A Second Stab at Daughterhood

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken - Jack Kerouac

Recently, I find myself contemplating the misbegotten exercise better known as ‘Eudemonia’. It has been nearly ten years since I took my first selfish stab at self- realization and the course has rendered mixed results.

Still, the question persists…Is happiness possible amid emptiness? Further more, is it possible to be flooded with guilt and guile simultaneously? It appears that I have been mistaking numbness and delusion for happiness for a while now. It has been over two years since heartbreak and it has also been two years since I had one of those days where one wakes up with a song in their head and hops around the bathroom while brushing their teeth. One of those days when it’s just good to be alive and for a fleeting 24 hours, there is no need to justify that.

But yesterday, I woke up with "Darling from the 7 Khoon Maaf" soundtrack in my head (It goes without saying that taste does not factor in particularly well with my subconscious). This recent foray into ‘Walking on Sunshineville’ ironically owes to my renewed relationship with my father. Forgiveness or forget-ness, and I’m not sure which comes first, is an odd thing. It has taken me years to fully admit to myself that I love my father. The sentiment has always been present but the admission has always eluded me. After all, how does one express love for someone who stands opposed to everything you represent simply because the person happens to have sired you? It has always been that way between him and I, an ever-present incomprehensibility regarding the other. He has always stood like a Titan over my literal and metaphorical shoulder …judging and I have always cowered under the gaze, all the while erecting harsher barricades in my mind.

Things appear to be shifting now, the ice of his disapproval seems to have thawed considerably. In retrospect, I suppose it is a waste that it has taken us half a lifetime to get here but it would be tragic to dwell on that. At times like this I am ever grateful for being granted the soul of  The Fool, who cannot digest tragedy for too long. I am programmed to delve into distractions and while my emotional and artistic setting may never be practical in the established sense, it serves its purpose. Our present conversations, Baba’s and mine, seem to me like the first level playing field we have ever pitched our hopes on. There is conversation and for once, there is disagreement (on my part) which is allowed (on his part). That is perhaps what I am most grateful for at this juncture, the fact that I can finally show my father who I am without the paralyzing fear of being shunned.

Our shy shuffling back and forth between phone calls and dinner dates is something I am coming to treasure and my nerves are no longer getting the better of me in the process. I am also developing a new found respect for the gentle, unassuming coding of Xeno’s second paradox. Because re-establishing one’s daughterhood after a near decade of silence means much shifting between time and mood zones. And Xeno’s “To get from A to get to B one would have to make half the distance between both points and then half of that half and half of that and so on” is proving to be a source of constant comfort. I suppose the romantic in me would like to think I am finally waltzing with Baba.

Our recent conversations have run over some turbulent waters: money and matrimony. The former is something I feel guilty about discussing and the latter seems to be something he feels guilty about broaching. All the while my own mind wrestles with those disastrous Freudian anagrams of girls who search for their father in all the men they meet and he seems to feel the need to reassure me constantly about how he will always provide for me. It is an awkward premise but at this point I am grateful for any foundation I can get.

There are times when I wish I could think about money, the future and security like other adults but it appears I am not built for such things. My moments are made simply by his silent approval of something I have said or done that in-turn allows me to turn a blind eye towards our silent disagreements.

Recently, he casually offered me one of my dreams over a platter of mushroom steak at Gymkhana.

“You want to go to Europe? Fine, you plan it. I’ll pay for it,” he said.

And what I felt wasn’t something as perforated as glee over the chance to finally travel and explore on my own-some, as I have always wanted to or the fact that I didn’t have to worry about how I would foot the bill. The feeling was nauseatingly primitive and rather obtusely Darwinian. It has been a long time since I haven’t considered myself as my own caretaker. Granted, it is quite liberating to know one is capable of taking care of oneself but it is even better one to know that one has Dad if and when one can’t. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I missed that.

“You can’t keep planning things and not living them. You need to stop letting all this ‘what if something bad happened’ nonsense stop you from doing what you want in life. Life is short and you don’t want to look back and think you didn’t do anything because you were too scared to even try and because you were too busy being perfect,” he says to me, oh-so casually.

The following minutes encompassed nearly three decades, where Schopenhauer’s time fractions split apart and an entire foundation I had constructed for my sanity shook me silly. Schopenhauer tells us that the shape of our intelligence is time, a thin line that only presents things to us one by one. And once upon a time, Time told me that I needed to be perfect for my father to love me. I knew I wasn’t. I knew that I was the soft, slobbering, quiet, romantic, troubadoring hobo to his unmovable, workaholic, stoic, brash and brilliant watchman. He knew it too.

But in those minutes I looked across the table and found that ten years had taken their toll on both of us. He –for better and worse, and admittedly much to my discredit – has stooped a little at the shoulders, his hair is grey and he occasionally laughs at my fumbling attempts at self-deprecation disguised as humour. I have learned to speak up for myself with some conviction and keep quiet only when required. I tell him things now, far from everything but some things. And he lets me.

Funnily enough, my mind can’t help but dipping into Jesus’ last words on the cross at such a juncture of metaphors and rebirths and all that rambling new-age lunacy. ‘Consummatum est – It is completed.’

 I believe I can finally close a book that I have lived in for a long time. I can finally move beyond a story, where I was the daughter who had to turn her back on everything she knew to feel alive.

I’m hoping starting a new chapter means we both can.