An interesting dynamic emerged as condolence messages and calls and visits poured in after my father's death.
In the aftermath of growing apart from him, I've been trying for more than a decade, without realizing it explicitly, to seek father figures in a multitude of men.
Message upon message, and call upon call seems to affirm that my father, in his own way of growing apart from me, has sought to be and been a father figure to multitude of young folk who have had the good fortune of making his acquaintance.
Contrastingly, the image of my father etched in my mind has been that of a disciplinarian who lacked the emotional quotient required to handle a nuclear family. He was not just strict, but lacked the ability to connect emotionally with his wife and his only son. A man incapable of kindness and basic human decency towards his wife who he decided was his arch-enemy because — in his mind — she influenced the son to abandon the religion and the rituals. Perhaps this left a massive void in his life that he filled by being tireless in helping out other folks in his life. Everyone around him, that is everyone who did not know the sort of treatment he meted out to his immediate family, seems to have known him as an epitome of patience, selflessness and help.
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On the third day from when he died, I was driving to drop-off my cat at a boarder's. As I drove, I realized that with his passing, I join my maternal cousins in the no-dads-club. In some sense, we lost our respective fathers in the reverse sequence of elderness — the youngest of us lost our dad first and the oldest lost his last.
My dad's last dad-like thing that I saw him do was to help, advice and participate in a fatherly-figure-like capacity at my maternal cousin's wedding in Bangalore. His very actions came as a major surprise to all of us given the mechanics of that wedding.
Yet, his last vengeful act of non-cooperation was one of the reasons why I had to abandon the idea of marrying a person I had grown fond of.
Dad was an expert at nursing a grudge. This was great when he was on the ethically-right side of the aisle: grudge became grit, vengeance became a fight for justice. But when he was on the other side, it was very unbecoming of a human, a nasty sight.
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It has been an interesting experience trying to understand this dichotomy: every side, every aspect, every characteristic both good and bad has been real or almost real. He's been a horrible father and an even worse husband (a trait that seems to run in the family) but also a great comrade and a friend to disparate people in different times. In a bunch of unions and communities serving some specific causes, he's been a very active, vocal and sometimes magnanimous member. WhatsApp messages have been pouring over about his intellect and his untiring work to secure success for the members of the unions and associations.
Every once in a while, I'm forced to juxtapose this image with that of the man I knew personally. The contrast is jarring. Coldness and non-communication and false accusations prevailed. But out of the house, he seems to have been someone else, someone so completely different that if I had met him and worked with him as part of the unions and communities he was part of, I might have seen in him a father-figure I missed in some of the most critical years of my life.
In his passing, it has become clearer that there isn't a "who is the real man?". All of him was real. Providence dealt my mother and I the bad hand.