After retirement, we two used to spend our evenings sitting in the open veranda enjoying the resplendent beauty of the sun setting behind the coconut grove stretching beyond the vast paddy field. Our conversation was mostly about our teaching careers in which our students numbering thousands giving us immense satisfaction.

It was only after my classmate Tilak, a retired high government official suddenly turned up one day and made that inspiring remark about the veranda, a new addition to the old house that really began to notice its exceptional harm.

‘Wow! Cyril, what an exquisite veranda you have here! Whose plan is it?’ he exclaimed trying to take in the whole thing with his eyes running all over the place.

He, being a longstanding pal and a well-known connoisseur of such things I was compelled to view the veranda in a new light thereafter and then the man who made that part of the house a reality ,though long after his death.

When we bought the house a few years ago with Indra’s money, it had an old prosaic look, a box-like affair with just two rooms, the living-room and the kitchen. While worrying over its condition there suddenly came a messenger from a proctor in my hometown who had wanted to buy a one-acre plot of land in a little island situated in the vast lake in our ancestral village deep south. Being obsessed with the ambition of opening a hotel in that panoramic site she had discovered my father’s ownership of the land and had scouted for me as all my other siblings had already sold out their parts of the island.

‘Dena deviyo geta geneth denava’ Indra commented in ecstasy.

It was after we finished the new addition to the house that my mind ran back to my childhood every time I entered the veranda which I myself planned with a beautiful arch, two ornamental columns and a balustrade on one side of it.

Until this new part of our house came up, I did not have an abiding love for my father. He did not show any fatherly love to me ever since I was able to understand life, and incidents evincing his particular affection for me were only related to me by my mother – How he took me around standing on the back seat of the car looking through the rear window, how he took me to a shop on a birthday and bought for me the most expensive baby bike I selected etc., painted a clear picture of an adoring father.

However, when he later proved to be only a liability with very little financial support to run the home, life became hard for the little ones. He spent the lion’s share of his income from lands on litigation, mainly on a court case with his younger brother, on a boutique that belonged to the grandfather.

When the dispute got prolonged father was compelled to get a loan by mortgaging our house too.

‘What if you fail to redeem it. We will have no place to go to…’ were the words that disturbed us one evening when father had intimated to mother his wish to get the loan.

‘Don’t worry…. That won’t happen….. I’ll get it back as soon as possible…’

Father took to drinking when he lost the case and it was Raja, one of my elder brothers who was by that time employed in a company who undertook to redeem the house.

Father did not completely relinquish his duty of providing for my education, for when I passed the ‘O’ levels, he took me to the central school to put me there for my ‘A’ levels. I still remember how he went that day decked out in his best coat and sarong to speak to the principal. He may have had prospects of getting me to a higher place in society so that I would be able to correct the errors made by him. But before I even went to university father died, so that Raja took advantage of it to get mother to hand over the home to him.

He not only acquired the house he had undertaken to redeem but also persuaded mother to legally give him half of all the property that belonged to father and was bequeathed to mother following his death. When I protested over visiting his home, he only tried to justify his action by lame arguments.

‘ Your taking the house is not fair because the value of the house is several times more than the amount you’re paying for the loan!’

‘You know nothing about these things’ he spat out. ‘The house is not as worth as the amount I’m paying with the interest also….’

Although he tried to appear as the innocent party, he cleverly collected the income from the lands he had grabbed from the mother. She managed to make ends meet only with the income from the rest of the property and a little boutique, she ran.

Why Raja took the better part of father’s property was, it was revealed later, that he married a girl without a dowry rejecting an arrangement made by mother for him to marry a girl from a rich family.

‘If he had married that girl he wouldn’t have had to depend on father’s property,’ mother lamented with utter disillusionmen, expressing her dislike of Raja’s wife who was known to be a one of loose morals.

Raja had been working as an artist in a private advertising company before he joined a government department and later went abroad getting a job as a designer. He went on craving after money while his house went into chaos, His daughter committed suicide over a love affair. Raja came back to attend the funeral, but returned soon after and did not come back for a long time.

‘Didn’t your father come home, Ravi?’ I used to ask his son whenever I happened to run into him in town and his usual answer was. ‘He is working as a street painter, staying with some friends there and he talks to me at least once a month’.

A few months later he added another piece of information as well:

‘He has developed an asthmatic condition and is taking treatment now. But he has not stopped working as a painter…’

Ravi, who owned a flourishing business in town came to see me off and on with his newly-married wife too.

After a few minutes chit chat he made known the purpose of his visit. ‘I wish to buy your share of the cinnamon land uncle… You’re not doing anything to get any income from it, no….’

‘Why… half of it already belongs to your father, isn’t that so?’ I rejoined in jest.

‘That’s true… but I have bought all the other shares also from others…..’

The money I got from this deal also helped us make our life more comfortable. When we sat chatting in the veranda what preoccupied my mind was the father whose invisible presence was continuing to help me.

I often visualized him from my memory and what came to my mind were the things closely related to his life. The ornamental wooden box where he used to keep his money, the string of sovereigns he used to wear on his coats, the little round gold-coloured watch he used to keep in his coat pocket – all of which were ‘confiscated’ by Raja.

Out of all this, what appealed to me most was his old push-bike which we used to learn cycling. This was also taken away by Raja. I had seen Ravi riding it until recent times and thought it must be still there.

‘You can’t use it, uncle… after the two rims got corroded and the seat broke I could not use it. Only the frame is there now….’ Ravi gave a description of its woeful condition.

‘Can I see it if I come?’

I asked with increasing interest.

‘Of course, you can, uncle’.

We reached Ravi’s home early morning one fine day leaving no room for them to invite us to lunch. It was Indra’s idea who never liked Raja’s wife for her unbridled demeanour.

Ravi took me to the back of the house while the women sat having their usual phoney palaver, Wimala having no compunction for the absence of her husband.

‘This is it’ Ravi showed me what remained from father’s bike, just the frame now full of corrosion all over.

‘You don’t mind if I take it with me?’ I queried.

‘No harm, uncle, now that father’s returning is also not sure’ he cast a hesitant look at me.

I got intrigued and asked at once, my eyes obviously widened.

‘Why… what has happened?’

‘He has left his friends and had not returned after that…..’ he said in visible despair and when I tried to say something he added:

‘No one knows where he had gone and none of his friends have seen him thereafter!’.

I felt miserable seeing Ravi’s sad look at his father’s plight.

I remembered my father immediately and instinctively looked at the relic of one of his close companions in his last days and a strong determination in my mind to get the bike repaired by a workman as soon as possible.