We stopped having family dinners (or any meal for that matter) about two decades ago. I can't remember the last time we all sat down to have a meal together under normal, peaceful circumstances. A vague fog of a memory remains of a time in the early 2000s when my parents and I had dinners together, always filled with contagious laughter at the expense of my maternal grandfather who would feature prominently in my mom's dinner-time narratives. The tides of time and human fallacies began chipping away — and then eventually broke apart — the familial bonds, and at some point we stopped having meals together just around the time we stopped being a family.
I moved out and lived alone, having dinners by myself for such a long time, I forgot that some people hold very special feelings about family dinners and that, for some, it's important to break bread together.
The very last time my parents and I had a meal together was at a local restaurant — a cheap dinner of idlis — on the way to take an MRI scan for my father. Later that night, he collapsed unannounced and was declared dead in the next ten or so minutes.
*
Mere days after I wrote No Dad's Club, I happened upon a beautiful piece of eulogy written by someone for their father. Comparisons ensued for writing lends itself to be compared. A brief pang of guilt followed: was I being ungrateful in my non-eulogy? Several moments of introspection happened. And a sense of calm returned. Two very different sons wrote about two very different fathers in two very different cultures.
*
In the months after his death, resentment reigned supreme in my mother's wailings. But I could never partake in that emotion and that, unbeknownst to her, riled her up even more. She took my innate silence and natural aloofness to mean that I resented this new chapter I was thrust into by my dad's sudden demise and when I corrected her version, she got argumentative. I think she has been unable to come to terms with the idea that I carry no emotion for my father, and by extension, have not much to feel about his unplanned absence.
While he was alive, I resented being compared to him in all of the negative qualities he was characterized with. "All my life, I've been trying to not become him," I must have said to a few close ones, when lamenting about how my mom tried to guilt-trip me with her incessant reminders of how I am, after all, "just like your dad."
But now, I no longer seem to care.
*
In an inter-school drama competition, our team won some award and I, one of the actors in the troupe, got a book on Ramayana by D.S.Sarma. In this translation, Sarma writes of the time when Ravana lays slain and Ravana's wife asks Rama to allow for proper final rites as is to be accorded a king. Rama's reply, in Sarma's words, was, "In death, all enmity ends."1 Somehow, that sentiment tattooed itself on a young, impressionable mind.
It would be wrong (not to mention anything of the melodrama) to characterize the anger and resentment I had for my dad in the intervening years as "enmity" but it was close enough as an emotion. By my early thirties, anger gave way to a state of dispassion about him that I had comfortably resigned to, maintaining a reasonable mental and physical distance.
And in his death, even those emotions dissipated, leaving me with mere facts.
*
Every once in a while, I remember that I have no video or audio recordings of my father. To be clear, there is no regret involved in this. Not surprising. I do not seem to have a craving for such memorabilia and it's very much a trait I inherited completely from my father.
Perhaps that trait — a weird variation of an Indian stoic, bound in sāmsārika2 vagaries and forever reaching for the hermitic asymptote — was his unintended gift to me.
That, and the last, unexpected family dinner.
—
1 Possibly inspired by Shakespeare.
2 Worldly.