... my father's day

Yesterday, I celebrated My Father's Day. No, not with candles, palatable dishes, balloons and dusts of mica. The day went on with purgative torture, with almost no food and without hilarity.

I had no school. My father's physical breakdown crippled my feet home. A week ago, he felt a severe cardiac pain, which was actually a depressing upshot of gas. A two-time cerebral haemorrhage winner as well as a bypass surgery conqueror had now lost all energies to fight with constipation. Constipation led to that point that laxative was used in his rectum for clearance of his bowels. A few days ago, he got rid of a severe difficulty with prostrate gland. The nebulous urine had made it in the limelight. The winner of yesterday is totally vanquished by tormenting today. The laxative worked on him. I cleaned him at first and then the waste matter, carefully, from the rubber cloth. He was more vehemently trembling due to neurological disorder than fighting shy of his nakedness. After half an hour, I helped him urinate. He can neither stand nor walk steadily due to his unresponsive left leg. I took hold of his hand firmly, as my mother, laden too by geezerhood, cannot maintain the balance. She endured much. Now, it's time for me to rearrange challenges of life and curb her endurance.

These days, I can't sit at my computer for hours together. I read much these days, riveting my eyes to the pages of Kundera and Eliot. I feel if I sweep thirty-six novels round a year, at least, for Learning's sake, a limited learning will be done. However, time thwarts time. I have stolen myself away from them at this juncture. Now, I was with my father. I saw him like I had seen him ever.

The day consumed much of him. The agonized groans died down slowly. He began falling asleep, tired and tortured by his illness. Commonly, I am mentally distanced from my father. But, yesterday, I sat for a length of hours, rubbernecking at his fuming face. He was sleeping, snoring, his face systematically ballooning upward, his exhausted body hidden inside a quilt, looking like a soldier with neither armour nor sword. Inside the mosquito net, inside the room closed and curtained, the hazy figure of my dear father was mantled in jade light. No candle was lit up, yet it was much better than a candlelight dinner. The distance between my father and me was just of a five-foot silence. Silence was that silent that even a deaf could hear the breathing of a bug.

This is my father, whose constant guidance has made me stand on this platform. I have seen none write English that excellently. None could bear a candle to his linguistic aroma. Only fluorescent words could tide over the distance between his pen and paper. Today, he is mute like a swan, almost blind like a Milton. Time has questioned on his adaptation to the cosmology, perhaps, because of his age, being two more than seventy. He has forgotten many words, but frankly saying, he has forgiven many words too. In my childhood, he constantly provoked me to make use of proper words, otherwise, breaking through the barriers of grammar can never ever be possible. He always said in his instructive panache – what to write about is known to everybody, but there is hardly a soul who knows how to write. I miss this teaching right now... a numbness, therefore, pains.

Pain relieves us greatly of our mental squalor and reduces any distance. The distance that was invested by both of us is having no worth to me today. What could be more delightful than this? The sudden failure of his health has triggered a reaction in me. I know – one day, one tragic day, with the flashing of the sun or with the rising of rainbow or with the waxing of a moon, he will receive a full stop to his life, and with this he will be atomized into the eternal sentience to plug into absolute freedom.

There will be another day calendared for me to celebrate a father's day once again...