Of Tuesdays, Libraries, Baking Bread and more...

A Father's Day Special

Ishika Mitra

MAJMC Sem 2

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Happy Father's Day 

Life does not always come full circle; sometimes it's just a line- maybe straight, maybe wavy with lots of crests and troughs, but not a wholesome circle. It has a beginning and end; not the ever-flowing motion that a circle constitutes. On the summer evenings now when I am left alone with my thoughts, I often find myself thinking about the Tuesday evenings of my freshman years at university- the Tuesday evening that had set in motion a series of Tuesday evenings to remain etched in my soul forever.

It was a Tuesday evening in early spring in the British Council Library in Camac Street when after browsing through rows and rows of books till the closing hours of the bibliothèque, my father asked me if I would like to stroll down the lanes of Park Street. The year was 2016- I was a college freshman majoring in Economics. While some would argue that it is a very pragmatic subject, I was inclined to be less grounded in reality and more floating in my rose and honey-tinted dreams back in the day. The choice of my major was the first big mistake of my life but I tend to cut myself some slack for several reasons- I was too young, and the wrong major made me bond closer with the best man ever to tread the earth. The drudgery of studying, talking, writing and listening to economics and the mind-numbing terms the discipline came with, day after day all through the week, made me miserable. I needed friends who would discuss literature, cinema, and anything out of the world of share markets, mergers, economic policies, and Adam Smith. I don't have the greatest track record of making friends and in some ways, when I think back to the days gone by, it was spending time with my father that I enjoyed more than going to cafes and malls with my college friends.

The proposition of spending the evening in Park Street with my father was alluring and off we went to Park Street with two sacks of books we had secured from the library and a raging appetite. We strolled through the stores and restaurants with the bright, vibrant lights enjoying our ice creams, talking about the new books we had got and brimming with excitement about the upcoming few weeks of enjoying these books. Once home, we sat on the couch with all the books laid out in front of us telling Mum about our lovely evening and eventually getting engrossed in going through the books like a couple of gal-pals after a successful shopping spree at the mall.

This became a regular affair- every week my father would take me to the library on a Tuesday evening after he came back from the clinic and I got home from university; we would spend a few hours in BCL, get bags full of books and spend the rest of the evening in Park Street. I would look forward to Tuesdays all week long and Tuesdays made me more excited than Sundays because discussing books with my father is more enjoyable than sleeping in on a lazy Sunday. When summer came and the city turned too hot and humid to walk down the streets for hours even in the evenings, we would resort to a small cake shop and read one of the new books in silence, occasionally breaking the flow to show the other one something amazing we had read and most of the times it would be me asking him meanings of things I read but didn't comprehend. And my father, he always had the answer to everything!

This little father-daughter tradition continued all through my undergraduate studies and truth be told, these Tuesday evenings made the rest of the week full of RBI regulations and calculus and GST implications, somewhat bearable. When I was finally done with the insufferable three years of enduring the discipline of pragmatic studies of the economic sciences, I decided to embrace something that came naturally to me- the arts. Might I say that the first and my biggest cheerleader was my father when I announced that I wanted to study cinema! How he prepared me and guided me to crack the entrances to film schools is a whole different story but when I did crack and eventually started packing to move away for university, he got me a huge box to fill with books that I wanted to take with me.

Life at my second university was different. I lived in a picturesque little university town up in the hills of the Western Ghats several thousand miles away from home; studying cinema, living with friends in the dorm, walking to classes instead of taking any transport, swimming in the evenings and taking weekend trips to sea beaches and waterfalls outside the town; I lived amidst nature with friends who loved cinema and would stay up with me to talk about cinema and books and I had a new found freedom at the ripe start of my twenties in a way I had only dreamt of.

Nevertheless, I carried on the tradition of going to the library on Tuesday evenings and eating cakes or ice cream while reading. Our town library had a great selection of books and every Tuesday, I would pick a few, buy a cake or ice cream at the Student Plaza and sit on a park bench and enjoy my time. I would call my father and tell him about what I read and he would tell me about what he read. When the heavy monsoons descended on the Western Ghats, I took my book and pastry to the dining hall and had my Tuesday evening there. My friends knew not to disturb me on my Tuesday evenings.

This life so replete with blossoms on trees and walks in the cool evening breeze came to an abrupt end with the pandemic taking the world by storm, or might I say, by a raging cyclonic tornado. The universities were shut down overnight and we packed whatever we could in a few hour's notice and flew back home leaving most of our stuff behind. Sadly enough, I had to leave most of my books in the dorm for the airlines would only allow so much luggage, pandemic or not. Thereafter began a long, almost never-ending ordeal of being confined within the cemented and secure walls of my home. The world had shut down it seemed back then, except the hospitals which couldn't keep up with the inflow of COVID-stricken patients. My father being a frontline worker got no respite from working. I remember him serving every day of every week, wearing a five-layered mask from morning till evening, going without any food or water till he came back home and not a word of complaint would fall from his lips. Bordering on sixty-five, he never missed one working day in the two years that the virus killed millions of people.

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I had to spend a year and a half at home, but our Tuesday tradition continued with a few tweaks to it. We started baking. My father had always been a baker in his soul- he was a doctor by day and a baker by night kind of a person. I grew up eating cakes made by him and in those pandemic-shaded years of being hidden from the world, he took his baking several notches above. I was his apprentice. We baked muffins, cupcakes, pies, pizza breads, pita breads and pastry puffs and a lot more. Eventually, we became more experimental with our adventures in the kitchen and ventured on to make anything that we would consider ordering at the restaurant. From Tuesday evenings, we extended our collaboration to Thursday evenings and from there to the weekends. From spring rolls, Vietnamese summer rolls, Vietnamese Pho, French Onion Soup, butter croissants, Shepherd's Pie, apple pie, roast turkey, bao buns, Georgian Khinkali and Japanese Gyoza to South Indian appam, Nepali Thukpa, homemade Gulab Jamuns, we made it all. We would often times flex our culinary skills and capacities to our family, in jest-"You name it, we will make it."

Time went on, the pandemic faded away and I continued my studies into my late twenties- from the South of India to the North of Europe and back to my homeland, I saw it all while being in academics under the tireless encouragement of my father. Through it all, we kept our Tuesdays alive. But, time changes. People age. My father was like Atticus Finch in more ways than one- he was an old father like Atticus, he was my role model like Mr Finch was to Scout, and he was a voracious reader, just like Mr Finch; and believe it or not, my father was also in awe of Atticus Finch.

The age began to show on my father and our weekly trips to the library ceased for I wouldn't go to BCL every week without him accompanying me. We began buying books, me more than him and he built me new bookshelves when I ran out of space on my old one. We kept up with our cooking, mainly on Tuesdays for he returned home in the afternoon and we could work throughout the evening on some complicated dish. Our latest obsession as well as our latest flex was baking our bread- yes, we made our own bread, for the week. We no longer consumed store-bought bread- we ate gourmet bread or so we liked to believe. All my mother's friends knew about it for she couldn't help flaunting it on her Facebook. As for me, I photographed them just like I used to photograph everything we cooked.

Good times don't last long and neither did this. Our house smelled like a boulangerie and the oven buzzed plenty of times a day and often one could hear while passing by our dining room window, a happy, cheery giggle and soft screams of 'yay' as my father and I poured over some complicated recipe or weird experiments in our kitchen and found success. All of it stopped suddenly when he fell ill. Throughout his illness, I would look forward to his recovery so that we could make our weekly batches of bread and our monthly cravings for butter croissants and occasional Shepherd's pies. Lying on the hospital bed, he would tell me how he was thinking the next wise investment would be a pasta noodle maker and the next experiment would be to make a sourdough Focaccia and that I should read Tarkovsky's essays on 'time'.

Nine Tuesdays have gone by since I lost him and I have found myself at a loss of what to do on Tuesday evenings. Whom do I share with what I read about? Who will have fun with me in the kitchen? Who will bake the sourdough Focaccia with me? He has left me with a million questions and no answers, but a realization all the same- life always doesn't come a full circle; sometimes it's just a line with its own share of crests and troughs. I have a lifetime of Tuesdays ahead of me and maybe on one of those Tuesdays I will figure out how to navigate the culinary scene without my father by my side, but till then, I will keep the candle of hope alight.