Episode #25: Papa Ki Pari // Papa's Princess
"Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes." - Gloria Naylor
When I write about my mom, I tend to go in circles. I write the same thing over and over again, spinning ad nauseum into a whirlpool of C-PTSD buzzwords. Writing about my dad, though, feels different.
It feels difficult. As someone who has spent most of her life in a different country than my parents, almost completely estranged, I’ve had a lot of time to process. But today, burnt out and bogged down by the state of the world, I have no fortitude to process. So with no intent to process, here are some thoughts about my father.
My dad was always a cool guy. Unlike the desi parents within the TikTok zeitgeist and the Mindy Kaling universe, I knew my dad to be witty, charming and sensitive. He named me Akanksha, desire, because having a daughter was the deepest wish of his heart. He grew up in 70’s Dilli, the eldest son of a single mother, abandoned early in life by his own dad. He wished all his life for a daughter, he told me, because in his experience, men were disappointing. I am thirty-two years old now, and have never been pressured to marry, because he never raised me to believe marriage was my purpose.
My dad is charismatic, the life of the party. He is well-read, eloquent and deeply loved by strangers and friends. When he walks into a room he commands attention, buzzing like a magnet, and blinding with his light. He possesses a depth that feels intimidating, but carries it with a lightness that feels approachable. Even in the peak of my estrangement from him I sometimes felt his presence on my journey, on my stages, like residual glitter.
And speaking of my stages, my dad always nurtured my writing. He indulged me in mini book clubs and encouraged me to enter contests. We read some of the same books and comics sometimes, enjoying father-daughter book clubs on the steps of the Asiatic library. When I finished a book we’d go to a Bandra bookstore and pick out some new ones, quickly befriending the sweet uncle who worked, and still works there, and still asks after my father when I come in. When a new Harry Potter book came out, my dad would find a cheap reprint at Bandra station and bring it home to me with a Dairy Milk.
My dad taught me what love is. And where his love was the North Star of my shattered self, my mom’s was a treacherous, swirling void, a perennial thorn in my side. But as I get older, as I count years with lines in my woman’s body, I sometimes pluck that thorn from my flesh and examine it. As I move through my own experiences with shiny pretty, hollow men, it is my mom’s energy I feelwith me: off-stage, lying awake at night, crying and bloating and bleeding on a 28 day clock, residual tar pit.
It’s hard to write about my father because to write about him would be to take my rose-tinted glasses off and see, unfiltered, my blessings and freedoms, with their muddy, tangled roots in pain.
Maybe one day I will be brave enough to get into it, to wax lyrical and express it artfully. But in this moment, I am simply moving through it, simply feeling through it, simply parsing through neglect in love’s ornate clothing.