25th June 2025
Last Father’s Day, I wrote what I felt was a moving letter to my dying father.
He glanced at them with a poker face.
Unlike the uncertainty of the death lottery one enters in our 70s, a cancer diagnosis has a certainty that often ends in a year.
He had 8 months.
I have blocked all his memories.
As a writer with volume goals and as an editor, I couldn’t afford to waste my productive days on ‘negative’ thoughts.
There lies the difference between a father and a mother.
The poker face, the pressure cookered emotions, and the society’s diktat to lead the family through trials and tribulations.
And by the 60s, the fathers drop dead.
And by the 70s, the lucky few fathers realized that one doesn’t have to be a stoic.
My father wasn’t.
He expressed his fears.
His fear of heights.
His fear of death.
His fear of running out of money.
His fear that we might never have a house of our own.
His regret of getting old was expressed even more frequently.
Once, on a ride in my car, he looked at my white beard and proclaimed in disgust, “Shave those. Will you?”
He constantly reminded me that at my age, “He was a handsome hunk.”
I controlled my laughter.
He was talking to a different man. A man who was in his 40s, even as a teenager.
I didn’t fancy the foolishness of the youth – the chasing of women just for the fun of it, the vanity to show off.
I couldn’t relate, but I understood him.
His jet blacked dyed hair was evidence of his fear.
The fear that he would be called an ‘Apachan’ (old man)
He didn’t mind his grandchildren calling him ‘Apachan.’
From the moment-to-moment commentary of all his fears, his grandchildren’s presence brought the greatest joy.
He narrated the interactions and his judgment about them. That was the only time he wasn’t worried.
When a maid, who worked with us in the 1980s, shook my hand during his funeral and said, “He was a man who was so scared of death”, I felt an impulsive anger but soon resonated with the truthfulness of her statement.
I nodded.
While lying frozen in the casket, he looked uneasy.
It is said that one’s last emotion is imprinted onto one’s face.
He didn’t like the outcome – to quit the world he so desperately loved.
He didn’t want to travel the world, but he was curious.
Curious about new technology.
Curious about every topic.
Curious about what I did.
Even when I shared the gigantic shift happening in the world of AI in the midst of his fight against cancer, he wanted to learn more.
Three years ago, as was a new tradition, I took him shopping a week before his birthday.
He looked at my face for one long minute – unusual even by his own standards, and said, “You are lucky; you have youth.”
I was 38. Maybe it was the moisturizing cream that gave him the impression that I was in my 20s. Or perhaps he didn’t realize that his son was getting older and he was deep into the 70s lottery of death.
I could see ‘his’ only regret was his inability to beat aging.
In his 40s, he narrowly escaped a broken marriage, a bankruptcy and built his financial security – while sacrificing the warmth of a woman and watching his children grow up.
Stoicism wasn’t his philosophy.
Every year, when he stayed with us for his 60-day vacation from his job in the gulf, he would transform into a different person – calm and carefree.
He was the same curious self, examining the interiors and the arrangements of the house, not realizing the brown mustaches we boys had accumulated over the years.
He might have been too deep into rebuilding his life, and I assumed he had no emotions.
But then, like clockwork, a day before he left for Dubai, he would sob uncontrollably in the middle of the prayer.
As it is a tradition in Christian prayers in God’s own country, every family member is called out in the prayer, and a request for their welfare is transmitted to the forces above.
For every one of our three brothers' names, he would sob.
With great anguish, he would narrate the prayer.
Then again, just before leaving for the airport, he would sob again in the middle of the prayer and kiss us with a warmth and a longing I had never seen after, even when we had been together for years.
What would father’s be remembered for?
For the stoic poses?
The angry outbursts?
The strange smell?
The support?
I don’t know what resonated with me the most.
I would say his support.
It is not often one gets to choose what one gets to do for a living.
One is forced by the capitalistic society to pursue careers that optimize shareholder value with no regard for the kid’s mental health.
The ‘follow’ the passion crowd is dwindling in a society that saw a technology-driven stock market crash, a bank-driven financial meltdown, and a pandemic – all in a span of 20 years.
Children of the 2000s aren’t chasing dreams.
They are chasing security.
In this ‘insecure’ world where a few elite algorithms determine what one must eat, work, buy, consume, and share, it is even stranger as a father to guide my two sons.
My world is a mixed tale of the tribulations of pursuing one’s dream and the trials of the algorithmic world creating havoc.
How can I shield my sons from the ‘dangers’ of this modern uncertain world?
Perhaps that is what fathers are thinking when they look at their sons and daughters with stoic poses.
Will my kids be alright?
Will they find ‘security’?
Will they be happy?
It is when a loved one leaves that one is reminded of the fortune.
The fortune to have someone who cares. Someone who thought about you. Someone who is finding ways to make your life easier.
Perhaps that is the emotion I didn’t want to confront.
A sense of loss. The loss of a supporter, a confidant, and an emotional and flawed person.
Still, a person who would call me randomly and with a deep baritone enunciated, ‘Apu.’
I miss his sound.
I miss my father.