Moments of Poignance
“Oh, how it hurts to think that my dad could’ve behaved so badly with my sister I was rather fond of!” he resumed after a long pause. “I was away in Ranchi then and what I had heard of it hurts me to this day. One late evening she was lost in her thoughts, whatever they were, on the verandah, oblivious of the ogling ways of a roadside Romeo. My dad who happened to return home then got it all wrong, and paying a deaf ear to her professed innocence, like a man possessed he had beaten her black and blue, the poor thing. Well, she never forgave him for that, even after his death, and I don’t fault her for that. But what an irony that it was on her account he once ventured across the Godavari in spate risking his and my life as well. Sure he came to soften up his stance on other issues but somehow he failed to shed his blinkers in sexual matters; and he was lucky that the inclinations of my sisters and the impediments of the times gave him no hiccups on their pre-marital front.”
“What a tragedy it is to hurt the loved ones owing to the debility of belief.”
“Well said, more so the religious belief; maybe towards the end one might be able to shelve self-indulgent biases but the faith-induced bigotry tends to grip one all the more.” he said thoughtfully. “Saying ‘sorry’ would’ve helped, but he believed what he wanted to believe, and her denials seemed but self-serving arguments to his closed mind-set. Well he was rude with me too in my childhood that is; but in his deathbed gesture I came to see his way of saying sorry for his intemperate past. He gave me, and not my brother, his wrist-watch with his name embossed on it, which was a long service award from Lipton. It was another matter that my brother loved him more than I ever did, and it appeared as if he bestowed it upon his first born, but I suppose it was not as simple as that. When I was ten, toying with his wrist-watch, I dropped it down to its doom inviting his wrath. Frustrated with the loss of his first acquisition, he roundly thrashed me even as my mother tried her best to put sense into his agitated head that it was after all an accident. Though resentful then, it was much later that I could understand his sense of loss; money being scarce, it was no easy task to replace it. Maybe laying on his deathbed, he recalled the episode while he recapped his life; he surely would’ve, for one of my uncles once told me that he would project the celluloid of his life on his mind-screen thrice a day. Why not, if youth is daydreaming about the future and the middle age the dilemma of the present, then old age makes a memoir of the past. Well, it could have been my father’s sense of remorse that might’ve prompted him to make a present of that wrist-watch to me by way of his redemption. But by the time the possibility of that occurred to me, he was no more. If only I could’ve told him that I understood his constraints and never bore a grudge against him on that or any other count; oh, how that would’ve helped ease our consciences!”