Tribute to ‘Toth’ |
On a rare sunny Sunday in April — Sonth in Kashmir — I sat with my family in our ancestral home in Jahangirpora, Baramulla. Spring sunlight rested gently on the lawn, as if nature itself wished to soften the harshness gathering quietly inside our home. My father was unwell again. For the last three years, he had been bedridden. Illness had reduced a once-commanding man into someone dependent upon others for the smallest human needs. My mother, with astonishing patience and dignity, had become his caretaker, nurse, companion and a silent pillar. Saturdays and Sundays with parents had become a routine for me, but beneath that routine was an unspoken fear: the growing realization that even the people who appear eternal in childhood are, in truth, mortal.
My relationship with my father was complex, like many relationships between fathers and sons in Kashmir. Love was often hidden beneath discipline, expectation and silence. Yet fathers shape us in ways we only understand when they begin to disappear. A son spends half his life resisting his father and the other half discovering him within himself. That day, my father sat quietly with chachvor, the Kashmiri bread considered gentle on the stomach, and tea before him. My mother tended to him as always. Suddenly, I noticed how weak he had become. The man, who once animated bus journeys between Srinagar and Baramulla with stories and conversations, could barely speak now. In his prime, people listened when he talked. He carried warmth, humour and authority effortlessly. Fathers rarely know that their ordinary habits become sacred memories for their children later in life.
A few days earlier he had survived hypoglycaemia and acidosis. A brief recovery had given us hope — that dangerous human emotion that survives even against medical evidence. We returned to Srinagar and resumed our routines; pretending normalcy could negotiate with fate.
That Sunday, doctors prescribed Protobol and Moxifloxacin. We discussed land disputes in the lawn while my mother, more assertive now with age and necessity, lectured us on compromise and fairness among siblings. Families often continue discussing property even while death quietly waits in the next room. Such is human denial. By evening, the call came. My father had suffered four seizures. An ambulance rushed him to GMC Baramulla- a college in infancy and so in attending to severe health issues. The night became heavy with helplessness; all of us were only lazing around without any purpose. Nobody truly spoke. We merely occupied space, waiting for either mercy or tragedy. I remember feeling anger toward God........