On Father’s Retirement (written last year)

When I am home, I make sure to watch him polish his shoes each morning, a practice he has inherited from his days in the Air Force. I try to measure the pressure he applies on the shoes. Is it as vigorous as it was years ago?
I hug him and try to gauge the strength in his bones. His body isn’t frail, but I know the difference from years ago. An ocean swells inside me. But, I let it engulf me only later.
When we were younger and I lived with him, we would spend hours looking at the vein structures of leaves or the pattern of clouds in the sky; we would feed the monkeys that had usurped our rooftop, much to the chagrin of mother.
It was strange to see papa cry when he would tell us SriRama’s story at bedtime. Brother and I would become characters in the story - “ek din Anu aur Manu apne papa ke saath kahin jaa rahe the. Raaste mein unhein Jataayu dikhe…” and it would go on.
It was our own bildungsroman. He introduced us to the subaltern, the secular, the plural and the pantheistic through his telling of the Ramcharitmanas, much before I was introduced to the formal terms.
His being was my first lesson in ‘karuna’ and ‘bhakti’. Through him I learned that the spiritual and the scientific were not conflicting entities, but one - a means towards creating a more empathetic world.
He is in the mountains at the moment. He’ll bring wild flowers for me when he returns. I have long outgrown picking wildflowers and keeping them between the pages of the books I read, but I don’t tell him yet.
I can predict this because he is my papa: Tonight, he’ll ask me if I want him to send the flowers through a courier (Gujhia, almonds, pickle, bhujia, mangoes, a book that he feels I may like, everything is up for being couriered.
If it was up to him, he would courier the sound of the birds that visit the little patch of a garden at our home). I will say no. So, he’ll keep the flowers until my next visit. Just the way he keeps news paper cuttings of the articles that he feels I may find interesting.
I tell him that anything he reads in the news paper can be read on the internet; that he can WhatsApp a picture. Yet, I realise how reassuring the certainty of finding those clippings and the flowers is, when I go home.
He has retired after twenty-five years of serving as the principal of a school. Notes and letters from students, teachers, parents and the lives he has touched during this journey, haven’t stopped coming - these, he WhatsApps to me, overwhelmed and innocent as a child.
He has vowed to give most of his clothes away and keep only the cotton or khadi kurtas and his Bata chappals. I make fun of his frugality telling him that Bata is not an Indian brand and it is okay to indulge sometimes.
For some reason, he still believes in the co-relation between austerity and nation building at a fundamental level. What is it that makes him believe in this principle, in the almost clinical distinction between the essential and the unnecessary?
Is it the fact that he spent the early, impressionable decades of his life during a time when the country was still building its resources and frugality was essential for growth and abundance; a post 90s abundance that we now take for granted?
The life of the village boy who waded through the monsoon waters on foot to reach a school fifteen kilometres away from his village, until he could afford a bicycle, has come full circle. He is excited about using a bicycle as a primary means of transport in his retirement years.
For someone who hasn’t heard Pink Floyd, he has lived, ‘all you touch, and all you see, is all your life will ever be’, with non-negotiable simplicity and integrity.
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