goodbye and thanks for the chase

sometimes instead of karim-saab's we'd head out to the sri mulam club for a game of cards and a couple of pegs of brandy. this place was chock-full of middle-aged and older men playing cards with their favorite poison at their elbow. it was the kind of place where eneryone knew everyone else and the average net worth was the gdp of most african countries. appapan (what i called my grandfather) had an established set of cronies and they'd yell at a bearer to bring me a small stool. they tried to get me interested in rummy early on and although i understood some of the finer points of the game (these guys spent more time at cards than working), i never did see the point. my stongest memory of the place is one of them trying to teach me to play billiards. i remember standing on a stool to be able to use the cue-stick.

we had a big dinner almost every evening. if i was lucky he'd give me some money to buy sip-up's from ayyapan's shop down the street. sip-up's were frozen sticks of flavored water in little plastic sleeves. the after dinner session was on the porch with me straining to read in the bad light, my mom and a visiting aunt talking about relatives, with my grandmothers cutting in occasionally with some obscure insight.

he got me hooked onto james hardly chase early on and he gave me the few he had lying around. he'd pooh-pooh my grandmother's protests over the gratuitous half-naked woman draped over the cover. a certain phase of my literary growth consisted entirely of hapless detectives and traitorous women oozing oomph in palm beach or beverly hills. at the end of each vacation he'd get me to bring him a bulging wallet from which he'd extract a few hundred rupee notes and press it into my hands. those notes had a half life of about 10 minutes, after giving me a fifty to buy a book on the platform my mom would confiscate the rest. appapan was always a little quieter on the day i was leaving, and as if to compensate for this slip he'd be extra gruff when he was sending us off in the auto.

that's how i remember dr.c.m.george. retired professor, bon-vivant who travelled all the way to canada to get his phd, whose photos holding a kid with a white woman in the background led to no end of speculation among us cousins, the terror of the neighborhood. he lived a good life and they tell me he died a good death, keeping everyone around him on their toes and grumbling about the food in the hospital. i didn't give him a chance to call me the 'great man' before he died, i was too busy trying to juggle graduate school and a relationship gone awry to travel out to say goodbye.