Elegy for My Father
©April 2nd, 2017
By Vijaya Sundaram
I try and try to remember
Everything, everything about
My father, who spent
His life unravelling, like
A gaily-coloured ball of yarn
Tumbling down a steep,
Unforgiving slope.
When my little brother,
Eleven years younger,
Would watch the sky with round eyes,
Point out planes with toddler fingers,
My father would name them.
Avro, he’d say, Jumbo Jet.
And my father would burst into song,
Always the same one,
He’d croon in his soft light
Baritone, musical and innocent:
Avara hoon (I am a vagabond),
And sing, Avro hoon (I’m an Avro),
And we’d laugh, like clockwork,
Predictable, precise,
Delight permeating us.
He loved flying, and planes,
(despite his dreams of becoming
a pilot thwarted by this and that)
And flew everywhere, fleeing
His debtors, leaving wife
Grieving, kids conceiving of life
Without a father for a long,
Long time.
Reality was a game to him,
And he played it recklessly,
Grimly, convinced he would win.
Yet, back at a time when
He was still around at home,
His children rejoiced,
Found his bulk reassuring, solid,
Hardly ephemeral, eternal –
A man with weight, jollity,
Benevolence, levity, jokes.
Picchu chitti aathilé
Chaapaatu pandhilé
Chappati chappitane,
He’d say, more and more rapidly
And we’d repeat them,
Tripping over his water-falling
Tongue-twister, and get
All knotted-up, laughing.
Punning in three languages,
He’d make our sides ache,
And we never stopped to wonder:
Did all dads do this?
It was no big deal to us –
That’s what a father did.
I wish I could remember.
I try and try, but my mind
Falters, and I cannot bring back
His word-play, his heaving belly
Rippling with mirth, his strange
Obsession with tidiness, his urge
For control, for so much
Had been taken from him:
His worth, his wealth, his daring,
His promises to himself, his
Poor lost left leg,
Lost to a crushing train.
I try and try, but I cannot
Remember most of his jokes – just one,
The one he made when we,
Weeping, surrounded his hospital bed
Nineteen years before his death,
When he, with amputated leg, said:
“Now, your mother can truly say
Naan ottha kaal la nikkaren,“
(Since standing on one leg
Was what stubborn people did –
In Tamil.)
I try and try to recall
His humour, but a shadow
Falls over it, the shadow of his
Chasms of pain, craters of loss –
He didn’t speak much of that;
I do. I have lost his voice,
The one that chuckled
And guffawed, rocking the room.
I have forgotten his puns.
This is a small loss, and a great one.
When he was cremated, a shape
That resembled him lay
On the mound at the cremation-grounds,
A shape of ash, a shape of dust.
And the priest who presided
Collected the main part of it,
Placed it in a brass pot, covered
It with something (a cloth?
I cannot remember), draped
Lovingly wound garlands
Of beautiful flowers around it,
Handed it solemnly to us.
My brother, sister and I
Carried it in a rickshaw
To a river outside the city,
And dropped the pot,
Ashes, flowers, my father
Into the waters, and we
Watched, as it floated away
Bobbing in the waves.
We didn’t say much.
Where did all his words go?
Did they fly up, like birds
Released from his frame,
When his breath escaped,
His eyes fixed on a spot
On the hospital walls
Beyond all of us, who watched
While he left us, his cancer
Eroding his insides, the pain
Matching the brightness
In his eyes, as we held his hands,
And the hospital staff filed in
Silently, with bent heads?
Did he pun one last time?
Did we not hear it?
For he couldn’t speak, then.
The words had flown,
And he couldn’t catch them.
His breath fluttered out.
He left us yet again –
This time, to a place
Beyond our imagining,
Probably transforming himself
Into an Avro, flying into the sun.
He imagined us all.
And we remain,
Scattered remnants,
Of his tattered life,
Eddying in his wake,
As we gather ourselves
Into an illusion of self-hood.
I shall try to remember all this
When my breath flutters,
And my words vanish in
A puff of air, and my eyes
Fix on a spot somewhere beyond
Those gathered around.
I shall follow my words
And escape the shell
Encasing this world.
And who knows? I just
Might meet my father’s
Puns spiralling down.
_____________________________________________________________
This is my poem for Day 3 of NaPoWriMo. The prompt was to write an elegy (I chose to write an unrhymed one), and to “center the elegy on an unusual fact about the person or thing being mourned.”
