Dads & daughters

Of course everyone knows Randy Pausch. Right. Go look if you don't. The best place to start might not be this page, but his book The Last Lecture or the Youtube video. It might just be that it is inspiring to me especially because of varied reasons. I do vaguely recall seeing something about him over at csm's. That was last year. I said 'uh huh' and moved on. Then I read his book last week and somehow I had to write something real quick or else I felt I would burst.

When my father was battling his demons for those long years, was I there enough for him, this is a question that bugs the heck out of me ever so often. Of course the easy answer is that I was NOT there. I was in college, then I was in graduate school, I got married and shuttled between my in-laws and parent's homes when I was visiting India, I was working on my papers, I was going to conferences. I was working hard, I was having fun, I was making friends, I was growing up. Meanwhile, through it all, he was here, with my mum and our few close relatives and his friends.

We spoke on the phone, we wrote letters, after a point he dictated his letters to mum (and cribbed about how it came out after all), and I typed my letters and printed them out (because writing is really a lost art). He was never satisfied. I was waiting all day for your phone he would say on Saturday. She wrote such a short letter he would say to mum. She is visiting us but only for four days he would complain to his friends. Overall though, I had the sense that he would have hated it otherwise. If I spent all my money on phone calls, if I wrote more letters and submitted fewer articles to journals, if I quit school and hung out at home. I don't know if it was what I wanted to sense, but it was there, sort of said but unsaid. You have such good news for me every time you call, he would exclaim (something silly like an award, a conference acceptance, a triumphant Malai Kofta made & enjoyed), which I interpreted as - He wants me to be in grad school, do well, make a good marriage, build a life for myself.

Perhaps it was his training as a scientist, perhaps it was just his style, he was good at crystallising what exactly was the most bothersome part of it all. Initially, as his sight underwent ups and downs, and we were unable to figure out if the side-effects of the medicines were worse than his neurological condition, he would say to anyone who would listen, Imagine not being able to read! My mum would gamely, heroically, offer to read to him. But then he would crib too much about her pauses and so on and they would have a mini-fight and he would go back to making jokes about how he was in-visible. Later, as more things began to be wrong, he would focus on one thing, that he was terribly inconveniencing his wife, my mother. No amount of telling him that she NEVER complained (she truly never did then, not even now) mattered. Such a young girl, how dare I go and marry her, knowing back then about my heart condition, he would say. But you were fine till 1993, we would all insist, the same dialogue from my sis, my mum, and myself. Of course I cannot imagine mum thinking herself as young, although he was right, she is ten years younger than him, and has spent the best part of her forties and fifties shuttling between home and hospital (and managing to do some teaching).

These jokes of his, like the in-visible, where we purposely mis-interpreted stuff, were the glue that held us together. I am a Visionary! he would wake up and exclaim, and we would all rejoice, yes, dad, truly you are one. I miss that a lot.

He managed to teach his classes through it all. The year he retired, we breathed a huge sigh of relief, a job well done, we told him. His students always adored him, though I am not sure if they saw much of what he was going through in his final years. It is when I think of this phase of his life and career that I feel the most bad. I don't know, if I had encouraged him to think more positively of his career, or perhaps if I had gotten him to retire from his job several years earlier, write a book, relax some more, perhaps he would have been happier? I could sense that he was quite upset at his own inability to do the things he could do when younger and healthier - spending hours in the lab squeezing answers out of his students and dripping knowledge into them; lecturing in his slow pace and ensuring that every one of them 'got it'; ignoring all pulls of hunger, tiredness, children, and family once he was deep in research discussions with his colleagues; singing; riding his scooter into the wind...

For a few years towards the end, we both dreamed this dream of writing a book together. I have all these stories to tell, he would say. Tell them to me, I will write them up, I can type real fast on a computer, and look, I have this laptop computer, I would say. It never went anywhere. I have vague pictures of the things that were supposed to be in the book - mental pictures. The stream in which he bathed, back in his village, back, way back in his boyhood. The big tree he used to hang out in, and fall out of often. The sound of cow-bells. Go ask my sister, he would say sometimes, she has many stories too. I would excitedly go off to her house, anyway I was due to visit them, an old couple hanging out alone in this thatch-roofed home. Tell me something about my dad, and you, I would say. And now, she is herself so pre-occupied with her husband's health, which bares an eerie similarity to my father's, so I am left with just what is inside my head.

Randy Pausch says often in his book that he is most concerned about what his children will seek about him, their dad, in later years. Perhaps my father thought that too. But then I was a big girl, all of twenty-six, when my father passed away. And so, I was thinking that too. What memories of me, his big grown-up daughter, will my father take with him? I do hope that they were good ones. Things that made him proud and happy and excited and most of all contented.

Ironman Triathlon

Well, I wish I could do that. I don't know to swim (contrary to popular perception, I have learnt three times and forgotten all three times). I am wary of cycling. But I can run. Anyway, the triathlon is surely wishful thinking as of now. The Ironman is, well, just completely out of my league. But be that as it may.

Yesterday, I suddenly realised that the iron-board was creaking under the weight of clothes sitting atop it. Skipped the morning exercise thing (anyway the gym is closed on Mondays; my running partner has scooted to the US for the summer; my walking partner (mum) is back home) and decided to attack the creature bravely.

First, the tiny little t-shirts, mostly pink in colour. Have to be ironed ulta so the graphics and letters don't melt.

My dad was a chronic iron-er. He needed EVERYTHING, by which I really do mean EVERYTHING, neatly pressed. His shirts and pants went to the dhobi. The lazy old man in the place opposite. They got stacked in the godrej. Prior to wearing the shirt, just prior to it, he would fire up the box and iron out the wrinkles where the sleeves were folded and so on.

Okay, moving on to the handkerchiefs. Whats this? Holes in all of them where they were safety pinned to the t-shirts? Oh well.

His bathing was a ritual. Most irritating when I was next in line. Recall it fondly now. Towel, undie, banian, dhoti, all white with that ridiculous Robin Blue happening all over it, all ironed and folded in specific ways had to be kept ready. He would take eons to bathe. Drag this huge copper pot of cold water over himself PSCHAAK. Mum would yell. DON'T LIFT THAT HEAVY POT. To no avail. Later, mum did the needful and hid away the pot so the man had to bathe using a mug like a decent human being, or at least a human being with a heart condition.

Uff. These interminable shorts. Why bother ironing stuff she wears only at home? At night?

Me, on the other hand, was (still am) quite a casual bather. Not to mention demonstrating a distinct tendency to iron my school uniform salwar knee-down only (which is the only part that showed under the kameez; and yes, in 11th and 12th, we had to wear these horrid salwar-kameez uniforms). The skirt with pleats was at a younger, healthier time. Dad would try to iron it for me but usually the pleats frustrated him. He would mutter disapprovingly if I suggested we give up on the ironing totally. I did not care much. But, he would not hear of it.

Ah, beautiful frocks that the monster cribs so much about wearing. What's this? White lining material? Nice. Irons well.

Mum has, in their long years of marriage and togetherness, picked up the ironing bug. She is markedly more efficient of course (mum is almost synonymous with efficiency. bustling with efficiency is a good way to describe her; in her walks, cooking, cleaning, gardening, everything). For long years she maintained a semblance of normalness at home, ironing the towel and so on quickly, so that it would seem that the only reason dad did not get to iron his own clothes is that mum got to them first. Not that his shoulder was dislocated last night. Not that this morning he is still reeling under the medication. Even when he was in the hospital for the nth time, he was allowed to wear his own clothes, and they were pristinely ironed.

The pants are all of varied lengths. Barbie proclaims this one (yeah right! bought it at 50 bucks). Everything is short for her. This devilish creature with her daddy's long legs.

Although it has been years since a dhoti has been ironed in my presence (or, for that matter an undie), everytime I stand here at this nice ironing board (bought by my father-in-law, a man I have never seen in front of an iron-box. When we go out for dinner though, he is the most smartly dressed, his sons look like crumpled heaps next to him :-)), I remember those days. The smell of a long time ago. A snaking coiling iron-box wire that I burnt innumerable number of times. Our special, sturdy, huge, ironing table with the cabinets below that housed my 'home clothes.' Oh, even those patches of Robin Blue Blue on dad's white towel.

I WILL iron the monster's clothes myself. Next year, I will have her school uniforms to do. I do hope I remember how the pleats should be done.