In a thunderstorm, remembering, no doubt, how thunder and lightning scared him as a child, my dad would make the rounds up and down the landing to see if everyone was alright. Our cat was always afraid, I remember that - she was a fearful thing, a stray who, when we took her in, was shy and scared and hid from us children under the sofa. But that didn't stop her clawing at our toes as they poked out from the bedclothes in the morning. She was playing a game with them, and was a kitten again when the house was quiet and unthreatening. And she too, a kitten, a cat fell under the umbrella of my dad's concern when thunderstorms rumbled over the house.
I think later on we were all impressed by what we took to be her dignity: she was ill, but she wouldn't show her illness. Ill, and when she let herself be lifted up in her last illness, dignity was all that held her body to itself. A cat's death is not, in the end, very significant. Or it is so just as everything matters, and in these small events is also everything.
I remember her, feet tucked into her body, sitting in the afternoon light that used to come through an upstairs window. Content, and her coat, which looked black, also showed brown patches in the light, and her pupils were slits when she opened her eyes and you could see the traces of the flush of blood that must have once filled the iris of an eye. Perhaps she'd caught the claw of a rival there, for she fiercely defended her territory, watching out from under the car and then slinking forward in her viciousness.
The world of cats overlays ours, or ours theirs; our house was also her house, or what was hers was also ours. Where do they think we go in our cars?, I wonder. And from where do they think we return, as they wait outside to be let in? But their time on earth is shorter than ours, and there have been two cats who have lived and died as I grew, and a third cat now, back there at the house, who survived the death of my father and now must be alone in the long daytime.
When did we discover her favourite game of following lights across the walls and the furniture? When did it become part of the ritual of the day for my dad to tilt a mirror into the morning light as it came into the kitchen and let light dance across the cupboards and the floor? No one could believe that you can train a cat, said dad to us, as it was our secret that our cats (with the exception of the last, but this could be just obstinacy) knew the meaning of the word 'upstairs.'
'Upstairs': that's what you said as you switched the light off in the lounge and they were to let themselves docilely from the room. Just as dad would say to us children, calmly, I think it's time you went to bed, and we would go upstairs as he had said. Isn't this the power of a father, who can say things more gently than a mother, who needs only insinuate where she enforces?
I think we were obedient. I remember lying, more than once, and my dad's anger at those lies. Didn't he have an unshakable faith in reason, in rationality? That he would only have to explain in order to persuade, because children too were each gifted with the light of reason? So his calm words, but then he could become angry, too, and all of a sudden. Anger - sudden flares - and the whole house would change.
Of course these changes are part of the weather of family life; it is life offstage, where only a newspaper, the old, big broadsheets, can, held up around you like a fortress, give you peace from everyone else; where a cone of noise and light from the television might open to enfold you and your family; where a trip out in the car can bring you together in a common adventure.
But we would never know quite where he wanted to go; he liked to surprise, and to surprise himself - where was he driving? He had no plans. This was his impulsiveness - to turn up somewhere without plans, looking in vain in Slough for the Diwali celebrations, arriving at Bognor Regis, but without swimming trunks or costumes - he liked to drive, and the world to open to him from the car. Just as he liked it to open on television, watching nature documentaries, and, when we were children, making voices to the let the animals speak. Yes, the natural world should reach him on his terms; there should be a pane of glass between him and what was real, a kind of distance - otherwise where would be the enjoyment?
But he liked, too, the element of risk in driving, and would go too fast down country lanes, a look of excitement in his eyes: were we safe? was he? At those times I wasn't sure with whom to side - was he right as a man, as a male, to insist on risk? was this part of the life of a man, as we might break out together from the world of women? - or was it the recklessness of machismo, from a vanishing world of what men used to be?
In family life, where little is private, and a small house cannot hold apart four separate worlds, you cannot help but learn of the others' weaknesses and strangeness: it is all there to see, and when a parent commands - this has always struck me - you also hear the voice in which they command themselves. Spend time with one parent alone for a while and you will understand the integrity of a life, the way it is held together, autonomous and separate from yours, the way a self is bound to itself by the secret demands it whispers to itself. And perhaps, then, you can learn of something like their parents, for perhaps that voice in which they speak is the voice of parents and elders - the older ones who always stand around us.
Five thousand miles from home, we rarely saw my dad with older relatives; he was a man in charge - but then, I remember a visit from an older brother, and now my father was a boy, anxious that everything appear right, and that this brother feel comfortable on his visit to our house. And so, it seems, the brother did - a just man, a calm one, though fast speaking, interrogative, assembling facts and impressions for himself, and in this he was just as my dad, although his younger brother only spoke of his conclusions when asked. And indeed because he felt no great need to talk, and because the rest of us liked to speak, dad was not always asked - but how curious to know that another there perceives what you have seen and heard, and knows it from a perspective that is not your own.
He was quiet, for the most part; he used up his words for the day quickly. And he preferred serious talk - he liked the talk that swirled around serious topics - to discuss this or that intellectual topic, or to laugh at the follies of our new world as he always laughed, knowing that everything was going to pot. Serious talk - but also, and I think this is how it must be for fathers, the happiness of hearing the family in the other room, talking together, even though he might rather be away from them, at a slight distance, with his computer, for example, or reading the paper, or with the television on in the other room, but knowing they are there, the background to his life, as he is the background to theirs.
This was his role in the great continuity of family life. A quiet role, perhaps. But there to listen, to offer quiet judgement: a kind of rock, as a father must be. From him must judgement come. From him the balanced opinion, the other side, and that amidst the swirl of family life. And didn't that give his quietness a kind of life? There was another person in the room of whom one must take account. A quietness that commanded, because of his seriousness, because of his sense that children should never speak ill of adults - and because of that judiciousness that would never let him hear another condemned in speech.
My mum and her friends would sometimes talk in the kitchen, or in the dining room. But sometimes it was in the living room they spoke, and my dad would read the paper, listening, and carried along by the conversation, even if he did not join in. He would form a judgement, that he would speak only when asked. And there would be our first cat on his lap, or our second on the quilt mum was assembling, and sometimes the third, though she preferred to sit up on the warm amplifier instead to watch us all, only coming over at nine o'clock for the ritual giving of Iams and then to lie soppily on the sofa to be stroked, the white fur of her throat and belly open to us to touch.
He liked our cats, despite himself; they fell under his protection. Was he to judge them, too? He spoke to them as he spoke to us as children, with snatches of Danish, which we never understood, sometimes imitating them phonetically, amusing him. Yes, cats were a kind of child, but they were also other, the alien in the house, another perspective, drawing into their liquid eyes what happens around them and living it in their terms, and sometimes asking to be spoken to, as they bask in the attention of everyone in the room.
Of course a cat can understand that a baby is young and needs to be protected, and even cats can indulge the young letting them be more boisterous and loud, and holding back their claws. But a cat, I think, can sense sickness, and I remember how they avoided my dad after his operations. What could they smell? Did they know of their own mortality through his? Only later did they come to him again (two cats from different times - we never kept more than one. Dad wouldn't allow us to get two kittens, as we always wanted. A pair of kittens - who could resist? - but he resisted.)
To be sick - to endure the long downward curve of your life, as the earth turns into darkness from light - what was it to live with evening always before you, the fading of light, and then night? 'I've had my three score years and ten' he said, turning 70. But many years of sickness, many years of not being able to walk long distances, and the cold which prevented him from walking at all.
I think it was in his country, or at least in his family, that death was not something of which to speak. I think he said once to me - I was a teenager, but still the oldest son - that he wanted his ashes to be scattered in the Ganges. A curious comment to hear from a nonbeliever: but there it was: the Ganges that the puranas say flows from Shiva's matted locks, he catching the goddess-river as she fell from heaven. The river-cousin of that other which dried up, stranding the earliest of civilisations in old India, whom archeologists seem to want to date farther and farther back.
The desire to have been first, the earliest, before Greece, before Europe - it marked by dad as it has done many Indians. And the sense of Hinduism as the broadest and most tolerant of religions - as a monotheism, and that first of all which welcomed other faiths, which included everyone and never proselytised. A monotheism, a religion, but also a way of life, a great culture, that bore in its streaming - like the Ganges itself, or the other, more ancient river, saints and metaphysicians, lives of whom we would learn in the comics he would bring for us back from India.
But he did not like to speak of death. When my mum's close friend died, too young, and of a drawn out illness, he confided to mum that he didn't have the words to speak. What was there to say? He had known death; his last sister, his beloved Sita, died in 1981. There were other sisters, and a young brother who had died years before. But death was marked and mourned in a different way over there, in the old country. And perhaps here it is rituals that must grieve for us, and that is what is given by religion. Didn't he warn the husband of that close friend that he must not give up his faith? 'I don't why I told him that. I don't believe in any of it', he said, but there is a belief before belief, a living of the great trials of life through ritual and where the rite is more eloquent than we can be.
Cats, of course, are creatures of ritual. They live by rites, of their own devising, just as children demand that parts of the day be repeated. Rites - that harden from habits, from expectations. It is nine o'clock now (the same time, winter or summer), and time for Iams. It is ten o'clock and time to lie belly up on the sofa, luxuriant. And now it is twelve and time to hear 'upstairs' and to go out into the darkness - but it is true, our latest cat always affects not to hear this call, and protests at the injustice of being shooed out of the room. And their rites become ours, and the day is organised by how it is lived by a cat.
Another life, another view of the world - they watch us from somewhere else, from a world more distant than any human one. But they are our cousins nevertheless; they are like us, and our worlds can intersect, the world of cats upon the world of humans, and the other way round. They need us in some ways, and in others, we need them.
I cannot speak of my dad's last years as though they were different from the ones which went before. There was no long descent into old age; his face was unlined, his hair no greyer than mine; he was slim - perhaps too slim, moderating his intake, carefully, scientifically measuring what he was to eat, wanting to avoid the insulin upon which he would one day become dependent as a diabetic; his legs were thin sticks, but he looked young - ten years younger than his age. Hadn't we admired him as children, calling him our film star dad? That was our rite. It believed for us, and we believed, as children need to as much as cats.
And there is a last rite to perform, with my dad's youngest brother standing in for me, the oldest son. One year after the death (but according to the Hindu lunar calendar, nor out solar one), a ritual to let karmic debts be paid back, on behalf of the dead one, who otherwise would be condemned to a ghost's life on earth. Debts to ancestors, first of all - to one's elders, to one's parents, and, I think, to one's teachers; and then debts to the saints and the temples; and finally, to God, to the one God from whom all comes.
And note the order - God comes last, but no doubt he comes first, too, as he gives ancestors and saints, and as perhaps he gives everything and knows everything, even the smallest event - the death of a cat, its life, and what we thought as children, being driven along on a family trip. Or perhaps there is no God and only the sense behind all of the importance of those events only we know who have known family life.
Small events, significant-insignificant, that let the corners of the world be brought to light. They live in our shadows, cats, but we live in theirs. In India, they are scrawny and barely fed; children are warned against them as they are warned against rats. But then people, too are scrawny and barely fed, and that is worse - poverty on all sides, and that is the shadow that overwhelms all.
The sense of that shadow reached us all in our house. Poverty, injustice, colonialisms and racisms, and the sense that the life of the rich rides upon the life of the poor. But another sense - that the Sarasvati river of legend flows still, in the Ganges, in India and all Indians, that other civilisation, that other source of civilisation, with our ancestors, with temples and saints - and weren't we, our family, descended from a saint? - and then the God in whom none of us believed, placeholder for that belief before belief that is family life and from which we live, for all that we take its great continuity for granted.
Perhaps we know it only when it is broken, as it comes apart. Perhaps it is clear only then, when my mum's close friend no longer visits, when there is no one sitting at the computer when I go home to visit; when the chair in the lounge is not occupied by him, and the television is not showing the Ashes or the football, or even the wrestling, which he used to watch, Big Daddy crushing Giant Haystacks.
I think men like to imagine they can lift themselves from family life, or that it is what is to be taken for granted before real life begins. Only later, much later do they remember that life, and want to return to it. I think it is invisible to them, the milieu they think belongs to women and children: the space of the home is only what gives unto the life of the world, and it is out there they must prove themselves, knowing their strength by what they defeat.
I think it is only when they are old and have room for weakness that they want to return. Old, and weakly knowing they are borne back ceaselessly into the continuity that is what they are made of and always were, and all debts must first be paid to that. Of what are we made? With what must we begin, and end? Perhaps to die is also to return.
Appropriate, then, that he died on a visit to India one year ago tomorrow, and the night before his medical treatment was to begin. Died at a stroke there where he was home, and having been sent off from here - I've seen pictures, he looked glad, young, smiling with a child's smile - very ill, but with the hope of that treatment. And perhaps the hope that gives itself on the return to what you knew then, when you were young - knew without knowing it, believed without believing in it: family life.
And meanwhile, over here, there is a cat that looks to have a mirror tilted in the morning when the sun comes into the kitchen. A cat for whom, one might think, anyone will do, for whom one is just like another. But I know she has mourned and her ritual is a part of mourning. Doesn't a cat, too, believe? Hers, I think, is a religion of lights, and who knows what those lights are for her as they move across the floor and cupboards. And who are we that play with her, she who is the part of the weave of continuity? Perhaps it is that she weaves us back, that is she is a living part of what our life was made, back then when we lived together.