October

Most babies find the single syllable ‘maa’ easier to form and hold in their tiny mouths as their first word. Mine was ‘baba’. Spoken often and with such clarity that people would sigh at their own children’s mumbled noises. I learnt to sing almost simultaneously as I learnt to talk. My mother tells me the first song I started humming, and then singing perfectly was one of the Rabindra sangeets my father often played— one of his favourites. She tells me how overjoyed he was when I started humming it while he held me in his arms. He never tells me any of this.

Growing up, I gave several adjectives to the image of my father, in my head. I thought he was strong and invincible like every other child does. Now every time I go back home, he seems to have grown older. I thought he was my best friend. Every argument we had when I was sixteen made me doubt it. I thought my father was flawless. But he is only human.

Most of my family tells me I’m just like my father. I’ve grown up hearing this phrase echoing all around me. My father had one great dream, and, just like him, so did I. My grandfather left the earth quite suddenly and put my freshly graduated father under an obligation to grow up before he could age. He had to abandon his dream then, for the sake of his family— my grandmother told me. He never tells me any of this.

My father always wanted a daughter. I was not a planned child and when I was born, my mother saw him shed tears of happiness for the first time. He gave me the heavens and the earth, anything and everything I wanted. My great dream started blooming in front of his eyes. But it wasn’t the same as his great dream. I remember him trying to shape my great dream into his. And for a short while, I almost gave in. Almost. But my great dream remained mine. I often wonder, how he, at the age I am now, gave up on something that incited such passion in him. I think about how people are either not good at the things they love to do or don’t love to do the things they are good at— but my father’s great dream was something he loved to do and was good at. How does one give up something so rare without feeling like they’ve lost their life force? My mother tells me I am my father’s life force. It took me years to understand why he tried to morph my great dream into his. We have always been mirrors of each other after all— he is all I wanted to be and I am all he could have been.

I often think about a hazy memory of us— my father is throwing me up in the air, my mother takes a perfectly timed picture on our old film camera. I don’t know why this memory is so special to me— it’s not even a memory. I was barely two years old. I only recognized it as a memory when I was looking through one of our family photo albums and came across this picture, the edges of the old paper deteriorating. This is my mother’s memory more than it is mine, I suppose. I remember asking her about the photograph and she told me how every evening, my father would come back from the office and play with me while she watched her daily television show. He never tells me any of this.

I made small, sparkly stars around my father in my drawing of this memory and I don’t know why. But now it is making me think of how I worshipped him before. It happens to everyone or at least I hope it does— the usual teenage disillusionment, de-pedestalizing your parents. What still remains though, is the love, shining through shared memories, captured in old photographs like these.

Let me tell you this thing that happened with my father. He was the first person to figure out how to get baby-me to stop crying immediately. This was during our 2006 trip to Gangtok when I got to see snow for the first time and had my first near-death experience of almost falling off a cliff. I wonder sometimes how nobody else in my tightly-knit joint family had noticed this before, but my father realised that I stopped mid-tantrum if I saw a camera pointed at me. You see, I’ve always been about putting up a perfect front. Throughout our trip, he tested it out— he picked up his old camera and told me to pose and smile every time he saw any hint of tears in my eyes. We had a short trek to some beautiful mountain pass during this trip. My face turned red with continual sobbing. I remember him asking me why I was crying. The moment I told him, “Baba, it’s so cold”, he told off his muffler and wrapped it around me, wrapped his jacket around me, in -10 degrees Celsius weather. He gave me his gloves so that I could wear another layer over my tiny hands which were already covered in my tiny gloves. Just so that I could hold a snowball for the first time. And stop sobbing for just enough time to smile at his camera. He never tells me any of this. This is my first real memory of him.

This is how I will always remember my father— someone who gives. This is who I want to be— someone who gives.