Friend, philosopher, guide, father

(Note: This piece about my father was first published on December 4, 1997, in the San Jose Mercury News, when I was living in California. I would like to reproduce it here because it complements my previous blog about my Mom.)


When I was a little girl, my father seemed to me the tallest, strongest, most handsome man on the face of the Earth. Daddy could beat a dozen men single-handedly in a fight, could scale mammoth mountains, swim across oceans and conquer the stars - or so I thought. But as I grew up, I came to realize that Dad wasn't Superman after all, in the physical sense, but he was indeed an intellectual colossus, a caring and sensitive man, my friend, my philosopher, my guide.

It is no exaggeration to say my father was a self-taught man. He had never entered the portals of a college, but he was so widely read and well-informed that he could put an academic to shame. Reading was his passion, his way of life. He spent a considerable amount of his income on buying books, had an extensive personal library on a wide range of subjects, and above all, he encouraged me to read. My fondest childhood memory is of my Dad lounging in his easy chair with his eyes closed, and I, his youngest child (just 6 years old at that time) sitting beside him and reading an article aloud from Reader's Digest. I remember pronouncing the 'p' in "psychology" when I encountered the word for the first time and my father correcting my pronunciation. Countless were the number of hours I used to read aloud to my father and that was motivation enough for me to get hooked on reading.

Another favorite memory is of my lying with my parents on the terrace of our house under a star-studded sky and my father pointing out to me the different stars shining in the velvet night. There was Hesperus, here was Orion or the Seven Sisters, the hunter, and so on, and I would try to make out different shapes in the constellation that my childish fancy would lead me to. Dad would talk to me about black holes and supernova and the aurora borealis and other such celestial phenomena, and would have me spellbound about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life.

The first elocution contest I participated in was when I was in the first grade and the topic was "My Ambition In Life." Typical of all kids, I told my Dad I wanted to be a doctor and he wrote for me a speech that I memorized. Oh boy, wasn't I thrilled when I walked away with the first prize! There was no looking back thereafter - I would run to my father for opinions and ideas, be it an essay competition or a speech contest or a recitation contest, and I would follow him like a puppy around the house, jotting down everything he said. I recall very vividly the time he dictated a speech on "Thrift" from inside the bathroom. There I was, standing outside the door and writing in my notebook: "Thrift, as Samuel Smiles put it, began with civilization. It began when men found it necessary to provide for tomorrow." That was how the speech began, and I still remember the lines after almost a quarter of a century. Need I tell you that I walked away with the first prize that time too!

Then there were the times my father used to encourage me to memorize poems and recite them. Robert Southey's "The Cataract of Lodore" was an all-time hit, with its plethora of '-ing' verbs describing the waterfall at Lodore. My Dad opened up for me the magical world of books. Contrary to my childhood ambition of becoming a doctor, I chose to major in English Language and Literature. I did my father proud by graduating with top honors, and have been an English professor in a college for the past 12 years.

Retrospect...reminiscences...recollections - what a hive of memories I have become! My father died of kidney failure four years back, and the day after the funeral, there I was in my undergraduate class, teaching John Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud." It sounded rather ironic and bizarre at that time, but now it appears an appropriate defiance of death. My father may have passed away, but he lives on in the nostalgic memories of his beloved daughter.

My only regret is that my 2-year old son never got to know his wonderful grandpa. He will never hear the tales of the great explorers and adventurers while seated on his grandpa's lap, and he will never have the privilege of meeting his mother's friend, philosopher and guide - her father! To him, Grandpa Samuel is just a picture on the wall, and on warm summer nights, when he and his mother gaze into the starry sky, Grandpa is there amid the stars, having transcended the barriers of time into eternity.