This Father’s Day…

Every year Father’s Day comes and passes me by… and this time around as well, I was oblivious to its hype and hullabaloo … I still do not understand how a single day becomes The Day to celebrate a person or his place in our lives… That is perhaps why I am losing interest in birthdays as well (or maybe it is because birthdays have lost interest in me, lost count of my age 😀 )

But this Father’s Day was especially and quietly special for me as well… My father, despite running a full Indian house single-handedly on his own, was all smiles… Despite the fact my mother is down and out with Sciatica, our cook-aunty is on leave, my meticulous grandfather wanting everything in perfect order, my father smiled a big smile at me when I went home this weekend… and Pop, went my heart… (pun most intended)

The reception I got was near perfect and in his own words “filmy”… When I reached home, the heat was driving me insane… and since my menses were around the corner, I was as if having a spasm in my eyes… in other words, a full-fledged migraine attack… everything was mumbo jumbo, but nevertheless perfect. My almost septuagenarian father was sitting on a chair with a cramp stuck in his thigh, at an arm’s distance from my mom who was lying diagonal on the bed, all flushed out from the extreme unpredictable pain (with an international name)… I arrived and the painful picture was complete… And the three of us were smiling.

A lot of people believe my representation of my father isn’t all too heroic… that I have, in fact, maligned his image… I cannot even refute that because I know how dry and sardonic I can be in my writings… Let’s just say he’s not an easy man… and I am his difficult daughter… the culmination is that I love my father… You know why?

Because –

• He has given me the right to stand as tall as him… figuratively and literally…
• He has given me the right to voice my opinions, howsoever revolting and unshy…
• And he has allowed me to take his wife away from him…

I thought he had the world at his feet, so I, in an attempt to have at least one parent by my side, sneaked his better half away… Nobody really benefitted from that, least of all, him… but the fact that he never really stopped her from supporting me made me realize his worth… Big Time !

So this Father’s Day… God thought of a plan… he did something amazing and lame, at the same time… He freed my wings caught in the NET… and fulfilled papa’s wish of seeing his daughter clear the UGC… When I first came to know I was through, for a good thirty minutes, papa’s face kept flashing before my eyes, before I realized I was crying. I am still bewildered, a little blue…  wondering what the “achievement” means to me, but it means quite a lot to him… and that, to me, is everything.

But I have made it clear to papa darling… to not get his hopes up as this doesn’t change anything…  I am, after all, still the same pain-in-the-neck-offspring.