Friday, April 6, 2012

70


[6th April 2012 - For my Dad's 70th birthday. Happy Birthday, Baba!]
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On the rooftop of an apartment building in a small town in southern Gujarat, two kids, a brother and a sister, both not 10 yet, looked up towards the sky expectantly. We knew, my sister and I, what we were looking for because we had already been shown many a times. A long drawn summer evening was coming to an end and the breeze from the nearby Narmada river was picking up now, chasing out the daytime heat from where it hid. And we waited.
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It is impossible to be objective about the influence of Dad on my life. I am up at 5 in the morning to write this. That's very much Baba. As a child, I had never seen him asleep at the time I woke up in the morning, no matter how early. I nearly started doing the dishes at 5:00 in the morning as I couldn't bear the sight of the stacks of dirty utensils piled up in the kitchen sink from last night's dinner. That's the neat and fastidious side of Baba showing up in me, sometimes to the extreme aggravation of Mom who would much rather have him focus on other things instead. In fact, the only time I have seen unshaven stubble on his face was when my Dadu passed away, a stark indication of how upset he was at the loss of his father. My obsession with cars, engineering, maps and travel? Baba. Baba. Baba. Baba.
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While my friends' fathers discussed competition, careers and finances with their sons, my Dad discussed world history, dogs and his childhood travels. It wasn't surprising that I was the only one in my friend circle who actually looked forward to my Dad coming back from work. While my friends would scurry away to keep out of their Dads' eyesight, my Dad would sit and watch Scooby Doo cartoons on TV alongside me, sometimes laughing harder than I did. A disciplinarian he never was, despite the omnipresent "Baba office thekey aashley Baba ke boley debo [Let Dad come home, I'll let him know]" threat regularly brandished by Mom when the situations were getting out of hand. We kids knew that it would take crossing a lot of lines to get Baba angry and in a way, we ensured that we never crossed those lines in the fear of encountering something totally alien like Angry Baba.
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All this unconventionality with regard to life and parenting had to be made up for with an extra effort to keep the boat from tipping over completely, a role perfectly essayed by a woman who has stood by this unconventional man for 40 years now. At various points in his life, Baba ignored the significance of things like landline telephones, colour TV, washing machines and vacuum cleaners. He has an inexplicable tendency, especially post retirement, to take hot noon-time walks to the bazaar and back as if this were a luxurious outing second to none. If it hadn't been for Mom the importance of NOT being ridiculously unconventional wouldn't have been drilled into us. Maa, while being a very unconventional woman herself, had and still has (most of the times, she is very vocal about that wish too) conventional expectations of how a husband should be. Baba being Baba refuses to conform. Needless to say, there are a lot of fireworks. All that we children, the three siblings can say that it worked out great for us despite the frequent bursts of emotional light & sound.
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There it was! Riding the wind, yet magically stationary, this bird which hovered high above us and we kids pointed excitedly. "Helicopter paakhi! Helicopter paakhi! [Helicopter bird! Helicopter bird!]" We were beside ourselves with joy as we ran around in crazy circles. Baba had first seen the bird on one of the evenings we spent on the roof and he had named it too. I don't know if anyone else in the town we were growing up in and the world we were growing up in even knew of this daily avian visitor of ours or cared for it. But my Dad did. He made us realize the beauty of little things tucked into the corners, often missed in the rush to keep up with everything everyone else was doing. To most people, life's purpose means the pursuit of happiness. The most important of all the lessons that Baba taught me, always relevant, not in so many words, but through his attitude to life, is that essentially happiness cannot be pursued. It is already here, all around us, for those who choose to see it.
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