June 15 was Father’s Day, which got me thinking that how I never celebrated this day. Since childhood it has always been Mother’s Day, mommy’s birthday, etc. For reasons unknown to me it never occurred to find out if Father’s Day existed. Maybe because I wasn’t all that close to my dad. He was someone who was there…somewhere…came like a knight in shining armour to shield me from mother’s anger. Earlier my dad had Wednesdays as his weekly off. Our favourite pastime – to hunt for the cane that mom hid and destroy the torture weapon. It was the most fruitful exercise when dad would find it hidden in the most unlikeliest of places (atop the cupboard, buried deep beneath the bed, between two cupboards – phew my mum led us to some treasure hunt), break it into many pieces, bribe my governess into having selective amnesia and in front of mom pretend as though nothing had happened. Needless to say all hell broke loose the next time I screwed up and mom reached for the cane 🙂
I do have some fond memories with Daddy. When I was a little girl, once we had gone to the market and due to the rush I happened to let go of his finger only to grab it again and yell for him to pick me up. Now my dad is almost 6 feet tall and broad built and maybe at the age of four I was a puny thing. So imagine my shock when I look up and find that the finger I am holding does not belong to Daddy. And the person in question was equally shocked to find a strange girl call him dad in a market place. Fear, panic and every other emotion overtook me till I saw my dad on the opposite side of the road frantically hunting for me. Relief…I was in safe hands.
One memory in particular that will always stay with me and which I don’t think I will be able to pass on to my children (if I do have any) is dad taking me to Diamond Garden every Sunday evening. It was a ritual. It was a children’s park where I would run amok…playing on the swing, see-saw, giant wheel and ending the evening with bhel and kulfi. Those were the best days of my life. And I would really look forward to our Sunday sojourn. Couple of times I went to the same garden with my mom…but it was no fun. She could never recreate the carefree magic like dad did (obviously because he never kept a hawk’s eye on me like mum did). Oh! and if you are wondering why I will not be able to pass it on to my children…simple by the time they would be born there wouldn’t be any parks left. My cousins too are growing up in an Esselworld generation…
However in this entire series of fond memories, not once do I remember being afraid of my Daddy. No doubt that he too would sometimes get angry with me (especially when it was time to have milk something that I detested or if I misbehaved with mom, etc.) but it was part of parenting or more like mommy conditioning that he was putting all her efforts to waste by sparing the rod and spoiling me. I am not talking of being afraid in that sense. I am talking of being afraid like Josef Fritzel’s daughter Elizabeth (who was raped and impregnated by her own dad) or or Arushi Talwar (whose father is speculated to have slit her throat) or Priyanka Todi (whose father killed her beau Rizwanur under the pretext of saving the family honour) or Chiranjeevi’s daughter (who had to file a police complaint against her own dad for threatening to kill her husband and her) or the numerous girl children who are drowned to death by their own fathers for not having been born as boys or the numerous female foetuses who are aborted while in their mother’s wombs by son preferring fathers or the Ameenas whose fathers sell them to rich old Arabs or maybe even to pimps in exchange for some money.
No…I have no such recollections of my childhood. Not even when my dad bathed me or hoisted me on his broad shoulders or gently laid me on the bed when I fell asleep on the sofa. I have never had the reason to feel threatened. A friend of mine recently became a dad to twin baby girls and one of the first things his wife initiated him into was nappy changing. Would my friend look at his daughters incestously? Would those girls feel uncomfortable in their dad’s presence? When they grow up and fall for some guy who may not be from their caste, will my friend retain his family honour at their cost?
There is a movie starring Rahul Bose, Koel Purie and Boman Irani titled ‘Everybody Says I’m fine’ which deals with this issue of incest very beautifully. The fear, the anguish, the confusion that a child goes through when subjected to unspkeable acts is something that is simply heinous, scarring, demonous.
Yet as they say, “every dark cloud has a silver lining”. We have such lovely well-known father-daughter relationships like Nana Chudasama & Shaina NC, Kabir & Pooja Bedi, Ravi & Anoushka Shankar, Pandit Jasraj & Durga Jasraj, Prakash & Deepika Padukone, Sharad Pawar & Supriya Sule, Manmohan & Pooja Shetty…the list is endless and gladly longer.
So as another Father’s Day goes by let us live with the thought by Enid Bagnold, “A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.”
no shades of grey 
