Son’s Reconciliation

My family history is strange, even for someone born and brought up in India when it was the jewel of British empire. My mother was born in a landowning family. Although the only child, she was deprived of her inheritance because of her gender. My father, the son of a well-to-do civil servant, focused on sports and fun as a teenager and did not finish grade school. He was a debonair young man who won the heart of his fourteen year old cousin by uncle’s marriage who resisted all sane advice and insisted on marrying him. My mother loved him to her dying day although he never earned a rupee, never helped with the chores and left it to her to fend for the family. She did this by first selling her jewellery and silk sarees that came with her dowry, and when these ran out, begging from her mother and rich aunt at whose mansion she had met my father. I never heard a word of complaint from her mouth about my father’s inability to provide for the family. Her only comment was “at least he doesn’t drink or gamble.” She had a grade two education but loved to read whatever was available. A proud woman, she inculcated in her three sons a desire to do well. They worshipped her and spent their childhood years avoiding their father.

The motto of my life, even after he was long dead, was “not to be like my father.” He was a poor student, I worked hard to be the top in the class; he was a good sportsman, I avoided sports; he could spend the whole day apparently doing nothing, I had to be busy every second I was awake; he was religious, I became an atheist; he did not provide for his family, I worked long hours to make sure my wife and daughters got everything they needed to develop their talents, whether to become an Olympian or the respected professionals. Unlike my mother, I never had a good word for my father and never grasped what she saw in him. It took a long discussion on my childhood with a psychologist friend for me to start seeing him and his relationship with my mother in a new light. “He does not have any bad habits” meant that he respected my mother and never had a harsh word for her. It meant he was proud of her and their children and never uttered an unpleasant word about them outside the home. It also meant that he said his piece but left it to us to decide its worth. If I were to be honest, I could not claim any of the above.

During my visit to India last year I had several discussions about him with my brothers. One of them pointed out that social customs of the day prevented our father from doing menial jobs which would have reduced the ‘standing’ of the family in society, making it harder for the children to grow up to be successful. Similarly, my mother could not work as a maid or a cook without her sons ending up in menial jobs too. In any event, such jobs would not have provided the means family needed for anything but the most basic necessities. My uneducated mother understood these implications and wanted more, much more, for her sons than mere survival. She wanted them to grow up into adults others looked up to, not looked down upon as her rich cousins tended to do. Strange though it may seem, I chose to disregard this aspect till recently. It is now obvious to me that the dye was cast for my father in his teenage and for my mother at birth. Thanks to his upbringing by an alcoholic mother my father, who was a decade younger than his siblings, did not develop the confidence needed to run a business nor the personality to supervise people. My mother was of the wrong gender to inherit the wealth and status due to her but she retained a burning ambition to recover it through her progeny. It has taken me most of my years to appreciate what should have been clear long ago: It is to the immense credit of both my parents that they were able to hold the family together and maintain a respectable social status, whatever the emotional cost, for the sake of the future of their children. “Children is all we had” my mother said to me the last time we met before she passed away. I now realize that my father’s love for my mother - which she reciprocated fully - kept the family together and enabled us brothers to make the best of the genes we inherited. I owe a huge debt, not only to my mother which I always acknowledged, but also to my father who struggled with his inner demons in silence all his life. I so regret that it is now too late to tell him this realization in person.