squealy singer. He stood by the window, his head wobbling and eyes sparkling. “Sanjiv tell me: you like Bollywood? Growing up, I listened all day this music. Melody is nice, no? It is wedding scene of course. Everything is wedding, wedding in India.”
        Dad was on the sofa now, tossing peanuts into his mouth and tapping his fingers on the arm of the chair.
        “OK Dad, I’m going now,” I said. “I’ll check the room key for you.”
        “Don’t worry, Arjun will help me. Just call when you are finished.”
        We left them there, Derek and I, with their Bollywood and their peanuts, and walked back to the elevators, back to Vegas Muzak, Britney Spears.
        Derek grinned. “You know they’ll just get a couple of brasses, those two.”
        I pushed the elevator button again. This was turning into a strange day.
        “Listen,” Derek said. “We need to have a proper drink, you and me. I’m having a mate over tomorrow, Lily’s going to cook something. So, you and Pops should come. It’s Brian, you know the one I told you about.”
        Brian was famous among Vegas’s most extreme gamblers. Seven years earlier, he’d taken a $100,000 bet to get breast implants for a year, only he’d kept them for reasons unknown. He wasn’t transitioning as such; he was just a man with tits. A father. I wanted to do a story about him, so Derek had been trying to put us together. But with Dad here, it wouldn’t work. Dad, who was already so convinced that I’d lost my way that he’d flown eleven hours to launch a rescue. So far, this trip was only confirming his suspicions. We were in Babylon, already accessories to Derek’s identity fraud. Then Arjun shows up with all his money and his Hindi, saying ‘Baba’ like the son he’s never had. And now this—a man with a C-cup. How could Brian possibly help my case?
        At the glass doors I turned to Derek. “Look, I want to meet Brian. But not with Dad there, it’ll freak him out. Why don’t I come over later, after he’s gone to bed?”
        “Don’t be silly,” Derek said, as we stepped into the jingle and roar of the casino floor. “You won’t even notice. Tell the truth, they’re only a bit bigger than mine.”

*

        

Floyd Mayweather was a wash. An HBO film crew was shooting some promo for his upcoming fight, so there was no time for an interview. I wanted to ask about his father because they were famously estranged. “Me too,” I’d say, and we’d bond like brothers. Instead, I got a tour of the house, an endless bragging tour, like that MTV show Cribs, until at last I’d had enough and decided to call a cab. His number two walked me to the door, promising “tomorrow, tomorrow” while behind him, Floyd was waving wads of cash at the cameraman shouting, “I don’t even know how much this is!”
        I did the math in the taxi. There were maybe fifty or sixty notes in that wad, each one of them a hundred. So, five grand or so. A single bet on the Pistons game for Floyd, but also the entire fee for my story, including expenses. Or six weeks of bills.
        I’d share none of these numbers with Dad, of course. He’d just flaunt them to my mother—look what I know that you don’t— and she’d convert them into pure, galloping anxiety, a remarkable process, like nuclear fusion, and with a similarly massive yield. Scientists should study it and solve our energy problems. Put her in a power plant, this little Indian woman with the wringing hands, and feed her mundane details about my life, like: “your son has bought a dog.” Oh no, now the dog’s going to take all his time when he should be focused on his future, and what about the vet bills, he can’t afford them, and if he has children, the dog might eat the baby, I saw it on BBC, etc.
        But Mum wasn’t waiting for me at the hotel, Dad was. And dinner loomed, a grim prospect. In twenty years, we’d scarcely spoken, much less spent an evening together, father and son—not until the Baja Grill, anyway. There was a time, there had to have been, when I revered him as a son should, but those memories had been replaced by his gritted teeth and raised hand, his spit-flecked anger. In the ’70s everyone got smacked around a bit and my story was nothing special, just the occasional middle-class slap, humiliating enough to shut me down. But that’s where the silence started, the seeds of it.
        At first, his temper brought Mum and me close, out of fear mostly, but also loneliness. She was stuck in a loveless marriage to an angry man a million miles from home and she had no one to talk to but me. So, while she folded laundry, with the door closed, she let the bitterness flow—how Dad had lied about his job to lure her to England, how he’d crushed her dreams, treated her like a maid, and threatened her physically. She mocked him and laughed at his failings, his fragile ego, and it became our secret. We exchanged knowing looks and eye rolls behind his back; we were like a people under occupation whose spirit hadn’t been broken.
        Dad knew. He’d always pegged me as an opponent. I looked like Mum—short, with a wide head and a big nose—and I was academic like her, while he was more practical, an electrical engineer who did DIY and grew tomatoes in his garden. Mum would goad him into sharing his interests with me to teach me something useful, but it always led to anger and scolding. Then I’d end up with Mum again, behind closed doors, commiserating. And when he walked in, we’d stop talking. He became a conversational fire blanket, carrying the silence with him.
        What I remembered so viscerally, even sitting alone in a Las Vegas taxi, was the disgust. Because that’s what it came to with Dad and me. Around the house, we repelled each other like magnets, never passing each other on the stairs. Eye contact was rare, touch unthinkable. It was revolting to feel his socked feet brush accidentally against mine under the dinner table. His every habit of speech and gesture made me recoil, the way he ate, walked, sat, and cleared his throat before answering the phone. Decades later I realized that I’d inherited many of those traits myself.
        By the time I was a teenager, I had more or less opted out. After years as the Arm & Hammer, soaking up the foul air, I receded from Dad’s temper, Mum’s self-pity, and my own partisan role in their feud. This was my protest, to do and say the bare minimum. And oddly, Dad did the same. We both withdrew from family life. While he shrank to a scowling figure on the couch, I skulked off to my room, each of us resigned to life on these terms. So much so that on Saturdays, when he drove me to and from a music school where I played clarinet in some orchestra—the kind of thing Indian parents force their kids into for the sake of college applications—even then, we scarcely said a word to each other. There was no stopping for ice cream, no attempt to bridge the gulf. He’d given up long ago. We both had.
        I knew why he’d come all this way. My leaving for America had shifted the alliances back home. Now, my parents were united by what they saw as my failure. They’d sacrificed so much so that their kids might have a better shot, but here I was in LA, living from check to check, and to salt the wound, I’d married some American girl they’d never met. Arjun was right, everything is wedding, wedding in India.
        So, my mother did what she thought a mother should. In a series of phone calls and emails about a year previously, she told me the hard truth—that I was an embarrassment to the family, a source of strife and shame, whose only hope was to fly home at once to get my life in order before it was too late. This was the message Dad had come to drive home.
        As the MGM Grand swung into view, I took a deep breath and called.
        “Hallo Sanju?” He picked up after two rings. There was no television in the background. He must have been sitting there, waiting. “OK, I’ll come down now.”

*

        

The strip in the late evening was an electric river, swollen with punters who poured in from all the tributary hotels. Flash boys chasing mini-skirts, name-badge conventioneers, and a million fanny packs, all of us giants in the long shadows, with the hot wind at our backs, urging us into the night.
        I used to charge into Vegas nights like these, the way a new puppy leaps into a dinner bowl. Tonight, though, I was getting a glimpse of the spindly-legged man I might become. He walked slowly beside me, agog at the 40-foot steak he saw on a video billboard, five-stories tall. As he reached for his camera, a woosh of digital dominoes replaced it with a different meat product, a row of shirtless Australian men covered in baby oil. “Thunder from Down Under,” Dad read, lowering his Olympus.
        It kept happening—every fifty yards or so, the sexual bacchanalia of Vegas would accost him. Even though Dad had come to London in the ’60s, his disdain for the sexual revolution was absolute. A pillar of his conservatism. Watching TV as a family, he would desperately switch channels at the slightest hint of nudity or even innuendo. We’d go from Benny Hill to golf, from James Bond to the Teletext channel. So, when a stripper van came past with two girls dancing on a flat-bed trailer in the back, he shook his head in disgust. And then a guy with a hoodie thrust a pamphlet into his hands. I knew what was coming before Dad could put on his reading glasses.
        “Oh dear,” he said. “Did you see, Sanju? He is giving blue magazines left and right!”
        “It’s not a magazine,” I said. “They’re escorts. Prostitutes, really. It’s illegal in Vegas, but not in the rest of the state, so they kind of turn a blind eye. They should just legalize it, like in Germany.”
        Now, he looked genuinely distressed. I sounded way too knowledgeable, and there was no trash can in sight, so he was stuck walking around with this thing in his hand.
        “Here, give it to me,” I said.
        “What? No, you don’t want all this!”
        “No, I’ll get rid of it for you!”
        “These prostitutes are very bad, Sanju. They carry so much disease and VD, I have seen on BBC.”
        I couldn’t tell if this was fatherly advice or if he really thought I visited prostitutes. Either way, he had a great story for Bobby Mukherjee’s mum back home. Oh, Sanju is doing fine, yes, he’s in Las Vegas now ordering prostitutes from a pamphlet he found in the street. Then he will give the VD to his wife who is white and unemployed. It’s all going very well.
        “You know this Arjun is divorced?” he said. “Western girl.”
        Was he baiting me? Was he suggesting that I get divorced too because my wife was—
        “I’m a bit worried actually,” he continued. “He is having some problem. Just a few months ago she left him and now he is here gambling and gambling. Must be he is gambling a lot, otherwise they won’t give him such a luxury room.”
        After I’d left, Dad and Arjun had spent the afternoon together. They wandered about the hotel, to the poolside restaurant and the shops, and Arjun wouldn’t stop talking. Somehow, he saw my father as a sympathetic ear. His whole life story came out, and now Dad was passing that story on to me. He became suddenly very talkative.
         Arjun was a Jain, a part of that life-revering religion whose most devout believers wear masks to avoid killing microscopic bugs by inhalation. There are many Jains in Antwerp, home to the world’s biggest diamond market, and they were rising there because they could outsource the cutting and polishing to family connections in India. Arjun’s uncle had emigrated from Gujarart to Antwerp in the ’60s, just as Dad had arrived in London, and he started a gem business there from the ground up. Then he flew Arjun over to join him, at twenty. And Arjun also flourished, building his own business and a small fortune with it.
        “He’s like you, Westernized,” Dad said. “So, he married a Belgian girl, quite pretty, he showed me the picture. But his family didn’t accept her. You know how they can be, these Indian families. It caused a lot of issues. These Jains are very strict.”
        Arjun’s family wanted to arrange his marriage. They’d found a match in Antwerp, another Jain from another gemstone family. But Arjun wouldn’t budge.
        “Sometimes things don’t work how everybody wants, like marriage especially. But you have to adapt, isn’t it?” Dad said. “His family didn’t adapt. At his wedding, only the girl’s side went, can you imagine?”
        “Arjun’s family didn’t go?”
        “Didn’t go! It’s very wrong. They didn’t go to wedding, they didn’t welcome her into family, didn’t visit her family. Nothing. These things cause lot of tension for a new couple. So, after two years she had enough.” He dusted his hands clean. “Divorce.”
        If only Mum and Dad had divorced, back when they were young and energetic, and could face the challenge of going it alone as immigrants in London. If only they’d chosen happiness over security. Instead, they wanted to arrange my marriage, if only to have one thing go according to plan. As the joke goes, never visit a doctor whose house plants have died. So Tawnya and I eloped. A private ceremony, no guests. Like the man said, you have to adapt.
        “The family should have supported him,” Dad continued. “Look at what happened. He married her anyway! You can’t stop someone. He is a grown man, making a good business so let him lead his life!”
        “They were ashamed of him,” I said. “They didn’t know what to tell their friends.”
        “Just say he is married to Western girl! It is not something to be ashamed. You did it! And I’m not refusing to meet, I have come all this way.”
        After the divorce, Arjun took a turn. The future he’d imagined had crumbled, as had his relationship with his family, and Antwerp became a constant reminder of what he’d lost. So, he left, selling his company and going on the road.
        “Just gave it all up!” Dad said. “First he went to Monte Carlo to do gambling. I think he has a gambling problem actually.”
        “I did a story in Monte Carlo once.”
        “He said it was too snooty there, especially being Indian, so he came to Vegas. Three, four months, he is going like this. Imagine the cost he is bearing!”
        “Money comes and goes, Dad, it’s not everything,” I said.
        “But to waste it like that. We don’t have money like Arjun but we are at least sensible. I have never gambled.”
        “You came to London from India with no job. That was a gamble.”
        “Like you!” he shot back. “You also came to America without job.”
        Of all the things we’d never talked about there was this—the fact that we’d both gone west as young men and struggled with the newness, the loneliness of a new country. The traditional motive for these journeys is ambition, opportunity, a kind of romantic striving. But neither of us is especially ambitious. I left to escape my parents and myself, to some degree, and I suspect he did too. Though it was harder for him, the culture shock, the language, everything. Maybe like Arjun, he wanted to marry a Western girl himself at one time, but it didn’t work out. Would he have been happier that way?
        We reached the Bellagio, at the lip of the lake out front, and people were gathering at the barrier, waiting for the show.
        “So, what did you say?” I said.
        Dad shrugged. “Not much. What can I say? I think he just wanted to let it out actually. It’s easier with a stranger. And because I am Indian. Did you see he calls me Baba?” He smiled. “I think he wants to tell his real Baba but he can’t.”
        “You didn’t give him advice?”
        “Not advice. He is your age now; he will do what he wants. I just listened and gave encouragement. I told him he is still young, he has his whole life ahead. Just keep looking forward, that is most important. All the time he is saying ‘my wife, my wife,’ but that is in the past now. That’s what I said. I don’t know if he will listen.”
        The musical fountains started up and the crowd whooped. Thick ropes of water swayed from side to side, in pink, white and yellow. Out came his Olympus again. He looked so happy, the fountains crisscrossing in his spectacles like fluorescent wipers.
        “Not everyone can forget the past,” I said.
        “Not forget, but dwelling on it is the problem.”
        “It’s not dwelling, it’s remembering. You can’t just pretend things never happened.”
        He looked at me. “No one is pretending.”
        The jets became spray in the night sky. Forget the past. That’s easy for him to say.

We ate at a Chinese restaurant that night at the MGM. Father and son drinking Tsing Taos. Son teaching father to make duck rolls in plum sauce. We looked the part, at least. And all thanks to Arjun. He’d become the patient, now, the one for whom hands are wrung, a topic we could agree on. The poor man was on a slippery slope and yes, his parents shared in the blame. I think we were both aware of the subtext, but to point it out would have broken the spell. Instead, Dad and I spent a couple of hours in relatively good spirits. It was a strange feeling.
        “You remember that Chinese restaurant in Florida?” he said. “The king prawns were so big!”
        I had to think. I was eleven then. That was the happy vacation, the one time that we managed to spend two whole weeks without a sharp word. In our family, digging out happy memories is like dredging a bike from a river, but for Dad, they were bobbing at the surface. Dad, of all people, was laughing about the good times, checking his rear view and seeing Space Mountain, not the time he slapped me in front of my cousin for not eating my tomatoes. He was getting off way too easily. You can’t sail in twenty years later talking about king prawns, and suddenly all is forgiven. You can’t break things and fix them whenever you feel like it. I haven’t eaten raw tomatoes since.
        “Let’s get the check,” I said. “I have to work tomorrow.”
        Dad’s smile dropped and he looked at his watch. “Oh yes. It’s half nine already. Getting late.”
        We returned to our rooms, his next to mine, and I helped him with the TV settings before bed. He padded around the carpet on his shockingly white feet, and I jabbed at the screen with the remote in silence. There was no call to feel this angry, I knew that, but this too was his legacy, this temper I’d inherited. And the revulsion returned. The smell in this room, of age and Old Spice, the whiff of his bedroom in Wimbledon. He had his Hush Puppies by the bed. That cheap old suitcase that reeks of India.
        “Why are the blinds closed?” I asked. “It’s so dark in here.”
        “I couldn’t open it. I think it’s stuck.”
        I checked behind the window for the switch and the curtains parted, revealing the Strip at night in all its glory.
        “Oh, it’s an electric one!” he chuckled, embarrassed. “Wah, look at that! You can see the whole Vegas from here!”
        He aimed his camera at the window. “Sanju, that is your boxer, isn’t it, Floyd Merryweather?” A huge ad for the fight appeared on the wall of the neighboring hotel. “He must be good to have a big advertisement like that.”
        “He’s the world champion, I told you,” I said.
        “People will be interested to read the article, I think.”
        And for an instant, I wanted to tell him about Floyd, the kind of a fighter he was and why I was interested, the kind of person I was. But moods have momentum and we rolled through that station without stopping. I put the tennis channel on and headed for the door.
        “Can you send me your article when you have finished?” he said. He’d never asked that before.

*

        

I got my time with Floyd in the end. The instructions came in the morning: head to some dingy strip mall downtown and look for a door marked Philthy Rich. Floyd was inside on a barstool in the middle of the office, watching the game and getting a fade. It was just me, him and his barber.
        I asked about his rift with his father, which next to mine, was of a different scale entirely, mythic in the way that both men were fighters, with the same name, Jr and Sr, the son trained by the father. It started when Floyd was 16 and Sr went to prison for five years on a cocaine charge. “My career blossomed when he got locked up,” he told me. “But when he came back, he still wanted to tell me when I can and can’t go out. He couldn’t accept that I call the shots now.” So Floyd fired him as his trainer and they’d been talking trash at public events ever since. But Floyd shook it off. He’d surpassed his father in every way. He was the greatest fighter in the world. “It’s not that I hate him, he just never let me become a man,” he shrugged. “He do him, and I do me.”
        I got worked up as he spoke, I couldn’t help it. I told him that I had father issues of my own, it all came out in a jumble. I even mentioned the Baja Grill. But Floyd just looked at me, and then turned back to the TV. “Check the sides one time,” he told the barber.
        Still, I left that interview on a high. The interview was finished, job done, finito. And some of Floyd’s swagger had rubbed off. Because I wasn’t a kid anymore either. Why should I care what Dad thought? That’s what I told Tawnya when she called on my way back to the hotel. “He can do him, I’ll do me,” I said. And she got all sentimental. “Give him a chance. He’s trying to patch things up because he doesn’t know how long he’s got left.”
        Dad had been at the hotel all day. On his own, this time. Arjun had a friend in town, and they were out for the day. But he’d left Dad a key in case he wanted to hang out in his fancy suite. So that’s where half the day went. Then he went shopping which explained the flustered voicemail telling me to not buy a bottle of wine for Derek’s party, repeat, don’t buy wine. He’d bought a bottle himself, that was why, a Goldilocks bottle: “not too expensive but not too cheap.”
         I spotted him waiting by the elevator, asking a waitress for directions. He was all dressed up. The same jacket as on the plane, with the elbow pads. No fanny pack either. Lose the plastic bag and he’d look all right.
        “Dad!” It still sounded weird.
        “Oh Sanju! How did it go, your interview. Good? I wanted to buy flowers for Derek’s wife but you have to go out somewhere. I think it’s far. Look.” He showed me the presents he’d bought for the kids, some chocolates and a Jordan shirt for Derek’s son.
        “Derek’s invited a friend of his to dinner as well,” I said. It was time. I told him the Brian story in broad strokes—the bet, the surgery, how he’d kept the implants. He frowned and said “oh dear” a few times. I reassured him that this was just for a story. A work thing.
        “When he goes in the street like that, don’t people pass comment?” Dad said.
        “I guess, I don’t know.”
        He went quiet for a moment. “OK, let’s see,” he said. “I won’t say anything, don’t worry.”
        Derek lived in one of those tract homes in the burbs, his place a clone of his neighbor’s but for the number on the door. But in Vegas, the outward uniformity masks all kinds of madness. Brian wasn’t there when we arrived. It was just Derek in his Tommy Bahamas, his two scampering kids, and his pretty wife Lily with her thick Sofia Vergara accent. “Oh, how sweet!” she beamed. “You take your Daddy on a holiday. What a good son!”
        We got the tour. As expected, Dad asked about the square footage, the down payment, the monthly outgoings for utilities. But Derek didn’t mind. He was proud. “See Pops! All this from gambling!” He showed us his “office,” a bank of computer screens where he plays six games at once. “Online poker’s where the action is now,” he said. “It’s where the idiots go. A fool and his money and all that.”
        “Arjun doesn’t play this type of gambling, does he?” Dad said.
        “No, it’s not really a job for Arjun like it is for me.”
        “Yes, because he doesn’t have all these computers!” Dad became animated. “He doesn’t take it in a professional attitude. Like this office.”
        “Well, I’ve got Lily and the kids to support. She likes a mall, my wife.”
        “Yes, like Sanju,” Dad said, not quite keeping up. “He isn’t just writing here and there. He is married and settled and doing his work seriously. Like a job.”
        Derek and I nodded in agreement, not sure whether he’d finished or not.
        “Speaking of jobs,” Derek said, “I think Lily needs a hand in the kitchen.” And as we went down, he took me aside and whispered. “By the way, Brian called, sends his apologies.”
        Sweet relief. “Oh, it’s totally fine, we—”
        “No, he’s coming, he’s just late. Had to get his tits waxed.”
        “Of course.”
        “Because his dress is low cut.”
        “Appreciate the update.”

When the doorbell rang, we all looked up. But Brian was nothing like I’d expected. Ruddy and blonde, he came bursting through the door in a rustling purple shell suit which he’d zipped up to his chin. If there were breasts under there, they were firmly taped down. He was full of noise, ranting about how the freeway was still one lane on the turnpike and councilman so-and-so. Whatever relief I felt at his outfit was dispelled by his rowdy demeanor—anything could happen with this guy.
        “I tell you it’s a mess!” he declared in conclusion, and plonked himself at the head of the table.
        Derek was delighted. “Here, Brian, meet Sanjiv. He writes for GQ.”
        “OK GQ. That’s fashion, correct?” Brian said. “Very good. I know everything about fashion, as you can tell from my outfit here. I’m just kidding. This was $12. Not bad right? It’s just clothes, it’s not important. It’s what’s inside that counts, am I right? And you must be the father, I assume?”
He gave Dad’s hand a vigorous shake. “Well can I just say it’s nice to have a bit of experience at the table. Some wisdom for a change! So, what brings you here, you checking up on your boy I assume? And so you should. I mean look, he’s mixed up with Derek here, who hasn’t done a hard day’s work in his life. A degenerate gambler I tell you!”
        “Here, pipe down a second Brian. Guess who he interviewed today, go on,” Derek said. “Floyd Mayweather.”
        “Oh, that guy, I can’t stand him. That guy’s a big mouth! He won’t stop talking! And if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a big mouth. Isn’t that right Lily? So, what did Pops do? Did you go?”
        Dad had a frozen smile on his face, trying desperately to keep up.
        “He’s asking if you went to the interview with me,” I explained.
        “Oh no. I stayed in hotel,” Dad said.
        “It wasn’t ‘Take Your Dad to Work Day’?” Brian roared.
        “That’s a good idea actually,” Derek said, filling everyone’s glass. “My Dad would be like, take a longer lunch, son, don’t work so hard.”
        Brian slapped the table. “Yeah! Ask her out, that girl in the typing pool.”
        “Typing pool?” Derek shook his head. “Shows how many jobs you’ve had.”
        It was a bawdy, noisy evening, the banter just knocking along, pinging around the table. Too quick for “Pops” and me too at times, but that was OK. Brian and Derek made sure to slow the train from time to time, to include him. It was sweet. See Dad, my friends are nice. No one mentioned the breasts, which was good, but Arjun came up. Brian hadn’t met him yet, and he had a hundred questions, many of which Dad could answer. He had a moment at the table. Everyone leaned in to listen, and we heard it all—the love marriage, the bitter Indian parents, the divorce, the heartbreak, the gambling.
        “I thought he looked wobbly,” said Derek. “He bets loose, there’s no strategy.”
        Brian sucked his teeth. “We’ve seen this movie before, haven’t we Derek? It doesn’t end well.”
        We came to a consensus—that Arjun should return to Antwerp and reconcile with his parents. His parents should apologize, and he should forgive them. There—the world put to rights.
        “You only have one family,” Dad said. The wine had unshackled the gates, you could tell.
        “See! That’s what I’m talking about!” Brian proclaimed. “The wisdom of our elders! Listen Pops, I just want to check this one thing.” He pulled a playing card from Dad’s shirt pocket. “I thought so. You’ve been stealing my cards.”
        “Oh!” Dad looked alarmed. “No, I didn’t steal it. I was just sitting here.”
        “That’s OK, maybe you put it there without thinking. Oh look, there’s another one.” Brian pulled another card from his pocket. “I see what you’re up to.”
        Dad giggled. That sound again. It turned out that Brian was, on top of everything else, an expert at close card magic, and for a good twenty minutes, he put on a show. We were all gathered around at first, but then Lily went upstairs to put the kids to bed, and Derek and I went out into the back yard for a smoke, leaving Brian and Dad at the table, a sight I’d never have imagined. Brian in his shell suit, pulling out trick after trick, and Dad, flush with wine, trying to guess how it was done.
        I’d always seen him as a bully, the ogre of my childhood, but Brian quite liked him, and so did Derek and Arjun. They saw an amicable old man who meant well, and maybe he was, maybe he’d changed—the regrets had stacked up and he’d come to make amends, to try at least. And if he could change, then so could I. Isn’t that the way things worked? Me being half of him. I had thought of Dad as a grim foreshadowing of my future, but standing at the pool with Derek, watching Brian and Dad in the living room, even ordinary thoughts began to pierce me—that maybe Dad had been deformed by the bitterness of our home just like the rest of us. And surely my rejection of him had been a part of that.
        “I’m going to cancel the flight tomorrow,” I said.
        “Oh yeah?” Derek pulled out his phone. “Want me to extend your stay at the MGM?” His eyes lit up, tickled by the kindness and the mischief both.
        “I’m going to take the old man to see the Grand Canyon.”

Photo by Sanjiv Bhattacharya