Ten Things I Know About My Dad

1. His name was Pythagoras Chaudhury. I know, right? Who’d call their kid Pythagoras? Well, Byron Chaudhury-Roy, for one. Grandpa Byron had got his name because his father loved English classical poets. He once told me, “It could be worse, Al. I could have been called Elizabeth Browning.” I laughed, even though I didn’t know who Elizabeth Browning was. Anyway, Dad called himself Pye, and sometimes for a joke wrote his name like the Greek letter pi. You know: π. His sister’s called Hypatia, and she lives in Canada, but I’ve only ever met her the once. Well, twice actually, if you include when she was five, which we’ll get to later. Dad said that Hypatia was the ‘mother of modern maths’. The original Hypatia, that is, not his sister. She’s an estate agent.
   
   
2. He loved me very much. This is what Mum always tells me, so it must be true.
   
   
3. His favourite meal was fish and chips with chilli pickle. He said to Mum that, like them, it was the perfect Anglo-Indian marriage. Except he was only half-Indian, because Grandma Julie was Welsh.
   
   
4. He was very, very clever. He once built a dishwasher in the garage from old parts that he got off a friend. Mum said it didn’t work very well, but she never said that to him.
   
   
5. He and Mum met when Dad was a student at university becoming a doctor. Not a real doctor, but an engineering doctor. That’s what they call you when you pass an exam called a PhD, so his name was really ‘Doctor Chaudhury’, though he never called himself that in case people thought he was a real doctor and wanted him to cure them. Mum was working at the university bookshop.
   
   
6. He wasn’t very handsome. I know that sounds mean, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t ugly or anything, not like Tara Simmons’s dad, he was just … all right. I’ve seen photos and video and stuff, and he’s sort of skinny, with loads of black hair (‘a bird’s nest’ Mum says) and a slightly pointy nose. It’s his smile you notice, though. Mum says it was his smile that she fell in love with first. There’s a picture that we had up on the mantelpiece until shortly after Mum started going out with Steve, and Dad was grinning at the camera and you could see what she meant. When he smiled he became almost good-looking, except for a crooked bottom tooth. I think he looks nice. I wish Mum hadn’t taken the picture down. She probably thinks I haven’t noticed.
   
   
7. My dad didn’t really have any hobbies, like football or fishing. He just liked doing stuff with computers. At work he wrote software programs that helped other programmers write their software programs.
   
   
8. He died four years ago, when I was eight. I have tried to forget most of it, but I do remember the ambulance, and going to stay with Aunty Ellie. Everyone said I was being ‘brave’ but I just didn’t feel like crying until a few days later, and by then it was too late to start.
   
   
9. He could sing songs in Punjabi. There was one that he taught to Mum as well that they’d sing to me at bedtime, but she never sang it after he died. I asked her about it not so long ago and she said she had forgotten it, but I think she might have been fibbing.

That’s only nine, but I can’t think of anything else. Is that really bad of me?

I’m sometimes scared that I’m forgetting what my dad was like.