deferred live

12^th June came and went away, not much unlike any other day. It is now one year without my father. And five months without you. Every now and then I think of you both and an inexplicable sadness and sense of guilt come upon me. The guilt is more associated with the memories of my father and the sadness is of you. At night, at around 3, or in mid noon at around 3; if I happen to remember my father I inevitably feel a sense of guilt. Because if it is at night then I am awake and if it is the mid noon then I am prostrate on the floor of my room with cigarettes and ash tray unhidden beside me. So the guilt. It would not have been so if he was alive.

I am missing you terribly now. Don’t know how else to write it, or if at all I should write it. But you don’t believe in “moner jor” et all [ and rightly so, at times it does reek of the amateur ]. The greatest irony of my life will be this. Just when I started to feel the redundancy of the words, I need them the most. The other day I was thinking about the day when I wrote 26 scenarios for you, right from the letter A to the last Z, one idea per greetings card!

For all it is worth, I love you.

post scriptum, 23^rd June 2010

I was using “a sense of guilt”. I don’t think I chose the right expression. It is not guilt, when I think of my father. It is like a sense of letting him down, from his perspective. I am sure he deserved better, specially so when his son had all the promise and flair of a successful citizen. This is no sarcasm that I am employing, I am being my objective best.

Thinking in the shoes of my father, his expectations were really very reasonable and justified. I have never seen a more honest man than him. He was tossed and thrown from posting to posting by the Indian Railways, because he refused to sway to the tune of corruption. Once when I was a kid of 4 years, he was even beaten up and held at a gun point. But never ever did I see him being bitter about the organization, he was so proud to be a part of it. I am citing this part of him to elucidate his mind, his thought process. His expectations were not typical Bengali.

A man as he was, he still could not let go the ego of ownership, as far as his son is concerned. I am sure he never had the remotest inkling about this thing, about this inherent “ego of ownership”. And I must also accept that he tried his best to fight this ego, without really knowing that he is at war with himself. He did great when I did not want to walk the corporate path. But even he was unable to accept the imminent end of his progeny.

I could sense the time of final confrontation. It was on the cards. For he had started to mention the “marriage” thing, and the frequency of these mentions was increasing. His frustration was also starting to show, he could rationalize all my subversive ways and even could bring himself to support me; but the death of his blood line was too much, even for him. Here the ego refused to go away.

It will be wise to review the dictionary meaning of the word ego, to ward off any trivialization.

Ego is that one of the three parts of a person’s psychic apparatus that mediates consciously between the drives of the id and the realities of the external physical and social environment, by integrating perceptions of the external world and organizing the reactions to it. Id is that part of a person’s psyche which is the unconscious source of impulses seeking gratification or pleasure; the impulses are usually modified by the ego.

So I do not suffer from a sense of guilt when I think about my father. I just become sad realizing that I was not the one who resonated and “cooperated” with his ego. This is the price of being an individual. And I think I am also sad because I could not tell him my mind. Maybe he deserved to know more than my cursory retreat every time he broached the topic of marriage. I lacked the courage for my conviction and was always happy to push the “revealing” to another day. So it is not guilt, it is the feeling that I could not tell the truth to the man whom I admired most in my life.