Better late than never. A letter to my father written an hour after his birthday.

Today is my father’s birth anniversary.Correction. Yesterday was. It’s 1.07 am now. No longer the 6th of November.

I had planned to write this post earlier. Once I finished writing the presentation for a talk I am giving tomorrow in my Finely Chopped Consulting avatar. And do my yoga for back pain stretches before dinner and after I finished writing the blog post.

I don’t make many presentations these days. In my corporate life my juniors would write them after we brainstormed on it. I would give my feedback and make changes if required when they were done. I would usually present to the client.

My presentation on youth beverage trends to India’s most trusted and largest home grown consumer brand went off well. I still don’t know how to share screens though!

The point is that when I do make presentations today, it takes me about an hour to decide on the template and font and put in my logo in the footer. The actual writing takes half an hour or less as I use one line per slide and a picture and am clear about what I want to say. I don’t exceed single digits in terms of the number of slides. I have no reason to torture my audience.

Which meant that by the time I got the template ready, K burst in and exclaimed, ‘I am hungry. Can we eat by ten?’

So it was ‘hello oven, bye bye blog post, bye bye yoga and wait for a bit PowerPoint.

We watched Ozark while having dinner and finished halfway through when done. K cleaned up after dinner and I used the time to finish my presentation. Before you go all gender agnostic feminist woke on me, let me point out that I made dinner. Roast chicken wings with vegetables. And once done with watching the rest of the pre-season finale of Ozark, I went back to my desk and wrote this post. (I am subbing this right now. Monday afternoon. The narrative remains as that from the previous night.)

The rest was a breeze once I decided on the template!

As a freelancer, I work with a very lean team. My boys and me. My boys are cats. So it comes down to me! You will read more about this when my second book, The Diary of Cat Dad, comes out. My younger cat Nimki might contest the ‘’allegation’ I just made. He did hop on to my desk while I wrote this post, walked on my keyboard, then climbed out of the window to rest on the platform in front of my writing desk. He typed three letters in the process. I don’t want to break it to him but the letters made no sense.

Baby Loaf would point out that the three of us do yoga Nidra together every afternoon. If this isn’t a ‘team building’ exercise then what is?

Team FinelyChopped

So here I am, breaking my rule of ‘no writing post dinner .’ A rule I put into practise after I moved out of the corporate world to become a freelance writer. Writing on the blog at night after work, while I was a market researcher, led to insomnia. Hence I avoided it later, when I was writing all day in any case.

We have a standard practise on my dad’s anniversary as started by my mum. We garland his photo. Offer prayers and some sweets. At times light incense sticks. My brother has done so this year. As he does every year.

My brother has inherited my mom’s genes when it comes to keeping things in order.

I have not as you read in my letter to my dad. The reason for not doing so is rather embarrassing.

We had framed photos of the 4 loved ones we have lost – my father and my maternal grandfather, K’s father and maternal grandmother – and displayed them my study. Sometime back my dad’s picture began to get pigmented. My dadu’s photo frame broke. I had to fix this.

I put all four pictures inside till then. I took dad’s pic to Mohan Colour Lab but turns out that studios no longer restore old prints. K told me to keep my father and grandpa’s photos carefully back then. I did so.

I planned to step out after yoga nidra and buy frames from Fabindia this evening. I looked for the pics before going out. I could find neither.

I had no idea where my special safe space for the pictures was! The photo frames with my father in law and grand mother in law’s pics were there. But not the photos which were frameless.

That’s typical of me as K would point out. I am bad at keeping things carefully. And love to procrastinate. The missing photos were a result of this. I would not admit this to her. Then she would say, ‘that’s your problem. You won’t accept it when anyone points out a mistake to you.’ I would deny it if course and we would both look away. I would make some small take while skirting the issue at hand. We’d usually make up soon.

I faced a similar mystery when I took the boys to the vet last time. I could not find their cards which recorded their vaccines and health history. I was mortified. What sort of a dad am I? Dr Nicole was pretty chill about it and made fresh cards. I found the originals a few weeks later in my ‘drawer where I keep important things and never find them when needed.’

My mum once said that my father was pretty careless when it came to his papers and that she would have to keep track of them. This caused a lot of problems when he passed away.

Is this a man woman thing I wonder? K is the more organised one between us.

I did feel rather bad about not having his picture framed and garlanded today.

What I lack in short term memory, I make up in LTM. I might not remember where I kept the photos, but I do remember an incident from my dad’s birthday in 1980. This was just after we had just moved to Kolkata. This is the only memory that I have of his birthdays as I do not remember his celebrating it as such.

We were at Sonarpur at the house my dad had built for his parents. My thakuma (maternal grandmother) had made payesh for him as is (or was?) the practise in Bengali homes. He was to drive to his chambers at Minto Park after that. Things had to wait as six year old me kicked up a fuss. I am not sure why. Perhaps because I did not want him to go. He managed to placate me, the apple of his eyes. He gave an orange coloured water bottle, with Subhas Chandra Bose’s image embossed on it. Which I thought was funny as it was his birthday and yet I got a gift.

I wonder what happened to the plastic water bottles which came in myriad shapes and sizes in the 80’s. Some of the shapes that I remember are the fruity ones…mango, pineapple. Or the thermos ones which were considered cool as you could take cold water or Thums Up in it. Aerated drinks were not seen as satan’s staff for children back then. The problem with those was that the inside section made of glass, which would keep things cool, was rather fragile. They would often break and you’d open the bottle to see the Gold Spot you had dreamt of drinking all morning being full of shards of glass. Then there was the wonderful world of pencil boxes. A popular plastic version was in the shape of a chocolate bar. There was the ones with glossy covers featuring Disney characters (with no royalty paid) and magnets to snap them shut. High tech! And when in class 8, the Geometry box. The contents of which helped us (shakily) navigate the world of Pythagorus theorem, isosceles  triangles and other equally useless things. There was not much that I remember about tiffin boxes of yore but for the fact that they would be sectioned into a rough 20:80 metric. And that each had a different locking system. I remember the contents of the tiffin boxes vividly. The chanachur sandwich that Sattu would being, the uthapam that Gopa would bring, the beef sandwiches that Michael would bring, the Maggi with sliced alu and ketchup ‘chow mein’ that Tito would bring, the theplas in Deven’s box.

Mine would have chicken or cheese sandwiches.

I like to believe that Baby Loaf is like what Baby Raja was. Chubby and his daddy’s boy.

Like the much coveted Chinese fountain pens, Sulekha and Chepauk ink bottles with nozzles from eye drops and ear drop bottles to fill them, of pre-liberalisation India, the world of plastic tiffin boxes, water bottles and pencil boxes with very poor finish and design have receded into the annals of history. Remembered by us Gen Y folks and the Boomers before us.

Dad passed away threes years later. Or Two birthdays later. He would have been 80 plus had he been alive today. I somehow can’t imagine him being so old. I remember thinking how old he had become when his chest air had begun to turn white. By that yardstick I am Methuselah. What with my salt and pepper beard and all.  From what I gather, my age today is more than that of my dad’s when he passed away. Too young!

Little Nimki is more like my brother when he was young. Thin. Mamma’s boy and on his mom’s lap when he gets the chance. He is fond of me too but I get nose boops and toe kisses. He doesn’t get on my lap,  he walks on me to Show affection when I wake up. Likes to nap with me in the afternoon.

When I see folks who are in their 80s, I sometimes I wonder if my father is better off. It is hard to imagine someone so full of life as a frail and dependent senior citizen.

Something tells me that my dad is happy wherever he is. Happy to see his sons settled, to see both his daughter in laws look after his sons and his wife so well. I am sure that if we are happy, he will be so too.

Talking of The Diary of a Cat Dad, you could back the book by contributing to the crowd funding organised by the publishers to help bring the book to life. Here is the link. Thank you.

I wonder what my dad would have said about my beard.