The Chair

He wouldn’t let me sell the chair. Or use it for my experiments in carpentry. “See this dining table?” he said one day, when I petulantly demanded to know why I shouldn’t take the chair apart to learn the fine art of furniture making. “It’s the finest I could afford. You can saw it to pieces if you like. But don’t touch the chair.”

I couldn’t see what the big deal was. Sure, it was an old chair. A small chair made for children. I knew the story behind it too. His father, my grandfather, had made several chairs for the local school, and this had been a spare, an extra. I myself had sat in similar chairs in the selfsame school, secretly proud that my grandfather had probably made several of the chairs that accommodated the bums of a couple of generations of schoolboys. But it still didn’t explain why I couldn’t dismantle that chair to learn the secrets of dovetailing and tongue-and-groove joints.

The years telescoped to my thirtieth. Against all odds, I had secured a job in Dubai, UAE.

The night before I left, he sat stroking the chair in a peculiar manner. He would rub his thumb along the edge of the seat, while his thick fingers, the fingers of an artisan, not an artist, caressed the strut that supported the seat.

In his usual style, he began speaking, with no preamble, “He liked to stroke it like this. And one night, he called me and told me to take care of Ma, your grandmother, as he stroked the chair. I didn’t know why he was telling me that. I didn’t know why he was stroking the chair. In the morning, he was gone. He died with his hand on this chair.” He looked at me, and it was the first time in thirty years my father let me see any emotion in him. “Ma,” he said, blinking back the tears I would see only once in my lifetime, “told me why he liked to stroke the chair. He was never around to caress us, so he took the chair with him wherever he had to go to make the money to keep us in school.”

He paused, then, “Go to sleep. We have to leave early so you can catch your flight.”

As I tried to drink myself silly on the flight back for his funeral, I realised why he wouldn’t let me touch the chair, and why he had stroked it the night before I left, as his father had, the night he bid goodbye to his son.

Deepak
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