Journey to India

I miss my father. He died in 1995. I would love to talk to him about India, his family and his life here in India and why he left; what he felt after he left, and how he felt when he came back. As a matter of fact, I did travel with him for three weeks in India in 1982. We had a lot of fun together. It was summertime, and really hot. We used to laugh at a lot of things together. He was on a business trip, but as he always did, he took time out to go to Calcutta to visit his mother and his sister, and a host of nephews and nieces.

 

Baba enjoyed being a Bera Sahib, taking taxis, and drinking scotch in the late evening when the somewhat cooler breeze would come through the verandah doors into the living rooms with high ceilings, slow fans, and perpetual attendance of house servants, at his friend Lal's house in New Delhi. He also enjoyed going to the market and buying vegetables and fruits and bantering with the kaprawallahs about the textile business.

Baba never haggled for very small amounts... he said the sellers and rickshaw drivers worked hard and deserved the money. He did haggle shrewdly with his suppliers for large amounts of hard dollar cash.

 

Baba left India for good in 1963 and though at times he lamented all things western and threatened to go back to India in his old age, he never did, except to visit. After three weeks of visiting, he couldn't wait to get back home to Canada. Not only because his family was there, but because after three weeks, he couldn't stand it anymore here. He would use the dirty toilets as an excuse, but it was much more than that. He wanted to keep it as simple as possible, and liked it when things were reasonably reliable. He had gotten used to that. Baba was as ready to spend 6 minutes studying an eggplant in a Canadian supermarket, as he was to spend it talking to a man with a cart full of eggplants in Kanpur. But, at the end of the day he wanted to go home to a quiet place, with lesser stress levels.

 

What I have not blogged about, and will not do in public in detail, is Baba's pain and suffering. Much of it is common to all Indians, much of it is common to all humans in the world. What I can say is that I have a great deal more respect for him now than I did in the past. Baba escaped a very tight stranglehold of a culture, where there was a great deal of love, in the family and in the community, but very little of it was unconditional love. It was nearly all conditional. He had to perform. He had to perform financially, morally, educationally. Oh, he got a lot of perks, all sons in Indian families do, especially the oldest, but he also had to do the dirty work. He was not free to be himself, not even remotely. And that is what he got away from. It wasn't easy. You can take the boy out of India, you can even take the Indian affectations out of the boy, my father was very western in many ways, but what could not be taken out of the boy was the unhealed wounds inflicted on him by a very ancient culture. And this I know, not from conjecture, but from what he told me.

 

And so, I love my father more than ever. I miss him. Yes, I have been angry with him for things, and that was a natural reaction on my part, and one I wouldn't take back. I had things to be angry about. But now, I would love to drink a couple of beers with him in Varanasi. Not on the ghats, overlooking the holy river, but at the Taj Hotel, with bearers at our bidding, with him bantering with them about anything and everything, including life, love and death.