Dear Baba

Dear Baba,

Wish you a Happy Father’s Day! You can wish me the same. I celebrate my first Father’s Day this year. Ofcourse you know all this, but then a worthy salutation is needed to start off a letter, so there it is. It will be 7 years since we last spoke, though I like to think of them as close to 7 days (I distinctly remember the priest saying that 1 year for us mortals is just a day for where you are). Guess its the ‘Coping mechanism’ which makes me think of it this way.

I won’t bore you with all that happened in the 7 days since we last spoke. But rather tell you about the past 2 days. You are now a grand-dad, again, yes after 20 years! Aatmay (no, we didn’t come up with a nickname yet. You see chota-dadu,mini-dadu and micro-dadu were already taken so now its gonna be just Aatmay we think), your grandson, doesn’t know about you yet, but he will in the coming days. In the next month he will be all of 1.

I must confess that becoming a father has awakened a sense of responsibility in me. I somehow have a sense of been grounded, which has led me to a kind of satisfaction which is hard for me to put in words. As a father yourself, you can better appreciate this. I now realize that we never had a chance to sit, just the two of us, and talk about everything and nothing. I feel that when the time came for you to sit back, relax and have my ear, it was too late.

There are close to 25 years of memories which I have of you, which will last me for the remainder of my lifetime. The funny thing about memories is that they are not free flowing. They invariably need an anchor to survive.  Objects, incidents, references, even to words said and meant in a particular context act as those anchors. Once anchored, memories have this habit of coming back to you when you least expect them, surprising you. The sad part about memories is that they are way too personal in nature. You can try to share them to someone, but you can never completely convey what they really mean to you. They are both a treasure and a burden in that sense.

Even otherwise, I am sure there would not have been any parenting tips forthcoming from you. The only thing I intend to do in that regard is to ‘be the best that I can’.  I can only hope that I am afforded the time to sit back, relax and look back at a life well-lived.

Cheers!

Dadu