so this is what fathers do

& other things july brings back

i was in the park today and i forgot my phone at home, intentional and wonderful, and for ten or fifteen minutes i was just a person in the world, watching things. a maina waddled through garden water with her yellow pointy beak and her mean-looking eyes, inspecting fallen branches for food, entirely unbothered by me. an egret stood on stilt legs in the dry grass...OUT IN THE DAY...which if you know egrets, you know is practically unheard of. portulaca in ivory & magenta & peach. the underbellies of gulmohar & amaltas trees dotted with blossoms. parakeets being opinionated about something. a barn owl. crows being their most crow selves.

i stood there in the blazing heat of a summer month and i thought: the rains are coming. any week now, the whole sky changes its mind.

and just like that, from thinking about rain, i was seven years old again.

monsoon in my memory smells like wet mud & guava & every emotion that cannot be named. it feels like the trust of a ladybird on your fingertip...she climbs on, red & spotted black, sometimes orange, sometimes nearly yellow...and she does not fly away. fully trusting. a child’s thick black pigtails and chubby fingers and she deems them safe. i was that child, standing on my terrace with my hand out, waiting, and they always came, tens of them, in all their colours, the most jewel-like things i had ever seen & they were just...there. for free. for anyone who held still long enough.

sparrows took shelter under the shed near the guava tree when it rained hard. i watched them from the window...small & brown & completely unbothered by the storm...and i thought we had an understanding, the sparrows and i.

we ran wild in the park, my sister and i and whoever else was available. painted metal slides that got slippery in the rain & that no modern playground would ever allow. cuts and bruises that didn’t hurt at all until we were home...funny how that works, how the body saves the pain for when you’re finally safe enough to feel it. with your friends you’re howling into the clouds. splashing through mud puddles in your good shoes. completely, recklessly, magnificently & you don’t even know to be grateful yet because that’s the gift of being seven...you just ARE it. you don’t have to try.

all of this was at house no. 560.

the only address that has ever felt like mine.

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every home after that has been a phase. a transition. an in-between place. beautiful sometimes & full of people i love, but always someone else’s walls, someone else’s furniture arrangement, someone else’s sense of what a home should look and feel and smell like. i have lived in many houses since 560 and i have been comfortable in most of them and loved in all of them but i have never once looked around and thought...mine.

house no. 560 had a bright orange wall. who gives a flying fuck what architectural digest is going on about, in THIS household we welcome beyblades & hannah montana merch & a lot of fairies the girls found in the garden. there was a bunk bed with a ladder & my most favourite tom & jerry fan & butterflies on the walls & my mother, who understood something that took me years to articulate: a home should ENABLE you. not contain you. enable you. it should say yes to the orange wall and yes to the fairy collection and yes to the magnificent mess of a life being figured out by small people doing their absolute best.

i want to tattoo that address on my body someday. 560. just that. just so i always carry it. i’ve already got the two palm trees growing in front of our home on me.

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july is my birthday month & every birthday, without fail, my father called.

he worked abroad for many years & even when he was in india the circumstance was this: my parents separated when i was four & i continued to live with my mother & my grandparents & my sister who is three years younger to me. so my father was a voice on the phone. a birthday call at midnight. a presence i had no architecture for, no frame to hang in any room of myself. i would pick up & really all i wanted was to be with the people HERE, in this room, in this home, opening my gifts. my brain simply didn’t know what to do with him. didn’t register his importance.

you simply cannot miss something you’ve never had a shape for.

i only understood what i’d been missing much, much later.

we were on the school bus, my sister and i, a regular morning, when the driver braked suddenly...screeching halt...everyone lurched forward & looked out the windows. there was a bald man with a paunch running toward the bus, slightly out of breath, arriving at the window just in time. through the metal bars he passed a pencil box to his daughter sitting two seats ahead of me. he must have found it at home after she left & he ran, this bald sweaty man, he actually ran to get it to her before the bus pulled away.

he apologised to the driver. profusely. he apologised to everyone for the inconvenience.

his daughter took the pencil box without even looking up.

and i sat there, two seats behind, watching all of this, and an unfathomable ache in my chest & suffocating clogging in my throat.

...oh. so this is what fathers do?

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i don’t tell this story to be sad about it. i’m not, not anymore. i tell it because the monsoon keeps bringing it back every year...i am learning to love all of it. the home i had & the ones i’ve been visiting since. the father i didn’t know how to want & the wanting that arrived anyway. i now have a good relationship with my father. if i were to skip many many years ahead into the future, i’ll show you the both of us dancing on the terrace of his home. yup, another home i got to live in for many years before i flew to a different one.

and the rains are coming. any day now

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PS: if you'd like to read more essays like this one, my full archive is here!

iloveyou.
see you next wednesday.
mo.