sinking... feeling.

I hurt myself today….

My stunt in America has taken so much from me. Every day that comes to an end now reminds me not of all that I’m missing by choosing to be back home, but all that I missed out on by choosing to be away. The basants, the weddings, the aimless wandering down the streets I once knew. The birthdays, the promotions, my own engagement. The funerals. The passing away of doting uncles who never ever ceased to smile at the sight of you. Even though you knew the way to their house better than you knew them. Even though you never played with their children when you were young simply because you had a bigger house and a bigger car and a bigger allowance. Basically, because you were an asshole with an ego too big to belong to a human being.

And today, I hugged his sons. I hugged them without any pretensions of snobbery. Without any reservations, like hugging long lost brothers. And that is exactly what they are, long lost brothers. My grand parents lay buried in a grave yard that is their back yard, which they single handedly have maintained for generations because they remember that the dead deserve as much respect as the living. We go there often. To visit our dead. All my life, at least the life that was spent here as my father’s son, we went their often. And today, six years between now and then, I paid my respects to a new grave. And I stopped myself from crying for a man who deserves so much more than strangled tears. By the time I was done praying for his soul, the loss of his life to me seemed inconsequential compared to the loss his children must’ve been feeling. How do you bury your own father? I wondered as I looked over my own father struggling out of his shoes to stand barefoot on the soiled steps that led to the mausoleum where his parents are buried.

A new surge of pain then rose from somewhere within, as the thought of having to bury him one day took hold of my Ill prepared brain. I can’t begin to explain the kind of fear one feels at the notion of losing one’s father. Its like the sun has just drowned with the solid promise of never rising again. Like the world has ended and you’re standing alone in the midst of hellish demons inching ever closer to feed on your flesh. It’s a crippling fear, a terrifying state of mind because irrespective of how in command of your own faculties you feel, your knees do give way, at least a little, when you realize that this man who has never ever let you down may one day soon just cease to be. My heart sank, just like it had right before my drunken Kuwaiti friend drove us into a cliff.

The back of my father’s balding head reflecting the sunlight became the most welcome sight ever. In a futile attempt to regain my composure I tried to take a step to balance myself, but found out that whatever resolve my mind had reached about the fairly inevitable course of life, it hadn’t yet been communicated to my legs that the crisis was over. And thus I lost my balance and slipped, heading head first towards the dust laden concrete steps flailing my arms wildly to reach some kind of a support to grab hold off. And then I wasn’t falling. My arms were now in the steadfast hold of this lil old man who himself can’t walk straight because of a metal plate in his back from a botched surgery. This was perhaps the best possible physical manifestation of the psychological crutch he’s always been for me.

ON the verge of losing his own balance, he somehow found the strength to steady his tumbling son.

I know I would have been embarrassed. I am that petty, I am that arrogant. That the thought of a crippled 70 year old man aiding my step would have sent me immediately into a state of enraged humiliation. Instead, I felt like crying. From the sheer integrity of the situation, I had tears ready to fall. He saved me from falling. Like so many times before, he held out his hand and broke my fall. I looked at him and the smile on his face as he casually straightened me up and patted me on the shoulder and I swear my heart just stopped. Looking onto his wizened grey eyes I saw such unprecedented pride that I failed to understand the reason for him to be proud of me. So without wasting a breath, I hugged him. A strong rib-cracking hug. The kind of hug you give someone you never want to let go off. I guess I was trying to make him see I wasn’t ready for him to leave me now or ever. That I needed him to guide my steps all the way to my own grave.

These are things you never tell your father because you are afraid he will think of you as a lesser man than he expects you to be.

And these are the things I wanted so much to tell him, maybe somehow make him change the course of destiny, maybe somehow make him make god let him be forever. And I honestly believed that he could for a second. He is such a man that you would never put anything, no matter how credulously improbable it seems, beyond his capacity to achieve.

I’ve always known I love my father, I loved him even when I ran away from home just to be away from him. And I love him now that I have returned because he deserves to have his son by his side. Today, I know I love him more than I ever have and ever really thought I could. Today, I know for a fact that I would die willingly, happily even, if it meant he could live.

But more importantly I know now that he needs me to be sure footed and strong willed and honest and forth right. He needs me to live for him. For his legacy, for his pride. And most of all for his grandson who doesn’t yet exist and If my emotional constitution doesn’t change probably never will, but if he does, somehow, manages find his way down to god’s earth, than I will inevitably have to be the man to him my father is to me.

That’s a tall order.