Whose Boy?

It’s the longest relationship that I have, the one with my father outlasting the one with my mother who decided some years back “I’ve had enough, I’m getting out; I will learn to fly to the great gig in the sky” (Peter Gabriel/Pink Floyd mash-up, anyone? You got it right here!). As it draws towards the end of its tenure, one way or the other, I’ve been pondering over my relationships with both parents and the kind of people that they were; perhaps the one with my father just a bit more than the other.

They were very different people from each other with a stark contrast which for the most part worked complementary. My father was a very short-tempered man with patience as an extinct species inside him. “was” is key here; I’ll come back to it later. We often bore the brunt of it. But the man is also very affectionate and is never afraid to show it. Not for him the “real men don’t show their feelings” bullshit.

I learned from him, as I did many other things, to love unfettered. No muddled middle-ground.

My mother was one of the gentlest people I’ve known or met. But she was very guarded in her expression of anything. Very different from my father. Not less affectionate but just very subtle in her display. She also was very resourceful. We were not well-to-do but we made do. Hand-me-downs of my brother’s shirts and trousers which mother altered for my size were the norm. But the once-an-year new shirt and trouser kit was done well. Neither parent would compromise on that.

I learned that one could be happy and sated with what one had and to work well within constraints. I haven’t lost that even after becoming financially comfortable.

They worked well with each other. It was a partnership that I realised later was very unusual here in my country definitely, perhaps elsewhere too. Decades later, while it is perhaps not as rare as it used to be, it still is not often found here. Mother was a housewife while father went to work. Every night after we were done with dinner, he would chop up the vegetables for the next day’s meal which she would cook. On holidays, he would join her and together they would cook up a treat. For all my father’s ebullience and temper and domineering nature, my mother could calmly hold her own. And he respected that I think. That was the norm that we grew up with, both of them as partners.

A woman was not a lesser being, a creature prey to subjugation and convenience but an equal, just different. Seeing every day how my parents were, I was gently marinaded in that thought sauce; the idea was not something drummed into me.

Mother was chill. Father was all fire. I get a mess of both, often displaying the wrong characteristic in situations which required the other. I have over time learned to optimise that. Left to myself, I’d rather lay back, all mother. But if the inertia of motion took over, I’m my father’s boy all over. My wife was the first who told me that I’m very intense. Till then I’d never thought of myself that way, and I am brutally self-aware. I realised then that I do go all out if I take something up. But I also find it very easy to let go and back off. Not me, that’s all on my parents; I just figured out how to make it work for me.

I learned that if you take something up, then you do it well. That said, I also learned to put things in perspective and not to burn myself up. In very different ways - ways that they neither expected nor comprehended - I learned to be philosophic from them.

Mother came from a family of musicians. Her father whom she lost when she was 4 and after whom I’m named was a master Carnatic classical musician. Although I never learned music formally, it flows naturally through me. For some years, I was somewhat pissed with her for not pushing me to learn music when young. She was just too la-de-dah to be bothered with it. But it turned out well for me. I’m not blinkered by straitened strictures and that gives me a perspective and feel for music that is, let’s say, different. Father, being a pocket rocket, encouraged me towards sport. He’d be there at every short-distance race that I competed in. I’d be up ahead of the field and then slack off at the end to finish a close second. Every single time. He never got angry about it which given his temper seemed strange. He’d say with a wry smile, “that finish line string is not going to cut you, you know”. Later when it came to heading to college, the usual choices and done things in India back then were to pick either engineering or medicine. You were a nobody otherwise. By that time I was already establishing my subversive nature and so “Fuck you! I won’t do what you tell me” was a prime principle long before it became a Rage anthem. I refused to do either and had the singular pleasure of chilling out my final school exams while all my classmates went around tense and serious. My parents didn’t push me. A friend’s mother turned up at our home one day to “beseech” my parents to correct my “erring” path with the argument that I was gifted and that I should not waste it (fuck knows what that interefering creep was talking about). My parents calmly told her that my gift, such as it was, lay in my ability to know what I was doing. They had brought me up to their best ability and instilled in me principles and values that they hoped would always show me the way.

Neither of them pushed me to be what the world calls a “winner”. And I turned out alright. I learned from them that having trust reposed in you motivates you like almost nothing else does. I also understood what self-confidence is and how it is vastly different from chest-thumping braggadocio.

There’s no dearth of screw-ups from them (I mean, I do my very own more amazing screw-ups) but I tend to focus in general on things that one can learn and be better. My father is almost 92 now. He’s learned to be calmer, he’s learned to be better. That’s not a new thing for him; it’s been a continuing process for him for the last few decades. During the course of a conversation many years back he apologised for things that he had messed up. A titan kneeling in humility.

I learned that one can always be better right till your life ends. I learned empathy from my mother and from my father integrity, honesty, humility, and to say “I’m sorry” and to mean it. I am mamma’s boy but because he taught me a good way to be a man, I am just a little more papa’s boy.

(and as I write this, I am crying like how he taught me that it’s ok for men to do that)