This story rolls back two decade in time to the city of Lucknow, where I lived with my family living up to the Indian values of a patriarchal family. We had a fine education and a great global awareness, but limited experience.
Going overseas was not an everyday happenstance in the neighbourhood, overseas returnees with their culture-changing habits, an even rarer event for Lucknow – for those who went out once, found returning back to the city a trifle curtailing in lifestyle and migrated to larger of the TCS offices. There were no pubs in Lucknow, at least to my limited knowledge, to unwind on Friday evenings!!
The Valentine Day celebrations were just catching up in the city in those times, but it was an embarrassing and a taboo topic to discuss at home. Dad had high moral standards and we dared not mention frivolous items at home. He never watched movies with us, as one never knew what would pop up in the next scene – and God forbid, if he walked into the room while the movie was on, we kids would hold on to our breath… prayerfully pleading with the Heavenly powers that be, to hang on for those few minutes before the romantic scenes went back on!
Mornings were devoted to the newspaper – dad, who was a hearty breakfast eater – with pots of tea, lusciously buttered toast, cornflakes, fruits, et al…spent almost an hour over breakfast reading every line of the newspaper and before school/college or office – we would seldom find him indulging in small talk. Dinner time discussions were around science, mathematics, space, news, social causes, politics, neighbours and relatives,…anything but the valentine’ly cause and effects☺.
Then he got unwell and had to undergo a bypass surgery. We took him to Escorts, Delhi which was one of the few viable ones in those days. But we were common people and Escorts used to have a queue full of politicians and high-placed individuals who would pull strings to get their operation dates advanced while ours shifted out day-by-day.
The hospital had very short visiting hrs of 2 hrs only in the morning and evening each – and sent us all packing home at nights. A rather trying time for us, as each morning we would be back at the hospital in anticipation of an operation that day, dad was prepared for the impending operation and then it would shift out one more day.
For dad – the worst part was the measly pre-op breakfasts of 4 Marie gold biscuits with a cup of tea allowed to him at 6 AM by the hospital in anticipation of the late evening operation– just too little for him who “breakfasted like a king” – to sustain till 11AM, by which time the list of afternoon operations was finalised. Almost for 8 days this routine continued.
And then one day, when mum returned from the morning visit to the lobby – she was crying and clutching 2 Marie gold biscuits in her hand. All our family immediately jumped to attention – what’s up – we had just seen in the lobby that his name was not on that day’s post lunch operations list again. So what happened??
After calming down a bit – mom told us. We had completely forgotten (not that we had ever particularly remembered before that as well) that it was Valentine Day that day. And dad had preserved two of his Marie gold biscuits that day from his scanty breakfast and given them as a Valentine day gift to mom…….
It was a revelation of sorts…. we grown up office-goers, thinking of ourselves as globally-traveled forward-looking youngsters, proud of our convent-education, thinking of the Valentine day till then with a coy smile.…. and my Dad of the bygone 1940s era, who has never seen a movie with us till date, knew about the value of love that Saint Valentine wanted to teach us .…better than us.
We still don’t discuss Valentine days at home (old habits die hard!), but we sure do celebrate it in our little ways …from that year onward.
When I see the rampage on TV that happens with people protesting the westernisation of Indian culture, I remembered the lessons of yore we learnt from dad, and pitied the misguided youths. Maybe they did not have a dad like mine, to teach them about unconditional love and small expressions..….
-By Bandana Sinha
