What my father means to me

My father is growing old. Few hours ago he completed another year of his life, another journey round the sun and now he is on a new one. As a young man my father has led the most exciting life any youth can dream of. He joined the Marine when he was in his mid-twenties and has been rowing his ships through the waters of the world since then. He travelled new lands, married the woman he loved, raised a prosperous family and otherwise was engaged in keeping himself happy. The good taste of an old wine, French cologne, Italian cuisine were the simple things into which he loved to indulge and seek happiness. My father’s world was precise, defined by parameters those in themselves were not far-fetched in scope as well as in their future translation to reality--- or such was my idea about his world for a long time.

As a little girl I would seldom find my father at home. For a long time I thought that was the norm, that fathers are supposed to stay away in lesser-known lands and earn money, that they are to miss birthdays and festivities, that they appear only in random photographs hung on the wall. Being a father seemed like a whole lot of bad luck, someone who misses all the fun. I had this strong belief that fathers might have done something terrible for which they are being severely deprived and punished, as was the simple rule of childhood which said only bad things brought worse punishments. It took age and growth for me to realize how simple rules might transform themselves to strange paradoxes; that it might not be bad things, just things, to bring to us such huge prices to be paid; just things, that unlike the many bad things we do, provide us with not even the slightest allusions before bringing us down.

I have vivid memories of my father and me catching up in lazy afternoons after he returned from his voyages. Looking back now I find them to be the most intimate of moments I have spent with anyone so far. One thing my father has always maintained is to never bring his work back home. He had this simple theory that his work only brought us separation, only took him away from a part of my childhood that no father would miss for anything in the world. Yet the world intervened and kept building its ridge. The world brings us together and the world sets us apart, and it does everything beneath the garb of all those things that were inevitable, that were meant to be. Thus in those summer afternoons we spent in our not-so-beautiful house, with less money in our closet and with a happiness that is even less in my present world, my father described to me his own childhood set in the background of some idyllic village. It had the raucous laughter of six siblings who shared almost everything, starting from lunch money to clothes bought for annual festivities, but it taught me that sharing is beautiful and that sometimes when you share nothingness it grows to a love that you learn to cherish as you move on. The simplest thing about childhood was that it was always simple. That even though my younger self tried to imagine all the things my father then told me and live through those long-lost joys vicariously, I was a child who did not know the greater reasoning behind what she was doing. Such was the power of childhood that even my vicarious joys attained through half-imagined, half-remembered things stood out to be greater than all the other kinds of pleasures that have henceforth arrived to replace them. It was a different time that my father talked about, a time when schools charged 6 rupees from their students but gave them back football matches on rainy days. It was a time when friendship was a strength that was regarded above races that we now run to throw them away. It was a time when people changed but their love remained. It was a time when people learnt to win but not to forget what made them win.

Leaving our old house and its shabby neighbourhood was easy for me. To confess the truth I have no friends there. All the friends that I have now were made once I arrived at my new house, the one that has been my home for fourteen years now. I was ecstatic to leave behind narrow alleys lined by moss-covered, open drains. New things gave me new vision and I did not have much to miss. Almost all my old playthings were brought with me to that new-found newness whose towering waves filled my life. I liked everything about this newness, the smell of paint from walls whose colour I liked, the nor’westers that came in through the southern window, the money-plants which I then learned to take care of. And in the hustle of all these changes I failed to notice that those precious afternoons have been left behind. A bigger house gave us empty spaces, spaces that we mistook for something crucial for a better life and its private aspects, spaces that started from an indulgent luxury only to become a habit whose presence I now regret. In the end empty spaces took the physical form of that ridge which the world has started to build long ago. We stood on their banks and dropped into them our golden afternoons only to never look back at what we have thus lost.

Change is constant. Even if we do not realize it exists and influences our life in the most unsaid, unfelt manner. Change was there when it devised the arrival of new friends who came to us following the traces of old ones. Change was there when every time we foolishly gave our hearts even after they have been broken the last time. Change was with faces who came to us and left and in those who stayed back but were not quite the same. Change was when my father stopped sending letters to us. Internet was then the latest addition to our list of commoditized pleasure. Thus letters and handwritings left their room but only half of it was occupied by emails, brevity being their trait. Empty spaces grew.

As per the laws of physics, when you hold an empty space and run against the wind, it makes a wailing noise. As life ran faster and faster the empty spaces beside us made wistful noises, only that we were too engaged to detect noise or seasons. Even though his voyages became shorter my endless examinations kept me away from father. Distance brought with itself a set of antonyms that found purpose in defining us. I was everything that my father was not. He was the man to strive through separation while I grew to despise it for all that it had snatched away from me. He was brave patient and buoyant while I was bruised time and again doing things that drowned me deeper into the sea. He was venerable for his might and strength while I found solace in the smallness of unrecognized words. Lack of understanding brought differences and an absence of clarity brought quarrels. Our visions appeared rarefied to one another, esoteric, often to be dismissed. Lack of words, as I could not realize then, is better than the clumsiness of wrong words. But that’s what we gave each other, a hive of wrong words that doomed over our sky like the ash-coloured darkness of a perennial monsoon.

But there were moments, at the end of birthdays or beginning of a new year. Moments when it occurred to both of us how evanescent our fights and contradictions truly were. Moments when an all-encompassing silence would wipe out all the jumbled up noise and confusion. They came to me like a recurring epiphany of the residual love that always exist in bonds like these, its weight so significant that no matter how far we go the locus never truly shifts. Sometimes I and father bonded over more trivial issues like the hilarity of my many failures and sometimes at the stranger turns that we faced with death, loss and deeper garbage. With time, with new desires and goals, these moments changed their form. Sometimes they were deep like grieving nights, and sometimes crisp like the breeze of a fun spring evening. And when all that was to change had changed there came a moment of reckoning. I knew it was there when I looked into his eyes, every single time--- that simple sense of security that is perpetual and remains even when homes have been washed away and histories have been overwritten. That what is truly ours stays, no matter the time, no matter the change.

Belated happy birthday Dad.
You taught me the essence of home through your homecomings.

(Pictures by Sailik Sengupta)