A recurrent question crosses
my mother’s mind whenever she talks about her married life and our childhood. A
question that she always asks me but never gets an affirmative answer for. She
looks at me, asks me, “Do you have any memories of your father?” It leaves me
with a stream of thoughts in my mind which try to dig up those childhood
memories of which my father was a part of. All these years, I have been making
an effort to recall those memories but they never seem to come to light.
Astoundingly, I don’t remember
his face, voice, touch or anything else related to him. His image in my mind is
a construct of whatever my mother has told me about him, be it his face,
dressing sense, personality or even his love for me. My pursuit for finding the
reason for this to be happening to me ends abruptly.
I was a child who was still in
the initial stages of getting a grasp of what things were around him. It was my
third birthday when he left us. I could barely speak or think for myself. Being
a child who started mumbling very late, my mother was still teaching me to call
‘Mumma’ and ‘Papa’. Even after a month of his death, I used to keep a pillow
beside me waiting for him to come and sleep right next to me, as he always did.
Not even tall enough to see things for myself, I would just look up to my mother
and call her, “Mummma….Muuummmaa.” There was a reason why I wasn’t aware of the
truth and couldn’t express myself through words. It all seemed God’s plan to
save me from knowing the biggest truth of life – death.
Sigmund Freud seems to have an
answer for what has happened to me. Of what one would assess of my situation
based on his theory, the memory of my father is a repressed memory in my mind.
Had I recalled things about him, I would have always got hit with a lot of
grief having lost him so early. Unfortunately, I would always regret not being
able to remember anything about my father, anything at all, apart from whatever
I have heard.
Although I wasn’t blessed to
live with my father and experience his love, I owe him a lot. It is a part of
his inheritance that has brought me to the place I am today. I feel sad for his
absence but the fact that I cannot even recall him pierces my mind even more. I
devote my prayers for his soul to always rest in peace. My inner self asks me, “How
can you not remember your father? How? Don’t you love him? Would his soul feel
happy about it?” I fail to answer all these questions. Eventually, I leave for
another fruitless stroll down the memory lane, only to find more questions with
no answers.
