playing it by the ear

A few days ago Sravani and I were at Nancy-Ankur's place and I was playing with Anaya. The little game we'd improvised was that I'd carry her half a foot above the ground and she'd try to pick her toys from the floor using her feet. Obviously it was tough but everytime the toy slipped from her grip, she only laughed harder until suddenly, in a split second, she slipped from my hands and fell on her head with a thud. We look at each other, both too shocked, for what seemed like a long moment before she started to cry. I picked her up and started apologising profusely which only seemed to make her cry harder. The adults around were nonchalant and when Ankur picked her up, I just sat there, crestfallen, unable to lift my head. They kept pacifying me, laughing it off and saying, "बच्चे तो गिरते रहते ही हैं, don't worry about it" but the look on Anaya's face refused to go away from my sight. Her expression seemed to say, "I trusted you and you let this happen". I felt so ashamed for having betrayed not just her trust but also the trust of her parents and नानी and मसि, that I broke down and refused to look up until Ankur insisted that we go out for a drive during which he proceeded to tell me how many times he had dropped her or caused a little injury inadvertently. I felt better but the shame refused to completely go away, so much so that even right now I feel a little tremor in my heart when I think of that incident. The pain that I caused her makes me feel bad ofcourse but what seemed to affect me more was my own failing: here was a child who trusted me and I couldn't live upto it. Viewing from the old Guilt-Shame classification, I didn't feel guilt for that particular action (neither did I do it wilfully nor was I particularly negligent and most importantly, and thankfully, it was only a minor accident) but shame (during those minutes, the entirety of my being felt inadequate- 33 years on Earth and I couldn't do one thing right. I felt undeserving of any good feeling).

I've had discussions around fatherhood with quite a few people and hands down Ankur has been the most brutally honest and articulate about his journey. So, again, after the incident we spoke about fatherhood, my vague fears, about fathers we saw around, and his intense feelings for her. When he spoke about thinking about her or missing her when he was at work, I thought I saw the poetic romance of a 12-year old boy floating in the clouds when thinking about his crush. Not just the joy, the longing, the singular presence of that girl in his life, but also a pleasant surprise at his own transformation of being able to love someone like that. It was incredibly sweet. Towards the end he told me, "यार टाइम लगता हैं इन सब चीज़ों में| मेरेको टाइम लगा सीखने में के क्या चीज़े करनी हैं, कैसे करनी हैं, मैं किस किसम का बाप हूँ| देख, फर इंस्टेंस, मैं उसको कुछ बोल नहीं सकता, मेरेको उसे ये सिखाना हैं वह सिखाना हैं करके कोई ख्वाइश हैं नहीं. मुझे सिर्फ वह खुश चाहिए, मैं उस के लिए प्लेमेट हु| मैं ये चाहता हूँ के वह मेरे पास आके कुछ भी बोले, के पापा हैं तोह चिल हैं|". 

This dovetailed with something instructive Sravani told me a couple of weeks ago, when I was, as usual, hemming and hawing about not wanting to be a 'typical' father, "You don't have to be a certain type of father. You do realise that you choose what is important for you, what you want to inculcate in the kid. If you think I wanna travel with my kid, then that's what you'll do. It doesn't only have to be buying property or taking them to tuitions or disciplining them or whatever else you think a 'typical' father does"¹. That sort of helped me see that one of my biggest fears has been that I may to have change myself into a certain idea of a father, and both the standard refusal to conform as well as guilt that I may not be able to and fail the kid, created a demon within. It does now, finally, seem like there are as many kinds of fathers (the variations might be minor but they do exist) as there are kids.

Even during our walk yesterday, when TK was saying that he hasn't been able to buy something for himself because his keeps using that set money to buy something for his son, and I asked him if it pissed him off sometimes, he said, "नहीं, मतलब जब तक तुमने ये बात पूछी नहीं मुझे लगा ही नहीं के मैं कुछ सैक्रिफाइस कर रहा हूँ| बस हो जाता हैं|"

Finally, towards the end of another conversation, after I raved on about the complexity of being a human being, the myriad experiences, emotions, biases, weaknesses, desires we harbour etc. in our long lives (when I compare the difference between the lifetime of a feeling/ thought and the length of my own life, it does seem like a long life), it struck me that to want to isolate 'pure' intentions and 'genuine' feelings to ensure we really want it before embarking on a journey is a fool's errand. It is the full-blooded entirety of my being, all my history and biology and philosophy and poetry and narratives, that I call myself at this point of time that feels and does something. Ofcourse that could, and probably will, change about every single decision I've taken, and there's nothing I can do about it except adapt and improvise. Its not escapism for my actions in the sense of "please don't hold me responsible for what a different me did 5 years ago" as much as an acceptance of the complexity of my being- all murky thoughts and messy feelings. 

Dheeraj recently told me of an aphorism Ramarao Kanneganti garu apparently uttered, "We are not rational people. We are rationalising people". I find it to contain a deep truth. All this kvetching and manoeuvring and soaring I do on the blog is at some level a joke. For all the claims of realisations and epiphanies, I don't think I've been able to consciously apply these learnings. It exists primarily as a document of my wrangling with trying to understand and rationalise my behaviour. Everything here is both true and false. It is the truth but not the whole truth, whatever that is.

¹Reminds me of the beautiful line from ఆకాశమంత- "ఒక బిడ్డ పుట్టినప్పుడే ఆ తండ్రి కూడా పుడతాడు"