It’s been two months since I was laid off. And over a year since my father passed, after a stroke, emergency surgery, and attempts at rehab. He was 81. I am glad he doesn’t have to see this round of me in-between jobs. He would have understood that I have reached the salary digits that my workplace did not want to go beyond, for the role I was in. That 5 years on a contract job with annual contracts, usually ends in no contract in the 6th year. Yet, he would be pained. And yet again, I would feel that I had failed him.
Yet again. For not being the Math whiz that he had been. For not having done STEM subjects in college like good Asian young people do. For not having a tried and tested old-school professional degree, that may perhaps, have altered the fortunes and fate of my family.
But what I did study helped me understand that he was neurodivergent. It helped me make sense of his own chequered career with no contract renewals. It helped me understand the lack of empathy and emotional intelligence that fuels marital conflict between two already incompatible and difficult personalities. He was never the father who wished his daughters — my elder sister and I — on our birthdays. Or anyone, I had thought, until the birthday cards started coming for my little brother. I did not resent it, but it made me sit up and take note. It helped me understand his barely expressed grief, alongside my raving lunatic kind, when my dear brother, all of 18 years old at the time, died suddenly one day in a road accident.
My father of no grand gestures and hardly any conversations, had had a special gesture for me though. When the Reader’s Digest sent pamphlets advertising their catalogue of books, depending on how the cash-flow was at the time, he’d ask me to pick one or two titles of my choice. He enjoyed the fact that I was a reader. A voracious reader himself, but of newspapers and fortnightly political commentary magazines, that was his love language for me. So today, when I got myself a Medium subscription, it felt like showing myself some self-love, but also like the love he had shown me too. Thank you Papa, for the love that was only, yet always, felt and understood, and I hope you felt, reciprocated.
