Call me in my name and on time
My mother doesn’t call me a lot. We rarely talk over phone. She considers me responsible enough and I consider her independent enough to bother asking her whether she fell from the stool while hanging clothes in the gallery. Alternately, I talk to my father on a daily basis. He expects me to call him on my way to work in the morning and then way back home in the evening. We don’t have much to talk about though. In the morning, he’ll ask me whether I am feeling fine and I’ll ask him whether he slept well the night before. In the evening, he’ll enquire how my day was although it’s difficult to explain him how my day was. I’ll ask him how many rounds did he complete (walking) of the local park. The usual script. Once in a while, I’ll ask him whether I should send him new books to read and once in a while, he’ll ask me how his daughter-in-law is doing. The whole setup is very, for lack of a better word, functional.
However, I recently realized that I wasn’t doing him a favour by being diligent about our daily 1-minute phone calls. However, I must admit that I felt I was being a dutiful son by calling him up and trying to fill up his loneliness — all retired folks feel lonely in a manner that unretired folks can’t relate to — I noticed this after my dad finally retired at the age of 69 — with a few familiar words of assurance. I’ve learnt with time that we should aim to be more patient with our parents than they were with us because they were more patient with us than we could ever be with them. There are so many terms I can’t explain to him over the phone. We speak in Tulu but we aren’t speaking the same language if I divert from our script. In fact, I’d fail miserably even if we were to talk in person simply because he belongs to a different era. Clicking blurry pictures and sending them across on WhatsApp is nothing less than a miracle to him. Yes, there are adult children out there who have been more successful in evangelizing their ageing parents with technology but I don’t fall in that category. And neither does my brother.
Anyway, I digressed.
Many a time I am not able to call him for various reasons. Twice a day is the norm. Once a day is an exception. None a day is an aberration. And on those days of aberration, I learn something uniquely precious. See, the unwritten agreement between my dad and me is that I’ll call him no matter what. He seldom calls me. In fact, he calls my wife more than he calls me. And on days I fail to call him even once, he’ll call around dinnertime (8-ish) with a stern voice asking me how am I. This is so because in his mind, if I am not calling, then it basically means that I am unwell. Also, the reason why he doesn’t call during daytime because he doesn’t want to disturb me as I am busy finding the perfect formula for world peace.
Which is an interesting derivation on his part as I tend to feel that I need to call him to keep a check on his well-being while he expects a call from me to keep a check on mine. We are silently keeping a check on each other with our shorter-than-short calls. I don’t know much about fatherhood although we know for certain that it’s not as celebrated as motherhood. Yet, we can all agree that love becomes a language in itself regardless of the distance separating two people who care for each other.
