My dad and I are home-alone these days. My mom’s visiting my sister in Baltimore, and my other sister’s starting her uni in Indiana soon, so it’s just him and me for awhile (been that way for the past two months—will be for another two) and sometimes, lately, I’ve had a few flare-ups with him; partly because it’s ramadan, and you can’t have anything in your stomach for the whole day (so you tend to get a bit ornery), or maybe because you’re just a hothead sometimes, who’s trying to rebel against his dad and find his own way, and avoid his domineering and overprotective personality. We had to go to the atm today, and I told him I’d be downstairs in a minute (I was upstairs, on the computer, and it took me a quarter-of-an-hour to come down as usual). But I had to brush my teeth (you’re not supposed to do that actually; they say it’s like Ithar—an islamic perfume—the smell that emanates from your mouth ((they call it a fragrance, which I don’t know how you can call it that)) when you’re fasting and you haven’t even brushed your teeth yet, which is why I’d rather use a bit of pepsodent on my gums and my molars, just in case), and so I combed my hair and was downstairs and ready to go.
As I’m locking all the doors and picking up the car keys, I see my dad taking the scooter out, so I tell him not to bother, we’ll go in the car, but he says we have to fill some petrol in it, so I say fine. As we finish filling the gas at the pump, I close the seat cover, under which the petrol lid’s kept, and it slams-shut with a thud. My father admonishes me of course, by telling me: that’s not how you close the seat son; what you do is, you bring the seat as close to the nozzle as possible, like so—and lightly push it in. And I look at him and I go, that’s okay dad—fine; that’s maybe how you want to do it (and he was right to do it that way, of course) but that’s not the way I’d like to do it. I mean, you could’ve just told me this before—that the reason why we were coming here was so that we could get some change for the vegetables that we had to buy later on, instead of just telling me to follow you—no questions asked.
My father is the typical arab in that sense. I mean, sure, we’re Indians—but his grandfather was from Yemen (had migrated here from the middle east) and so he’s quite particular about his authority. Even though, my actually having been able to have this kind of a discussion with him would’ve been totally out of the question a couple of years ago—so I guess he’s changing, finally. Anyway, we got the cash out from the atm and after we’d reached home and were about to leave for the vegetables, we both decided to sit down and take a look at our finances.
One thing led to another, and even though he rarely ever talks about it, I asked him how much he ended up spending after my accident. 10, 12 lakhs?? And he said—who keeps a track of such things, but I persisted. My sister, My family and friends, and my dad’s friends all ended up paying so that I could be sitting here typing this today. My dad, well, he had to sell his shop so that he could get the money to pay back all the people he’d borrowed the money from, when I was in the hospital, fighting for my life.
My dad then told me about this guy who comes to his mosque every day, who hardly ever talks to anyone—but just comes there to pray, and leaves. Yesterday, as my dad was taking his scooter out, he spoke to him for the first time. As-salaam-alaikum, he said, and then he asked him about me: apke bête yaha ek saal se nahin dikh rahen hai... theeq hai nah / I haven’t been seeing your son here for the past year... is he alright?
So my father told him that I’d started praying in another mosque, a masjid-e-ibrahim, and he said, yes—he knows of it. They have a very young, energetic imam there who speaks quite eloquently, and he said yes, that’s exactly why he feels compelled to go there. Well, they spoke like that for awhile and then the topic of conversation turned to his grandson somehow, who’d recently passed away, at the age of four. He told him he would’ve been eight this year. His parents had come down from the states at the time, for a visit, and were about to go back when the boy fell ill. Very ill, in fact—so much so that a doctor had to be called. The doctor checked him over, and gave him an injection and left, and he fell into a coma after that. He never woke up, except for opening his eyes once, after a couple of months—just before he passed on. His father ended up spending everything he had on him.
It’s the holy month of Ramadan right now, the month when you’re supposed to be thankful for what you have... and I guess I’m thankful for my dad; he’s not perfect, I know, but then who is... ? ((Sorry for being such a dunce, dad. I know you’ll forgive me though, like you always do.))
