The silent currency of Fathers

The day my father passed away, my world didn’t just crack .. it shattered like a cheap whisky glass on a cement floor. One day he was there, and the next .. vanished. No last words, no dramatic exit, just gone, like the last peg of rum at a monsoon wedding.

I didn’t cry. No, no. Men of my vintage don’t cry. We freeze. We build walls around us so thick and fortified, even Alexander the Great wouldn’t have tried to scale them. And inside those walls, we tell ourselves absurd things, like, “If I survived this, I can survive anything,” while chewing on all the stale memories and pretending the ache isn’t there.

My wife, sharp as the edge of a fresh razor, once asked me, “Is this what you think strength looks like? Becoming an emotional vegetable?” She had a point. Apparently, I had been doing a rather good impression of a corpse at most dinners .. physically present but emotionally dead, like some marinated pickle forgotten at the back of the fridge. It hit me then. I’d been hiding behind a facade of impassiveness, like a bad actor in a low-budget drama. I was learning that true strength isn’t about dodging the arrows of pain...it’s about taking them in the chest and still turning up for dinner, jokes ready and arms open. I am learning what the fathers of old were built upon.

Now, If you were like me, born during the heights of mainstream cable TV, before beyond 2000 on BBC, before we began using phrases like “emotional intelligence” at dinner tables, you’ll know what I mean. Back then, fathers didn’t say “I love you” to their children. In fact, if you dared to utter such scandalous filminess to your old man, he might’ve dropped his newspaper, adjusted his spectacles, and muttered, “Oie nee kudichittundo?” (Oie, are you drunk?).

We were raised in homes where affection was measured not in words but in awkward, grim-faced gestures. My father, for instance, was a man of few words, smiles on your accomplishments, frowns when in general distate, and even fewer compliments. If, by some miracle, I’d drawn him a stick figure titled “Bestest Papa Ever,” he’d have probably mistaken it for a ransom note and locked me inside with the family goats for company.

My Father wasn’t a huge fan of hugs and heartfelt confessions. In my young adolescent days, the most fatherly love he said to me was, “If you so much as breathe near my ironed white shirt, I’ll rearrange your face for free.” And, to his credit, I never ironed my shirts and always stole his, He really meant it.

Oh, don’t get me wrong .. our house was not devoid of emotions. Far from it! Emotions were flying around like the fat pigeons you see near Corniche. Anger? Plenty ... Sarcasm? By the KILO. Hysterics? I mean .. we'd managed to serve hot with evening chai. Love, however? That shy fellow stood in the corner, fiddling with his fingers, afraid to show his face.

My father? After a particularly disgraceful report card, he declared with the solemnity of an astrologer, “Ee Kannakkinu poyyal, nee vello pothu valarthenddi varum” (At this rate, You’ll be grazing buffaloes in your future). At the time, I thought, “So no doctor-engineer dreams like my cousins then?” Only later did I realize that beneath that thunderous voice and sharp tongue lay a heart softer than butter.

You see, ours was a generation that mastered the unsaid. Love came wrapped in silence and delivered through peculiar rituals. A mother slipping extra rials in your pocket “just in case” (while also accusing you of being the family's spendthrift). A father buying you football boots polished to military perfection, pretending they fell from the sky. That uncle who, without saying a word, stood beside you, buying that Shorook Leham shawarma (Large meat) from the local shop .. watching you devoured it, as thou you were never fed at home, both staring at nothing, sharing everything.

Their love was like telegrams .. brief, cryptic, and usually arriving late. But when it did, you could feel it in your bones. Even when you grew up and tried to modernize things, you couldn’t shake off that vintage style. You’d return from your  college hostel with some suspicious greenhill oil for your grandmother’s creaky knees, blabbering about “tribal healing methods” and “scientifically proven benefits,” while both of you knew fully well it was just love, badly disguised as Ayurveda.

Now, of course .... we’ve changed. Everyone’s become a Shakespearean actor. “I love you”s are flung across dining tables, WhatsApp groups, and Zoom calls. Fathers surprisingly now hug their children; Mothers say “I’m proud of you” without needing two ‘silent prayers under their breath’ first. Emojis, heart GIFs, and tear-jerking Instagram reels shared like no tomorrow.

And good! It’s about bloody time. Love shouldn’t be a crossword puzzle, where you spend your entire adult life decoding why your father bought you those expensive football boots for school. Was it duty? Guilt? The spirit of Maradona possessing him? Or was it... hmmm .. love?

Today’s children don’t need to guess. They’re told outright. And maybe that’s progress.

Still, a part of me misses that clumsy, clunky affection. The unspoken pact between us and our silent fathers, who, without ever uttering a word, carried the weight of their love like a secret treasure.

Sometimes, I'm reminded how I’d sit with my old man in silence, watching some rerun .. a fifa match on television, and think: Neither of us will say it .. but we both know. And perhaps that was enough.

A good Monday to you as you cherish your Father, or whoever that Father figure is in your life.