My surname is very unobtrusive. It is present in all my official documents. It’s absent in my signature, and when I am casually giving my name in say, a form, I stop at my middle name, which exists courtesy Kerala’s matrilineal ethos. The surname’s modest behaviour is apt for the person it represents.
On a Wednesday morning, I sat in an auditorium that was almost full. This was the only thing he had explicitly asked for. An occasion for his near and dear to share their stories. I sat listening to his colleagues and students speak about him and the many things he had done for them and the campus he loved. He was a friend, a guide, a mentor, they said. A person they could go to when they had a problem. One so dedicated that after his first bout with cancer, when he couldn’t consume food orally, still continued to travel by rail and air for candidate interviews with a PEG tube in his abdomen, despite the hassles at security checks.
It was obvious that the world got more than a fair deal – the hostel mess fees he paid for students who couldn’t afford it, his adherence to a work ethic despite personal setbacks, his surprise gifts to others, and even during his final years, how he got a college admission for our cousin’s daughter and contributed every month to her fees and expenses. The list was long. Many people broke down as they recounted their stories.
I sat impassively. It was difficult to square all this with the person I knew – whose absence in my academics and decisions on higher studies had rankled until recently. Towards the end of the event, I heard a person say something alluding to this. Among the only two things he regretted, she said, one was not spending enough time with his children, especially after he became a single parent.
Once upon a time, I’d have smirked, but I sighed. Because until recently, I was unable to step out of my selfishness and the scars of my 15-year old self. This translated into how I treated him when he got older and fell sick – operating at best from a sense of duty, not affection. Answering his queries with monosyllables and irritation. Displaying anger for his wrong choices that were disrupting my ‘well planned’ life. To the point where I once sat unmoving, while he had to take help from others to get up. Even my immediate regret had no chance against rage and stubbornness.
I sighed because a few months ago, I looked in the mirror and asked myself what I was doing. And then I recreated the narrative in my head. From his perspective. What does a 49-year-old man do when his wife dies after a prolonged illness and leaves behind a 15-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter? He panics, and has no other go other than to wing it. Maybe he assumed that I could handle myself. Maybe he needed to escape his own sense of depression and pour himself into his work. And maybe when he went down a path, it diverged so much from mine that he just didn’t know how to connect. Conversation can be a muscle too. He didn’t deliberately set out to do it. It happened, and we were where we were. I apologised to him, and could sense from his messages that he was at peace. There was closure, up to a point. Because my regret, I realised, was ruthless and relentless.
I sighed because when I do look back, what I can remember most vividly about him is his infinite patience towards me. In his entire life, his demands from me were zero. And such was his equanimity that I can clearly remember the only time he snapped at me – the day his father died, when I, still a kid, went about the house playing loudly. He calmly endured the phase when I was adamant that I would address him by his name and not Achan. I remember the time when Amma sanctioned a present for me for some academic performance, and I said this or nothing because I had seen it at a cousin’s place, and was fascinated by it. It went well over budget, and he and I smiled conspiratorially at each other as we stood at the receiving end of my mother’s outburst!
One evening, I stood terrified, waiting for him to come home, as Amma told me that he would be furious and probably give me a spanking because I filched from his stamp collection. When he was told about it, he softly asked me not to do it again. Poor man couldn’t get angry if he wanted to! Years later, once when he went away for a couple of days, I battered nails across the walls of a room to hang posters of my teen crushes! All he did in response was to stare at me a few seconds more than usual. That was repeated when I took his favourite cassette that had a single Bryan Adams on loop, and decided we needed only one play of the song. I remember him telling someone that he no longer understood the person I had become. But his only comment to me was more reflection than admonition – that I had started talking a lot more.
He was speechless when, thanks to my calls with D during our engineering college days, the landline bill went into magnitudes of the normal amount. He must have figured out it was me, but said nothing. When I was struggling to find my first job, he accompanied me to meet the people who could be of help. When I announced my marriage to D, he didn’t make a scene. He was in attendance at the BDA complex in Koramangala, and only requested that we have a reception in Cochin, so he could call his friends and relatives.
I find it easier now to understand him, because I am at the age he was at, when my memories of him start. And predictably, I can sense some of him in me. Any success in my finances owes its first attribution to him and his account book – a habit that I thankfully picked up. He was a committed planner and so am I. He loved food, and I now realise how much our weekend dine-outs in the late 90s in Gaanam, Tandoor etc must have meant to him. So yes, I will also make sure I do what he asked us to do on his death anniversaries – eat happily and remember him.
Unfortunately, what I have not inherited is his ordinary kindness. The thing that makes him dear to many. Between a scarcity mindset and a halt at cognitive empathy, my acts fall short of even my own expectations, let alone anyone else’s. Whatever resilience and calmness I display is the result of a brutal, hard effort that I cannot sustain for long periods. But I haven’t given up.
This is us, from a lifetime ago. We look very comfortable with each other. I wish it had always remained so. It was when he left us, and I kissed his forehead one last time, that it finally struck me – deep in me there was an understanding that just his being around, even as a frail old man barely able to get up, meant that someone unconditionally had my back. What I would give for a few seconds to let him know this, thank him again, and receive in return that kind, peaceful smile.
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