"I am just getting to know who my father was"

The relationship between a father and son changes with death. Through fragmented memories, photographs, and personal anecdotes, the elusive nature of a father’s life—one marked by reticence, social activism, and an enduring obsession with land is explored in this reflective piece by Jey Sushil. It delves into themes of memory, legacy, and the complexities of familial relationships, questioning how one's past choices influence their final years.

***

It has been three months since my father passed away. A slow, somewhat painful process as he was bedridden after the paralytic attack. For his last six months, he had to be assisted by others because of his immobility. Yet, for all his life, he was never sick. However, despite his sturdiness, he spent most of his life in the peripheries.

It is difficult to remember him as I do not have many photographs of him. In the family album with hundreds of photos, my father appears only in a few of them as shadows. In the corner, gravitating towards the edge of the frame, he is looking awkwardly in the air as if he were wondering why this person is taking his photo. There is no picture of him alone. He is always with someone in the foreground. As reflected in these photographs, my father remained sidelined all his life. At dusk, when this thought dawned upon me, I wanted to cry as I could see him vividly now as a firefly going out of my window. Fireflies only glow for a second, and after that short moment, it is hard to see them again. Father was like that. His glow was short and limited to himself. He kept himself always in the dark; occasionally, we saw his glow when he talked, but he rarely talked. He was a reticent man with only a few words to express himself. The spark in his eyes can only be seen when he talks about his factory work and, recently, about land. Nothing else made him excited or willing to talk. Firefly’s disappearing light reminded me of my father’s pale eyeballs. One day, my six-year-old son saw a firefly and caught it with his bare hands. He placed it in a glass jar and slept with the jar beside him. Late at night, I opened the jar and let the firefly out of the window.

It was daytime in India when I called up my mother. I wanted to know about something, a photograph that had suddenly cropped up in my mind. A picture of my father with a fully-grown beard and long mustache. I did not have that picture with me. I had seen it many years ago and did not understand why it suddenly came to my memory now. I could not help but want to see that picture again. Mother picked up the phone, and we talked for a while. Then I asked, “Maa, where is Papa’s photo with a long beard?” Mother thought for a while and replied, “It was in an old trunk. I must find it...” If I remember correctly, the photo was framed and kept somewhere in the house. I recounted to my mother, “Yes…Yes, it is framed and must be in the old trunk. I will find it.” I wanted to ask why the photo was kept in the trunk but stayed quiet.

Mother did not make any effort to go and open the trunk. She went on a memory trip, “Do you remember? You used to play with Papa’s beard. It was from that time. You must have been five years old then.” Somewhere in my mind, I had this faint memory of me playing with the beard, and I also remembered it suddenly disappeared one day.

I asked my mother, “Why did Papa cut the beard?” “Long story,” mother replied, but not to end the conversation. Without even asking, she went on, “Papa was very active in the worker’s movement. They were called Naxalites. Everyone had a beard then, most of the protesting workers. There was a strike going on for a few weeks. Then, one evening, Papa came with blood on his torn shirt.” “What?” I exclaimed on the phone. Mother did not bother to react. She was now a storyteller.

~

Papa had beaten up some senior officials in the factory. The blood on his shirt was of the officer he thrashed. He surreptitiously left the battleground where he had fought so hard and came home to change his shirt. Around 10 pm, a worker came with a message: “Tell him to cut his beard. No one knows who had beaten up the officer, but they are saying it was someone with a long beard.” It was 11:30 pm when my mother gave my father the message. He immediately left for a barber who he was friends with. The barber was sleeping in his tiny shop and opened the shop as soon as he heard my father’s voice. There was a photo studio that just opened near the barbershop, and my father decided to get a picture clicked before his beard was shorn. Mother told me this in a long narration—a habit I am used to.

When I woke up early in the morning, I remember not being able to recognize my new father—a father without a beard. In place of the long-twirled mustache, a pencil-thin stripe appeared instead. Another faint memory that has crept up after his death. I mentioned this to my mother, and she confirmed that I was surprised. She could not find the trunk then but promised to look for the trunk later.

~

After a few days, I received a message from my brother on WhatsApp. I could see the photo on my phone now. I remembered it being in an enlarged frame, 10x14 inches. On my mobile screen, the photo and my father look way smaller than they were in my memory. I opened it on my laptop to have a closer look, to see it the way I remembered seeing it as a child, the way I remember it now. Father is posing in an awkward way. It is neither a front profile nor a side profile. It seems he is looking to his left. His head is turned slightly to the left, but the neck is stiff. The shoulders are pointing in the front. He is avoiding the camera. I conclude. The beard is thick, a mustache is twirled on one side, and the other side is not visible, with a broad forehead and black hair. Young, probably in his 30s. A white shirt with small rectangular shapes in it. He looks like a typical revolutionary, a Naxalite. I do not remember him like this. Photographs make you think about a man in a different way.

Naxalism was an extreme Maoist ideology of India that originated in 1967 in West Bengal and believed in direct action and violence to change the system. Though the group disbanded in the early 70s, splinter groups remained active and took the shape of worker’s movement in nearby industrial cities. The followers of this ideology were loosely termed as Naxalites. My father had no idea who Mao or Marx were. For him, Naxalism was just a way to secure more rights for the factory workers. He followed a leftist leader (Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)), Satya Narayan Singh, whose name and face I vaguely remember. In my memory, Singh was a chain smoker who spoke calmly and firmly with conviction. My father revered him and sometimes took us to the public meetings the group organized in the early 80s. After the death of Singh in 1984, father kept himself to work and work only.

Father never talked about his ideology or politics to us. After retiring in 2003, he moved from the industrial colony to the distant village in another state where he was born. His father had died when his mother was seven months pregnant with him. Growing up as a fatherless child, he was treated badly by his mother and the villagers, as someone with bad luck—someone who ate his own father. He ran away when he was a teenager and built his life from scratch in a factory. Somewhere in his mind, he expected that the village would give him the respect he deserved when he went back after retirement. Alas, the village had changed. His ancestral lands were tilled by the relatives, and they were not happy seeing him return as my father claimed his lands back. Unpleasant fights, humiliation, and quarrels with relatives broke his heart. He lived an unhappy, dissatisfied, and disgruntled life for another 20 years after his retirement.

It took him years to build a house and acquire the land of his own. He wanted his sons, including me, to come and help him in the village, but we had our own lives and careers by then. My brother and I, at the time, tried to convince him not to worry so much about the land. But he ignored our advice. A man who was obsessed with machines and workers found a new passion in his old age: Land.

Land that could not be moved. Land that could only be transferred from one generation to the next. Land that should not be sold. Land where he wanted to die. Land where he was born and lived as an old man. His unwavering passion for the land in this village was unbearable for me, and we clashed over it regularly. I mostly listened to him because he rarely spoke other than on this matter. However, whenever we had a conversation, he would walk out of it, making an abstract declaration such as “Land should not be sold.”

Last year I made the difficult decision to sell a portion of the land. He didn’t take it lightly. Soon after, he fell ill and despite our best efforts, he never fully recovered.

While I do not blame myself, I cannot help wondering if selling the land hastened his decline. Everything I am thinking now is in retrospect. Would he have lived for another year if the land was not sold? Maybe, maybe not.

The last time when we visited him in the village, he was happy to meet my son. A calmness appeared on his face as if he had lived his life. The day we were returning, he told me, “I am tired. I want to die peacefully.” He had not been keeping well, and I was forcing him to go to the doctor more regularly. That was the last time I heard his voice. It has been nine months now.

***

Jey Sushil is a multilingual writer and translator. His most recent work is the Hindi novel House Husband’s Diary. Jey has worked as a journalist with the BBC world service and currently a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis.