I don’t remember him

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.