Today, my father would have turned 94. He passed away suddenly in 1995, leaving us to remember and miss him every single day.
With each passing year, my experiences deepen my appreciation of the person he was. It is hard for children to truly appreciate their parents (a category that in India still includes grandparents, uncles and aunts) because they simply do not have the life experience to do so. But as we live through every vicissitude and recall what we have seen and heard from this older generation, we understand better even when we disagree and we appreciate more.
My father was confident. His parents did a marvelous job--or the universe did--of just making him comfortable being himself. In this world of branding and self-promotion, I appreciate my father's authenticity. He was always just who he was. I remember him speaking in exactly the same way--warm, honest, matter-of-fact, blunt--to everyone. It did not matter if it was a celebrity, a priest, an employer, a colleague, a cousin, an employee. He was himself, always, with no apologies. I have seen him in conversation with the garage mechanics who would ask him how to fix things and with my professors and with the shiny, posh people of his times. He was always himself. I am trying to find words to capture this and not succeeding.
Who was my father? He grew up and went to school in a village. He had to get a job straight out of school and he was proud to say--to anyone--that he began by sweeping the floor. He was a machine-whisperer and could fix anything. He had a formidable work ethic. He rose to the top in his line of work by dint of these two things. He did not strategise his rise or network. If he liked you, he did and you knew. If he did not, he did not labour to hide it either.
While he did not have the privilege of a college education, it did not stop him from being a reader and a book lover. Bookshops and book exhibitions were a favourite family destination. I got through chickenpox as a ten year old, reading two books a day, dutifully purchased by my father on his way from work. (I also got spectacles at the end of that summer!) My father travelled a great deal for work and books with boarding passes tucked in as a bookmark lined many shelves at home. A signal to us that he was sitting here, or there. Always a book with a boarding pass tucked in.
My father was fearless. He shared his birthday with Vallabhbhai Patel, we learned in school. It made perfect sense. "Iron Man" meets "Iron Man." As a child, this unfamiliarity with fear meant my father would climb trees, swim across rivers and defy teachers (and be punished often for it!). As a young man, it meant he was a wild biker who met with many accidents. As an adult, he took adversity as it came--neither lamenting his fate nor bragging about his courage. What was, just was. He dealt with it as best he could.
Always shielding us from impact. He was not a speech-maker or a hugger but my father lived his love of family. He was a quiet man, actually. He spoke very little and he would seem not to be listening or noticing. But then he would remember small things--fresh potato chips which were a favourite with nieces and nephews or to bring back 'Andhra killi beeda' from Madras for every single adult relative in Bombay. When difficulties came, I don't know how, but we still had music lessons and I still paid for French class. When other people faced problems, he would quietly show up, do what they needed and move on. When he died, we learned from strangers how much he had helped them.
My father's heart was soft--unable to watch suffering even in movies that he knew had happy endings. It was large and generous, prompting him to give without counting or thinking twice. And it was very brave.
My father's brave heart spent the hours before open heart surgery planning a new venture. What he had--work experience and a capacity to work tremendously hard. No capital. No fellow-enthusiasts. No business experience. He had the courage to try and the courage to fail. I think about this every single day of my journey with the NGO. He came out of the surgery and at a time when I see a lot of people pull shutters down and say, "I am a heart patient, I cannot do this or that," he simply took his patched up heart that surgeons told him was now 20 years younger and he tried.
He also failed. Or do you ever really fail when you try with all your heart? That's something for me to meditate on today. To try and fail comes with a price in the outside world but on balance, it leaves behind a more magical legacy than an industrial empire--your children learn they too have the freedom to dream, to innovate, to do what moves them, in the way that they think is right. There are really no external standards.
My father taught himself many things and he encouraged us to do the same. All appliances were accessible to us as soon as we could stand and balance ourselves! We were allowed to use the record player, the typewriter, the spool tape player, the cassette player when it came and cameras. He was shutter-happy and so are we so that we have some marvelous family photos over the years. Our willingness to learn new platforms and ways comes directly from him. He would have loved this age and been an enthusiastic early adopter of everything, including possibly TikTok (or whatever there is now!).
My father could tune out wonderfully as well. He would immerse himself in the morning newspaper, in a book or in a programme on TV with the absorption of a child. He, who never spoke about his worries or troubles, would forget them--sometimes for the ten minutes in which he caught just the end and closing credits of a film, we teased! He would have loved this world of OTT shows and YouTube and Instagram and also had some caustic observations on some content! He could compartmentalise, always paying attention--while not seeming to--to the task at hand or the company around him.
I want to tell you that my father was a terrific cook. His vadai and chakkarai pongal remain unmatched. But while he liked to make the special dishes, he wasn't like most men raised in patriarchy who only do that and seek praise for making tea. He could do it all and made a lot of housework part of his daily routine--from bed-making to shoe polishing to cooking regular meals to buying vegetables. When I was 16, my mother was in bed for a few months. In any other household, I would have taken over. But in ours, my father did. Apart from the traditional housework, he also did other things like braid our hair every morning and mine was down to my hips! I did not realise that housework was gendered until someone in school commented on vadais my father had made! That too was a gift--the ignorance of patriarchal norms around housework!
My father wanted to write his memoirs. He knew he'd had a remarkable life but he did not expect it to end when it did. While alive, he was too busy doing and living to sit back and mull and write. Still, he would not have looked back. No regrets, no maudlin nostalgia. What was, just was.
When he died, I understood for the first time how lucky we were to have him. I had truly taken him for granted, as every child does. Now, memories of my father feel like meditations on life. As a child, visitors would comment on how I resembled him. Now, I hope I have ingrained some of his qualities too.
Postscript: I learned as an adult in the US that there is such a thing as an 'Iron Man' Triathlon that involves swimming, cycling and running. Very fitting, for a person who'd been such an active youth! In one of our last conversations, he rued that being his daughter, I did not swim, bike or drive. He did all of them with great enjoyment!
