Living Dad

There he was, lying on a mattress on the floor, and getting some rest. I sat on my bed and finally started on what I had so much wanted to write down for sometime now. I saw him lying there, and I could feel something within me feeling glad and warm and peaceful. It was not the kind of happiness that you had when you were joyous or excited, not the happy moment, when you did not really feel the need to pause and think of some sorrow that deeply troubled you. It was not when you were just happy and you relished in plain simple joy. No, this was not that. If you had been me, and had you known of the enormous pain that the thing that lay there had been through, the long and the winding tedious journey that its weary feet had walked, the hands of cruel reckless fate that had taunted the once hungry and lonely child, and now when you see it, lying there, with closed eyes, and taking its deep breath filling its weakened lungs with oxygen and you know that it is resting, receding a long way from the cursed wakefulness of the world, and then you feel some beast like relief wildly creep into you, and you want to have more and more of it. This was just that. Was it happiness? I do not know. It was relief alright, but there was something greedy and restless about the whole emotion. Whatever this feeling really was, I was nevertheless too glad he was resting there now. “Sleep, Dad! Sleep well! I need you to sleep well! You have come a long way. You should rest now. Let the air breeze into you and let it soothe the wounds within and heal them all, if it can”.

I have loved my dad always. But, there were also things about him that I have not liked, like his pragmatism, which I have felt, was excessive. To me, as a character, he was just like any normal man that you saw around you, and I had never bothered to really know the thing that was he. Well, recently I came to know about the life story of my dad, and that did change a lot of my understanding, about him. Knowing what I then did, he almost suddenly rose to the stature of a hero in my eyes. And, when I sat here to write this thing today, my empty and numb insides are filled with an enormous sense of respect for the thing that lay there - the man, my father, whose achievement in life far exceeds mine or of most other men I have known of and read about. You watched the movies and read the books and you imagined stuff and you thought you had seen it all. But, silly how, you very often fail to just pause briefly and take a look at what huge hidden truths lie in what had so obviously been near you always! How little had I known of what he had been through? And how I have been entirely unaffected by his treacherous past? I cannot help but think now that, had he ceased to fight for his survival for one single moment and surrendered his life to the enormous ruthless hands of fate that seemed to have derived so much sadistic pleasure tormenting him, I would not have been here, grown to be the angry adolescent young romanticist cynic that I today am, basking in my unceasing rationalizing spree and a reasonably glorious history of academic success.

On happy sunny mornings, the fruit smiled its happy ripen optimistic face onto a warm little earth. The fruit was rare, and its flesh nutritious and rich in taste. It had rejoiced in its glory for a long time now, and it was proudly facing the sun, with an all-knowing expression. And, little did it know of the hungry farmer who, having no tools of his own, had tilled the rocky earth for a full decade with his bare hands that were bloody and worn out now. After years of painful toil, he had finally bore one full smile on his face as he had planted the sapling that now bore the rare fruit, and now, he lay there in his lonely hut hiding away from the sun that had long burnt his skin, receding into the darkness of a wild restful sleep.

And what I have really wanted to do for a while now, is to narrate, in plain simple words the tale of my father’s life.