My Dad Taught Me Everything About Being A Father, If Only I Had Listened

As you read this, your Diwali festivities will be on the wane, but you’re most likely still feeling the warm glow that comes from spending time with family. Yet, it’s also a time that gets some of us nostalgic. We think of the years we spent as a child waiting for that first firecracker to go off, or lining up at an interminable line at some temple or gorging your face with shankarpalli until your mother glared at you with that secretive, sideways look that froze your blood. And for some of us, Diwali is also a chance to think of those whose spirit burns as brightly as our memory of them. As a father of two, I always tend to compare notes with what my father did. Like, how we’d light firecrackers in a bucket as members of the family had their ‘pahili anghol’ (literally, first bath of the new year), and how we’d go fish shopping and he’d make the Koli women blush. I also tend to look at his approach to fatherhood.  

While we disagreed on most things, and he wasn’t always a model father, I can assuredly say he was a very good man. He stood for one thing above all else – Integrity. He didn’t mind upsetting people to stand up for what was right and taught us to do that too. That’s one trait I hope passes down to my daughters.

Yet, some things do and must change as we move along. My father was less friend and more disciplinarian, which made it very hard to talk to him. The one real conversation with him that I remember was when I announced that I’d split up with a girlfriend that the family was particularly fond of. He said, “Whatever your decision, we’re with you.” While the right thing to say, given the context of our relationship, the statement made a further conversation awkward. I’d like to have more than just functional dialogue with my kids. I want to be able to talk to them about life, love and everything else in between. I want conversations on moon landing conspiracies, religion vs tradition, the latest Bond movie and of course, our ‘mutual’ love for a football team from Manchester that wears red. My four-year-old, has a great imagination and she loves to make up songs and sing aloud for no reason at all. Growing up, that was frowned upon in the Vyavaharkar household. I don’t ever remember my father being really into music. My brother and I learned the tabla and it was treated as yet another thing we participated in, quite like the National Cadet Corps or the quiz team. One side of me says that that lack of pressure helped us make our own decisions while another will also point out to you that each time my brother or I drummed the dining table, we were yelled at. It was all very confusing, but again, I think it was about us having a semi-rigid framework that we had to work within. It made us independent. Fiercely so. I hope to achieve the same thing for my daughters. But I wonder if we must take the same route as my parents.

Like how my dad petrified my friends. A lot of classmates wouldn’t call me because they were afraid my father would answer. He wouldn’t say a word more than ‘Hello…yes, one minute…” but there was something about the way he spoke that made them shake in their boots. And yet, as I grew up, I realised that a lot of cousins and friends regarded him very warmly. He was the dependable uncle, the helpful one, the supportive one.  I’d like to be that for my nephews and nieces, but I want to be that for my daughters too above all else. So I don’t have to be posthumously understood as being a loving man. It’ll be seven years this coming March since my father died. But one memory lights up more brightly about the love he carried in his heart for his firstborn. Having started writing at 18 for some Mumbai newspapers, he never openly gave me any credit for my bylines and stories. While I thought it strange, I put it down to the somewhat fractious relationship we shared.

After his death, my mother and I discovered a stack of years and years of painstakingly curated articles with my bylines, as well as printouts of emails I had thoughtlessly typed out for my brother and him while I was living in the US. To realise that he valued my work overwhelmed me, immensely. There’s a song called The Living Years, by Mike & The Mechanics, with lyrics that read – Crumpled bits of paper/ Filled with imperfect thought/ Stilted conversations/ I'm afraid that's all we've got. I sort of feel that way. I know that he didn’t mean to, but from my father, I did learn to care, and to love without having the need to show it. I imagine, it’ll now be up to my daughters to teach me that it’s just as important to show it. My father fathered me for nearly 30 years while I’m just four years down my journey. I know the road is a long one and we haven’t even reached the teenage years yet. Good thing then that Diwali vacation is over, so let the schooling begin.