From a daughter to her Father!

A new chapter has begun and I am not yet turning pages ahead. I am still going back to the old passage, trying to look for new meanings. I have wondered enough about the future. About what is right and what is not. And now I am merely a spectator watching over the rights and wrongs. Life teaches you to love and then it also teaches you to leave. Both are done with equal competence. We call it adjustment. And we don’t prepare for it like any other test of our life. We are just thrown into the pit and we have to learn to survive.

For most of my life I have been running to seek substitutes. My love has found one man, and since the time I knew that man and his love, I have been busy finding a substitute for him. Not because his love wasn’t enough. On the contrary his love is sufficient for this and many other lifetimes to come. But because, the fear of losing him hangs around my neck like an albatross and hence I look for something that might fill the void that he would leave behind.

I am an ordinary girl who thinks that superheroes are not real. But dads are. And my dad is my hero. Not knowing when that consciousness dawned upon me, but I knew he is special. Thousands of miles away I can hear the laughter in his voice; I can see the twinkle in his eyes and feel the warmth of his hands. We are growing old. We have shared a lifetime together and yet there seem so much more to be shared. I am not scared of the distance. I am petrified of time. It ticks away slowly. And I cannot make it still. It’s a futile war and I hate being on the losing side.  

My father means the world to me. And I am not the first daughter to say so! Although I secretly wish, I was the first one to love him the way I do. My lessons in life have come to me by watching him. He is not a preacher but a man of actions. His optimism would put gods to shame and his anger kids to bed! (I can vouch for that!)

I remember writing an essay on my father for the school magazine. It was an instant hit. My teachers and friends went moist in their eyes. Everyone appreciated the sentiment and the writing. My father said, ‘Write shorter sentences, it will help you make fewer mistakes.’ And then he smiled. The smile I knew well. He was happy and sad. That was the first time; I was leaving home for college.

One thing led to another. I finished college and got myself a job. Jumped through various profiles and then one day decided in the favour of a sabbatical. I was once again living as his daughter, writing C/O MK Jha on my forms. It was a happy reunion with my long forgotten past.

The two years spent with him before I tied the knot made us closer than ever. Our arguments were unstoppable but our love like always had no stopping. To this date he remains a man of mystery to me. We still have the longest discussions on phone and not when we are present in front of each other. Poetry and literature is his weakness and his legacy to me. That’s one thing that exclusively comes to me. I am proud and grateful for this gift.

Now that father’s day approaches some might say I am getting sentimental and mushy. But the truth of the matter is that pa is in my heart 24*7. We are physically distant but in love we are together, in verse and poetry we meet, in between the lines we fight and in rhymes we make up. I have a father who grows young with every written word. How on earth is a substitute possible for him? He is my muse for now and for ever. And when I sit down to write it is his faith that shines the most.

I am my Father’s daughter for now and forever.

Happy Father’s day pa!

Love miloo.