If I Had to Tell It Again

by Gayathri Prabhu

  Wrong Take.

  It never worked out like that, and nothing of that brochure narrative seemed to be good outcomes to him.

  Retain Take One.

  He would say the intoxicants saved him. The chewing tobacco, the alcohol, and for a few years, cigarettes too. How could he possibly have managed otherwise? He worked so hard, harder than anyone around him – he poured his everything into his work, but did not know how to deal with the fact that not everyone was as earnest and selfless. He never understood that too much honesty, too much hard work and too much trust in strangers were bound to be perilous.

  The world was already a damaged place and he could not see how imperfect his notion of perfection was.

  People would come into grace and then fall out of it. The only thing that stayed constant, that gave him some release from the dark shadows in his head was the drink, quite watery in the early years, then dense bitterness straight from the bottle.

  Two people first saw the signs of occasional drinking turning into inescapable alcoholism – he and I.

  I was a schoolgirl, he was a stressed overworked bank manager, and between us was the bottle.

  Hide it, he would insist, and no matter what I say, don’t give it to me.

  I would nod solemnly, determined not to let him down.

  Please, please, where is that bottle I gave you? Give it to me. Just one peg, just one peg, I promise.

  Which father should I have listened to? The one who was spiralling into addiction or the one who needed alcohol to make it through one more night, one more day?

  It was a great burden on someone barely a teenager. A great guilt too. Love was to be my undoing as much as his. I always resisted the nightly pleadings, but invariably I would give in. The one helping would vanish. More pleadings.

  Fine, one more swig.

  You pour it, he would say.

  My hands would tremble, my heart cold.

  If this was the road to our family’s doom, I was sending him that way, or so it felt. His desperation was always there, intensely visceral.

  Was there ever a father I could count on? I don’t know. If there was one such father, that was the year he must have receded, faded away.

  Love, our undoing. So much love. It was love that manifested in the strangest ways. In fear, in pride, in violence, in encouragement, in neglect, in drink. If I could change one thing of those lost years, it would be to be loved less by him. For my sister, it might just be the other way round – it might be an excavation for love.

  Not having a son, my father had been told all his life, would doom the Brahmin male soul. Who would deliver it to the other world? Daughters didn’t count. With typical irreverence, he had instructed that no rituals be conducted before his corpse was sent off to the medical college.

  My mother had mixed feelings about all this. She liked custom and tradition.

  I’ll be a ghost, dangle from a tree, he had joked repeatedly, and she had tried to laugh with him.

  As it turned out, after his death, the disposal of the body and leave-taking ceremonies were the last thing on our minds.

  I am relieved, my mother kept saying, that it was not suicide. He talked about killing himself more and more frequently towards the end. Anything but a suicide, my mother said. Suicide was the greatest crime and his soul would never get deliverance. The soul would have suffered, stayed a burden on earth. Every day I thank God, she said, that it was not a suicide.

  What else was it? This drinking till the liver collapsed, till there was bleeding in the throat, in the intestines, bleeding from every orifice. His O+ve blood, same as mine, that he had donated so many times to save lives, spilling out of him. Blood in his stools, blood in his vomit, blood on the bedroom floor, blood in the car that rushed him to the hospital, blood in the emergency room of the two hospitals they took him to, so much blood that they had put him in the deep freezer to stem the flow. For days after he was dead, our eyes would alight on stray specks of blood on a bathroom tile, on some cloth, on one edge of the sink where I stood brushing my teeth.

  The self-deception of her no-suicide relief was lost on my mother.

  We were exhausted. The body was gone. All the visitors had left. We sat around the dining table, mother and two daughters, eating takeaway from a nearby restaurant, talking about the foolishness of this dead man who had decided to get treatment too late.

  You are now a free woman, I told my mother. For years he threatened to go, and now he is gone. Now you can live your life.

  She sniffled into the edge of her sari, saying, how could he do this to me? Never listened to me, followed everybody’s advice but mine.

  He is gone, I reminded her, and you are free.

  A dead man’s soul stays on earth, stays in his house, for twelve days after the body is cold, my mother said.

  I doubt it. He was in a hurry to go, always, wanting to die early, swiftly, without hospital stays or lingering illness. Did he anticipate what our lives would be without him? His green diary, the one found under his pillow, now rests in the clutter of my bag. How can I possibly open it, read it? Not yet.

  Three days later, we are in my father’s old car, my sister and I. She is driving me to the railway station. We had decided she would stay on for a fortnight to help my mother, and then it would be my turn in the summer to sort out the paperwork.

  My father’s daughters, united by a deep fondness for each other, were divided by his erratic ways.

  When we were growing up, when he was alive, we both knew we were not the same for him. I was the darling, the doted-on, and she was the afterthought, the ignored. Both roads were equally hard with this man.

  I remember every single slap, every thrashing, every yelling. And I remember feeling unworthy, unimportant, fraught. My sister remembers almost nothing, but knows she was punished, treated unfairly. Everything has been blocked out, barricaded, everything but the resentment. Two children, born of the same parents and living in the same house, enduring nearly the same punishments – one suffers from not remembering and the other from remembering too much. Such are the workings of trauma.

  Between us are seen and unseen battle lines.

  He always loved you more, she says.

  The streets of Mysore are almost deserted, winding down and soothingly quiet. The street lamps cast big pools of light on the gentle grey of the road, the familiar road. So quiet, so cool, those stray April winds.

  I have heard this a million times. I was his favourite. He loved me very much.

  And I am weary of being apologetic for it. His love has been a chain around my neck, my feet – it had almost killed me. And she would never see it my way. Why should she? Her version is just as real, just as consuming.

  It was bloody hard being his favourite, and the price I paid was too high, I say aloud.

  She listens, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road.

  Anointed the unfailing sidekick to his mercurial act, one had to be perfect, always gather praise, always succeed. And be thrashed with anything he could lay his hands on when disappointed. He had tethered me early to his views on what to be and do in the world, not an ounce of coping skill taught or put in place. Look what he did, constantly putting me in unsafe situations, because people are all good and supposed to admire me like he did. But it never occurred to him that I was just a child, accessible. It was exhausting, damaging, infuriating to be his favourite. Probably just as bad as being the ignored child, like you – difficult in a different way, but difficult nonetheless.

  It was difficult for you.

  For the first time, I hear her acknowledge my perspective on our childhood, agree without even the flicker of hesitation. For the very first time. It is an extraordinary feeling for me. Almost of levitation.

  And then something else feels extraordinary.

  A shape in my awareness. Just like our father. There in the car, in the back seat, I feel he is listening to us.

  He is here, listening, I tell my sister.

 
I hope he heard everything, she says.

  I nod. It is another car ride I will never forget.

  Good riddance, I say.

  There are holes in this story and it looks like a sieve.

  Not because I forget, but because the holes fascinate me more than the woven strands around them.

  He was the consummate weaver, the finest storyteller I knew. And I was the gatherer of the gaps, the unspoken. He loved to talk, and he knew how to work an audience. His stories dot my childhood like wild flowers across a meadow.

  I remember them all.

  It made me want to tell stories too. It made me a writer.

  He was unprepared for the seriousness with which I withdrew into the cave of my craft, blinds pulled down to the lights of his world.

  All he had was one plan, one expectation, and it had packed up – there was nothing else to take its place. The plan was to incubate success, a daughter with accomplishments, enough to impress the many people who gravitated to him. He prided himself on the fact that he did not raise us to be conventional girls – we were told to have careers, follow our dreams, always be exceptional. There was never any pressure to get married, and he proudly sent us to distant cities for our higher studies. In return, he wanted to hear the applause, the accolades. But my life trajectory defied him.

  He wanted me to be a television journalist, watched and admired by the world every single day. I freelanced on odd media jobs, I sometimes stayed unemployed, and then I wrote two novels that went unnoticed.

  He wanted me to be the poster child for the warrior talk he spouted but could not live himself. I cracked open when I was thirty-one. Broken marriage and clinical depression like eggshells under my feet.

  He wanted me to always surge forward, fly upwards. I returned to studies at a time when my friends were sending their children to school. I restarted life from two suitcases when others my age were buying their houses.

  He watched me through the grey of his gloom. Soon I was nearing forty, no debt but no savings either, back under his roof as a single woman with a doctorate but no job. And when the teaching job did come, it seemed on par with being a writer nobody read – nothing to fuss about.

  In the last years, I noticed his eyes rarely stayed on me, for they were heavy with one question. How could it have gone so wrong? This was the repository of all his hopes – his beautiful, chirpy child of promise. Her hair had greyed in her youth, she had grown quieter, retreated into some secret uncommunicative furrow where there was no room for the father once adulated.

  Perhaps, he thought and said aloud, he had raised us all wrong. All that freedom, what good did it do? There is a reason why men are men and women are women and why all those gender roles must be upheld – it is a mistake to think one can raise girls like boys. That is why it had gone so wrong.

  He tried to backtrack but it was too late. Life had already taught his daughters that freedom is not something one ‘gives’ – it stays nestled in each person. And if at all there is any giving of freedom, there is no taking it back, certainly not the notion, the deep taste of it, not even when the taste is acrid.

  I was twelve or so, my sister trailing behind me by three years and nine months, and we had just moved to the biggest city I had seen. Having figured out which school we should attend, my father put us both on a school bus and handed me money for enrolment. It was an unending bus journey with imagined fears at the other end of it. We were soon in our new school, the only children in a long queue of parents. I had to pay the fees, find my sister’s classroom for her and then figure out my own. Somewhere in that day was one limpid moment when adulthood exploded in my head. I was unsure if I could ever expect my father to do things for me after that.

  I never did.

  Like the time I missed a train, my first long train journey away from home, standing on the platform, late in the night, in a city I do not know, alone …

  Like the time I woke up in the middle of the night desperate for a drink of water, the night after a surgery, in too much pain to crawl out of bed, alone …

  Like the time I had no roof to call my own, my entire life stuffed into two suitcases, dragging them across the city, in and out of buses, up three flights of stairs, alone …

  If our father did not come to the rescue, it was because he believed in spines toughened by hardships. (There is little that daunts me now, that cannot be denied.) The whipping we received had the same rationale. He had grandly announced he would stop hitting us when we became teenagers, and mostly he stayed true to his word. That was also when the drinking increased, as if the rage had to be gulped down.

  You turned out fine because of the disciplining, he always said.

  We turned out fine despite you – much of our adult energy was expended in communicating that to our father.

  Before the alcoholism, we did not have the language to tell our truth.

  Afterwards, the alcoholism did not carry our words to him.

  Such a great man, your father, and as a writer you are obliged to write a book about his many accomplishments – this was said to us by his friends who had dropped in to pay condolences.

  Write of his greatness?

  A genuinely selfless man, they said, always working tirelessly for others.

  True. The children in the local orphanage grieved when they found out he had died. He would go there with a cake on every child’s birthday. He listened to their chatter, regaled them with tales, helped them as much as he could. While those children wept for him, my father’s daughters were mostly dry-eyed. We had been exhausted by his generosity and greatness.

  Here was a man who had saved no money but gave to anyone who appeared to be in need. He grumbled about the smallest chore in his house but rushed to slave for others without a second thought. Roadside trees had to be watered, all the stray dogs in the neighbourhood fed, every passer-by’s well-being inquired after. All his life, his face had been turned outwards, looking to the world, hungry for love and sympathy, so hungry, and perhaps what his family gave had seemed gravely inadequate.

  Did he leave wanting – wanting more?

  The rhetoric of sacrifice and self-denial was our father’s mainstay. We were told to refuse all favours, give rather than take, and always say no, especially when in want. We never asked for anything as children or we shook our heads furiously in refusal – it was our only hope of a stray windfall.

  No. No. No.

  A self-made man – one of the visitors was echoing the praise my father valued the most.

  Nothing had been taken from the ancestors. SGM hated to take gifts, refused family land or produce, lived entirely on his earnings. He had often bragged about this mythic making of the self.

  And fearless, they said.

  Remember the time he had all his teeth extracted over one weekend? Not just the rotted teeth but the ones that would rot in the future as well. A man of courage, everyone agreed.

  Yes, you should write about what a great man he was.

  I was quiet, obviously a rude, unfeeling girl.

  But what can I say to these friends of his, these RSS workers? I find it hard to agree with them on anything. I find it hard to believe there is a saffron flag flying on top of my father’s house. It was around Hindutva politics that we had had our first real fight, over the whole Ayodhya agenda of the BJP, when I was a teenager. My father has never voted for any other party and harboured a virulent animosity for all members of one religion. After the initial storms of disagreements, we had rarely discussed politics, mostly because it drove him crazy that I did not see things his way.

  The visitors left after an eternity of tea and small talk. If I wrote all I knew about my father, nobody would believe me. He had told his life story so many times and with such virtuosity that my version can only be a feeble echo. But these echoes are all we have, as we learn to live without him.

  My father never acknowledged his vortex of darkness as depression. He said it was genuine suffering caused by his life’s
unfortunate circumstances and that nobody in the world understood him. It was only for a few years that drinking seemed to give him explicit pleasure. After that the undiluted rum was gulped as though it were medicine, and in the last years he would grimace hard and force the liquid down his gullet. Tortured and inexorable, that’s how his drinking looked.

  We were not short of causalities or excuses for this, some specific, others existential: he took voluntary retirement from his job in his early fifties and the unemployment was too much to handle; the plans he made for a business of his own, or for voluntary work, never quite took off and there was plenty of time to drink in the day; his marriage and his wife were dragging him down; the dog he loved more than anybody else had to be put to sleep after many months of terminal illness; his mother was bedridden in her nineties and taking care of her for a few months drove him out of his mind; he and his wife were in a road accident a couple of years before his death (she recovered from her head injury but his index finger was irreparably damaged); he was frightened of his own approaching old age, of the possibility of any disability or dependence.

  Always some explanation, none of which matters now. All we had to do was name and accept the illness.

  It was hard. We were swamped, I found, by the judgement of those who could bear to have anything to do with mental illness or depression. How could a fractured mind, already suffering, endure that? We begged our father to seek help, but he would not. I just want to die, he said, don’t worry, I won’t be a burden on you.

  Ten years ago, just when I had thought I had become my own person, purged of many of my father’s traits, and was floating on the open seas in my own style, untethered to him, it came knocking on my door. And it looked familiar. It was what he had refused to name, and it was now with me.