I never wanted to be like my father. His deliberate, thick Indian accent was no longer excusable after five decades in this country. His lack of interest in my life, as well as his own, was one I didn’t want to model for my future children. And besides anger, I’d never known him to display any emotions, especially love.
Because of his apparent disregard for anything beyond the stock market or the news, I rarely had anything to talk to my father about. I was interested in sports, which he never played or watched with me. And when I was struck by the confusion of puberty, we didn’t discuss birds, bees, or other wildlife. We didn’t talk at all. Watching my friends’ fathers play sports with them, talk to them about girls, or even just hang out when I’d come over, I knew one thing – when I grew older, I’d become everything my father was not.
Those feelings brewed for thirty-eight years until a fireside conversation with my friend Mike. Reflecting on my relationship with my father, I told him that we never talked. Incredulous but at the same time compassionate, Mike asked me if I had ever asked my father about his interests. I didn’t think he had any, I answered. Though as I thought more, I flashed back to one of my girlfriends asking him about his collegiate boxing career, and his face brightened. As he showed her the basic techniques of jabs and hooks, he was the most engaged and energetic I’d ever seen him. I left our conversation determined to see that man again.
I knew I was asking the impossible, because over the years, his energy had declined. In fact, his speech had slowed, and his accent had thickened. When I asked my father to join me for lunch at a restaurant, his immediate reaction was to let my mother know. And when I told him she wouldn’t be joining us, he was incredulous. Interpreting his shock as rejection, I almost canceled my plan. I’m grateful I didn’t.
After some awkward, forced conversation over beer and appetizers, I asked my father to tell me about his decision to come to America. Silence followed, and again, I thought my experiment had failed. Then, he began. He told me about his decision to come here alone – that he had become frustrated with corruption in India, and thought America promised a better life. He asked his father for his support, which he granted under two conditions – my grandfather would only give my father enough money for an airplane ticket, and he would have to stay with family friends that he’d never met in upstate New York.
My father arrived at LaGuardia airport searching for strangers whose faces he’d never seen before. He would stay with them for several months while starting his engineering career. He grew restless, and seeking more adventure, he moved to Boston to live on his own. The job market, unfortunately, was not as welcoming, and besides some odd jobs, he could not find stability. In time, his bank account emptied, as did his hopes for success. He paused our conversation and took a deep breath. Tears welled in his eyes.
He told me that he started to consider his life a failure. I shook my head slowly. Tears now filled my eyes as well. His voice heightened in pitch but did not lose its clarity. Choking on his own sobs now, he recounted walking to a nearby lake: he planned to end his failed attempt at life. With the lake now in sight, he noticed a newspaper dispenser, and using one of his last quarters, bought one. Seeing an advertisement for a nearby job, he reversed his course, and walked to the building. He was hired on the spot. Using this combination of luck and resilience as a springboard, he would start to build his life again.
He then told me about the way he met my mother. He told me about the friendships he formed with people I’d never met. But I would not ask him the question that my heart begged me to: what happened to that man? Perhaps I didn’t want to spoil the moment. Perhaps I feared he hadn’t noticed a change. Perhaps I thought I was to blame – I was a sophomore at an expensive university when he would eventually lose his job, and never recover.
I would learn a lot of facts about my father, but what struck me the most, in all of this, was the clarity with which he spoke. His accent nearly disappeared, and his words flowed as freely as his tears. By asking him to relive his past, I had witnessed the emotion that I had desperately sought from my father. And for that moment, we were connected in a way I had never experienced before – for the first time, he had become not only my father, but a friend.
I never wanted to be like my father, but now I see that I am him. I have become that man who talks with fervor. That man who enjoys doing things that would frighten most. And I’ve become that man who is making his life story as beautiful as he can, by living passionately and thoughtfully.
However, I can also reflect on what time can do to that beauty if it isn’t cultivated, and it fills me with fear. I have witnessed how easily we can lose the energy for life, and the effects on the people you love. And I will fight every day to be the person my father once was, and who I now am.
Our world needs more heart-whole adults, not more refugees from childhood.
L.R. Knost
