Singing the same toon

There was a time in the mid-’80s when a cold war raged between Dad and me. Graduating by the skin of my teeth in a discipline I had absolutely no interest in, I had turned out to be everything my father — or any father, for that matter — wouldn’t want in a son. Firstly, I had decided I was going to be an illustrator. And a freelance one at that.

My father’s disapproval, at least in part, would have had to do with knowing his offspring wasn't blessed with the blazing natural talent he himself possessed. Plus, having been a professional cartoonist-illustrator himself for four shaky decades, he knew that life would never be anything but bitterly hard for a freelancer.

Those days, I must have weighed 50 kg (two-thirds of which was contributed by my hair), had a tendency to clomp about in Cuban-heeled cowboy boots (you were nothing if you didn’t wear boots in the ’80s), and was life-threateningly interested in a new girl every week. And everything revolved around how to lasso enough money to take Girl of the Week to the disco on Saturday night and profess undying love to her in the middle of an Air Supply song. Then there were my friends. A bunch sourced, it would seem, by ticking off mug shots from the rogue's gallery at T Nagar’s R1 police station.

In between, while time permitted, I drew some pretty ordinary pictures, sincerely if nothing else, for the few publishers I managed to find. Motivated entirely by the need to support my disco habit.

Then a curious thing happened. My old man, wily fellow that he is (note the present tense), found a way to communicate with me, register his contempt and keep his pride intact — all without saying a single word to me.

One Saturday afternoon, as I wondered who would loan me the hundred or so bucks I needed for the evening to invest in a lovely girl I’d just met, my younger sister handed me a sheet of paper.

“Dad said to give it to you,” she deadpanned and left.

On it was a quickly, efficiently, beautifully — and, most importantly, cruelly — drawn cartoon of someone who was unmistakably me. My scrawniness, loserly posture, and hair were exaggerated to their maximum caricaturable limit, and I was dancing — or imitating someone being electrocuted — to an old gramophone record playing in the background. Further along in the frame, stood a couple of my pretty ugly (without much exaggeration there) buddies who had rung the bell. The door had been opened by my father, whom the cartoonist had depicted as mercilessly as the other characters, I noted. The speech bubble above him read “Get a doctor, quick! He's got Saturday night fever on Friday morning”.

Dad had hit me where it hurt the most. He had called me a bad dancer. The old guy knew my weaknesses. Ha, but I knew his, too. The fact that my pesky little sister had been the courier of this poison dartoon was because Dad had taken off, with his equally ridiculous friends, on his weekend pursuit: horse racing.

When he returned, my response was delivered by the same courier. My own cartoon, though not as professionally and efficiently done but with fairly identifiable characters and setting, was of him and his punting buddies returning from the races... dressed in rags. One of my dad’s friends was doing the talking.

The caption said “Perhaps it was a mistake to bank on a horse called Omega in the jackpot”.

That would hurt.

For a while, with equal amounts ruthlessness and glee, we did this, Dad and I. Each saying with crystal clarity what we thought of the other — employing nothing but pictures and speech bubbles.

I like to think I became a somewhat better artist, excavated the writer who ought to have remained buried in me, and discovered my one true addiction —one that outlasted my disco phase — of sniffing out inconvenient truths, thanks to this long-running episode.

I continue in the same vein today. No cartoons now. Just talk. At breakfast, lunch and dinner, I take potshots at my all-time favourite target, my old man. It looks like a one-sided battle to the innocent bystander. Because Dad continues eating the idli and chutney beatifically like he can't hear me. (Not a thing wrong with any of his faculties, let me assure you.)

What kind of son does that to a seemingly helpless, captive octogenarian dad?

Well, the kind that likes to wheedle out a burst of renegade laughter from his cartoonist father from time to time, even if it means mocking him every day — and wonders if there are occasional cartoons of himself flying about on family WhatsApp groups from which he has been cleverly excluded.

Dad had hit me where it hurt the most. He had called me a bad dancer. The old guy knew my weaknesses. Ha, but I knew his, too. The fact that my pesky little sister had been the courier of this poison dartoon was because Dad had taken off, with his equally ridiculous friends, on his weekend pursuit: horse racing. When he returned, my response was delivered by the same courier.

Krishna Shastri Devulapalli is a humour writer, novelist, columnist and screenwriter