Everyone comes to this world, with a handful of invisible sand of life and like the sand in a sand clock, the grains of life keep slipping away from our hand. Hardly does one realize when and how the sand he brought with him slips away from his hand..
My father passed away today (Apr 23, 2008) without hinting anyone or realizing it himself.. He was a heart patient for the last 22 years, disciplined to maintain a good diet and exercise. Really, nobody expected his sudden demise at 66. I am sure if God asked anyone, “are you done with your loved one.. can I take him now?”, almost nobody will say “Sure.. go ahead” – because you are never done with them… you think there is always a tomorrow. But in reality, there is no always.
All this time, I think I took the existence of people close to me for granted – even though I knew not to. I thought they will just live on and survive my own plans and dreams. But the world doesn’t live for you, it lives on its own and everyone in it lives all by himself.
I think about my father now and I just feel a lot older than yesterday. I feel my present fast distancing itself from my childhood… leaving me more and more on my own. I realize that there was a wall between me and some of the things my father dealt with and that wall was he himself and now it is gone. There is a certain kind of emptiness that’s hard to describe. Religion and Philosophy tell us that personal attachments are earthly possessions, but for a person like me with limited wisdom, his existence was the reality.
I think of all the memories of him right from my childhood days, when we barely had a camera to keep them alive. Now I record videos with my son and feel sorry that I could not record any of my life when I was a kid except for a few pictures. I see when I look at me and my son, that those are the first pure father-son moments – ones you can never remember by yourself because you are so young, yet ones that are so immaculately unpretentious.
Someone has rightly said – “Sons will always want to look up to their fathers, even though eventually they might physically grow so tall that they look down upon them..” I still remember the time when I was a kid and was traveling with my father in a ferry. The weather was rough and there were big ocean waves. I did not know how to swim and was so scared that I remember it even now. I could see the shore wobbling up and down, from a ferry that was being tossed around by ocean waves. I distinctly remember that my only hope was my father who knew how to swim, and didn’t seem to be afraid at all – at least not to me..
I always thought my father did not fear the things I did – fear of old toilets with no light, fear of lizards, fear of ghosts.. I had heard stories about his childhood… true stories, may be a bit exaggerated by my grandma sometimes.. but stories that made some impression all the same. I believe, fathers are made out of such impressions.
When he died, I wasn’t near his death bed, in fact I was thousands of miles away.. Being his only son, I flew in to perform the last rites..
I know death and subsequent disposal of human body is an integral part of life. But it was the toughest thing to experience this first hand. I had never seen a lifeless human body, so up close.. and this, was my father. It was hard to look at his body, kept at a morgue, for me to come and cremate it as per the Hindu custom. The father I had played with in my childhood, father I used to talk to, and sometimes argue with, father who brought me gifts, and whom I gave gifts when I grew older, father who posed with us in pictures, one who used to get angry and fight whenever he saw injustice, father I read in his letters, saw in his persona, heard in his voice…. now.. covered from head to toe in a body bag at the morgue..
It seemed as though he didn’t bother anymore.. as if he was saying, do whatever you want with me now, because that’s not me anymore. Yet those were the very hands, those were the very feet, the very face which I still see in his pictures. What if he would just wake up, I thought.. and I can continue from wherever we left off..? That wasn’t going to happen.. People kept coming to visit, saying things that did not matter anymore, some crying, looking sad.. It was really strange.. I just sat there, staring at him.. and then finally we took him away… away from the house where he had lived..
It all ended on the cremation grounds. As per the rituals, I had to set the pyre on fire and lose everything that was once my father, to the eager flames.. In a few minutes, there was nothing but just the flames and the heat, I couldn’t see my father anymore.. The fire destroyed everything, burned it to ashes and next day, that is what I collected in a pot. There was nothing recognizable, nothing that could remind me of him.. just this hollow realization that my father, as I knew him, was no more..
My mind goes back to that day again and again.. for some strange reason, I feel closer to my father that way.. I know for the world as a whole, it doesn’t matter much. But I think about all the things he did in his lifetime, places he visited, people he made friends with and where it all finally ended.. I am sure I might still see something in his handwriting, wherever he worked during his lifetime, maybe a signature on some form, the letters he wrote, his name in hotel registers, visa forms, my birth record.. they all must be still out there, all over the place, all over the world.. till they too are not needed anymore and vanish.
Back at home, I was looking through a few old pictures, my father holding me in his hands when I was 1 year old, my father and I on the beaches of Goa, my father on my wedding day, in my house and then holding my son.. life comes full circle, I thought.
I am just a father now, and no son to a living father anymore…
…and it is strange, that this post just doesn’t feel complete to me, even after hundreds of edits…!
Jokes about husband and wife are most widely enjoyed and just like “there is no smoke without fire”, I say, “there is no joke without some reality”. These two diagonally opposite human forms come together in matrimony and start what they call the married life – an invention of a civilized animal that once roamed around like a monkey. What follows is either a war, a story, a documentary, an adventure, or a theme park ride! So I sat down and thought about what it has been for me as we pack a dozen years under our wedding ring.