Watermark

Watermark

"Buried underneath adulting

With the memory of childhood both living and cherishing...."

Abbu was walking around the room while I was singing. He sighed and said to my ammu, "tell her to stop this hunky punky and pin herself to study." My heart skipped a beat and I started whining sagaciously after he left, "Why's abbu like this ma? He's always been this uptight to my singing." "Shut up and stop nagging. You don't know him as I do." Ammu frowned. As usual, I kept my frustrated silence. 

As long as I can remember, he's never been nice to me and didn’t even try to understand what I want. For instance, I've been wanting to buy a guiter for 6 months. He knows I want it really badly but what he said, "8 thousand! That's a complete rip off!" Ahh! I've never been so furious in my life. I jumped off the sofa and slammed the door behind me. I paced in my room like a delinquent teenager. Suddenly my eyes got fixed onto something big on my table. "Is it a guiter? Ammu must've managed abbu to buy it. That miser old man, ugh!" I hurriedly opened the box and found my guiter and a letter. It said, "From the middle-class old fool who never wanted his daughter to be a creative failure like himself." I couldn’t control my temper once again but this time I couldn’t figure out with whom I was angry. 

"Did abbu used to sing too, ammu?" I whispered. My ammu replied smilingly, "See, I told you, you don't know him as I do. Yes, he used to. But after you were born, it seemed luxury to him running after passion." I just looked at my father from the corner of my eyes and came back to my room.

There are some people in our lives who are like watermarks on a smooth page. Their efforts are almost invisible to the naked eye unless someone really tries to see them. A teardrop fell on my guiter and my own reflection on it asked me, "Have YOU ever tried to really understand HIM?" No answer came along. Astonishingly, I felt my most forgotten and copacetic attribute of gratitude towards my old, middle class, miser father.