The Wicked Journey of a Dream

By Kalika Kochhar

I walked home from my ballet class and all I could think about was that Tuesday night two months ago. My eyes were on the road ahead but my mind was stuck in a loop. It was supposed to be one of the most exciting days at that time. Dad had gone on a business trip to Dubai for his upcoming restaurant and was going to be home that day. My thirteen-year-old self didn’t understand much about how business worked, but, from my limited knowledge, getting investors was one of the prime requirements of launching the business. My father had talked about starting his own restaurant since before I could even understand English. It was his lifelong dream and, in a way, it had become mine too. In our minds, the both of us had visualised what every inch of the restaurant would look like. We spent hours talking about the exact shade of brown on the brick walls, the number of pieces that our triangular pizzas would be cut and served in and the dessert bar where we would serve kala khatta gola giving our customers a world-class culinary experience. My household had always been one of the most unproblematic ones I knew of and the realisation crystallised when things took a nasty turn a couple years back.  I used to look forward to going home every day but lately, the fights had gotten so bad. It seemed as though my parents had gone from growing together over eighteen years to not knowing one another in seconds. 

But that day was different. That day, I was very eager to get home. It was the last big step before we launched the restaurant and a hearty celebration awaited us. On my way home, I passed by a woman sneezing continuously. She sneezed eight times and this instantly reminded me of Nanu and his plethora of superstitions. For a split second, the fear of something going wrong entered my head but I’d built up the joy of this day so tall in my head that nothing could get in the way of it. And then, it happened. 

The lift opened onto the sixteenth floor and what I saw left me in a state of confusion. There, lying before my eyes, were suitcases and a heap of paraphernalia strewn across the corridor. Why was there stuff from inside my house lying outside, in the corridor? Among all the stuff, my mom’s favourite lamp, which was now broken, and her collection of coins jumped out at me. Still having not the slightest idea of what awaited me, I braced myself and slowly rang the bell. When nobody opened the door, I thought to knock, but the door pushed open before I could. Movies had taught me to expect my parents’ bodies lying on the floor in a pool of blood with knife wounds all over their body. All I saw was my father, in the kitchen, wearing his headphones and about fifty cupcakes that he’d baked with another batch in the oven. He was compulsively cooking, evidently, to calm himself down and somehow the prospect of what had caused that scared me even more than the murder that had not happened. 

How was a father supposed to break the news of having walked in on his wife in bed with the friendly neighbour to his thirteen-year-old daughter? So, he did the best he could. He told me bluntly, as though he was trying to say it out loud to make his brain register the fact and come to terms with it. That explained her belongings lying in the corridor. Only one question popped into my brain. What would happen to our family? How was a thirteen-year-old girl expected to understand what one parent cheating on another meant? I did the best I could. I didn’t know what emotions I was feeling but I didn’t spiral and together, we did the best we could. 

For the last two months, a part of me had carried some hope with me. Some hope that despite my parents not being together anymore, there still existed some place where their love and respect for one another had not completely been wiped out and could co-exist with my father’s dream. They were supposed to meet today at noon, in an effort to come to a conciliatory position for our family and themselves. If my mother ended up choosing war, she had the law on her side, where my father would have to pay her hefty maintenance because she was unemployed. Dad sat me down and explained this to me last night. He said there was a chance the restaurant might have to go on hold before it even began and so, I hoped and prayed that I would go home to find my dad waiting for me to go over floor plans and interior designs for the restaurant. 

The studio where I learnt ballet had become my escape room. That one hour, every alternate day, kept me from unravelling. I forgot who I was as an individual and what my life was like outside those four walls when I was taking pirouettes. I still could not figure out exactly what I felt – a little bit of everything, certainly. Some anger, some sadness, some embarrassment, some confusion and some numbness. I hoped that that would end today. I rang the doorbell and my house didi opened the door. She had been cooking and cleaning at our house since before I was born and as a baby, she was one of the first people I recognised when I started calling her Kaki. She was more than just the role she played in the house. She was the glue that had kept the family together in the last few months before the incident. She found things that had gone missing, preventing one parent from tearing the other’s head off. She did chores that both my parents were supposed to do before the other one realised that they had not been done. She took care of me in every way possible while my parents emotionally drained one another. I gave her my bag and zoomed past the front door to Dad’s bedroom, only to find him curled up in a ball on the floor beside his bed. He was sobbing and suddenly, I knew exactly how I felt. I felt shattered inside, like there were needles pricking me on every part of my body. I knew we had lost the restaurant. There was nothing else that could hurt the otherwise tall, burly and strong man I knew as my father. Kaki rushed in after me, evidently not fast enough to stop me from seeing what I had just seen. The thought of the pain he was going through because of love, because of his wife, was difficult to look at. Kaki tried to pull me out of the room but I stayed. I refused to leave his side and I lay down next to him and cried with him as realisation and acceptance washed over us with our own tears.

Things felt out of control for the first time in my life and I felt helpless. So helpless and pathetic, as I watched my dad pick himself up and face himself in the mirror after having lost his self-worth, his restaurant and his vulnerability, that I could never risk feeling like this ever again. Feeling it vicariously through Dad was enough. Never again would I risk the lack of control that came with attachment and love, unless I was in a place, so secure, in my life that nothing could move me.

After weeks, the thing that got life back on track was the sit-down conversation I forced Dad to have with me after I could not watch him mull around anymore. I dragged him to the dining table and I became the father teaching math sums with the strict tone that could make anybody burst into tears. In my deep, strict fatherly tone I announced, ‘This is Family Meeting Number 1, I will now be taking attendance. Please state your full name followed by ‘present’ for the record. Shanaya Mittal present.’ Eagerly, I looked at Dad and waited for a response. He was looking down at the table fidgeting with his thumbs and I thought, maybe he’s not ready to move on and I shouldn’t be forcing him. But then, he looked up at me, stared into my eyes and said, ‘Shaurya Mittal present!’ while smiling. The first smile I had gotten in two weeks. I would do anything to plaster that smile onto his face. The world is a happier place when your only parent smiles.

From then on, it was only head down and focus. In the next few family meetings, we made a chart to track our progress on the way to launching the restaurant with important milestones on the way, allowing ourselves some treats and off days once in a while. We were determined to make the money back and get a new set of investors. I had begun taking tutoring sessions for primary school children up to third grade. I had realised that some use ought to come from the years of eventful, basic math lessons at the dining table. The constant battle between ballet, math tuitions and schoolwork getting more serious kept me busy enough to lose all of my friends. 

Months later, the restaurant was open. It was nothing like what we imagined it to be – it was smaller, messier, and in a completely different part of the city. But it was ours. It was what Dad and I poured our hearts into, despite everything. We named it Family Time Only, after the meetings it was borne out of, as it stood in a small corner of Juhu Tara Road. Maybe we could put together more families the way we glued ourselves back together, one meal at a time and one day at a time. The restaurant is our home now – more home than our house had felt like in a while.

By Kalika Kochhar