Old kite in the New Sky

Oh, what a sight he is! If I had to find his equivalent, honestly but charitably, I will settle for Quixote. But I think, that honesty without brutality is liable to be seen as just an opinion and so let me qualify the likening of the man, who by the way is my father, to Quixote. For the true picture, you must take out relevance from Quixote and denude him of his chivalrous appeal and you don’t miss vacuuming out every speck of ambition, then, top it up with undue optimism that perverts the senile wisdom; now you have my Father

Dead habits are heavy, as heavy as dead bodies, and dead traditions are deceptively light, a man with a will fortified with denial and senses desensitized to the stench of decomposing ideas can carry them with a sterile enthusiasm to his unmarked grave in the sands of time.

We, father and son, live in our ancestral house all by ourselves. My mother died of her heart, I think her heart broke under the pressure of my father’s idealism. When you fill your hearts with ideals, idols of ideals is more apt, you have no room left for people. Ideals are cold and impersonal and driven by the insanity of objectivity. They don’t have a pulse, just seizures to prove that they are alive.

Don’t judge me just yet for filial disregard, allow me a portrayal. Picture this, a septuagenarian with a kite, his digits that seem to use arthritic deformity as an evolved feature. Tongue stained by with betel juice and legs cultivating a paraplegic posture and now add in the backdrop, the certainty that the kite, with all its aerodynamic finesse, will just remain empty promise of flight, nothing my father makes flies, it just crawls, an apt metaphor for all his endeavors. No, it’s not a hobby, it’s one of his obsessions. He makes a lot of things with his hands, I wish he made a life out of them, instead he erased the lines of his hands.

My mother used to tell me, I never believed her, that Papa used to sing and write poems and jokes. I guess I never heard or saw them. I guess, along the line, he traded his lucidity with anachronistic aphorisms, and maybe his idealistic speeches are his newest jokes.   

My father owns a local newspaper that competes with tabloids for readership. You can imagine how that would go in a conservative town of recreation deprived people tired of feigning virtue and far form pretensions of intelligence. It was increasingly becoming a disaster. Our ad share is paltry, my father interprets it as a 100 percent as he despises advertisement and refuses to do puff pieces, and it is as if he is trying to fail. He fancies his paper as a watchtower. Oh, how clichéd!

My father never understood that an enterprise cannot outlive its niche? A town reveling in the bliss of ignorance doesn’t want news mirroring reality. But I think that is a moot point, for he never considered our newspaper an enterprise. No boy! any suggestion to that was an anathema to him. But I am at a loss to give it any other name as it was our family’s livelihood, though my father took it to be some sort of lifeline to society.

Frankly, I am not genuine myself, with all my pretensions of a renaissance man, I had achieved little in 30 years of my life. I failed with sciences and the essence of arts was lost on me. And I had to take up my family occupation, becoming a caricature of a newspaperman myself.

I often lose my patience with my father and get into loops of arguments, for instance, I was furious when I found out that he had made an Rs.10000 newsprint order, we don’t have a circulation to consume it, let alone support its cost. My father reasoned that long line credit is cheaper so he ordered for a year in advance. The truth is that he had a point but I was furious for more selfish reasons than financial prudence, I wanted to start a toy shop, I had already procured the material which I got from a friend on credit. I was frustrated to see that my father is not even considering stopping the press for another year. I reasoned that if I filled the house with the toys, it will persuade my father, just by the force of daily reminder, to let me set shop in the hole that houses the press. But he wouldn’t budge, it has been two years and the toys are aging, the barbies must be having their first periods already. The dancing bears are going extinct and the superheroes heroes have outlived the season of their shows.

I continued to work for the paper, occasionally I edited, even drew cartoons, but what I did with real interest was accounts, it suited my unimaginative self. I took it seriously and tried to maximize revenue. The way to do that was to gain readership and for that, you need eyeballs not thought stimulus. I wanted numbers not praises for the And you need sex and scandal and violence. Local Politics covers all of it but if you are not careful you become the messenger who is shot and in my town it means, stabbed and eviscerated.

It was a Wednesday when I woke up to the shrill ring of the phone. I don’t know if that’s possible, but I feel that a phonecall bringing in catastrophic news rings differently than a normal one. Anyway, It seemed that way, that day. Papa sauntered across the room, unusually, weirdly swift, and picked up the phone. He seemed to press the receiver so hard to his skull that the sweat dripping along his jawline could be his melting ear. And now it was my ear’s turn to melt. He began, get up and get ready we have to go to the town, what for I asked. It’s a rape case. I could sense danger as rapes in our parts are, statistically speaking, have been the domain of the rich and the powerful, and reporting on it is always comes with a threat, a threat of severe nature, I mean a threat of annihilation. No, I don’t have a historical basis for the assertion but it's just common sense. 15 cases of sexual assault in a year, none reported from filing to resolution, no statements from the victims of police. Papers just harvest the sleaze and scoop value of the rape and then abandon it. Now, given the scenario, do you think it is an opportunity? I know we have to print it, whoever gets it will do it, we can just be the first, But Is it lucrative to pursue it? Of course not, and on top of that, it is dangerous! But my father has a penchant for investing in the hopeless and journalistic foolhardiness. He has done that before and my father’s legal credit score boasts of 10 defamation cases, all ongoing, if that is not enough to dampen someone’s enthusiasm then what can? In stark contrast, my grandfather, who passed on the press to him, ran the paper in British India and never had vernacular press act charges, allegations of sedition or truth. I look at my father’s career and say, oh, Nietzsche, you were right, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger..”

We enter the home and there I see the sordidness of the affair. The victim is a 12-year-old schoolgirl and the perpetrator is the headmaster!

Her mother brings to me her progress report, I don’t know why she did that but I guess, due to the force of habit. She might have gotten used to fetching it on every available pretext, for all visitors. I think that was her little way to show that her differently-abled child is a child with a difference. Oh, the pressures of motherhood!

The girl’s name was Samvedna, I knew that from the report card, I couldn’t have imagined asking it at that moment. I learned she is an autistic girl (she was diagnosed so by the city doctor when she was three) studying in a normal school! Now, her progress report began to move me, she was scoring high in math and failing English. I learned that she joked around and gives her lunch to the playground birds and dogs. I also learned that she was being called for the remedial English classes and that’s where the extreme perversion of “personalized teaching” happened.

 This atrocious headmaster had quite ironically made news last year when he argued for sex education in schools and made a few impassioned speeches defending his position. I knew of him due to that and I also knew that he comes from a family of politicians and waiting in his wings for electoral opportunity.

The case was filed, the news was printed and we, as expected, became the only ones to print about it beyond 10 days. The child protection agencies got involved, the headmaster lost his position but spent just about 10 days behind bars before getting out on bail. It's all very predictable and usual. But something unusual happened in my house and my head.

I don’t know what happened but I have never argued with my father since that Wednesday. In the course of the entire affair, I realized that I was mirroring my father more and more and with youth on my side, I was at least more efficient, if not enduring. I was not forced to pursue the story by my father, I decided to pursue the story myself. I don’t know how it will end but my heart tells me to believe what my father repeats ad nauseam—“pursuit of justice is an end in itself.”

When we visited Samvedna next, I got her a Barbie, from my nonstarter toy shop she did not seem to like it though. Then, I despaired to find something which she would like from the collection of the crippled toys. A different toy for a different girl, then I can’t explain why but, I thought of my father’s kites, and when I gave her one of the kites, she liked it!