It is strange to miss a parent
who has not been around for almost as long as they were around. Because it is
not so much a missing them as it is a regret of not having the memories one
could have had with them. And there is
also the trepidation of whether those memories in the alternate universe where
they were still around would be as pleasant, as sweet as one would like to
think they would. Because, as Philip Larkin put it, they do f*** us up, our
mums and dads (NB: they don’t mean to but they do).
So it feels strange trying to pen an ode to my
Babba. I could have gone the tried and tested Facebook route of posting up a
picture of the two of us together in earlier, so much happier days with a “miss
you” and waited for the likes (why else does one ever engage in the public
narcissism of Facebook?). But, it never was all that simple. To begin with
there aren’t that many pictures. He monopolized the camera, a huge contraption
from the medieval days, and took pictures of strange compositions of mist and
mountains and honestly, they weren’t that good. Oh, he did photograph us a lot
as well- but would not let his precious Zenith out of his hands for long- woe
betide if I played with it, but there is an overexposed picture of him- so
maybe he did allow his lil girl rare liberties.
And there are the plants.
Chrysanthemums and Fuchsias, lowly Geraniums and those awful Cacti in their terracotta
pots. Rotated once a week or so and put into places where one was sure to trip
over them and break a pot and a great to-do was made of it all. Or he would
spend a day hunched over them chain smoking, and then complain of his bad back.
He used to complain of his bad back a lot- it was usually self-treated with a
hot water bottle and something or the other accompanied with lots of sleep in a
darkened room. Though now, when I throw
my back out or hunch too long on a computer, I sometimes am inclined to
sympathize with his supposed hypochondria.
When I do remember him, it is
usually through a haze of cigarette smoke- rising up suspended as blue curtains
near the fluorescent lights. He was good at giving up smoking. He did it again
and again- though when he finally did, it took him. Funnily enough, tobacco
smoke never seemed to stink as much when I was a child. Now it is just rank and
dirty.
He used to read. Building
battlements of books around him wherever he sat. Anything and mostly
everything. And inscribe his name in a flowing hand in those books. Work late
into the night fueled by black coffee, cigarettes sometimes leaving the TV on
all night, till it showed only static, waking up only to snap at the person
switching it off “I am watching it”.
He was not very demonstrative.
Indeed, I usually remember him dour and sometimes quite ornery, but there were
these little things he would do, like take me for long walk picnics, with an
orange and a bottle of water (for me) and his precious Zenith- and tell me
stories. And more than once in a while he would materialize the most fun things:
little scented erasers, animal shaped pens, beads, little dolls, and such
things, once even a sun hat. And when I sat up all night working on my ICSE
Geography and History files, he was up too smoking silently but making coffee
and sharpening my pencils.
It is strange that after sixteen
years of not feeling, then not trying to think and then letting the memories
get more and more faint, the patina of time adding a layer of protection from
the raw emotion perhaps, that I feel the need to remember him now. But of late,
I have been wondering about Babba the person. Maybe it is the one photograph of
my then un-bearded father rowing a boat in 1967, laughing at the camera that
makes me want to know him. That laugh, that pose is very familiar, yet strange
because I know it from personal habit. Parents are people too, you know. People
with whole lives that are and should be separate from ours. So I wonder about
the person. Would he have liked me, as another person? Would we have found
things to connect on? Or would our relationship have just been of father and
child, bound more genetically than actually…
