One

Let's start at the very beginning. They say it's a very good place to start.

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This is likely to be a space where I talk parenthood. But as I put proverbial pen to paper for my very first post here, I realise that it has got to be one about my own parents. So here goes.

I must have been about eleven years old. It was a cold Saturday morning, and my mother and I had just had yet another fight as she tried to get me out of bed. It was too early. It was always just too early.

I grudgingly peeled off the warm, heavy blanket and marveled at how perfect it seemed. It was fuzzy – not like the comforters that stopped doing their name justice on winter mornings with their cold cotton cover patches that froze way too soon. Those would attack your skin on mornings like these. But not this one. This would just always be warm to the touch.

Daddy had carried this blanket home from somewhere in the Middle East. Mora was the brand name. Ghastly in prints, but the Kapoor family urban legend had it that the ghastlier the print, the better its quality. I digress. The point is that Daddy carried this blanket back with him from a work trip. Seven feet by seven feet, weighing about 6 kilos. There was no way this thing could fit in a suitcase. He must have paid to carry it separately. But I recall the blanket itself took a few months of conversations about setting aside money to buy it. Work trips for the parents were always annoying like that: What came back from foreign trips was blankets, multiple bottles of baby lotion, and crockery! Plates are plates, man, who cares about stuff like that?

But that Saturday morning, like so many before and so many after, this blanket was my best friend. And I hated Mumma for separating us.

I dragged myself down the stairs and Daddy was already ready. Reading the newspaper, eating toast off his signature plate, smiling his sweetest smile at the groggiest, grumpiest almost-teenager.

He drove me to school that day. It was parent-teacher-meeting day at school. It was almost always he who took me. The exception. My teachers really liked him – even today they remember him as one of the only dads who came to PTM alone, and not because they were on driver duty for mom.

But I didn’t walk into school with him. At a traffic signal on the way there, I spotted my classmate in the car next to us. And quickly decided to move to her car. We weren’t even friends, really. Just sat a few desks away from each other in class, sharing the same mouth fog on days like these. But it wasn’t the condensation of our exhaled breaths that drew me to her. It was that her car was shiny and big. And ours, a Maruti 800. The colour of cold coffee.

And just like that, I jumped ship. On that cold Saturday morning, my father and I went to school at the same time, just in different cars. Perfect strangers, who’d guess his blood ran through my veins? I certainly hoped no one would.

I was embarrassed. But not as embarrassed then as I am now, of this fact. It took my parents a lot of saving up, a lot of rationing of their already modest means, to buy and maintain that car. My father worked until the day before he died, at almost 71 years of age. My mother, who retired at 60, continues to hustle on her own business that she started post retirement. It was her dream, a passion she couldn’t afford because she needed the job. But today, she knows no weekends, she fights to keep her dream alive.

I write this in 2022. My father is dead, my mother is older than she and I both like to admit. Looking back, there isn’t a damn thing I was ever deprived of. I always owned more clothes than I needed, spent more on one meal with friends than my parents did on a week of groceries, and went to a school that took my mother’s entire month’s salary for many years. And yet my father never let on how hurt he must have felt when I stepped out of the car for one just cause it cost more. I felt entitled to that bigger boot. Turns out I did deserve to be given the boot, just of a different kind.

Now when I think about it, beyond the price tag, our car probably cost a lot more than theirs.

I no longer grudge them the gifts that came from their work trips abroad. When in 2020 I returned to Delhi from a city with kinder weather, the first thing my pregnant body missed that winter, was a Mora blanket. When, post my father’s passing, we were clearing out our childhood home and moving Mumma closer to my sister, one of the things I took with me was a set of plates my father brought back from some country. Plain white with a subtle ring of grey. Just like Daddy.

I eat in them even today. I sometimes run my finger along that grey ring imagining that Daddy’s fingers traced the same curves as he stood in a Paris store several decades ago, wondering how he'd carry crockery back to India without breaking it. My heart will break if these do. Plates aren’t just plates, after all.