A Cimmerian veil of grief arrested her mind like a creeper choking a newly sprouted plant. Her heart became heavier than a thousand fully loaded sand bags. As if lost in an empty tunnel, she could not move her lips to say or ask anything, the somber news swallowing her emotions.
Time could not take liberty from stopping her eyes breaking the dam of sadness. The anchor of hope that a patriarchal shadow was always there to cover her back when in despair was broken abruptly. This picture hung on the time frame when I pausingly told her that her father had gone to the galaxy of stars in the arms of God. He was my father-in-law.
An altruist and abstemious person by nature he was lovingly called Baba by one and all. Though wisely aware that nothing remains permanent, his sudden demise made her forget for a moment how to measure the meaning of life. She had not just lost a father, she had lost a monk who had dictated the verses of family values and love since her green tender days.
As a hands-on father, for Baba obligations were always before pleasure and duty before rest. The dynamics of putting family first exposed his devotion and commitment. Baba had won many a heart for being there for whoever needed him. Until his death at the ripe old age of ninety-two, he abstained from drinking nor ever held a cigarette between his fingers. Baba had the best advice to his sons ‘never get lost in the whirlpool of vices as that would only lead to destruction and extinction’, as most of the fathers would do, hardly realising their sons would take it as a street side advise.
What made Baba the best dad ever was his unwavering views towards a girl child. He believed, every girl in a family should be treated with high standard of love, care, protection, empathy, and security by all means. Her mind should not be cramped with the chaos of societal taboos but a red educational carpet should be thrown before her to make the right decisions of life without setting boundaries. It had already dawned on him that ‘a son is a son until he takes a wife and a daughter is a daughter all through your life’.
Baba never regretted his spoken words nor prided his silence when questioned either sarcastically or with dubious mind by his peers. His life revolved around a simple philosophy of human nature. Never borrow nor lend because borrowed garments never fit well. Besides Marathi and Konkani, Portuguese language was close to his heart.
Baba always believed that during Portuguese rule there was good governance and hardly any corruption. But now in the so-called modern democratic world, development is used as a bait and corruption is revered as God. When mentioned that there was no freedom of speech during the Portuguese regime, he used to explicitly ask, where is it now?’ Such were the thoughts of a person who had no formal education. But the nature had thought him more than what the classroom could teach.
For a daughter in doldrums, at long last the sun of fatherly love had set on the horizon for the last time leaving behind the burning ambers of memories, warm and beautiful.
(The author is a freelance Konkani and English writer)
