Opinion My father-in-law raised two sons after a tragedy. This is what he taught us

Indian Express

05-05-2025

Before I begin, I must tell you two things: First, this essay is about my father-in-law and how he raised his boys. Second, my father-in-law, the subject of this essay, passed away last monsoon.
And so, before the story has commenced, you have been served the caveat: It is technically not my story to tell. Yet, everyone knows, we take from the wreckage what is most dear to us, we don't care who's looking. In any case, even more than the stories themselves, it is the fact that my father-in-law had bequeathed them to me that gives me the tacit permission I claim I do not need. When I first met him, perhaps I had been interested in his stories because I was interested in his son. But then it became the very thing that catalysed our independent bond, turned it into something that was able to live and breathe – at least for the most part – without reference to his son.
Now, the story.
My father-in-law raised two boys. When the younger – my husband – was two-and-a-half or three, and the elder was nine or nine-and-a-half, their mother was diagnosed with cancer. When she passed away after a decade, my father-in-law, always a hands-on parent, did what was almost unthinkable at the time: He took voluntary retirement. This was Calcutta in the Nineties; liberalisation had not yet set people's salaries on previously unimagined tracks, people did not yet know the phrase S-A-H-D, 'Stay-At-Home-Dad'. Why an engineer trained in England would decide to stay at home to cook for his sons and chat with their friends was a question that merited rich discussion.
But the one perk of living in their three-people collective was that, as they conquered grief – and a great deal of other trouble that descended upon them in the wake of her passing – they were free to drown out the noise in their own ways: My father-in-law listened to Bengali music; my brother-in-law to a contemporary sound that emerged from his new Philips HiFi music-system; meanwhile, S, my husband, watched old films on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), for hours on end after school. My father-in-law bought a second-hand Premier 118NE. When they weren't drowning out the world, they were absorbing the dusty Calcutta light that bounced off the cracked concrete as they drove around aimlessly on Sundays. Or they were inhaling the scent of the river at dusk, since they ended their journeys invariably by the Hooghly river, where they ate ice cream. This phase of long car-rides and America-flavoured ice-cream ('cookie dough' and 'raspberry') was when, I reckoned, they would have started talking endlessly about world affairs. Till the end, the three of them couldn't be in the same room without turning it into a noisy news studio.
The truth, though, is that I never saw any of these as parenting stories until, of course, I became a parent, after which all stories became parenting stories. As a strange and stormy child myself, I had grown in opposition to my mother – a visceral reaction that shaped both of us, and continues to shape us even today, through her fading eyesight and my (toddler-occasioned) fraying nerves. It was as though we were one block and I needed to separate myself to become my version of me, and then memorise the formula so that I couldn't relapse into being the single block again overnight. (There is, of course, no formula. I love my mother with a fierce love; I pull away with equal fierceness.)
And so, as I began to know my husband, I developed a great – almost academic – curiosity about the alternate father-son model that seemed to have shaped him: It was as though his growing up was in the opposite direction, it was towards the breach, the violent gap, that had opened in his father's life, and he grew, with the impossible tenacity of greenery, to first encircle and then cover it. It was the love of a 13-year-old who believed it was his duty – his mission, in fact – to protect his father from the world, when, in reality, it was, of course, the other way round. But my husband's conviction in this position, maintained till the end, was ultimately the very thing that moved me the most; its tenderness cutting me in half when grief arrived.
*
On the last day of my father-in-law's life, S woke up in our bed in Delhi. He had returned from Jamshedpur – where my brother-in-law lived and where my father-in-law was in hospital – the night before, with a detailed medical summary from the doctors there that he wanted to discuss with our dear friend, Ambarish, also our family doctor, and who was also closely acquainted with my father-in-law's case. My father-in-law had spent the last 55 days in hospital, and S had been with him through most of it.
When my sister-in-law called in the morning and asked us to come immediately, we didn't yet know that worldwide all airline booking sites had crashed. Before we left for the airport, my father-in-law spoke to us on a video call. 'Stay well,' he told me, smiling calmly, and suddenly I knew this was it. I had been in denial all through. As far as I knew, our party line did not allow for last words; we had a mission, and I hadn't been given a sitrep that called for final goodbyes yet. 'We're coming,' I told him, on a loop. 'We're coming, we're coming, we're coming.'
My father-in-law asked for my husband. As though completely restored to his old self, Daddy told him it was time. 'The show must go on,' he smiled.
***
The problem of a narrative like this is that in its attempt to distil the complex anarchy of human circumstance into a sharp angle, a full insight, a potent brew in a tiny shot glass, one necessarily oversimplifies. I had always admired his decision to become a full-time parent, the dazzling clarity of it, all along. When he confronted Death, my father-in-law learnt the value of what was truly important to him. Any decision in favour of love and against the dictates of reason appeals to me instantly. And yet, my father-in-law was a very reasonable man, who had made his parenting choices in an entirely natural and calmly-reasoned fashion. As his boys grew up, they took different strands of his life and did not choose others; they amplified the ones they'd chosen, and while they connected these loyally to their father, they also spent many years not consciously linking any of their choices to their childhood. My brother-in-law became a corporate star – he was able to bequeath upon my father-in-law the fruits of his success, and my father-in-law was very proud of him. My husband was an unremitting idealist – and my father-in-law was equally proud of the writer and thinker he became.
Does this mean this was the only angle?
Of course not.
To me and my sister-in-law, he complained regularly and robustly about his sons. (Never his grandchildren; they were perfect.) The complaints were at least 50 per cent of the time because the brothers refused to indulge his sweet tooth; another 25 per cent because they'd disagreed with him on geopolitics.
But beyond this layer too, there were others.
You open a door and enter a room. But the room has another door, and you go deeper into an unmapped house of many corridors and secret chambers.
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To my brother-in-law, he always emphasised the importance of being a hands-on parent; to my husband, he always said, 'Remember to keep the kitchen fires burning.' But he did not just tell my brother- and sister-in-law to spend more time with the children, he stepped in and gave a great deal of time to the grandchildren himself. He did not just tell us to be practical, he bought us our first car. The truth is that my father-in-law raised his boys the way he knew best; the truth is also that they took from his raising what they needed.
As I have since come to realise, parenting does not end with the children growing up; it ends only with the parent's passing. And so, it was perhaps the culmination of a life of successful parenting that even in death, my father-in-law was mindful of what his sons would be able to survive. My brother-in-law needed to be present by his bed when breath left his body; my husband needed to be 1500+ km away.
These days, the brothers call each other and discuss economics and international trade as they always did. But now that they are raising themselves – in addition to raising their children – they even allow themselves to ask each other one or two personal questions.