Amanda watched as her dad took his medicines. One after the other – there were so many. He barely noticed that she had been observing at him for the last 10 minutes. She felt her heart drop. When had her hero gotten so old? Wasn’t he the strong man with arms of steel that had scooped her up when she was younger, and then, when she was older, hugged her as she cried. Those arms were now frail.

The cat jumped onto her lap, interrupting her train of thought. It was time for breakfast. Amanda reluctantly got up to feed her pet. It was a tedious affair what with all the coaxing and bribing - Dreamies salmon flavoured creamy treats being the pay-off.

  “Come on, eat, Mili.”

Her pleas were met with indifference and a disdainful twitch of the tail.

  “You have to sit with her when she eats,” Amanda’s father told her. “She expects a cracker with every morsel of wet food.”

Amanda unwillingly obliged and to her relief, the trick worked. She smiled to herself. Every other day, her father complained about her adopting the cat.

  “It’s smelling, haven’t you cleaned her litterbox,” he would yell on finding the ugly evidence.

At times it was the shedding.

  “Her fur is all over the furniture. I can’t even sit on the couch without my hands and legs itching like crazy!”

Despite the vehement protests, Amanda knew that her father loved Mili. It was simply who he was – uncommonly kind to man and beast alike. There was something about him getting along with her pet that made her happy. She wondered if that’s what people felt like watching their children play with their parents.

Amanda carried Mili and brought her close to her father who was now watching the news.

  “Abu!” she teased. It’s what she called her grandfather growing up.

  “What do you want to have for breakfast?”

  “I’ll just have the leftover subzi from last night with chapati,” he replied.

  “I’ll make something fresh as I’m at home today.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself, I’m fine,” he fought back.

Amanda knew from the tone that he would have loved to eat freshly cooked breakfast instead of leftovers. The resistance was just a way to say ‘I care enough not to make you work on a day off’. While he didn’t want her to go through the trouble, he secretly hoped she would. So she did.

Indian meals were Amanda’s go to when she cooked for her family especially her father – a creature of habit. Nothing else, no matter how fancy, would cut it. Carefully reaching out for the glass jar of roasted semolina from the top shelf of her kitchen cabinet, she emptied the fine sand-like contents into a pan. She then transformed the humble ingredient with a tempering of oil, mustard seeds, curry leaves, chopped onions and veggies. The upma tasted heavenly and Amanda savoured every bite with her freshly brewed filter coffee.

In an attempt to make conversation with her old man, she asked him if he had heard of the ‘Sahitya Akademi Award’ – an Indian literary honour for young authors in different language categories, including her mother tongue Konkani.

  “Did you know the 1989 winner’s poem was called 'Sonshyache Kan’ (rabbit’s ears),” she chuckled at the irony of submitting a comically titled piece for a recognition so formal.

They discussed authors and literary works at length. Amanda’s father told her about some of his favourite writers whose works he had studied as a boy at school, revealing a side to himself that Amanda never imagined existed; it was delightful.

Growing up as an expat in a foreign country sometimes takes its toll. Hobbies and passions go on the back burner and work takes precedence. In all these years, Amanda had only seen the ‘hardworking father’ who toiled day and night to offer her a better life. That he might have been a young boy with dreams of his own, mildly shocked her – a sad reality of life.

Wanting the conversation to last longer, she probed into his childhood memories. They went through a series of stories, finally arriving at the one when the church had caught fire.

  “Some of us boys had stayed back after mass. The church was empty and that’s when we smelled the smoke.

  “At first, we didn’t realise what was going on but by the time we did, the fire had engulfed a huge part of the building. There were no mobile phones in those days,” he said pensively, his years peeking through the windows that were his eyes. Amanda looked into them, silently, so as to not disturb the flow of his story.

  “What happened then?” she enquired, gently nudging him out of his reverie.

  “I ran to the bell tower and started frantically pulling the rope.”

  “Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong…I don’t know how long I must have tugged at the rope before help arrived. The church’s old structure still has that blackish soot-covered wall. I’ll show it to you the next time we’re on holiday.”

Amanda’s stomach sank on hearing the words ‘next time’. At this age who knew if there would be one.

  “Maybe, someday, I’ll publish a book with your stories,” she said. That’s how she would honour and immortalise her father’s memories.

Amanda had played with the thought on many occasions before but never gotten down to writing. Inspired by the events of that morning, she decided she would. If nothing else, it would be the legacy she would left behind – one built on the life of the one who came before her. It was indeed a morning to remember!

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