Episode 16: TT and Road Trips with Mamaji
Growing up, I anticipated trips to India like nothing else. Maybe its because of their infrequency; we usually went only once every 4 or 5 years, in the summer. When we did go, we could occupy our time with mom while dad stayed back home but sometimes he would come with us. As a result, permanently imprinted on me is that that every few years we would spend 24 hours flying across the world to hang out with our elders and cousins.
The family we spent the most time with was my mother’s youngest brother. She is the second youngest of nine siblings, and was closest to Mamaji. That’s what we called him - Mamaji - and as a kid, the thing that I remember the most was that he played table tennis or “TT.” He competed professionally for some time, and had the trophies to prove it. When I saw these trophies, they were shinier and grander than anything I’d ever seen in the USA where I would play tennis or baseball and usually only receive teeny participation trophies, the people in permanent forehand or batting swing on them encased in faux plastic gold with my name spelled wrong or omitted. The trophies that filled Mamaji’s house in Modi Nagar, Uttar Pradesh, were something else entirely.
Mostly, I looked forward to him and my cousins playing TT with us during those long and obscenely hot summers.
I remember riding in his Tata car early one morning, when the heat of the sunlight hadn’t yet hit, when the morning fog hadn’t yet lifted, and when the animals still caw-cawed their morning prayers. On the way, workers swept the streets and shooed off the stray dogs, and carts for pani puri and other delicately fried goods stood planted on street corners, on the verge of opening, cuw-chewing buffalo and cows whose tails swiped away flies. Some hours (minutes?) later we made it to a gymnasium somewhere and climbed steep stairs into a building that stood apart from the rest of the grounds. Through the doorways was one room, with one TT table. Windows fringed the entire room, a solitary light swayed above.
And Delhi was hot, it would sear right through you, so hot that you could burst. And that room had me burst the longer I was in it.
That time, we came to watch Mamaji play. Mamaji was a short, stocky man with a mustache and round metal frames that hugged his face, the lenses tinted just a bit yellow. He taught at the recreation department of a local Delhi college and always brimmed with energy. He was always doing something. Rarely did I ever catch him sitting just to sit. For him, sitting was a means to an end. And even while sitting, he would be perched at the edge of the seat, quickly sipping his chai, ready to go on to the next activity. I know because he told someone about the details of his perch to someone else who asked why he sat the way he did. And when he played TT, he focused this into something fierce and dynamic, arms swinging and legs moving amid the staccato of ping pong balls bouncing off the table as we watched in awe.
He was not short of one-liners (in Hindi), and him and my mom were as thick as thieves, always planning the next trip, always laughing or talking closely about something my young ears weren’t privy to because I was too busy playing cards with my cousins or watching cricket. I didn’t (couldn’t) appreciate how important this time was to my mom, or to me.
And whenever we came to India, he was our man on the ground alongside Mamiji, who is a national treasure of jokes and jest. Together, we took road trips (it was always road trips back then) to Jaipur and Agra, to Dehradun and Rishikesh. Crammed into a Maruti van, sometimes the kind where we would face each other in the back on seatbelt-less benches, the semi-paved roads forcing our arms to reach out for one another, to grasp for stability. We would hire a driver, and we would take our time, stopping at dhabas along the way, where much chai was enjoyed, and photo-ops of all of us holding up our clay mutkas was inevitable.
On those trips, Bollywood reigned. Songs from either the latest releases or classic cuts that all the adults would instantly swoon over, swaying their heads while the words synced perfectly as they sang along. Even my dad would bounce his head along, happily. Songs from the 70’s by Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, R.D. Burman, Kishore Kumar, and Mohammad Rafi from films like Mughal e Azam and Sholay became second nature to us. We would play unlimited rounds of Antakshari, the game where the player would emphasize the last syllable of the song, and then would repeat it for anyone to start the next song with that very same sound. Playing Antakshari felt truly democratic and participatory, in that anyone could jump in and start the song, including us kids - and everyone would join in without hesitation.
We kept going to India to see Mamaji (and others) and after numerous attempts at getting a tourist visa for him and Mamiji, they came to the Houston for my sister’s wedding and came to visit us in California. By the time he came to visit us, we knew he was suffering from some unknown maladies. At least, unknown to me.
In Spring 2014, after completing a demanding 1 year clerkship, and months before my partner and I were expecting our first child, I took a solo trip to India with my parents. We had designed an epic journey that started in Kerala and ended in Bangalore, specifically so that Mamaji and Mamiji could come with us. We hailed a (different) Maruti station wagon and driver, and would emerge hours later in a different state, in a strange city, with a new array of people. Most of the trip we spent seeing the flora and fauna off of the highways and roads and gullys en route to the next city and savoring the tepid AC pumped out by the wagon rather than staying still. We fell into routine of driving, getting into the car, and then talking and snacking, playing Antakshri and telling stories, and staring out the window. This was the first time my parents and perhaps also Mamaji and Mamiji spent a significant amount of time in South India, and our tour took us across Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, from the bottom tip of India where we watched the sunrise to the Ramanathaswamy Temple where I got doused by water 22 different times from 22 different wells because it was holy (and mostly because it was fun).
At the time, Mamaji was in the later stages of his maladies. Diabetes, cardiovascular issues, and some other unknown to me ailments. One time, prior to the 2014 visit, I went with him to his “doctor,” who turned out to be a dermatologist rather than someone certified to treat the issues that Mamaji was experiencing. I called out the quack. That this quack’s palatial home was undergoing some type of construction, funded by Mamaji and other patients felt like insult to injury.
After my return to the U.S., I learned months later that they went back to the quack out of desperation, in hopes of trying anything. I don’t blame them. He eventually went to better hospitals with the help of some cousins, but by that point, they couldn’t do much for him.
Some time later Mamaji passed. I didn’t understand it, he was only 60 something years old. He was younger than my mother.
In some ways, I wondered what was the point of all that TT, of all that exercise? Why couldn’t he beat whatever it was that he suffered through? When he came to California to visit us, he was in a precarious state, and sometimes not taking our advice on what to do. I wonder now if that was because he couldn’t bear to take advice from people he helped raise, or because he was just strong-willed, or both.
And then I remember how much care he put into all of us on those trips, in taking us to play or watch TT, how much care he put into the relationship with my mother. They were always talking. They were the closest of all their siblings.
.