"And before long, the music, the views rushing past the window,
my father's voice and the narrow cobblestone streets all merged
into one, and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers
to these fundamental questions, it was good for us to ask them anyway."
Orhan Pamuk
Deepti had always been very close to her father, maybe because she was the eldest of three girls. Dad was an Army officer and hence, she had been brought up as an Army brat, travelling
with her parents to various wonderful places in the country. Every two or three years, she would be uprooted,
and weep buckets of tears as she left her good friends, who would promise to write to her. She had got used to living in two rooms, flats, cavernous bungalows, mansions with eighteen rooms and of course, in one room in the Officers' Mess.
Her sisters were much younger, and they played together, fighting over toys and books. For them, she was the older sister, who was grown up enough to have a room of her own. When Dad was posted to Panagarh, her parents decided to pack her off to her paternal grandparents in Kerala, so that she could finish her high school with no major upheavals. After all, studying in eight different schools in as many years is no minor feat!
Dad himself came to drop her off. He knew just how strict his father could be as he was the Headmaster of a boys' school and venerated in the city. Dad and his two brothers had been brought up very strictly, and he didn't want his daughter to be so stringently brought up. He also hoped that she would bring in a ray of light in the lives of his aged parents.
Waking up early in the mornings was always a Herculean task for Deepti. Dad understood, and he never insisted that she should get up with the lark. Or the koel, in this case! However, he emphasized that she would have to go to bed later, to make up for time lost. He himself revelled in the early morning air, the scent of the flowers and the balmy day before the ghastly mantle of pollution and smog descended.
Ann The Gran
"Father, she is not used to getting up very early in the morning. Do let her sleep in!" His father had rolled his eyes, but acquiesced. The young Miss was very close to his heart, as she was his eldest granddaughter. Her grandmother too doted on her, as she ordered melting-in-the-mouth cupcakes from the bakery, and fed her on delicious sandwiches with white butter and sugar. Since they had cows at home, the milk was amazingly creamy, the butter even more so. Even when Deepti was grown up, she could taste the goodness of that amazing combination of butter and sugar, which aided her to put on oodles of truant kilograms.
Her grandmother loved to play Scrabble, and she would wait for the afternoon when the two of them would sit in companionable silence, poring over unique words to play, as the balmy breeze blew outside, punctuated with the lowing of the cows in the sheds alongside.
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This separation started off a correspondence between father and daughter, spanning two years, when thoughts took wings and metamorphosed into ideas. These letters came in like a breath of fresh air when she missed her parents, and always made her smile.
One letter read, “Education is a process which continues right through your life, but what you attain from textbooks will never be lost to you”, advice which made her glance at her chemistry textbook more fondly. Dad loved reading, [both her parents did], and expressed his desire to be locked away in a room filled with books. To her petulant comment, “I hate Math”, he made it a game with mazes and puzzles that tickled her brain.
One particular paragraph that caught her interest went thus. “The time spent in the playground is never a waste [a healthy mind in a healthy body], the hours you devote to general reading makes you better equipped [wealth of knowledge neatly packed in many a book, recreational reading relaxes you [all work and no play…] and the strains of music refine you [music being the food of love]. She wondered how “one little head could contain all he knew.
Dad would come down often, bearing gifts from Mom - bundles of storybooks, pretty clothes, hand-drawn cards from her kid sisters and loads of love. "We all miss you, you know!" he would tell her as he ruffled her hair. She missed them all too, but she was happy in her own way, even though life was simple.
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She would go to school, where, after the first few days, she made many friends. She still remembered her first day with dread. She had worn her uniform, her shirt tucked tidily in, along with polished black shoes and smart pigtails. When she reached her class, she could hear titters. As she looked around, she realized that she stood out like a sore thumb. None of the students wore shoes as it was the rainy season. Neither did they tuck their shirts in, but let them flow over their skirts.
"What are you thinking of?" Dad's voice startled her as she stood in her old room, years later, her old room which had been painted pink in her honour. Deepti smiled at Dad. "Remember how Grandma insisted on painting this room pink, even though it was a little violent to the eye?" she smiled. Dad nodded. "She loved you so! And she didn't want you to miss us, or your home."
Deepti looked at the bookcase which still had some of her old books on it. She picked up a well-thumbed copy of Julius Caesar, which fell open to Mark Antony's oration. “I will never forget how Grandpa helped me learn 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen...' by heart." She had been chosen to participate in English Recitation and Hindi Elocution at school. "He would make me recite it every day, correcting my pronunciation, telling me where to pause and breathe, and how to make the speech effective. I could have said it backwards by the end of it!"
Twenty19 - How to Overcome Stage Fright
Her face flushed as Dad gave her a quizzical look, his gentle eyes amused. She had climbed on stage, begun her speech with confidence, and suddenly all the eyes staring back at her made her falter. She had stopped in confusion, and the speech which she knew so well flew out of the window along with her confidence. Her mind went blank and she stood there, wishing that the earth would open up and swallow her. As tears streamed down her face, she had made a quick exit, refusing to go back on stage for the Hindi elocution.
“After all those hours of practice...!" she said ruefully. Dad's reply soothed her down. “The question is not whether you win or lose, but whether you took part in with true spirit – which you did. Public speaking is not easy – you have to cultivate it and groom it!”
"Dad, do you remember my final year in school?" Dad had called 1977 a red letter day in the calendar of her student life. Deepti still had the letter he had sent her on the occasion. "We wish you all the very best and hope you come out in flying colours!” He had gone on to write, “I remember fondly your first year in school in Delhi, when you howled your way through the entire year. You have come a long way since. You have passed through several schools, gained varying experiences, learned to differentiate good from bad, and most of all, developed the confidence of working by yourself.”
Soon she was back home, happy to be in the bosom of her family again, as her two young sisters vied for her attention. The first thing she did was chop off her long straight hair, hair that had been lovingly oiled and combed by her grandmother. But Deepti wanted a different look, a smart new haircut that would go with the times. The next time her grandmother saw her, she almost had a fit, which made Deepti feel rather guilty. But what was done, couldn’t be undone, as a great soul once said.
After a year, her father opted for premature retirement, and Mom decided to settle down in a little town called Thrissur in Kerala, to start a school of her own. Dad had to complete his last tenure at Mumbai, before he could join his little family. Her sisters had joined school there and she was all set to begin college.
“Tomorrow you will be joining college – starting a new phase of life. At this juncture, a father’s love is extending its warm tentacles to wish you all the very best in whatever you undertake during your collegiate career.” Dad’s letter had ended thus. “Do remember that a loving father is waiting to hear from you often about your exploits, your hopes, your disappointments, your successes, your failures – your essence of life!”
Mom surprised her with a moped to commute to college in. Thrissur being a conservative little town at the time, there were plenty of folks to ridicule her for making a spectacle of herself, especially since she was the first girl to ride a moped there. Dad smilingly reacted to a comment of hers. “It is good that you experienced the booing as well the clapping, in good measure… you should not shy away from riding your moped to college. Yes, there may be booing, but soon they will turn around to clap, to look up to you as somebody who could not be discouraged.” To her astonishment, that was exactly what happened.
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"Deepti, what happened to that friend who sat behind you on your moped and slipped off?" Dad had a twinkle in his eye.
"Oh, that was so embarrassing, Dad!" she smiled. "There I was, whizzing away, at full speed, talking nineteen to the dozen to her, as I always do. But after a while, I could not hear a response and I turned my head to see why. To my shock, there she lay on the road, a hundred metres away, and I had not even noticed that she was not with me!" Dad and she both burst out laughing. Luckily, her friend had not sustained any injuries, apart from a few minor scratches.
Dad pointed to the album of match labels that lay on the dusty shelf. "Remember how we used to eagerly look out for different match boxes?" Of course, she remembered... the way they used to soak the matchboxes in water so that the glue would come unstuck. They also collected postage stamps from various countries. "Dad, I used to wait for your letters, not only because I missed you all, but because you would send me exotic stamps in them!" The excitement of seeing a new stamp infused both of them with enthusiasm. There would be a brand new stamp inside every letter, and she would use it and send back a letter to Dad so that he would also have a copy of the stamp for his own album.
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"Dad... I missed you at my wedding!" she turned around, but he was not there. “Dad, where are you?” she said, raising her voice slightly. Where could he have wandered off to? She looked around the room, and walked into the next room, calling out for him. The rooms loomed - empty, dusty, silent! And suddenly there he was, the unmistakable twinkle in his eye, unmoving as he had never been. She moved closer to him, tears flowing down her cheeks as she saw the black and white photograph that eclipsed the mantelpiece.
28th September 1978 brought a rather poignant message. Her father had gone back to Mumbai after a short stay at Thrissur. The whole family had seen him off at Cochin Airport. “The picture of the four of you – the most precious people in the world for me – as I saw it through the porthole of the aircraft still lingers in my mind. Even our stay separately today is for the provision of a secure and steady home for the three of you so that you can grow in an atmosphere free from anxiety and uncertainty.”
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Was there an inkling of some unsettling event in the horizon? For he further wrote. “Be your mother’s right hand in running the household. There are many, many things that you can do at your age to make things easier for people around you.”
On the 7th of December, her seventeenth birthday, she received a gift of books, with Dad's message, “With sweet memories of this day in 1961, when such a wonderful gift as you, was received by your mother and me!”
The New Year of 1979 brought a further missive from him. "The motto for you in the New Year that starts today, your eighteenth year, should be to take part with full self-confidence and adequate preparation in whatever you do, without worrying as to what the results are.” He ended on the following note. “On the 7th of December, 1979, I would be glad to hear from you that you have been guided by this motto in your activities.”
She waited to tell him that she had followed his advice, but the day that he had spoken of dawned and it was a sad and lonely day, for her father passed away at the beginning of the year, on the 29th of January, 1979 at the young age of 42.
She vividly recalled the day when her best friend’s father suddenly passed away – and she had written to her father, horrified at the sight of the tears, the anguish, the finality of death. He had promptly written back “… it is indeed dreadful to lose one’s parents, who have done what they can during their lifetime to make you what you are – that too with all love and affection”. Years later, she was to read these fateful lines again as they ironically found an echo in her own life.
There was so much more he could have told her, so much more she could have learned from him. She longed to tell him of her exploits, her hopes, her disappointments, her successes, her failures – her essence of life … only he was not around to guide her anymore. But, even at the darkest moment, when she missed him desperately and needed his guidance, she would open up his letters. She knew, in her heart of hearts, she had captured her father’s spirit on paper.
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