I watched Gunjan Saxena last evening and felt inspired to write about the similar relationship that my father and I have shared in our lives. It’s something that I have wanted to document for a while, but I guess its time hadn’t come.
My father, now retired, was a General Surgeon in the Bihar Government. He came from a family with limited means. But he was blessed with a very high functioning brain. I remember him telling me how he used to hide the slates on which he got 100/100 in math just so he could have it for longer. He was a brilliant child but also out of control naughty. His relationship with his own father was fairly strained. He used to get belted by him (and I mean, literally, with a belt) very often. As an adult, it continued to stay strained as he would fight for attention from his parents but never became their ‘favourite’ son.
He was an honest surgeon serving the State Government. And when he was not in the hospital, he was giving free service to those who needed it. He took his Hippocratic oath very seriously. He wouldn’t dole out surgeries and meds if you didn’t need them - something I learnt and kept very close to my life. In Bihar, practising medicine was a business at the time. Infact, medicine continues to be a business even today. But he was giving free surgeries and medicines instead. I remember going to our village after Diwali every year with cartons full of his physician samples and doing free medical check ups for the villagers. As a doctor, it was easy to make money, get gifts from the pharma companies if you just promoted their products. My father never did. He never did forced surgeries, never charged excess fees, never lied to patients and hence, never made too much money from there.
He was, and continues to be, a very honest man. He was, and continues to have, a huge sense of duty for the oath he took. As a young man, he faced enough hardships and social pressure to get corrupted - especially in 1980s Bihar. Only a spine as strong as his could have gotten through it. This pressure continued on him when he got married and became a father very early on - to provide more for his family. He held on to his pride desperately, and somehow managed to get through that.
But what is beautiful is what follows after. When I was 6 or 7, he told me something, outside the gate of our small Patna house, after a confrontation with family on money matters. I remember it so distinctively because even with my little brain processing power at the time, I understood he was deeply hurt with what was happening and he wanted me to not go through that ever. He was passing on a life lesson. And it was this: ‘I don’t have any money to give you, no estate, no farms. All I can offer you is education. You make what you can out of it.’ I took that lesson to heart. And did exactly that.
Now this becomes very significant in another context. In 1990s Bihar, women didn’t get shit. I am not sure if they do even now. By popular belief, my father was a conservative man. I can say, at that time, even I felt so because he didn’t appreciate me wearing sleeveless or going over to my friend’s. He was also an absentee father. For my teenage years, while my mum brother and I lived in Patna, he served in Darbhanga. He didn’t want us to move there because the schools were better in Patna. I am lifelong grateful for that decision of my parents. My life wouldn’t have been what it is today without that. He lived up to his word on providing me with the best education.
However, our distance continued to grow in my teenage years and I resented him for his so-called backward thoughts at that time. I didn’t fully understand that perhaps it was for my safety and because of his helplessness in the possible scenario of something happening. It was very common to get abducted in Patna while I was growing up there. Especially for doctor’s families. And maybe he was aware that if one of us did, he wouldn’t have that much money to pay ransom without having to ask someone, and he didn’t have any influential connections to fix it either. I understood this only much later in my life when I had passed my teenage angst.
Anyhow, coming back to the significant context of women in Bihar. His thoughts on women’s rights were very different from other men at the time. My mother was 19 when she got married - still in first year graduation. With his and my dada’s support, she went on to study, despite two children in 3 years of marriage. She is a PhD Doctor today. My father provided the same support to me. He didn’t differentiate between me and my brother one bit - for anything. He gave us the same opportunities and the same love. He supported us equally. And even with limited knowledge of parenting, he ensured he didn’t pass on the baggage of his own relationship with his father onto ours. He never once hit us. Not even a slap. Ok, there was once when I told him that my brother was bleeding from his mouth. That was a stupid move! He never imposed religious beliefs on to us. When I come to think about it, the very hardcore things that children learn from parents and then try and reverse them in their adult life, were never imposed on us at all. We had the freedom to be our own individuals.
I wanted to be a doctor like him. So I started preparing. He was clear that if I studied, I had to go to the top schools, where he couldn’t. However, when I did start studying, I realised it was way more hard work than I was prepared to put in. So I changed my mind. He supported. When I finished schooling in Patna, I wanted to go study in Delhi University and he supported that too. But his condition was only one - I needed to get the college hostel for me to live in Delhi alone, for safety reasons. We didn’t have any relatives in the city at the time. No kids of my generation in his family had stepped out of Bihar to study - no women. Patna Women’s College was the scene back then.
He came with me for college admissions to Delhi. We stayed at Indian Medical Association’s facilities since the rooms were discounted for member doctors. We took buses in and out of Delhi University for almost 1-2 weeks. We didn’t talk much but he was just there. When I got through LSR for Economics, Math & Statistics, he was very proud. He wanted me to take Economics for the career choices it offered - he had done his research in the gloomy Bihar days of limited exposure and internet. But I said I will take Statistics. I didn’t know much about it back then, but it sounded cool. Once again, he supported (after a bit of arguing). Within a few hours of that day, he went to a cyber cafe and read up on career prospects of Statistics. He knew more about it than I did!
For a man grown up with limited means in the darkest days of Bihar, to stand up against his own family’s pressure - to send his daughter to the infamous city of Delhi to study a subject like Statistics which no one could probably pronounce, let alone know of, took great guts. He had it. He stood up for me and my decisions. When I hear of stories of supportive fathers in metros, I really appreciate them. But fathers who come from the most backward upbringing in this country and make something out of their daughters, deserve a special place in the annals of feminist fathers.
I didn’t do much to disappoint him while I was in Delhi. My brother did his bit though. That was the first time my father felt ashamed of his children. But both of us were so good with our academics, that our other mistakes could still be covered up back in Bihar. I went on to do an MBA from XLRI - and that pumped up his chest even further. I start working at HSBC at a starting salary he had never earned till then. He couldn’t be more proud of me. Then started the downfall of me as a poster child. I fell in love and I wanted an ‘inter-caste love marriage’. The concept of the usual Bihari maithil brahmin marriage proposal had been rejected by me. He couldn’t take the shame and family pressure of what me and my brother had done, and decided to move out of Bihar then.
It was a huge shift for him. He had never lived outside of Bihar. He had no family, no support system in Delhi. He was very conscious of the fact that his command over the English language wasn’t good enough to survive in a big city. He scrambled through jobs in private hospitals. He was soon disenchanted with the level of corruption in all these places. Between his professional and personal failures as a father (that’s how he processed it), he became a very bitter man. At this time, he was also nursing his own father and getting him treated in Delhi for cancer. Cancer care is extremely draining on families. My mother stopped working to support. But it was still physically, emotionally and financially very draining. But the biggest blow came one year within the passing of my dada.
My dad’s younger brother, the only brother, had a medical emergency. He called my dad one evening relating some symptoms. My dad immediately asked him to get to a hospital and take blood transfusion. Calcutta, where my kaka lived, isn’t that fast with things. So even though he went in, he never got any transfusion till next morning. He haemorraged and passed away before 7am next morning. My father couldn’t take that blow. My mum called me, I flew into Calcutta by lunch time to be with my father. I have never seen him so broken. He couldn’t stop blaming himself for the death of his younger brother. I don’t think he has still forgiven himself for it. But the truth is, universe has its own plan. That was all that my Kaka had been given. Not my father, not those incompetent doctors at Calcutta could have saved him. But as humans, we tend to believe that we have control, we could have changed things, could have done more. But people like him, we always do the best we can at any time, anyway. So there’s nothing more you could have done Papa. But he did. He went on to fight a court battle against Apollo Hospitals for 8-10 years in a case of serious medical negligence. Honest people rarely win against dishonest systems. He knew that. But he fought. And continues to fight - against the same community that gave him a large part of his identity as a doctor. He fights for what he knows is right. He fights for honesty. And that’s a lesson I have held so close to my heart.
In the aftermath of that tragedy, my father agreed to my love marriage wedding after a standstill of 4 years. A quick and dirty wedding. He finally seemed happy. He fought his incredibly conservative family to allow for the first ever ‘inter-caste love-marriage’ in the entire family. Everyone showed up as well. He drank for the first time in many years. After that wedding, every child in my generation of that family, went in for love-marriage. For every aunt and uncle, my dad was the benchmark - if Sudhir could agree, so can I.
But that wasn’t enough. Soonly, I gave him the other battle to fight - divorce. He couldn’t understand why I opted out of a marriage I fought for. At that time, even I didn’t. But I was happy to have. I don’t think I was ready for that concept then. He fought with me again. Stopped speaking for a while - we had those phases many times. Finally, he learnt how to lift his head again amongst family and friends and own up to the fact that his daughter was divorced. I am not kidding, the stigma of divorce for a woman is big. Despite being a strong independent woman, I couldn’t lift my head for a while, so I can imagine how much tougher it must have been for him. Sometimes I feel that perhaps because of all the shit that my brother and I threw at him, he became a stronger better person as well :)
Somehow, after that, my father decided to stop living his life, as dictated by others. He finally broke away from the shackles that the society had long since built around him. He made some money. He made his life decisions irrespective of what others thought. He became free. And to us as children, that version of our father was incredibly inspiring.
This man showed me that you could change as a person at 50. He now drinks with me. He plans my second ‘destination’ wedding with much more pomp than he planned my first wedding. He talks proudly about my brother to all his friends. He supports me in my business by calling and asking if I am having cash-flow problems in the time of covid and that he could send some money. He wants to buy a house in Bangalore because he knows I am not going to. He is doing all the daddy stuff while doing all the life stuff he wants to. He is travelling, meditating, doing yoga, doing treks which put 20 year olds to shame, socialising with his college mates, helping people, eating healthy, reading, learning bhangra! He has reclaimed his life.
I have learnt a lot of lessons from this man and I don’t say that out loud often enough. I have inherited a very sharp brain from the DNA of this guy and my mum, an equally smart woman. I have inherited honesty, integrity and a spine to stand up for things I believe in. I have been taught how to fight, how to believe in things, how to change my belief systems when I know better. I have been taught the importance of duty and dharma. I have become a healthy eater, non-believer in medicine and a minimalist in my own journey but I see how big his influence has been. He has shown me how to do more with less. He has shown me that all you need to be happy, is you. It comes from within. And when you finally choose to do that, happiness opens like floodgates. I continue to learn from him. As an adult, I have hardly ever seen my parents as parents. I see them as individuals, humans - with their celebrations and flaws. And I will tell you that he inspires me as a human being. I wish I continue to grow, like he is doing even at 60.
I am so proud to have shared my life with this very supportive man - who never once told me that I was a woman. It changes everything for a young woman from Patna. That is perhaps the reason I have never realised it in my life. I do things as I would, without the so-called ‘you are a woman’ tag. Parenting is a tough job. No one gets it right the whole time. But this important lesson of not conditioning your children with the crap you were fed with, is critical. The Indian and Bihari society still makes it difficult for such men to stand up for their daughters. But like Gunjan Saxena’s dad and my dad, I hope there are many more men out there who believe that their daughters can, and will be anything they choose to be.
