To the weekend, with love

A week ago, I decided to take Kavin to the beach since it was a long weekend and all. The driver parked our car and I went to the beach, carrying a bag that contained, among many things, change of clothes for me and Kavin. En route, we were accosted by hawkers of all hue, tempting K with their wares that ranged from Captain America key chains to spider man masks. Some brand position and market strategy, I say. Anyway, after sometime at the stalls, we resumed our trek to the beach, lighter by a few hundreds. Only when we started walking did I sense something amiss. My bag was way lighter, not literally, though. My bag didn’t contain my wallet anymore. I was more than one hundred percent sure I had lost it, because the car seat was completely empty when I got off it just a few minutes ago. I didn’t mention it. So, to avert any such altercations, I decided to play it quiet and went to the beach. 

I was going over what was to be done with contents of the wallet. Actually, until I came to the point of recollecting every single item in the wallet, I wasn’t too rattled by the loss. What with the blocking options of the cards and other such comforts of the times, I had actually no reason worry about any major financial loss. However, the wallet contained something, which I will never be able to recover, not as long as am on this side of the grave. It contained two of my father’s hand-written letters to me. He had written them to me sometime in 2004 when I was in Delhi and when cell phones and emails hadn’t become so ubiquitous.

The letters did not contain important information, but they did contain my dear father’s own handwriting. He always wrote on one of his factory-issued scribbling pads. In one of the letters he had told me in bullet points the enclosures of the letter; my tax returns, some employment news cuttings, and my train ticket. His handwriting had an unmistakable, confident right slant that will ensure his words followed a straight path on an unlined sheet of paper. And that’s something I struggle with even today. In the other letter, he had listed all the housework he was doing, such as watering the plants, ironing clothes, and many other things, all this amidst a hectic work schedule. He had also strictly, that’s in all caps, told me not to get any clothes for them for Christmas from Delhi. On the very next line, in his unmistakable affectionate, daddyish tone he had asked me if I wanted a saree or salwar kameez for Christmas.

A huge wave washed over Kavin and me. K held on to me and squealed with joy. But my heart was ready to burst with the sadness that was settling in the pit of my stomach over the loss of my father’s letters. Swallowing the anger I felt for my erratic and careless ways, I decided to simply let go. The waves kept washing over the shore and Kavin kept asking for more. And, my thoughts would keep swinging back to a post-script on one of the letters; he had said, sorry for grammatical errors, and in fact, it was one of the letters that didn’t have any. I remembered how I was in splits after reading the letter the first time in 2004. The letter had arrived when I was in office, and when I read out the postscript to my colleagues, some of them looked at me with pure hatred (for doing that to my poor father), and the rest decided that they weren’t the the sole victims of my grammar Nazism. I wasn’t exactly crying, but what began with the promise of being a happy, pleasant evening was swinging anywhere between misery and gloom. But, since becoming a parent, I have learned (ok, not mastered it yet) the art of postponing one’s own grief.

With waves gaining speed, Kavin was unstoppable. He jumped, tried swimming, rolled in the mud, and so much more that in an hour’s time when we took him to the nearby shower, he was unrecognizable as our child. Covered with mud and many other things from head to toe, he looked like a child brought up by Tom Hanks in Cast Away, and not by an IT professional living in a metropolis. It took me some effort to extricate the real Kavin from all the grim and sea sand that he was covered in. 

Refreshed, but crestfallen, I walked back to our car. My eyes scanned every nook and cranny for the letters, hoping for the thief to have dumped all the unnecessary contents of the wallet. As we drew closer to the car, tears had already begun to cloud my vision. I opened it to see the seats stare back empty, exactly as I remembered them.

I quietly settled in and secured the seat belts for K and got ready for a long, pensive drive through the ECR. It would be almost midnight by the time we’ll reach home. What’s usually a pleasant drive seemed to be a quiet and a sad drive. As one last attempt, I thrust my hand into the back pocket of the passenger seat. And, no prizes for guessing; sitting snug in the pocket was the wallet, holding in its safe confines my father’s words, telling me to be careful with my words, with my actions, and perhaps my stuff too.  I let out a huge sigh of relief and smiled, no laughed, and got ready for a long, happy, chatty drive home.