Titanic
A walk into nostalgic pastures of one’s life brings to surface many a strange memoir – pleasant as well as unpleasant, funny as well as serious and of course, fanciful as well as truthful. I met a friend after a gap of two decades. Twenty years is a long time to write history; we preferred to recite it, at least.
After the initial sharing of updates on professional and personal fronts, we migrated into more exploratory domain of mid-life crisis, parenting, and purpose of life and so on. It was during this thoughtful conversation that he cited an experience.
He, father of a teenaged daughter, reached home one evening after a week-long outstation trip. Soon after dinner, the daughter came to him and told him that she wanted to have a word with him – one on one. He was taken aback. The three membered family is adequately liberal, frank and modern in its demeanour to discuss any topic under the sky or even beyond!
“However, when a young daughter tells her father that she has to discuss something with him alone; options are unlimited and undefined.”, he shared.
I kept on crafting an image of the situation, as he continued,
“I settled on the side of the bed and she pulled a chair in front of me, looking straight into my eyes. I was petrified. She said, with a bit of anxiety but a lot of firmness, “Dad, I have now learnt of the big mistake that you committed when you were of my age.”
He paused momentarily to gauge the expressions on my face. My curiosity was raised; so was my concern. What would have been the revelation that his daughter would have discovered?
Taking a sip of water, he continued, “My heartbeat galloped. Before I could utter a sound (word was something unassailable at that fractured juncture), my memory jumped in action and brought to surface the follies of lifetime.”
The puzzle was getting jumbled for me; it would have been equally so for him as well. What was the mistake? Unmindful of the turbulence in my mind, he continued, “I recalled my misdemeanours during heydays and later; I recalled the excesses I ventured into during that unforgettable and eventful trip; I recalled my experiments with drugs; I recalled the foul language that I adopted; I recalled the disrespectful behaviour I exhibited before elders. The list was endless. The moment was the most revealing moment of my lifetime. I have met many top leaders and learned from eminent scholars but the one sentence was a very long sentence – I was, in fact, sentenced for life in a fraction!
As he shared his thoughts, I could read the mystery on his face. In fact, human follies have been very eventful in history and have evoked mixed responses – ranging from penance to penalty. Nevertheless, the indomitable human spirit has overcome the mistakes of history and continued to thrive. There have been criticisms and there have been reconciliations. All have survived the tests of time. When Obama visited Hiroshima, he called the nuclear attack as a difficult decision but stopped short of apologising; when Cameron visited Jallianwala Bagh, he called it as “a deeply shameful event” but again stopped short of apologising.
While life generates moments of mistakes, it also grants freedom to forget and at the same time, aeons for atonement. I asked him abruptly, “so what was your folly and reparation?”
He resumed, “I was only afraid that she does not find about that mistake, which I had deleted from my memory.”
“Folly”, I intervened, “was an allegorical figure in medieval literature and artwork and depicts a young man. The depiction is, perhaps, because youth is an age of experiments and hence, an age of mistakes! I also mentioned a couplet from Gurbani Main vich aib gunaah na hundey, tu bakshenda ki (If humans did not have vices and mistakes, what would you forgive?”
His smile revealed that he was partially vindicated. He continued, “Finally, she shot another salvo – Dad, I just wanted to tell you that I will not commit the same mistake. An eerie silence prevailed thereafter. I was worried. I had been my daughter’s pride. For a moment, it seemed that my Titanic was exposed and sinking.”
He took a moment off to answer the unexpected call on his cell-phone; I waited with concern. He started from where he had left.
“So, then, I prepared myself, constructed all possible answers – in imagination rather than actuality – and asked her in a subtle voice What mistake?”
My heartbeat was racing as the story unfolded.
“She said forcefully, typical of a teenager, I am not, repeat NOT going to study the same subjects that you did and repent later throughout the life. No, your next generation will not commit that mistake again. Period”
“Aaah! What a relief! My Titanic was saved. We smiled, as I took out my handkerchief.”
So did me.
Wiping my forehead, I wondered, was too much imagination another mistake of our life?
