My Dad, My Father

I remembered this morning that Apachen’s birthday is around the corner. Do I hear the mallus ask why do you call him Apachen? Well, blame it on his twisted way of keeping his mallu identity. Twisted because he did not give a thought on how his this act of his defiance against modernity embarassed me and my brethren every time people asked us, “How is your Pupppa/Daadee?” (that’s how we mallus say it). And we had to tell them that Apachen is fine.

I always had the rebellious streak (the immunity sometimes lasted beyond Sundays) in the family. So once when my brother, sister and I were sitting together I said, “Why cant we rebel and call him Daddy? And keep calling him that till he relents?”. My brother shook his head sagely and said, “No point, I tried it several years ago. And he gave me a sermon on the need to always be proud of our heritage. Go ahead, if you want all of us to go through another speech”. That was a good enough threat for me to decide against it.

Except for this and a few other eccentricities he is a great person. I remember his visits from the Gelf. (Gelf or Persia is the Mallu ‘Father’land). The foreign smells, the bundles of Faber Castell pencils and erasers. They disappeared even before he went back, given our sudden popularity in school. Back we went to red and black Nataraj pencils and with that went our evanescent esteem. I remember visitors dropping by to visit him. They had this habit of visiting at odd hours, I mean 6.30pm was our study time written in stone and there was no way we could be part of the entertaining conversations. Well that didn’t stop me, as I strained my ears and heard the stories and anecdotes Apachen told the visitors. His American and British colleagues at the Refinery, how he defied their acts of superiority, how he could speak English to their faces, about the service on British Airways and Air India and so on. Most of them I could repeat even in my sleep. I could visualise him in a suit, with his thick moustache as he stood up against the westerners.

Apachen had tried his hand at several vocations. He was an instructor in the railways, he was in the navy, he worked as an engineer. Amachi, in one of those rare moments of nostalgia of their romance, said that he also did a stint as a school teacher in her school immediately after his ‘matriculation’. She used to go red in the face as she told us how he looked with his wavy black hair parted down the middle, and how she didn’t mind too much when he made her write ‘imposition’ for not paying attention in class. He now spends his retired life tending his vanilla plants and date palms.

I should definitely call him and say thank you on his birthday which is the date his uncle and school teacher came up with. Apparently all my grandmother recalled about his birth date is that it was during the floods of the nineties in Kerala. No, no not the 1990’s, this was some obscure calendar that they followed in Kerala before they accepted the Gregorian one. I will call him even though I am not one for birthdays. (And all you out there who don’t remember mine, I am fine with that. After all there are better things to do in your lives and besides I don’t want the pressure of remembering yours.)

Many summers have passed, I am now not embarassed about having to say, “Happy Birthday Apacha, thank you for being a great dad”