Remembering Papa
I dreamed about India again last night.
One of the women I grew up with is getting married next May, so in my dream I was tagging along with Varsha and her mom, winding our way through sari shops, assessing fabric with the flip of two fingers, taking cups of tea before talking prices, sweating in the sunshine, drowsing in the car ride home. I woke up wishing it had been real.
It’s been five years since I was in India, and everything about my life has changed since then.
Five years ago, I was riding to the Agra train station in a hot car with my parents, full sun beating down on the battered roof of the old vehicle. A day spent in wonder: my first look at the Taj Mahal, an entire afternoon touring Fatepur Sikri, my mom translating the Urdu of our nearly-toothless guide for my father and me. Five years ago, a daily parade of salwar kameez and cups of chai and afternoon naps with the sounds of Mumbai in the background. Dreaming in Hindi and devouring the kind of mangoes you just can’t get here in the States.
We flew to Jaipur and baked ourselves sightseeing in the pink city. We spent half a day in the art museum in Delhi. We ambled through the poorer parts of Amristar, visiting the neighborhood where my father grew up, standing in the very room where he was born. I bought books from sidewalk vendors. I ate the best garlic pickle of my life. I cried when we visited the Golden Temple at dusk. I drank Kingfisher and ate masala potato chips, discussing politics with my uncle. I wrote voraciously, the whole time.
That trip was my first visit to India in over a decade and my first time there with both of my parents since I was a baby. My first time traveling with my parents as an adult.
Ironically, the logistics of the trip rendered me something of a child again—dependent, latched to Mom and Dad, phone-less, computer-less, out of my element and feeling conspicuously foreign. I am first-generation and consider myself American first: Southern-born and still in possession of an accent. My parents taught me English first, so my Hindi is poor. At the time my hair was short—chin-length—and my ears were, gasp!, unpierced; plus, by Indian standards, I’m considered tall—5’7’—so I kind of, literally, stand out.
But instead of reverting to adolescent ways, those unmitigated hours in India with my parents built a new way of being between us, one that acknowledged my adulthood without minimizing our family unit. It was the most time we had spent together since I was a kid, even passing some nights all piled into the same bed. We talked and talked and talked; I had so many questions for them, about everything I saw. It was, as if, for the first time, I considered the possibility that my parents had had lives before me, before each other even, and that they had stories to tell. And that I wanted to listen.
A month to the day that we got back from India, my father called his doctor, complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath. His doctor sent him to the
emergency room of a nearby hospital, where he would die less than three weeks later. He was sixty-four years old.
What nobody tells you about grief is that, when someone dies, they take things with them. There is collateral damage of sorts, the remnants of things left behind, tainted in a way by their association with the dead. The restaurant it’s hard to go to without him. The hair you will feel guilty keeping short, because he always preferred it long. The literal and metaphorical ocean that will open up between you and the subcontinent where your last memories of your father lie. That you will, on some level, resent the hell out of Father’s Day for the rest of your life.
~
My earliest memory is vague, as I suppose early memories often are. I see the old rotary-dial phone from my parents bedroom, with the fancy carved handle and golden finger-holds. I see my mother in the polyester turquoise nightgown she wore in the wintertime, which had a top zipper and quilted front. And I see my father, crying over the news of his own father’s death.
I was too young then, just three, to do much more than be scared, to inadvertently make a movie in my brain, to wet the bed despite having been potty trained for over a year. Now I feel retrograde compassion for my father, marbled with ironic strands of empathy. Since time and space are jumbled in memory, as they are in dreams, I experience the irrepressible urge to go back and comfort him, to tell him, “Papa, I know how you feel.”
~
After five years, grief is a deep, deep bruise that the person whom you adore is no longer in the world. You may have grown your hair long and pierced your ears for him, you may have learned to make his favorite foods (including rajma chowal & gajar achar), you may well think you are doing him proud, but you cannot see him smile or hear him sing or call him while he works a night shift, like you used to. You are still living your life, changing and delighting and hurting every day, but your father is frozen in time, his life is done, and more than anything, that breaks your heart.
Top image “Know your DAD” by Ragesh Vasudevan
About the Author
Nishta Mehra Has Written 1 Articles For Us!
Nishta Mehra is a first-generation Indian raised in the American South. She’s an un-snobby, enthusiastic cook and blogs about food from her fun-loving kitchen at Blue Jean Gourmet.
