footloose, it had to be my father.
My father had always dreamed of seeing the world. He never talked about his childhood, but I knew it had been very different from mine.
The fastest way to annoy him was to beg for pocket money. “You are spoiled, my child,” he’d mutter, doling out a few shillings. “There were days when I didn’t have anything to eat when I was your age.”
Is that really true? I’d wonder but didn’t dare ask.
My father wasn’t much of a talker—unless he was preaching to me about school. Those Sunday mornings when I baked with my mother were the best times to ask my burning questions.
“Why didn’t Papa have enough food to eat when he was a kid?”
“Is India really hot? Is it like the Kalahari desert?”
“Can we visit Sri Lanka one day?”
“Did your mama teach you to bake when you were a girl?”
“Have you ever eaten a gulab jamun with real gold sprinkles?”
Little by little, between sifting flour and mixing dough, my mother told me about herself and my father, how they met, their childhoods, and their lives before me. When she told me her stories, I listened enthralled, only paying half attention to my baking chores.
As a young boy growing up in India, my father used to watch the enormous ships that came into the harbor. He stared in wonder at the strange pale-skinned travelers who spilled onshore with their cameras and wide-brimmed hats. He would have given his soul to join them, to board one of those shiny ships and sail beyond the horizon.
His friends mocked him and his siblings teased him. His parents made a living growing vegetables along the railway tracks near the slums, and had a hard time feeding their five children.
My father, his brothers, and his sister, Aunty Shilpa, had worked since the day they learned to walk. No one believed a grubby boy from a low-caste family from the outskirts of a shantytown could travel outside the city. Journeying outside of Goa, let alone India, was an unthinkable extravagance. A childish fantasy.
Over time, though, and with help from newfound friends at tourist cafés and shops where he hung around in his spare time, my father taught himself to read in English. He was a keen student, and eventually put himself through the local shantytown school, but it hadn’t been easy.
His brothers thought he was being lazy. His mother accused him of being selfish. His father gave him a good beating more than once, for neglecting his duties and disappearing to school.
My father, though, had a dream and wouldn’t let go. He saved scraps of paper reeking of dead fish, stolen from fishmonger stalls, so he could write. He swiped any pen or pencil left unchecked at store counters, and he dove into garbage dumpsters at the back of bookstores, cafés and schools to unearth the one thing he treasured most: books, especially books about adventures in far-off, exotic lands.
The dumpsters behind international hostels where young Europeans and Americans stayed offered the best selection of all. Sometimes he found trash, but there had also been gems, like the day he discovered the tattered copy of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. He had found it without a cover, ripped, and smeared in fish oil. He’d cleaned it, taped back the pages, and carried it with him for the rest of his life.
But the greatest mystery of my childhood was how my parents had got married.
Every once in a while, I’d ask for the hundredth time, “Mama, how come Papa is from India and you’re from Sri Lanka?”
It took a long time before my mother opened up on this. It was three months before the car crash and we were making cakes for my father’s thirty-eighth birthday. To the twelve-year-old me, he was as ancient as the baobab trees of the savannah.
“Papa’s getting old,” I said to my mother as I poured the batter into blue cake liners. We were making his favorite cakes that day, chai fairy cakes, a rare treat for us all. She laughed. “He’s not that old, honey.”
Like good chocolate and fresh strawberries, loose chai tea leaves were not easy to find in East Africa at that time. My mother got her baking supplies from an Indian store in town.
It was a musty shop that sold outdated Bollywood videos, samosas smothered in oil, and illegal fifty-kilogram bags of rice with the blue UNICEF logo still on them. They even exchanged local currency for US dollars for a hefty fee, which you had to do if you ever wished to buy something from the fancy duty-free store downtown. At the back of this old shop was where the owners kept the special ingredients my mother ordered in advance.
My parents rarely squabbled, but I knew this was an issue between them.
“How can you go to that place?” my father would say. “You’re encouraging the black market, don’t you know?”
“That’s the only place I can find the ingredients I need,” my mother would reply in defense.
One day, I jumped in. “Everyone in school goes to the duty-free store or to Jo’burg,” I said. “Even Shanti’s family.”
“We can’t afford to go to Johannesburg to buy groceries, or anything else for that matter, honey,” my mother explained. “We’re not rich like Shanti.”
So, we baked using the out-of-date ingredients from that musty store. Still, I remember the cakes tasting delicious, and my father’s birthday cakes were no exception.
That day, while we waited for the cakes to rise in the oven, my mother decided it was time to tell me their story.
My parents had met at a university in England. They’d been on a program that gave scholarships to students from Commonwealth countries, students with high grades but with no funds to finish school.
It was the day my father returned home in the last summer of university that everything turned upside down.
His overseas education had initially turned him from self-absorbed son to local superstar in his shantytown, but no one was prepared to hear his announcement the day he came back.
He was planning to marry a girl he’d met in the UK, a foreign girl at that. The whole family, including grandparents, uncles, aunts, distant cousins, and neighbors, shunned him. "Even the lowest-caste families have standards to uphold," they murmured to each other, shaking their heads. "Doesn't he know these simple facts? What good is an education if he doesn't understand the basic principles of life?"
“Oh my life!” my grandfather had cried. “Marrying a non-Indian? May Lord Vishnu strike you for the shame you bring us!”
“You abandon your own family like this? You’re no longer my son!” Grandma had said when he asked her permission to marry the woman he loved.
“We told you so,” the sages of the neighborhood had said, nodding wisely. “This is what happens when you let your children go to school. When you allow them to go abroad, they lose all respect for our traditions.”
My father went from hero to outcast within a day.
It had been much worse for my mother, who’d also returned home with this news. She was the youngest of four daughters of a poor but up-and-coming family living on the outskirts of Colombo.
Over the years, her father had progressed from selling cinnamon sticks on the streets to carrying mail for the post office, a substantial jump in income and social status, a jump their mother never let anyone forget. Each of her four daughters had graduated from secondary school, a first in a community where women didn’t finish school but stayed home to cook, clean, and have babies. It was progress but old beliefs prevailed.
On my mother’s return, within minutes of intense cross-examination, her family discovered, to their utter horror, my father’s background.
“What kind of children do you expect to breed with this dark-skinned Tamil?” my eldest aunt said, spitting on the ground.
“Konkani,” my mother had tried to explain.
“No matter,” her sister had replied, “he’s not our kind.”
Kind? That always perplexed me.
I never noticed the differences between my parents or those of my classmates and teachers at my international schools. I knew they came from many countries and different backgrounds, but their “kind” was never something that came to mind. What I always remembered was how they treated me and how they made me feel.
I knew my father was color-blind; he had a hard time telling the difference between a blueberry cupcake and a mint one until he took a bite. Maybe, I thought, I was becoming color-blind too. They say it’s an inherited condition.
“This is what happens when you leave the village,” my mother’s mother wailed, beating her chest. “You get corrupted by foreigners. Aiyo Bodhisattva. What to do now?”
“If you leave with him, you leave us forever,” my eldest aunt had said, dismissing her sister with a wave of her hand.
“Ané,” cried the more compassionate of my aunts. “My young sister, what is this you’re doing? Let us find a good Sinhalese man for you.”
“But he loves me and I love him,” my mother said. “Can’t you understand?”
Her pleas fell on deaf ears. My mother had cried for days, knowing she had to make a choice between the man she loved and her family. I cried, too, when she shared this story with me.
In the end, my parents had followed their hearts. They moved, leaving behind their families, their friends, their pasts.
They used their newly acquired degrees to find work overseas. Their journey over the years hadn’t been easy, but they had made a new future together. Not an extravagant one, but a far better one than either could have imagined in their poverty-ridden childhoods.
I didn’t know it then, but my parent’s actions had left an indelible impression on me.