(Tell him, tell him …
I can’t, I simply can’t …)
What mirage was I trying to protect? Even if it shattered you as a father, as a person, even if it served no purpose, even if you did not believe me, even if you said stupid, hurtful things, even if our words clawed at old wounds that I had worked at healing, it did not matter – I wish I had told you.
That adult cousin of yours whose bed I had to share, or the teenage male relative you left me alone with, or the neighbour you trusted to watch over us while we sent kites flying into a faded Delhi sky – I wish I had told you.
You cannot take it, you will erupt, you will drink more, you will cry, rant implode. This was what I believed.
As a man who talked all the time and as a daughter who stored every word in her head, you and I, we were a disaster. You shared your life philosophies endlessly but it was all about an idealistic place. Your entire outlook was predicated on a few keystones – work ethic that demanded selfless hard work, generosity that would rise up to meet any need without any return expected, and above all, faith that people are capable of unalloyed goodness even if the collective was tainted by greed and selfishness. It was particularly the desperate need to trust in the incorruptibility of individuals that caused us trouble.
There is much more we should talk about, if only you could listen outside the lassos of your woes. And perhaps the only way for me to do this now, without condemning you unfairly, is to remember what you would have said to me – the lines not entirely conjecture, for I have heard them from you many times.
I want to say: Your job as a parent was to protect, but you sent me on odd errands late in the evening, unescorted, sometimes with a little sister in tow, in a city roving with predators. Big city, narrow lanes, adult eyes that caged little girls.
You would have said: What could happen? You should be warriors, not cowards. I want my daughters to be like other people’s sons – self-reliant, efficient. You will thank me someday.
My future spoke to me in early teenage years, from within the few books you had collected. On a pink tissue-thin paper, carefully folded in half, you had neatly typed out the letter Abraham Lincoln had written to his son’s teacher: ‘… because only the test of fire makes fine steel. Let him have the courage to be impatient … let him have the patience to be brave …’
I read those lines ever so often, saw your younger self talking to my older self, till the pink paper started to crumble in my hands. The phrase about fine steel never left my head.
I want to say: You have this red motorbike and you drive like the fiend, both of us children clinging to you with our little fingers. A sharp swerve and you keep speeding, but I have fallen off on the street. I am sitting there dazed and have no awareness that my little fingers are not holding on any more. G yells about my fall and you come back for me. I am still sitting on the road. You laugh and turn it into a joke. I look at my bruises and never understand why it is funny.
You would have said: Nothing happened to you. Stop being such a crybaby.
I want to say: No, it has happened too many times. You have insisted on driving while drunk, the two-wheeler wobbling dangerously, and sometimes you have insisted on taking two women as pillion riders. Remember that night when you were drunk out of your mind but would not let us hire an autorickshaw. You screamed at us, insisted we ride with you. Every minute of that crazy ride, completely unsteady and dangerous, I was petrified, certain we were going to crash. We could have been maimed, dead.
You would have said: You exaggerate. Sure, I had a drink, but I was perfectly in control. Didn’t I bring you home safe?
I want to say: Sometimes you just forgot I was out in the world waiting for you. I was in high school and you dropped me off for an inter-school competition, an unfamiliar venue, promising to pick me up later, and then did not turn up. I had no phone number, no money, no option but to stand there outside locked gates, beside a road clogged with vehicles, while everyone left, and strangers slowed their vehicles to look at me. On the pavement, in a hostile city, I waited and waited. There was deep relief and regret in your eyes when you saw me that night and you said – I am very sorry, but I forget about family when I am at the office, and I only remembered you when I was locking up.
I want to say: You hated taking medicines or taking us to the doctor. When we had a cough or fever, you would give us some rum to drink, neat, and we would totter to bed, tipsy kittens. Surely there is a law somewhere about doing that to children. Marriage, pregnancy, child care, there were so many times we needed you to be a father, to be sober, but you never missed that drink.
You would have said: I have always lived for other people. Drinking is the only thing I do for myself. I drink with my money and I drink in my house. Don’t worry, I won’t come and beg you to take care of me when I am dying.
I want to say: You have been in the business of dying for years, and everyone has been suffering it. Do you know how many times you have passed out, and we have had to drag you to bed? Do you know how long you sit at the dinner table, each morsel taking ages to find its way to your mouth? How hard it has been for your wife to put up with it, night after night?
You would have said: Both you girls, always siding with your mother! She is not what you think she is. She is responsible for me ending up this way.
I want to say: And do you remember the time you took me to the seedy underground bar in that town? No woman must have ever stepped in there for the many decades they have been open. I was not a child then, I was well into my thirties but uneasy nonetheless around those strange men. You insisted I drink my coke straight from the bottle, so that they know I am not one of them. I saw you get so drunk that day, as the men around ogled, while my voice skimmed your ears, your eyes clouded. That day I watched you through a shimmer of tears, as you tried to gather imaginary morsels from the table, eating your own dribbling spit, the full plate of food lying untouched an inch away, your head swaying dangerously close to it.
You would have said: Did you consider what I was going through? I was taking care of my dying mother. Did you see the state she was in? Bedridden in her nineties, and I had to clean her urine, her stools, her vomit. Why is she suffering like this? I cannot bear to watch it. It is more than I can stand. I won’t be able to do it if I did not drink.
I want to say: Ever since I can remember, you have told me not to have children. You thought it the worst thing one could do – bringing innocent souls into a cesspool of misery. You said it too many times. I could never think of motherhood without your voice in my head. But I loved children, thought I would have my own.
You said: Learn from my experience. And I have seen what marriage and motherhood has done to the women in my family. You are meant for better things, great things.
You often held forth on the virtues of virginity, very difficult for any abused child to hear, and about the dangers of love. The first time I fell in love, you knew it. And it made you sad. I had a talk with you about this, without naming the young man, though you may have suspected – I was always so obvious. You told me to be careful, that love would hurt, and that one had to love anyway.
I want to say: We left home as soon as we could, just as we turned twenty, to study in distant cities. Parents of other students visited, at least once. Not you. Wait, there was this one time. You came on a very short visit, without any advance notice. I was not around when you turned up, and you went away to spend the rest of the day with your friends. They mattered more than me. Later, we talked on the phone, but it was time for you to return, without meeting me. I cried so much that day. You never came again.
You said: I wanted to surprise you. I also had to meet my friends. Don’t cry …
I want to say: You have had many good friends, but an equal number were dubious. A girl child without sensible parents is like a fenceless field, open to encroachers. I don’t feel safe in the world. I sleep poorly, with great difficulty, just a couple of hours each night.
&n
bsp; And that one time, I did say to you: I don’t like this friend of yours, the one who behaves differently with me when you are not looking. Eyes of lust, kisses blown in the wind, suggestive winks. He slapped my face for something silly in the presence of my mother. Already he has started to treat me like his possession. I don’t want to have anything to do with him. He is your friend, not mine.
You hit the table instead of me, kept hitting it. You accused me of being disrespectful and rude. Your daughter is like a daughter to your friends too, you claimed.
It would seem that you and I would talk at cross purposes about pretty much any memory I can muster. But for people who know us, we are more aligned than apart. My mother, your wife, has said it to me enough times, and often in a tone of exasperation: You are just like your father!
During the early years of my life, when I idolized you as heroic and infallible, these were words to be cradled against one’s chest, to absorb and reflect on with pride. I wanted to be exactly like you.
But that changed during the years you towered over us, wrathful, leather belt or lit cigarette in hand, punishing yourself and us for living in an uncaring world, and then weeping your agony like a child. I looked at you and thought, that cannot possibly be me.
You are just like your father!
These words kept me tossing through long nights. I would sit up while the household slept, my face resting against the grills of an open window, inhaling the vegetal fragrances of the night, and worry about how not to be like my father. I agonized that my mother was right – for aren’t mothers supposed to know their children best? – and what on earth would I do walking the earth like this cursed Frankenstein? Could I please be like my maternal grandmother, the sacrificing enduring saint?
You are just like your father!
The first time I knew that was not true, with the deepest certainty, was when the Babri Masjid was dismantled by the swayamsevaks. We watched it in Mysore on our television, those locust-like men descending upon a distant town. I was eighteen years old. You danced in front of the screen as frenzied mobs climbed the dome and chipped away at bronzed beautiful stone. I remember something inside me curdling slowly. You cheered the hooligans – you wished you had been there! You had had your RSS days, when you collected money for the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, when you volunteered to go fish out corpses in a flooded city, when your inherent sense of service could be clothed in the social comfort of Hindu pride and identity. This was your nation, and Muslims were marauders who had no place in it, nor did their mosques, now turning into a cloud of dust on the television screen. It was repulsive to me.
I don’t want to be you! It was a liberating moment to know it, and then to say it aloud. I disagreed with your politics much before I could muster the clarity or courage to disagree with your other choices. We argued, and I stood my ground. Dissent or disagreement of any kind needs a language and a tongue to speak that language. I had found both, standing on the edge of my teenage years, as the Babri Masjid crumbled and your eyes watched me with feigned martyrdom.
We did not speak to each other for days following this. There could be no dialogue in worlds torn asunder by violence. I was going to be my own person.
But Amma never stopped thinking or saying how much I am like you, even after your death. How is it possible? I have done much to chisel a different self, to travel away from you, to escape this likeness.
My mother compares father and daughter – self-absorbed and a wild streak that insists on its own reason, generous to ridiculous extents, unattached to money, that same way of trusting strangers and turning them into friends. We work more than our employers expect, never holding back. She remembers there were friends for you at every street corner, and you loved to chat with workers and shopkeepers of all kinds – your geniality knew no hierarchy. There is something of that in me, she says, your way of endearing yourself to any audience. And of course that strong will. Just like your father, she says.
Let us match memories, shall we?
The family is inside the cabin of a large truck, the only ride available so late in the night, after a picnic in a remote forest. I can clearly see the motley crowd – father, mother, a toddler, a little girl who looks like me and some distant relative. Inside the truck cabin is one driver, one cleaner and two men who are also impromptu travellers like the family. It is a very crowded cabin, there’s hardly any space to stand or sit. Mother gets a seat on priority, her toddler safely asleep in her lap. One of the other travellers, seated on a narrow cushion, offers to hold the little girl in his lap. Father agrees.
The little girl settles in the stranger’s lap, facing her father, facing a large pane of glass through which she can see the headlights of the truck on twisted tree trunks that are rapidly moving, the stranger’s arms firmly around her. The cabin is dark but for a string of little coloured bulbs above the windshield, blinking around some framed pictures. Nobody moves, only the truck, and then one of the men in the cabin hops off at a town. Father finds a seat, smiles and thanks the stranger for holding his child, asks him to return the little girl to him.
The stranger refuses. His grip around the girl tightens. Father asks again, firmly, but the man refuses. Father asks again, angrily this time, and the stranger refuses with the same finality again. Several times Father asks, and each time the stranger refuses, his arms tightening around the little girl till she has to gasp to breathe. Nobody knows why the stranger refuses. He keeps repeating, she is just like my child. Fine, Father says, but give her back to me.
No.
Father grabs the little girl’s arms and yanks while the stranger holds on.
Pulled in two directions, the girl is in pain but is silent, like a ragdoll. She is aware of nothing but her father’s fury. It is magnificent. She dare not blink. Father pulls till the girl is released from the stranger’s arms. Her memory of that night ends there.
What do you remember?
It gave SGM great delight that all of us in the family, including the dog, had names starting with the same alphabet, G. He had decided a name for me even before he knew I was a daughter, even before he was married, and it had a lot to do with a love of the alphabet, the sound of certain consonants when they met certain vowels. He cared for words as much as he cared for numbers, and it was passionate caring.
If one had to choose a single word that our father brandished often, that he identified with the most, it would have to be Failure. When we were little girls, he explained all about the word, talking frankly to us, as though we were adults. I would think, even say aloud at times: No, you are not a failure. You have shaped us, your daughters, and we love you – isn’t that achievement?
A few years after that, maybe because his eyes threatened to rain into the rum he swallowed undiluted from the bottle, I would even be so bold as to promise: I will not be a failure. I will succeed. You can live your life through me.
It is hard to explain what exactly that failure might have entailed, for it was surely more complex than amateur psychoanalysis might uncover. Some of it was personal but much of it seemed to be tied to his professional self, to the job he never made peace with.
But then, around the time he turned fifty, the nationalized banks offered a voluntary retirement package to its employees, and he eagerly took it. He moved with his wife to Mysore, where they had a little house. The house was the only thing, he would claim, where he was lucky – friends had filled the application, the plot was allotted through lottery, the house was built on bulk government contract, all costs paid by bank loans, not a finger lifted by him.
No doubt the house was built poorly, and he complained about the endless repairs it demanded. Still, it was his own roof, and now finally he had a chance to do something for himself, maybe start that business he talked about, a little shop of gift items. Our ancestors were traders, and one layer beneath his unrequited doctor dream were entrepreneurial aspirations. The bank had given him a bulk amount for taking early voluntary retirement. He finally h
ad the time and the means. With this came a new wariness about money, for he knew as well as everyone around him, that cash would invariably vaporize in his hands. All options were deliberated but he could never take the step towards setting up the business. Perhaps he lost his nerve.
SGM was never cut out to be a lone ranger – that was the sad fact. He always needed hangers-on, admirers, sidekicks, assistants, an audience in the office as much as in the neighbourhood. Losing the office space meant this need would have to be fulfilled entirely by social circles. He would leave home in the mornings, sit outside a nearby grocery shop, chat with everyone who stopped by, especially street dogs, and recruited the boy in the laundry shop to play his personal assistant. Soon, this young man had access to his valuables and financial papers, which even his wife did not. The need to trust and be trusted by strangers was almost an addiction with our father. The public’s admiration was heady, it was only too evident, but then he would have to return to the reality of his family that had long ceased to be dazzled by his flamboyance.
I am a failure, he would say for the millionth time. He took to drinking more, in the afternoons too, now that he was home all day, all week.
I didn’t respond, I couldn’t bear to, and I would think: Fine, go ahead, and think you are a failure, does not look like much else from where I stand.
Or maybe I had stopped looking.
I dwell on this now because it helps me muster some compassion, and not just resentment, for why I was always the screen on which his aspirations played out. My college years were the most promising for him – I brought home awards and prizes with assuring regularity. I was at the top of my class, I won the medals and ranks he wanted, and I looked all set to be a media professional, just like he wanted. But while doing my mass communication course, I changed my mind. Living away from him, my own instincts were emerging and they did not want to follow his script. I drifted from job to job, place to place, and he watched anxiously. I was in no mood to comply, to return to his expectations.
If I Had to Tell It Again Page 7
