06/08/2012
Real life: 'Gambling was my father's only real love'
This is the last photo of novelist Roopa Farooki with her father, an obsessive gambler who'd abandoned his family for the glamour of the gaming table. Days after their final meeting he was found dead in a Deauville hotel, his only possessions a neatly packed suitcase and a blank CD that he'd told her contained his life story. Here Roopa tells it for him...
For a writer, there are so many stories to tell. But in my case, I always seemed to be somehow avoiding the most obvious story of all. A story that begins ten years ago, and to quote a rather more celebrated novelist, with a sense of an ending – my frail and elderly father waving away help, as he mounts the high step on to a train in a Parisian railway station.
A call received in London from a Deauville hotel manager, announcing his death with kindly meant but confusing euphemisms – as though the departed might simply have departed, simply checked out suddenly with the bills left unpaid. A neatly packed suitcase delivered alongside the coffin, containing my wedding photos, first editions from the novels my father had published in the 1960s, expensive cashmere sweaters, and a blank CD that was supposed to contain his autobiography.
I knew that I would write this missing story for him someday, but it took me
a long time to get around to it. I could make reasonable excuses – I was busy with the children, writing my own novels and I wasn’t yet ready for such a big and personal project – but the real reason was more straightforward and less defensible. I didn’t think he deserved it.
Although I loved my father, it seemed to me that he’d got away with enough in his life already, getting others to do the hard work, in the way that my mother was left to pay the rent and bring up his three children. Leaving me to write his story just seemed an extension of this. Like his hotel and hospital bills, left fluttering behind him on the wind during much of his life, it was just another debt we were expected to cover on his behalf.
The difficult truth was that my father was an entertaining dinner companion, a generous host, a witty writer and frequenter of high society in many countries, a successful globetrotting businessman who deliberately kept the nature of his business clouded in mystery, so that no one in the family really knew what he did for a living.
He was a colourful character who never let the facts get in the way of a good story, but not much of a husband or a parent. Everyone described him as clever and charming (not always with approval), and everyone knew that he was an obsessive gambler – blackjack in smart casinos was his preferred game – who turned all his considerable talents into feeding his addiction, casually abandoning wives and families as he did so.
He led a cheerfully nomadic existence, preferring to be absent and extraordinary rather than present and correct, disappearing for months at a time. I was so used to his sudden departures, that when he finally did leave our family for good, when I was 13, it took me a few months to work out that he had gone. I vaguely remember him saying that he was going to Harrods.
‘He turned all his talents into feeding his addiction, abandoning wives and families as he did so’
We didn’t catch up with my father until three years later; he had turned up in Pakistan, so my mother and I flew there to organise their divorce. It was amicable enough, as my parents had both met new partners during his long absence.
After that we kept in touch sporadically, meeting every few years, sometimes in New York, where he occasionally lived with his new wife, a Chinese-American nurse 20 years his junior (who, like all of us, deserved to be treated better) and most often in Paris. It was the closest to London he could get, as he had trouble obtaining a visa to the UK, following his past incarcerations there for white-collar crimes – skirmishes with the tax office and debts left unpaid.
And it was in Paris that I saw him last; I stood on the platform, and watched him get on the train to Deauville, the coastal resort where he had been spending his time gambling, and living in a hotel when he should have been in hospital. He was in very poor health with a combination of heart problems, diabetes and high blood pressure.
He hadn’t seen his wife for some time – looking after her terminally ill mother meant that she couldn’t leave New York – and he refused to go back to Pakistan to be cared for in his family home. I was in Paris for business meetings, and we met in the railway café and talked about my wedding that he had missed in the summer.
I gave him a set of wedding photos, which he inspected and dismissed, noting with a snort that my mother’s partner had walked me down the aisle. He told me about his autobiography, which he was going to call All Gamblers Great and Small, which he said he had recently completed, and had back at the hotel saved on a CD.
It was hard to see him walk to his train, leaning on his cane, so obviously frail that people came up to help him. I had judged my father harshly in my teens, with that specific kind of adolescent righteousness, and then in my late 20s I still judged him. Inexperienced in marriage and parenthood myself, I thought he should have done better, that he should at least have tried. Two weeks after that, he was dead.
I received a call from a sympathetic but unintelligible hotel manager who kept gabbling delicately ambiguous things like, ‘He’s left us’, ‘He’s gone’, ‘He’s disappeared’. My French was rusty, and I was hoping that the man’s agitation was simply because my father had skipped out without paying the bill – it wouldn’t have been the first time. But then the hotelier finally said, ‘He didn’t suffer.’ And then I understood, and broke down.
My eldest sister and I went to Paris to repatriate the body to Pakistan, to be buried in the family plot, and were given his beautifully packed suitcase, which contained his capsule wardrobe, his few possessions and the blank CD that was meant to have his story. It was as though he really didn’t have anything more to say.
I used to think that my father’s wayward behaviour throughout his life, up to and including the way he departed from it, didn’t affect the way I chose to live, but of course that’s rubbish. It’s no coincidence that although I can shuffle and deal a deck like a pro, like any gambler’s child brought up around card games and casinos, I never gamble myself. I’ve never even bought a lottery ticket.
It’s no coincidence that my boyfriends were the polar opposite of my father in his brashly glamorous heyday; they were studious and scruffy, they earned their own money and spent it responsibly. I was quietly pleased that when my father and my future husband finally met, they agreed on the merits of the wine that had been chosen but on little else, not even on how to address one another. ‘You can call me Sir, or Mr Farooki,’ announced my father grandly, with his habitual careless arrogance. ‘I don’t think I’ll call you either,’ replied my husband, but with enough quiet humour not to cause offence.
When my father and I last met, my husband and I had solid, well-paid jobs in design and advertising respectively, we’d had a riverside wedding with 100 guests, four courses, and a cheesy disco afterwards, and we jointly owned a three-bedroom house in Southwest London that was likely to gain in value.
We were utterly conventional, and in my father’s eyes deplorable. I suspected that he disapproved of us as much as I disapproved of him. But during that last meeting, his face lit up when I told him that we were planning to take six months off work to live in the South of France. ‘Go to Cannes,’ he said, exhaling the name of the town with a breathy pleasure, ‘but leave before the summer. It gets too hot.’ I guessed that in the glittering casinos of Cannes, the dealers and the waiters all knew him and greeted him by name.
The year after my father died, my husband and I left our well-paid jobs, for six months at first, but then for ever. We’d had enough of our conventional careers, and we bought a ruined farmhouse in France.
We camped there for months, and then lived there for several years raising our first two children, while my husband renovated it and I wrote my novels. We lived a cheerfully nomadic life, just as my father had done, moving between England and France and travelling to exotic locations with our babies in slings, with no more possessions beyond what we could fit in shoulder bags or the car. When other people thought I was crazy to retire to France at 30 to pursue an outlandish dream of writing novels for a living, I thought my father would have approved.
‘I wondered whether for my father, parenthood was the equivalent of a dull
office job’
I used to judge him for his wandering lifestyle, but living between two homes myself, I see that home isn’t really a solid house of brick, but more about a state of mind, of being comfortable with who you are, rather than simply with where you’re living.
I used to judge him for his abandonment of marriages and family, but as I’ve got older and hopefully wiser, I can accept that marriage is no picnic if you’re not cut out for it, and that parenthood is even harder. Sometimes my husband and I struggle, with our marriage and with our children, but we’re still thankful that we got out of the pinstriped, high-fiving rat race.
I have sometimes wondered whether for my father, parenthood was the equivalent of the dull office jobs that my husband and I escaped from. I never doubted that he loved us, but I guess he loved himself that little bit more, and he knew he would never change.
It was at my most difficult time as a mother – having just had twin baby girls to add to our two boys under five, while teaching my master’s class at a local university – that I realised it was time to fill the blank CD that my father had left in his case. I couldn’t escape from my own responsibilities, but I wrote the story of a man who did.
I walked in his shoes from birth to death, and travelled with him, spinning a work of fiction as elaborate as all the tall tales he used to tell us of exotic locations and famous friends, of his extraordinary wins that would have us swept away to five-star luxury for long weekends, and the dramatic losses that left us struggling in his absence to cover the rent and the phone bill. The story of a clever and charming man who travelled light, and was compelled to lose whatever he gained, but who, despite this, still inspired love.
It was time to admit that without my father, this wayward man who lived careless of consequences, who wasted his talents and pursued impossible dreams, I wouldn’t be the person that I am today.
