A common name, a father's light
I always found Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day and their other mercantile mutations more Hallmark happenings than any meaningful moments of meditative mensch.
Something has changed now. I no longer feel like a judgy bear, holding up a disdainful nose at these commemorations. Life has softened me in as many ways as it has strengthened me.
This Father's Day, I found myself thinking about my father, who recently turned 95 and is fading faster than I can accept.
He comes from a family of priests, intelligent, fiercely hard working but once desperately poor. He was born in 1930, when India had not even become Independent, raising a family of females on a single salary in the 1950s-60s because society didn't encourage women to work. With almost single-minded focus, he pulled himself out of his own family's genteel poverty, wearing his values like a medal while 'serving the government of independent India'.
Like men of his generation, he was also singularly inexpressive of his love for us, his children, although by the time I was born, that was changing. I remember his cuddles and bedtime stories vividly. But it is one story that keeps coming to mind whenever I think of his love for me.
Growing up, I disliked my name because every 10th person was named 'Jyoti' then. When my friends called me 'Jo' or 'Jojo' or 'Joey', I responded happily, desperately hoping my given name would be quietly forgotten.
As the third of four daughters in a north Indian family, I always knew it was a son they were hoping for when I was born. One day, I must have been around 10, I asked him if he was disappointed at my birth. I don't think anyone had asked him that, not even after the birth of my younger sister. People just assumed that disappointment was a given.
He looked at me in surprise.
'Disappointed?' he said, confused. 'You brought me more joy than I can remember. Your birth was aligned with a big promotion, more prosperity. I enjoyed your childhood more than that of my other children.'
His usually serious eyes lit up in a smile. Although, by this time, our relationship had become more formal — his hugs and night-time stories a thing of the past — I remember his words bringing me comfort.
We were standing under the frangipani tree I used to climb in the rambling garden of one of the whitewashed government houses I grew up in. I still remember the way he impatiently flicked back his jet-black hair from his wide forehead as he said, 'When your older sisters were born, I was too young and too poor and had too many responsibilities — my parents, jobless siblings, cousins who needed a leg up. I could never pamper them the way I pampered you when you were born a decade later.'
He continued, 'Do you know why I named you Jyoti? As I was driving your mother to the hospital in Delhi on a cold January morning, the whole city was lit up for Republic Day. I felt the city was celebrating your birth. And so, when you were born, the only name I could think of for you was Jyoti (light).'
I embraced my name only because of this conversation. It reminds me of my father's love for me even today, when he is infirm, barely mobile, gazing out of his lounger, his eyes cloudy with cataract, his once sharp mind often disoriented, his once bushy eyebrows drooping and white. He is more expressive now, always telling me how much he looks forward to my biweekly visits, when I read the Bhagavad Gita to him or we listen to a podcast on Vedanta.
After his last foray to the ICU, he became even more fragile, but at least he is stable. For now.
I know the time has come to let him go, and I'm trying. Our conversations during these visits have told me more than my own memories of how my parents tried their best to raise their four daughters like sons at a time when this was an anachronism.
Even today, he won't live with one of his married daughters. He prefers to live in his own house, a hospice-type situation with 24-hour attendants, all of them financed by his pension — payback for his years of his service to 'the government of independent India'.
We live longer today because medicine has expanded lifespans, but sometimes, as in the case of my father, quality of life suffers. I know that even when he passes on, whenever someone calls me by the name he gave me, however common it may sound to others, it will remind me of his love for me, his third daughter who brought him light in a country that still doesn't value its women.
The writer is a former journalist and the author of 'Breathing Here is Injurious to Your Health'
National Editor Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly 'She Said' column
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