Lounge Fiction Special 2025: ‘Gas’ by Nikhita Thomas

Your father will come pay for it or what, he retorted from the mat. Face down and pivoted on his bloat, he looked like a see-saw. In a while we did go to the hospital. My father, for the most part, listened to my mother though he sometimes barked at her things he felt a husband ought to bark at his wife. My brother, who in those days only emerged from his room when called for, was called for. And we—meaning me, my mother, and my brother—drove to the nearest hospital with Da.

*****

Adult Terror. When, led by a strain of curiosity only found in childhood, I unearthed the meaning of ‘adulterer’, I was certain my father was one. Thou shall not commit adultery, Sister Judith recited in catechism class. And we, her ten-year-old subjects, chanted back impassionately: Thou shall not commit adultery!

But Sister, what does it mean? I asked her. She pinched my bum and sent me away. Thereafter, I warbled after her, all Ten Commandments, a little less pious.

Back home, teetering from the revelation that the adults around me had no interest in supplying me with all the answers, I riffled through a pocket dictionary my father had gifted me.

Adultery: sex between a married person and somebody who is not their husband or wife.

Below that—

Adulterer: a person who commits adultery, especially: a man who commits adultery.

I decided my father was one. Not because of anything he did. But simply because I believed this was what eventually happened to all families. Adult Terror.

Or maybe because of something he did. Once at a dinner party, a drunk Da, who sat across the table from me shared a cup of pista ice cream with a young woman from his office. Her lips were painted an urgent shade of red. One my father would never let my mother wear. They spoke to each other in English, a dainty silver spoon passing back and forth between them.

Pista. Yuck.

I looked at my mother who sat beside me timid, with her little English, and felt a great deal of revulsion on her behalf. It was not so much the whiff of infidelity that bothered me as it was his recklessness. In front of my mother. This, as I recall, is the first time I wanted to kick my father.

*****

The blips on the ECG looked like a doctor’s scribble. Which is to say that it told us nothing. Just gas, don’t worry, okay, the young nurse assured us. Unlike the ECG, she spoke our language. So we believed her. We believed her also because her hair was neatly pinned up. Into an obedient looking bun. So we too, obediently, headed back home.

My mother, now limp and scared, looked around for things to clean. My brother disappeared behind closed doors. Da, smug as though he wasn’t the pumpkin in the room, shimmied out of his pants into a faded cotton lungi. Topless, he curled up on the sofa like a very hairy Malayali mermaid. What did I say, he said, chumma waste of money.

From the kitchen, where she was wiping down the microwave, my mother asked him to shut up.

Evening arrived. Da, still married to the sofa, looked practically bovine. My mother, laced up, joined the flock of apartment aunties who jogged half-heartedly. My brother, in the habitat of his room, could be heard mumbling sweet nothings over the phone to a girl he thought we knew nothing about. The sky was the colour of a ripe papaya. Da and I remained in the living room. Alone together.

*****

Everywhere else I was quick to colour in silence with all shades of chatter. In my father’s company, I tolerated, even appreciated the quiet. When we did talk, it was brief and frivolous in the way two strangers might fraternise. Our exchanges were rarely without grease from my mother. And I cannot now recall many instances when we were alone together.

Da used to pick me up from the railway station during semester breaks in college. The car ride home was a silent affair. I sat buckled, upright and staring straight ahead, made queasy by the smell of upholstery mingling with the AC. Da sat, adamant about not letting me roll down the windows. Neither of us felt compelled to say anything in our cold bubble. Nor did it bother us. During these rides, despite the vomit threatening to exit me, I liked my father.

*****

Silence, that evening, did not come in a different flavour. If it did, it did not needle worry into me. Da and I settled into a lull that only startled when my father rolled off the sofa and belched a garrulous belch.

Alarmed, I called my mother asking her to leave her flock. Then knocked on my brother’s door, interrupting his courtship. We three crowded around the man of the house, now a sizable watermelon. Our animated concern must have embarrassed Da who yelled at me in bullet points—

You have no sense or what?

Did I ask you to call them?

Idiot!

This last one sprayed me in the face. Idiot was my father’s go-to word to fling at us when enraged. A handy three syllable to cripple a 10-year-old. At 24, the word only reminded me that I had grown older, my father old. Something about it made me sad. That it was all he could muster. Idiot.

English, I had learned from my father, was a cheap trick you could use to shut people down. It was wrong then to wield this lesson to win battles against him. But when scratched, I did it regardless.

Da did not like being the centre of attention. He liked even less being the centre of attention for having gas, which he continued to insist was all it was. My mother begged him into the car. My brother drove. Once more to the hospital. When I tried piling in, my irritated father said, is this a funeral or something, why all of us are coming-going? So I remained home, even though I could not remember a single instance when we went to a funeral, all four of us as a family. For a while I read. Opened the fridge and closed it. Boiled a kettle of water I wouldn’t remember to drink. And forgot about my father.

*****

Die-vorce. When I was a little girl, I would frequently ask my mother to divorce my father. A boy at school with divorced parents invited me to both his birthday parties; one which his mother threw for him and the other courtesy of his father. This, I thought, was splendid, and conveyed so to my mother while I followed her around the kitchen. On good days, she laughed and jabbed me jovially with a powdery rolling pin. Almost like she fancied the idea. Maybe it made her feel I was on her side even though there were no sides to pick in our household. On other days, on days Da and she fought, my prattle about divorce annoyed her. On these days, when she loathed him, my mother reminded me what a good father he was to us. Almost as if she were reminding herself.

*****

An hour passed. I remembered my father. The same one who had been carted off to some hospital. My mother, when I called her, blubbered. I thought I heard ‘heart attack’ in between sobs. But how do you ask a weeping woman to repeat herself?

So I called my brother who just said, did you forget? A balled up sock, pilled all over and scratchy, lodged itself inside my throat. He did not wait for an answer. Heart attack, he said. You should come. Pack him a bag. I noted down the name of the hospital.

Also read: Lounge Fiction Special: ‘A strange story’

In my father’s underwear drawer (foreign territory) I found socks, banians and comically vibrant ties I’d never seen him wear. My strange mother ironed even his underwear which lay neatly folded in bundles. Waffling through them, I pulled out the pairs without holes and stuffed them in a bag. On the rickshaw ride to the hospital, I tried to brood over the kind of lousy daughter I was. But wisps of hair kept getting stuck to my lips, interfering with remorse. The city whizzed past in a stone-blue blur.

While I was at home, at the hospital, a doctor, who looked like he was playing doctor, had pulled my mother aside to inform her that it was a heart attack. Da sat waiting in the corridor, unaware of the heart that was quitting on him.

My mother is a dutiful wife. This means that she is incapable sometimes of maintaining even a modicum of discretion. In her usual dutiful way, she approached my clueless father and told him about the heart attack. And he, upon learning this, swooned and dropped with a thud (just as he did twenty years ago when he saw my mother after a C-section). From here, he was collected into a gurney and wheeled away into oblivion. The doors clapped shut.

My mother and brother waited. For my father. For me to remember that I had one.

*****

I found them in a waiting room. All around, friends and families of other unfortunates slumped against each other. A lumpy woman was sleeping stretched across three chairs. The thin shawl struggled to cover all of her. Her toenails painted a hot pink, some chipped, stuck out. I joined my mother and brother on the cold metal seats. Racking my brain for prayers from catechism classes long gone, I tried to pray. Our Father. Hail Mary. Holy Mary. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Nurses whizzed past us. They saw our hopeful faces but pretended not to. My mother looked vacant and delicate like a thing prone to breaking. My brother sat a few chairs away from us. Occasionally he got up to stroll the floor.

Do you want vada pav, he asked me. Their canteen is good. I wondered how the hospital and its canteen had become so familiar to him so quickly.

Family arrived. Uncles, aunties, the stray cousin. I did not know who called them and when. Nobody smiled. I wished they would. They looked at us morosely as though Da had already died. I did not see my father pulling that stunt on us. Dying, I mean. He was not the melodramatic sort.

I felt like laughing. Is there an appropriate way to behave when your father might be getting defibrillated somewhere on the same floor? Whatever the code of conduct, I did not have it on me.

*****

From behind tinted doors the doctor walked out. Addressing the gathering he said—It was a minor heart attack. We’ve placed a stent in his heart…all good.

Tent-oh, my mother asked.

I imagined a miniature tent pitched within the canals of my father’s heart. Tiny workers emerged from it. They adjusted their eyes to the gushing red all around them and geared up to fix his heart.

No. Stent, the doctor replied and moved on to the next hapless family.

On the internet, I looked up “stent". It looked like it sounded. A compact thing. Designed to be inserted into some ridiculously small space. Too flimsy for my substantial father. Had nothing to do with tents, however. And was named after a fellow, Charles T. Stent. Just like sandwiches and bunsen burners and Horlicks.

The first person Da asked for from the ICU was my mother. Whatever transpired between them, I had no interest. But I did wonder if being confined to a hospital bed gave husbands better capacity for kindness toward their wives.

Next he called my brother. This pricked me but I wasn’t about to quarrel with a man who had just had a heart attack. What did he say, I asked my brother when he returned. Money matters, he replied but remained tight lipped when prodded.

Finally, third in line, I was sent to meet my father. The aisle leading up to the ICU stretched long and immaculate. I wanted to run up its length like a plastic bag in the wind. Instead, I walked slow and sombre, and readied myself to receive any profound words my father might have to offer.

When I reached him, Da appeared to be sleeping. He looked withered, like a bad toothpick. In the American TV shows I watched, patients were always trying to escape in flimsy floral hospital gowns with their naked bums on display. Did Da have an exposed bottom under his hospital attire? I did not dare ask even with the man being too weak to move.

Before I could wake him, his eyes fluttered open. Mentally, I sharpened a pencil to note down important numbers, passwords, family secrets. Da studied me with some interest.

How are you feeling, Da? I asked. Can’t you see, he managed to shoot back, his speech like the wobbly leg of a chair.

He fished out something from beneath his pillow and presented it to me. An underwear. Black underwear, free of holes. On its gray waistband, in bold red letters—JOCKEY.

Shaddie oh, I asked him, looking at the underwear entrusted to me.

It’s my favourite. Keep it safe, he replied. He sounded triumphant.

All the undies in our family came from the same place: The mountains of discounted undergarments—factory rejects, defective pieces—that my mother picked from at Commercial Street. Year after year. I gathered that Da, holding on to his precious briefs, did not know this.

I surveyed my father’s face, to see if some part of it had gone slack. Awake, he looked thirsty. Suddenly, I wanted to weep. I tried stuffing his underwear into my pockets but it bulged like a tumour. So I folded it, neatly, squarely, into a shape I hoped did not give away what it was.

I got fresh underwear from home, I told him. My father smiled at me.

Nikhita Thomas teaches English and sometimes writes also in English.

This story was selected from the submissions received in an open call for an original work of fiction from a previously unpublished author for the Mint Lounge Fiction Special.

Also read: Lounge Fiction Special: The Case of the Completed Crossword Puzzle