Thinking of Dr Vasani's fatherly attitude prompted me to write about my own father and other father figures that have been part of my life. Perhaps, some fathers reading these posts might realise their importance.
My father was a very handsome man – I watch today’s Malayalam movies with Mohanlal and Mammootty,
mainly because they are so reminiscent of that handsomeness – looks and
character both well blended together. My
four brothers and my own son are all inheritors of those good looks. (Of course, my mother’s brothers also have a
contribution to make in the looks department)
My father was a very intelligent man who loved reading and
books, movies and drama.
He not only loved reading, he loved to talk about the books
and the stories so that we were compelled to read it too. I still remember the movie MY FAIR LADY. Those were the days of the gramophone and
LP. He not only bought the record of the
movie’s soundtrack but both Shaw’s Pygmalion on which the movie was based
but the print version of the movie
script. And then he would regale us with
his own recitation of ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plane’ or ‘why
can’t a woman be more like a man’. The
latter particularly when my mother was in one of her whimsical moods !!
He was a story teller who narrated every story with a lot of songs and action.
My son has a similar bent of mind – in fact when I visited him I found a copy of ‘Atma Bodha’ very similar to the one in my father’s shelf. (I made it a point to get it from my sister and put it in my son’s cupboard.)
My daughter, though she spent very little time with him, has
a similar habit – watching a movie and then reading the book.
One of my brothers has inherited this art of story telling. A lot of memories of Appa came flooding back when my brother told me about his new serial CODE RED. My mind flashed back to “A few good men” and when I asked him, my brother said that it was his connection for the title too. Well, that too is from my father.
He was the one who nursed me through my chicken pox, the one
who accompanied me to college and then took me out for a snack and movie on
Saturday afternoon’s after college. He
came with me for my first job interview and made sure that I was comfortable at
the work place. He was the one who even
taught me how to wear my sari – my mother always wore hers a few centimeters
above her ankle but he made sure that I did not do that J
He had the same affection and fondness for all his eight children and expressed it unhesitatingly. Yet he never failed to punish us for any
wrong doing either. He lavished the
same attention on each one too.
While one never stops grieving for a father, nor do the
memories ever go away, it is amazing how they keep coming back also ! A father too is forever.
It is such a powerful statement! It adds an element of newness to our action every time because our best needs to go to the next level every time. So there is nothing that cannot be improved and there is everything that can be explored.
