My Father-in-Law Flew In From Pune for Ninety Days and Packed a Seven Iron

The Suitcase That Clanked

When my father-in-law came through the arrivals hall at DFW, the first thing I noticed was that his suitcase made a noise. Not the rattle of a loose wheel. A proper metallic clank, every time it tipped over a seam in the floor.

"Papa, what is in there?" my wife asked him in Marathi, hugging him while trying to look past his shoulder.

He smiled the way he smiles when he has done something my mother-in-law told him not to do. "Seven iron," he said. "Only one. It was wrapped in my shawl. Customs did not mind."

I had known Vinayak Deshpande for nine years at that point, and I am not sure we had ever had a conversation that lasted longer than four minutes. He is a retired engineer from the Indian Army, a man who irons his handkerchiefs, who reads the newspaper from the back page forward, and who never once in my presence asked me a question about myself. I assumed he did not like me much. I married his only daughter and moved her eight thousand miles away to a rental townhouse in Plano, Texas, where I test payment software for a living. If I were him, I would not have liked me either.

He was staying for ninety days. My mother-in-law had died two years earlier, and my wife had decided, with the firmness she inherited directly from him, that he would not spend another winter alone in the flat in Aundh. So he came. With one suitcase of clothes, a tin of homemade chivda, and a seven iron.

Nothing To Do In A Cul-De-Sac

The first two weeks were hard in a way I had not expected. My wife works at a hospital in Frisco and does long shifts. I work from home three days a week. That meant that on most days, it was me and him in a house that suddenly felt very small.

He woke at five. He walked the cul-de-sac in a woollen cap even though it was fifty degrees, which in his opinion was arctic. He came back, sat at the dining table, and looked out of the window at the neighbour's garage door. Sometimes he would take the seven iron out of the hall cupboard, hold it in both hands, waggle it once or twice, and put it back.

I asked him once if he wanted me to find a driving range.

"It is fine," he said. "It is too cold. And I would need clubs." Then he went back to the window.

I learned from my wife, not from him, that he had played every Sunday for almost thirty years at the course in the cantonment back home. He was not a great golfer, she said, but he was faithful to it. It was the one thing he did that was entirely his. After her mother died, he stopped going. He told everyone his back was bad. My wife said his back was fine. He just could not stand coming home to an empty flat after a morning out.

I did not know any of this. Nine years, and I did not know.

The Search I Did At Lunch

I am not a golfer. I have held a club exactly once, at a corporate team-building day where I hit a ball sideways into a pond and everyone laughed and I laughed too, while privately deciding never to do it again. So when I started looking for something he could do, I had no idea what I was searching for.

I typed something clumsy into my phone during a lunch break, along the lines of golf somewhere warm near me in winter. What came back was a whole world I did not know existed in my own suburb. People were playing on screens. Full swings, real balls, into a big projected fairway, and a machine that read the shot and told you where it would have gone. I scrolled through a few pages and ended up on the site for an indoor golf club in Plano that was about fifteen minutes from our house. I looked at the photos for a long time. Then I closed the tab, because I was nervous, and I did not know how to suggest it to him without it sounding like charity.

That evening at dinner, I said, as casually as I could, "There is a place nearby where you can hit golf balls indoors. With a screen. I was thinking of trying it. I do not know anything. Would you come and show me how to hold the thing?"

He put his spoon down. He looked at me for what felt like a full minute.

"You want to learn golf?" he said.

"I want to not embarrass myself," I said. "That is a different goal."

He laughed. I had never heard him laugh at something I said. It was short and surprised, almost a cough, but it was a laugh.

The First Saturday

We went on a Saturday morning. He wore a collared shirt tucked into pressed trousers, and he brought the seven iron in its shawl, even though I told him they would have clubs there. He said he wanted to warm up with something he trusted.

I had imagined something cold and technical, like a flight simulator at a science museum. It was not like that at all. It was just a room, a screen, a mat, and the sound of other people somewhere nearby hitting balls and groaning or cheering. I do not remember much about the decor. I remember his face when he hit his first shot.

It was a clean strike. Even I could hear that it was clean. The ball smacked into the screen and on the screen it kept flying, rising over a green fairway, drawing slightly left, landing and rolling. Numbers came up. He leaned forward and read every one of them out loud, slowly, like a man reading a letter from someone he had missed.

"One hundred and forty-two," he said. "Carry. That is what I used to hit. That is exactly what I used to hit."

Then it was my turn, and he became a different person. He stood behind me and adjusted my grip with his hands over mine. He tapped my left elbow. He told me my feet were too wide, then too narrow, then fine. He told me to stop trying to kill it. When I topped one along the ground and it dribbled forward on the screen about eleven yards, he did not laugh. He said, "Good. Now you know what wrong feels like. That is important."

I have been managed by a lot of people in my career. Nobody has ever coached me the way he coached me that morning.

What We Talked About Between Shots

Golf, I discovered, has a lot of waiting in it. Even indoors, even with just the two of us, there are long pauses while one person lines up and the other watches. In those pauses, things came out.

He told me about the cantonment course, where a monkey once stole his ball off the ninth green and he had to argue with his playing partner about whether it counted as a lost ball. He told me that my mother-in-law used to pack him a steel tiffin for Sunday mornings and that he never once thanked her for it properly. He told me that he had been worried, when my wife married me, that I would take her away and not bring her back, and that he had been right, and that he was beginning to understand it was not a crime.

I told him things too. That I was afraid of being laid off. That I had wanted to be a cricket commentator when I was twelve. That I had no idea how to be a son-in-law because my own father left when I was small, and I had no model for how men of his generation talk to younger men.

He was quiet after that one. Then he said, "Nobody had a model. We just stood next to each other until something happened."

Twelve Saturdays

We went every Saturday for the rest of his visit. Twelve in total. My wife came twice and was terrible, and the two of them argued about her backswing in Marathi so loudly that a man at the next bay gave us a thumbs up. I did not get good. By the end, I could hit a seven iron about a hundred and ten yards, mostly straight, which he described as "respectable for a software person."

One week I asked the staff something about how the indoor golf simulator actually worked out where the ball would go, because I test software for a living and I could not help wondering how it was built. The answer was more than I could follow, something about cameras and launch angles. Papa was not interested in the technology at all. To him it did not matter how it knew. It only mattered that it was honest. "It does not flatter you," he said. "Your friends flatter you. The screen does not."

The Night Before He Left

The night before his flight, he packed his suitcase on our spare bed and I watched him wrap the seven iron in the shawl again.

"You could leave it here," I said. "For next winter."

He thought about it. Then he unwrapped it and handed it to me.

"Practise," he said. "I will check your carry numbers when I come back."

He has been back in Pune for eight months now. He plays again on Sundays. My wife says he went back to the cantonment course the first weekend he landed, and that he has not missed one since. He sends me photographs of his scorecards on WhatsApp, with no message, just the card. I send him screenshots of my numbers from the screen. We still do not talk on the phone for more than four minutes. But we have something now that we pass back and forth, and it is enough.

Someone at work asked me recently whether there was anywhere to play indoor golf in Plano during the summer heat, and I found myself giving them directions and then, to my own surprise, telling them about a retired army engineer from Pune who corrected my grip with his hands over mine. I had not meant to tell the story. It just came out, the way things came out in those long pauses between shots.

The seven iron lives in our hall cupboard. I take it out sometimes, the way he used to, and waggle it once or twice. Then I put it back and count the days until December.