A Father's Day Special
Ishika
Mitra
MAJMC Sem 2
Life does not always come
full circle; sometimes it's just a line- maybe straight, maybe wavy with lots
of crests and troughs, but not a wholesome circle. It has a beginning and end;
not the ever-flowing motion that a circle constitutes. On the summer evenings
now when I am left alone with my thoughts, I often find myself thinking about
the Tuesday evenings of my freshman years at university- the Tuesday evening
that had set in motion a series of Tuesday evenings to remain etched in my soul
forever.
It was a Tuesday evening
in early spring in the British Council Library in Camac Street when after
browsing through rows and rows of books till the closing hours of the
bibliothèque, my father asked me if I would like to stroll down the lanes of
Park Street. The year was 2016- I was a college freshman majoring in Economics.
While some would argue that it is a very pragmatic subject, I was inclined to
be less grounded in reality and more floating in my rose and honey-tinted
dreams back in the day. The choice of my major was the first big mistake of my
life but I tend to cut myself some slack for several reasons- I was too young,
and the wrong major made me bond closer with the best man ever to tread the
earth. The drudgery of studying, talking, writing and listening to economics
and the mind-numbing terms the discipline came with, day after day all through
the week, made me miserable. I needed friends who would discuss literature,
cinema, and anything out of the world of share markets, mergers, economic policies,
and Adam Smith. I don't have the greatest track record of making friends and in
some ways, when I think back to the days gone by, it was spending time with my
father that I enjoyed more than going to cafes and malls with my college
friends.
The proposition of
spending the evening in Park Street with my father was alluring and off we went
to Park Street with two sacks of books we had secured from the library and a
raging appetite. We strolled through the stores and restaurants with the bright,
vibrant lights enjoying our ice creams, talking about the new books we had got
and brimming with excitement about the upcoming few weeks of enjoying these
books. Once home, we sat on the couch with all the books laid out in front of
us telling Mum about our lovely evening and eventually getting engrossed in
going through the books like a couple of gal-pals after a successful shopping
spree at the mall.
This became a regular
affair- every week my father would take me to the library on a Tuesday evening
after he came back from the clinic and I got home from university; we would
spend a few hours in BCL, get bags full of books and spend the rest of the evening
in Park Street. I would look forward to Tuesdays all week long and Tuesdays
made me more excited than Sundays because discussing books with my father is
more enjoyable than sleeping in on a lazy Sunday. When summer came and the city
turned too hot and humid to walk down the streets for hours even in the
evenings, we would resort to a small cake shop and read one of the new books in
silence, occasionally breaking the flow to show the other one something amazing
we had read and most of the times it would be me asking him meanings of things
I read but didn't comprehend. And my father, he always had the answer to
everything!
This little
father-daughter tradition continued all through my undergraduate studies and
truth be told, these Tuesday evenings made the rest of the week full of RBI
regulations and calculus and GST implications, somewhat bearable. When I was
finally done with the insufferable three years of enduring the discipline of
pragmatic studies of the economic sciences, I decided to embrace something that
came naturally to me- the arts. Might I say that the first and my biggest
cheerleader was my father when I announced that I wanted to study cinema! How
he prepared me and guided me to crack the entrances to film schools is a whole
different story but when I did crack and eventually started packing to move
away for university, he got me a huge box to fill with books that I wanted to
take with me.
Life at my second
university was different. I lived in a picturesque little university town up in
the hills of the Western Ghats several thousand miles away from home; studying
cinema, living with friends in the dorm, walking to classes instead of taking
any transport, swimming in the evenings and taking weekend trips to sea beaches
and waterfalls outside the town; I lived amidst nature with friends who loved
cinema and would stay up with me to talk about cinema and books and I had a new
found freedom at the ripe start of my twenties in a way I had only dreamt of.
Nevertheless, I carried
on the tradition of going to the library on Tuesday evenings and eating cakes
or ice cream while reading. Our town library had a great selection of books and
every Tuesday, I would pick a few, buy a cake or ice cream at the Student Plaza
and sit on a park bench and enjoy my time. I would call my father and tell him
about what I read and he would tell me about what he read. When the heavy
monsoons descended on the Western Ghats, I took my book and pastry to the
dining hall and had my Tuesday evening there. My friends knew not to disturb me
on my Tuesday evenings.
This life so replete with
blossoms on trees and walks in the cool evening breeze came to an abrupt end
with the pandemic taking the world by storm, or might I say, by a raging
cyclonic tornado. The universities were shut down overnight and we packed whatever
we could in a few hour's notice and flew back home leaving most of our stuff
behind. Sadly enough, I had to leave most of my books in the dorm for the
airlines would only allow so much luggage, pandemic or not. Thereafter began a
long, almost never-ending ordeal of being confined within the cemented and
secure walls of my home. The world had shut down it seemed back then, except
the hospitals which couldn't keep up with the inflow of COVID-stricken
patients. My father being a frontline worker got no respite from working. I
remember him serving every day of every week, wearing a five-layered mask from
morning till evening, going without any food or water till he came back home
and not a word of complaint would fall from his lips. Bordering on sixty-five,
he never missed one working day in the two years that the virus killed millions
of people.
I had to spend a year and
a half at home, but our Tuesday tradition continued with a few tweaks to it. We
started baking. My father had always been a baker in his soul- he was a doctor
by day and a baker by night kind of a person. I grew up eating cakes made by
him and in those pandemic-shaded years of being hidden from the world, he took
his baking several notches above. I was his apprentice. We baked muffins,
cupcakes, pies, pizza breads, pita breads and pastry puffs and a lot more.
Eventually, we became more experimental with our adventures in the kitchen and
ventured on to make anything that we would consider ordering at the restaurant.
From Tuesday evenings, we extended our collaboration to Thursday evenings and
from there to the weekends. From spring rolls, Vietnamese summer rolls,
Vietnamese Pho, French Onion Soup, butter croissants, Shepherd's Pie, apple
pie, roast turkey, bao buns, Georgian Khinkali and Japanese Gyoza to South
Indian appam, Nepali Thukpa, homemade Gulab Jamuns, we made it all. We would
often times flex our culinary skills and capacities to our family, in
jest-"You name it, we will make it."
Time went on, the
pandemic faded away and I continued my studies into my late twenties- from the
South of India to the North of Europe and back to my homeland, I saw it all
while being in academics under the tireless encouragement of my father. Through
it all, we kept our Tuesdays alive. But, time changes. People age. My father
was like Atticus Finch in more ways than one- he was an old father like
Atticus, he was my role model like Mr Finch was to Scout, and he was a
voracious reader, just like Mr Finch; and believe it or not, my father was also
in awe of Atticus Finch.
The age began to show on
my father and our weekly trips to the library ceased for I wouldn't go to BCL
every week without him accompanying me. We began buying books, me more than him
and he built me new bookshelves when I ran out of space on my old one. We kept
up with our cooking, mainly on Tuesdays for he returned home in the afternoon
and we could work throughout the evening on some complicated dish. Our latest
obsession as well as our latest flex was baking our bread- yes, we made our own
bread, for the week. We no longer consumed store-bought bread- we ate gourmet
bread or so we liked to believe. All my mother's friends knew about it for she
couldn't help flaunting it on her Facebook. As for me, I photographed them just
like I used to photograph everything we cooked.
Good times don't last
long and neither did this. Our house smelled like a boulangerie and the oven
buzzed plenty of times a day and often one could hear while passing by our
dining room window, a happy, cheery giggle and soft screams of 'yay' as my
father and I poured over some complicated recipe or weird experiments in our
kitchen and found success. All of it stopped suddenly when he fell ill.
Throughout his illness, I would look forward to his recovery so that we could
make our weekly batches of bread and our monthly cravings for butter croissants
and occasional Shepherd's pies. Lying on the hospital bed, he would tell me how
he was thinking the next wise investment would be a pasta noodle maker and the
next experiment would be to make a sourdough Focaccia and that I should read
Tarkovsky's essays on 'time'.
Nine Tuesdays have gone
by since I lost him and I have found myself at a loss of what to do on Tuesday
evenings. Whom do I share with what I read about? Who will have fun with me in
the kitchen? Who will bake the sourdough Focaccia with me? He has left me with
a million questions and no answers, but a realization all the same- life always
doesn't come a full circle; sometimes it's just a line with its own share of
crests and troughs. I have a lifetime of Tuesdays ahead of me and maybe on one
of those Tuesdays I will figure out how to navigate the culinary scene without
my father by my side, but till then, I will keep the candle of hope alight.
