Not too little, a bit too late

When I was a kid, they used to call me my father’s tail. He was a stay-at-home father and I wasn’t old enough to be in school. I would go everywhere he went. I knew the butcher and the bank-teller by name. His barber had to figure out what to do with a three-year old girl’s hair because of course I’d get my hair cut by him. When I was old enough for sixth grade, I put my feet down. I was no longer interested in getting my hair cropped to an inch of its life. I also got my ears pierced that year. From then, my father would always say he loved me more when I had short hair. I have never quite known what to make of it.

My sister finished grad school and moved back home a few years later. She was the only one who asked why I made a fuss every time the neighbor wanted me to go over to his house. It was the summer vacations, I was bored out of my head and I would still hide in the bathroom every time he came over. I remember she lost her shit when I told her he kept making me touch weird places on his body. There was a lot of shouting and my mother kept saying she didn’t know. At the end of the day, it was my uncle who went to scare the neighbor off, asking him to stay away. It didn’t bother me till I was almost twenty-one that my father refused to get involved in the whole mess.

Something my mother passed down successfully to my sister and me was that our father was always the first priority. Often our holiday lists would shrink because he wanted something out of my mother’s budget. We never seemed to break even though. There was always something more he’d want and we were always one impossible expectation away from an outburst. In our house, the minimum threshold for happiness kept out of reach no matter how high we jumped. I was sixteen by the time I realized it was not fair and there was no way in hell that my mother was being treated well. It occurred to me that it wasn’t okay that my father would invest huge chunks of my mother’s salary, without any discussion, into hare-brained schemes that never panned out. It also wasn’t okay that she never spoke up about it. So, I decided I’d do it on her behalf. In hindsight, that was not the best of plans. I ended up with my father’s hands around my throat. My sister once again proceeded to lose her proverbial shit. She threatened to take me and leave. I think that was the last time my father cared about me.

Once in college, I was asked to leave the game-room because the boys were getting excited and it would get lewd soon. I said maybe it was the boys who needed to clear out. A senior called me names and said he could make me leave. I walked out; my the-then boyfriend chose to stay. That night I dreamt of my father watching a game in his (our?) old barbershop with his friends. And I was there too; not as a child, like I was in the original memory but twenty years old. The next morning, he passed the phone to my mother before I could finish the whole story. I always did take too long to get to the fucking point. The next time I went home from college, the subject of our neighbor came up (yes, the same one). My father mentioned something he’d said recently. I asked him how dare he still talked to him like nothing had ever happened. He said, “Why wouldn’t I?” I used to think that was the last time I cared for him.

When my grandmother was bed-ridden, he complained about how my mother cared more for her mother than she did for him. I have never known anyone, other than my own father, who has told someone that he hoped their mother would die already. My mother cried but she never did manage to say anything to him. But that was nothing new. The day he downed a ton of pills, he told everyone in the ambulance that he did it for my mother, to give her the peace she always asked of him. He made the whole world think that my mother could ever say anything to him, against him, or even at him. I learnt of my father’s death on a phone call in a random lobby of a random apartment I was visiting. A stranger I would never know consoled me while I sobbed too hard to even form a thank you.

My mother and I have never talked much about my father. He liked to remind me time and time again that I was too selfish to ever have people love me and I would never amount to much in life. I asked my mother how selflessness worked because she was the one true selfless human I know. She told me we see in others the flaws we wish we didn’t have. She never questioned why I was bringing up selfishness all of a sudden, she didn’t even bring up my father. I wonder if the reason my father and I could never stand each other is because we saw too many of our flaws in the other.

Recently I have been coming to the same conclusion in multiple iterations that maybe it is time to stop spending so much of my time and energy on a man who could never bring himself to do the same for me. I wish I had reached this stage in my life when he was alive. Maybe if I told him this, I would feel differently.

Baba, thank you for teaching me which men to avoid in life. I am sorry you were one of them.