The Gift

I.

My father used to take me to the bazaar every Sunday. He used to carry a maroon and white striped bag that had grown dark over the years from overuse. We would walk till the local bazaar. He made buying smelly vegetables while sweating under the sun, nostrils filled with the stinking smell of fish look like art. He carefully analyzed them, felt them with his bare hands to see if they were consistent and then beautifully pitched in his price. My job was to hold the basket that collected the fresh vegetables. When I was young, I wanted to be like my Baba. He was so perfect at buying vegetables that I had thought it was the token of adulthood to be able to buy vegetables with such panache.

II.

I was 17 when one day my father left and never came back. I think he was just too tired of living the same day again and again. His days were all the same and he had never complained. I could understand him, even though I didn't want to. Even though my heart ached for my forty-year-old mother who as a habit looked at the clock at seven for quite some years even after he went missing as if my father would be home any minute, I hated myself for not being angry at my father. After all, whatever he was made of I was made up of the same things. 

I was his son and the only relationship we shared was that we went to the bazaar every Sunday together till some 17 years in my life. My baba used to work a feasible job which let us live fine. My mother always made it feel like it was less but my father never seemed to care. As long as we had a house to sleep in and food to eat, we were good to go. We had a little more to spend on family outings and matinee shows but we never went together anywhere except for weddings and funerals. My father and my mother, as different as they were from each other loved each other nevertheless. I don't know if it was the love that we read and see about. No, it was not that. There was no beauty in it. There were no racing hearts like I had felt when my first girlfriend had kissed me. There were hardly any conversations. But there was shared misery. There was a drinking weak tea before going to sleep standing in the balcony every single day. Without words. Sharing silence. 

Whatever my father did in his daily life was out of a routine. He held his routine very closely. Never challenged them, never instigated his pattern. He woke up at the same time, went to work, talked with the same people every day, came back home at the same time and went to sleep at the same time. Probably even saw the same dream every day. All I knew of my father was what I had inherited, diabetes and a strange love for the unknown. My father was a very curious man. Like the average Indian male, he too tried to pull off a macho at times but also like the average Indian male he too was scared most of the time. That's why in spite of being curious, he never made it out of his routine. His curiousness only came out through his reading. His greatest exploration were the words that he wrote but never published. Words were his solace. It took him away from his mundane life in the most mundane city and filled it with a hope that life was larger than it was destined to be for him. It was not a half-hearted job and a half-hearted love. For a few moments, life did not feel like it was struggling to swim in an ocean of unhappiness.

It was 9:00 p.m that day and my father would always normally be back home by 7 in the evening. He had never been away for more than that if it was not some prior commitment. He always made sure to let my mother know. Moreover, in a world of mobile phones, no one is ever truly lost until and unless they want to. My father had a fixed routine every day and he hated for it to be disturbed. He used to come back home, switch on the news, take a shower while the same lady on TV told the same news every day, about some different places around the world. That day the lady came and went. She was reading an excerpt from the Hong Kong revolution that has been going on for a while now. My mother had kept the TV on for my father to come home and watch it but the lady went unheard. Her face was turning white with every minute that went by and my father did not come.

My mother as strong a lady as she is was trying her best at that moment to keep her head straight. The calls started going out at half-past nine. No one knew about him. His colleagues said that he had left the office at his usual time and none of his neighbourhood friends knew where he was. The police were approached 24 hours later. The interrogation happened, the inspection happened but there was no trace of my father. Like the wind had swallowed him. There were also no traces of any dead body. The police were the first to lose hope. They declared it was a case of mid-life crisis. Then the relatives and colleagues and finally after a month, my mother too woke up and made breakfast like nothing had ever happened though I knew she felt life was over for her.

That it had been lived. I tried to be there for her. I felt a growing void inside me. For the first few months, every day I went to sleep I wished my father would come back the next day. Or even that we could at least get some explanation. My mother and I did not know whether to wait for my father or move on. Even if we were to wait, for how long? Eventually, I too started going back to school. The anxiousness changed to fear, the fear of dejection, dejection to hopelessness and hopelessness to normalcy. But a void, the size of my father, always existed. The police had found nothing missing from our homes or bank accounts. It was not until six months that I found out the desk where my father had kept everything he had written that he had not published was empty. 

Time heals all wounds. Time doesn't fill up spaces for people you don't know what happened to. I grew up with an emptiness that took up space for where my Baba used to be. In my walks alone to the bazaar. I could buy vegetables and make it look like art too. However, it did not feel as exciting as Baba had made it feel. When we stop being a child, we understand how flawed our parents are and that makes us feel more disassociated with ourselves. We realize they are as small, humane and petty. We question our beliefs, our relationships. However, with each white hair at a time, we realize we are slowly becoming more and more like them every day and that is the most helpless feeling ever. All this while we think we are better but we fall into the same abyss of mistakes. 

  I had grown up to be a lot like my father. I had also started growing a little patch of bald on my head. I had neither found the company of a loved one nor the pleasure of doing something that I love. You see, the life of a third world middle-class man is not grand enough to be an epic or even sad enough to be a tragedy. It is a bus ride from office to home with hardly any space to stand and breath. It is a crowd of unfulfilled dreams. It is an ocean of only half souls walking around incomplete. There is no respite. The memory of my father was only a picture in the living room of my old house. Now there were hardly any local bazaars. I had to go to the Spencers in the mall to buy my groceries. Buying food for one person is very difficult. You always end up buying less or more. Here, I was only an identity walking across the sections of the grocery store, without memory, without nostalgia. On some nights, I wondered if my father was still alive if he had finally decided to be a writer and chose his dreams over his family. I don't have any complains anymore. The only curiosity that my father had passed onto me. However if he liked writing so much, why could he not write a goodbye note at the least? 

III.

On some nights I dream that I have left my life behind and taken a train to nowhere to meet my father. On some nights, I see my father, still as young as I had last seen him. I see him writing sitting at a beach. On some nights, he tells me he is sorry. On some nights, he tells me we gotta do what we gotta do. Every time I dream of my father, I feel I get a little closer to finding him. Not that I am looking for him. Only that I am on the road that will lead me to him. Maybe it is because I am becoming him more and more every day. Maybe it is because this is where I was always walking towards. Maybe one day I wake up from one such dream and feel a strange pull for the sea. Maybe I'll have the courage to leave my job and take that train to nowhere to know what lies beyond. Maybe not. Maybe I will always be a nameless man with a bald patch buying grocery half heartedly.