Next morning Vinod rang up his immediate superior the Deputy Director in the Directorate of Estates to tell him that his revered father had slipped in the bathroom during his ablutions and sprained his foot: he therefore craved his indulgence for being granted leave of absence for the day, so he may be able to attend to his filial duties! Mr. Aiyer, Vinod knew well, was fond of ornate English and would be pleased if he garnished his request for a day off. Having made his excuse, Vinod was ready to take his father for an outing. With Sheila gone to her office and Vibha attending to her toilette, Satya herself made them a hearty breakfast of stuffed parathas loaded with large chunks of fresh butter that her daughter in law had made from cream that very morning. Washing down the heavy repast with strong tea - Baba liked his tea steaming hot - the father and son were on their way to the excursion. As they reached the ground level, Vinod asked his father to sit on a cement slab while he went to hire an auto-rickshaw for the whole day. It had to be an auto-rickshaw and not a yellow-topped taxi. The latter invited too much attention. Privately, money had never been an issue with them. Baba had inherited extensive property including an apple orchard near Solan, and during his active life he had multiplied his fortune by prudent investments in government-sponsored issues. In his expansive moods, he used to tell Vinod, “Veenu, if government service is any good, it is because you learn how to enjoy wealth without invoking your neighbours’ jealousy.” Baba was the first to climb into the three-wheeler. He masked his excitement by worrying unnecessarily about his son’s absence from office. When he was section officer, Baba said, he would ensure that all his subordinates were punctual and regular in attendance. If someone was persistent in failing to keep time, he would not hesitate even to report him to the administration and have him penalized. Those days people had respect for their seniors and the latter too watched the interests of their juniors. It was just like in family. But how things had changed! Even one’s own father was looked down upon as a burden….Vinod listened to his father’s verbiage for some time and then told him softly to relax and enjoy the trip. They were approaching the Ring Road. Baba asked the driver to take a turn towards the Safdarjung Hospital. To a surprised Vinod, he winked mischievously and said in an undertone. “Today we will give ourselves a treat”. “At the hospital?” “Wait and see.” At the big Safdarjung turnabout, the driver again sought direction and Baba asked him to drive straight to the Union Public Service Commission office at the Shahjehan Road. The cab came to a stop at the red light. Engulfed in heavy fumes of a hundred engines revving up together, Vinod wondered whether he had done the right thing in offering to take his father for an outing. What would he be doing at the UPSC office which conducted examinations for the Civil Services? UPSC, of all the places! He was not a youth in his twenties to be thinking of such competitions. Was then Daddy in some sort of dementia? The traffic light on their side turned green and their auto sped towards the destination. In a few minutes, they passed the Dhaulpur House and as the driver slowed down at the sight of the UPSC office, Baba asked him to move on. They took a turn to enter into a smaller lane. On one side there was a row of kiosks, selling cigarettes, pans, tea and cold drinks. Towards the other end of the lane, a large number of office workers - both men and women - were eating out of leaf plates. At Baba’s direction, the driver parked his cab near that shop. Vinod felt the prickly sensation of many people staring at him as he came out of the vehicle. They were mostly young. The women among them were fashionably dressed up. He heard his father shuffling inside the cab. A feeling of embarrassment for his father’s misshapen figure arose in him. He suppressed it with some difficulty. What the hell, he remonstrated with his juvenile self, while extending a hand towards the old man, the feelings of the man sitting in there - who was his own Daddy - were much more important to him than the derisory glances of all the world. Leading his father to the shop, Vinod stole a glance nevertheless to the nearest cluster of patrons. They were all busy, eating and talking among themselves. It surprised Vinod that Baba was a known figure here. The shop-owner himself took time off from his till and escorted them to a bench inside the shop. Baba grinned to Vinod in triumph. “What will you have?” he asked, as if he and not fat stall-owner held the place. Vinod smiled sheepishly, making an indeterminate gesture. For the next half an hour Baba was in charge. First came gol gappas, perfectly round in shape and golden in complexion. Once in mouth, they went crunch-crunch and left the palate tingling with a bouquet of sweet-sour-salty-pungent tastes. The brown-and-green pani that the gol gappa man poured from time to time in their small bowls smelled and tasted better than any gol gappa pani Vinod had tasted ever before. Even the burps it induced left him happier, asking for more. Baba now caught the eye of the man at the counter. They had had enough of gol gappas and would he bring them chat. After demolishing platefuls of chat, the father and son had dahi baras. The tasty snacks had made Baba very cheerful. Playfully he thumped his son’s back. “Go, tell the driver we are ready now for the next leg of our journey,” he said. Vinod brought back the scooter-wala with him and they sat again in the auto. He felt that his father was eyeing him humourously. There was a large spot of chutney on Vinod’s shirtfront. “You are becoming fat, Veenu,” said Baba with laughing eyes. “Watch out! Else people will say, ‘he a hunch-back and his son a football, what a duo!” Baba laughed uproariously at his own joke. Vinod, however, found it difficult to join his father in bonhomie. Of late, he was becoming rather sensitive about his paunch. From the Shahjehan Road they went to the Ghantewala sweet shop in the Chandani Chowk. Here Baba ordered half a kilogram of jalebis. Vinod made some noises about Daddy’s diabetes. But when the ‘richly red-brown, syrupy sweet and made-in-pure-desi-ghee’ jalebis - as the legend on the shop’s front advertised them - were brought before them on the table, he found his reservations melting in their anticipatory warmth. Baba, taking advantage of his son’s diffidence, put a large jalebi in his mouth and said, “the best way to appreciate a crisp jalebi, my son, is to eat it fast, before it gets cold and limp.” The jalebis had been delicious. Baba was now eyeing the stainless steel basin of rabri, that shone temptingly through the well-polished glass-and- aluminium showcase. “See there, Veenu! There’s rabri, the best you can have anywhere in the town!” he said zealously to his son. “Personally, I never cared for this sort of thing -too much of concentrated fat and sugar, my doctor once told me.” He now tried to sound guileless, “But I wont mind if you had a hundred gram plate for yourself. Ghantewala uses malai of the purest buffalo milk and a tad of sugar, bas. All else is the wizardry of his hands. You have to taste it to believe.” Vinod had inherited his father’s weakness for the milk confections, but of late he had taken to hiding his passion like one does a liaison. He decided to go along with his father’s game. “I too hate rabri. Its very sight puts me off,” he said in a sophisticated tone. “But there’s no harm in giving it a try once in a while, what do you say? One doesn’t have this sort of outing every day!” Baba gave a conniving smile to Vinod and ordered for two plates of rabri. The languid rays of the afternoon sun made their eyelids droop with heaviness. In the prevailing stillness of the shop, the father and son heard the dulcet strains of a shabad emanating from the loud speakers of the nearby Gurudwara Sisgunj Sahib. Finding himself in imminent danger of falling asleep in the strange surroundings, Vinod proposed to Baba that they go to the shrine. At the mention of the gurudwara, Baba roused himself from languor. Clutching his son’s arm for support, he discarded the chair and was ready to be taken out to the road. Now Vinod realized the immensity of the task ahead. There was a multitude of DTC buses and trucks and cars and tongas and rickshaws and scooters, and hand pulled thelas and bicycles - all vying with each other to assert their right of passage from all sides. Whatever little space was left on the road was filled by a whole lot of pedestrians, each one daring the wheeled machines to outsmart him. Vinod was puzzled. How could he have missed this melee a few minutes earlier when he had entered the shop with his father! But he was sure he needed help. Telling Baba to bide in the shop, he went half a kilometer away to the crowded parking lot near the Town Hall to fetch the driver of their hired auto rickshaw. It took the two younger men all their ingenuity to maneuver the invalid old man to the temple’s main hall. When Baba and Vinod were finally seated against a wall, Vinod whispered to the driver to come back in half an hour. The granthis were singing a particularly sweet hymn. Devotees entered the sacred portals and on offering their obeisance to the Holy Granth Sahib sat in a pious hush in the large hall; men on one side, women on the other. Even the ceiling fans whirled the air in godly silence. In the serenity of the sacred place, neither Vinod, nor Baba knew when they had slipped into deep slumber. Vinod felt some force was pulling him upwards. He opened his eyes. It was the auto rickshaw driver tugging at his shirt impatiently. “Chalo, babu, you two have been snoring in this holy place for the last one hour.” Vinod glared at the man’s insolence. He had lost his bearings. Then his ears caught the familiar sound of his father’s snoring. Baba was reclining against the wall, his legs spread wide on the durri. A trickle of saliva drooled from his open mouth and wetted a small portion of his shirt. Shamefacedly, Vinod looked around. The congregation was rapt in recitation of the scripture. He nudged his father awake. The old man had never been more pliant. They left the gurudwara in silence. As the auto rickshaw sped homewards, Bawa dozed off again without showing any remorse. Vinod felt an unreasonable anger rising in him against his father. The tiny cab thumped as its wheels met an unexpected obstacle. The old man opened his eyes at the rude interruption. “You were snoring! You were snoring even in the gurudwara…,” Vinod said to him in an accusatory tone. “As if you were whisking flies off my face while I snored!” “I did not mean that. But Daddy, why don’t you accept that we both made a nuisance of ourselves in the gurudwara!” “No, Veenu, we did nothing of the sort!” “Yes, we did. Only you don’t want to acknowledge. That’s the problem. The older one gets, the more difficult it becomes for him to admit his follies.” “Tell me, Veenu, why does one go to a temple or a gurudwara?” “To pray. Not to lounge in the prayer hall indecently while the priests say the Holy Word…” “Listen, my son! One comes to a holy place to be with the Creator. He is our Father, our Mother, our Best Friend. Why should you feel sorry for having dozed off in His abode? Would an infant ever fight shy of sleeping in its mother’s lap? In Lord’s presence everyone does what becomes him best. The granthis chanted verses from the Holy Book and we two felt so good, we went to sleep…” “How about all those people present in the gurudwara? What would they be thinking of us!” “For you it’s always the other people, as if you were acting out your life on the stage. When will you start living? You enjoyed a catnap in the gurudwara and are now feeling guilty about it, like a schoolboy caught napping in the class. But I don’t have any guilty feeling. Leave me out. I want to be as God has made me. If others don’t like me for that, I just don’t care….” The three-wheeler was having an easy time on a well carpeted road of Lutyen’s Delhi. Its recently serviced diesel engine was emitting a healthy purr, which gladdened the heart of the driver. At this time of the day, the road was as quiet as a sea before a storm. Soon it would be the closing time for the offices; and the zipping vehicles would congeal into a roaring mass. Baba had become earnest. Grabbing Vinod’s hand, he said in a choked voice, “Beta, you have given me one whole day of happiness. Others perform shraddha to appease the departed souls. What’s the use? The dead never come back to enjoy the feasts. You have done the honours while I am still alive and in full senses.….” Vinod did not quite know what to say. He patted his father’s hand feelingly. During the rest of the journey, neither the father, nor the son felt there was any further need of words between them.                                    *** The End ***