“I’m sure his soul in heaven grasps your pathos on earth?”

“If anything, I’m proud to be his son and blessed to be born to my mother,” he said as his eyes moistened and his voice choked, “I tell you, he lived only for his wife and children and if there ever was a homebody it was he; not the kind of homebody once pictured in the Reader’s Digest; when a philanderer boasted himself as a homebody, his wife punned humorously, ‘any home any body’. Well my father was so possessive of my mother that he wouldn’t let her go out even with her own cousin sisters, but to be fair to him, he gave her his undivided love, and my mother too didn’t seem to mind about her loss of freedom. Moreover, he never ignored her word because of her self-less disposition towards worldly affairs; but for all his love for her, sadly, he was a wife-beater until he softened in his forties. If anything can be said in his favor in this regard, that it was more of a norm than an exception with our men in those days; don’t we hear that there is no stopping it in the advanced West even these days? Whatever, after his death, my mother never uttered a word without reference to him and that was for over four years, at least I had never known about a widow who was so devoted to her man’s memory. But my father being a family man proved to be a boon as well as the bane for us his children, he was wont to ration our playtime, which was at odds with my sense of freedom from the beginning; though he didn’t have his way with me, he prevailed over my siblings all the while.”

“Well, disciplining children is a necessary evil but nowadays parents don’t seem to lay store in ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ upbringing.”

“Sadly so for the going-to-be-adult kids that is and if anything the failure, like in the U.S, to distinguish ‘child discipline’ from ‘child abuse’ has come to breed retrograde children in its advanced midst,’ he said and continued. ‘When I was six, supervising some furniture being made at home, my dad was not to move out for days on, and that curtailed my freedom more than ever. As I was not even going to school then, it was like being jailed at home and soon, I asked the carpenter how long it would take for him to complete the assignment. When he said that it would take a fortnight more, I told him that I would give him an anna if he completed the work in a week; amused, he asked me what the urgency was, and I told him that once the work was over, my father would go out as usual and that would let me be on my own. When he told my people about it, all had a hearty laugh, and years later, when my father chanced to meet him in another town, well he became a prosperous hotelier there, recalling that incident, he expressed his keenness to see me; and when we met, serving me personally in his restaurant, he narrated the incident to the amusement of all those present. Well, as I fondly relived that moment, my father was joyously embarrassed about it.”




Most Popular