Fathers and Daughters

When I was a little girl, my father used to take me to the sea. This was not just any ordinary visit, we had to make sure it was the fourteenth night of the moon, so I counted all I could on my little fingers that the moon would come faster, but the moon only came when it will. Years later, he gave me a ring which could have been stolen from one of the moon’s fingers.

I used to run after the moon, but in the car that my father drove, the moon was always running after him. I could watch it come so near to us, the wind sending it our way. The car used to be driving fast on Mai Kolachi, that new road they build only so that he and I could travel faster to the sea, and also that there was a reference point now, ‘lets take Mai Kolachi that one that runs to the sea.’

In time, words and phrases erode, just like the color on your hair does, and we started saying “oh just to Mai Kolachi� each time someone had asked us where it was we were going. My mother and sister never came along, though my father had wanted us three to go together.

I sometimes liked to visit alone, and hear the cars passing by on the street. These were the days when my father and I pretended the two of us didn’t exist for each other. The wind would embrace my calm then, and while he drove the car, I spoke several things in its ears. I once told the wind, “I’m about to sink into solitude.�

When Abu liked to talk of the moon, sitting by the sea, he was quite the man. He would tell me complicated things about life, and how to live it as a running clock with no hands. To feel its essential present. The waves would crash on their shores. Each word of the sea, brought calm to the mind of water. Everything came back to its own roots and shores.

At around fourteen, when I declared to my father that perhaps God didn’t exist after all. He mentioned his own period of burnt atheism in his life, and said: “one comes back to one’s roots.� I despised his response. It was allowing me freedom, but only at the cost of a certainty I couldn’t really care for. I was just embarking towards my life and the subtlety of his questioning glance burnt me deeper still. In any case, he said “yes, you can.� And I did.

A couple of years later I told him: “one is not born into a relation, you have to create it every day, like making sun out of yellow paint – the paint isn’t everything.� This had startled him, and he has not understood clearly up to this day, how I could say that. When my father speaks English I’m sometimes reminded of Spaniards or Native Americans, who speak from their heart.

He works on theories that he calls ‘theories of the wave.’ All the time he is talking about currency markets and foreign exchange, and yet the constant in his language came to be, what was constant to me as well: the moon. He had a theory that the moon affected the waves, and so a similar pattern could emerge in the currency markets that also moved like waves. Or this was what I understood about his sketches. He is with his paper and pencil all day, sketching graphs that rise and fall, and keep the rhythm of waves: each thing falls, he once said to me, and the history class teacher had said: “nations as well as people, have their infancy, adolescence and old age.�

At an early age I learnt that the Fibonacci series of numbers had a special significance, because it was also the number of your fingers, and your hands, your arms, and Michelangelo believed in it too. Father always had crazed eyes, as if he had seen something, known someone years before, and all this was certainly very important – more important than dying, giving up, not laughing, or laughing. Abu had a terrible friend who left him, the way no man can ever leave another. He never told me this. I found out only two months ago that Bali even existed.

My Bali was a musical man, he could sing or compose a tune within a second of his fingers running on water. He played the drums, the harmonica and the guitar. He was the friend of my father’s life. They used to play squash together, run together and go to office-meetings together. They used to laugh as well. Bali was someone you could rely on to come up with a solution to every anguish, be it of why she wasn’t talking to you, or why there wasn’t enough cash coming in. He had a solution. He had laughter. He had music. When Bali Chacha died, I was three years old. Abu has never been the same. And my mother, time, his contacts, all forgot to mention this death to me. So I have pretended like it didn’t exist.

It must hurt a man. His daughter too thinking his pain doesn’t exist. As if, Bali’s leaving and missing and singing and talking and not talking anymore, wasn’t enough. My father is one of the best men I have ever known. Except for one answer, he’s been able to give me all of the rest, and except for one person, he told me about all of the rest.

I sometimes wonder at what happens to father-daughter relations in Pakistan these days, or from always, I don’t know. There was a time when the moon hadn’t shone so brightly on my street, at that time I used to know the difference between right and wrong. Now the distinctions are all not quite that clear. Perhaps fathers are our brothers, when we become older, instead of just well-wishing friends out from the distance in our married lives, or work lives, or party lives, or whatsoever lives.

I sometimes feel, that on coming of age, the relationship dynamic between a father and daughter ought to change. If he never realizes that the girl has become a mature young woman, she has a heart that is incurable or a mind that is furious, then he’ll miss out on the beauty of the moonlight. This would be a terrible thing to happen to a father, who has loved his little girl – when she was a little girl – oh so very well. So very well.

He brought her all the right gifts, on all the right birthdays, took her as a princess on those sun-died days. I know that my father bought me the white horse I couldn’t get my eyes off of, the one that had a magical carriage behind it, so it could trail behind the horse like the magic that is dust-shine behind Cinderella’s pumpkin-carriage.

He got it for me, not caring it was expensive, or inappropriate. [I mean, it was a horse, with a golden mane, and a fierce blue red light on its forehead, it struck me then, it was an ordinary horse that could become a unicorn at will, upon a lighted touch.] It was important for me, his little girl, and he made sure I had it. Just like he made sure I had silver earrings, matching shoes, and an exquisite bracelet.

When one grows older, these things shouldn’t slip off our minds, like old shoes. It is so important an hour for a father. He is going to miss this for the rest of his life.
I think between fathers and daughters, is a sacred trust – but I also think, if this trust doesn’t reach its own avenues of beauty, and change shape over the years, then the life that is lived, will be lost to the life that could have been lived. In my case, it was my poetry that did it. When I had my book of poems ready, I called my father after several months of agitated absence and said: “Abu now I am like you, I’m an entrepreneur too. I wrote my book, it’s a risk I took on life, just like you.�

Little girls want to be like their fathers too, it’s not just the boys that harbor this desire. I was a poet to the moon, he was a sketcher of graphs that made sense to no one but himself. We did have a meeting point, it’s just that it took us several years to realize this. A woman in love, is altogether a mystery to a father, he approaches it like someone coming near mysterious white birds on the Karachi sea, that will disappear the moment he says “Can I sit here with you?� The sea is lost, it’s uncertain, it’s always present. This is what I am to you, father, is it not. It’s what you are to me, as well. It’s what you are to the white bird, the sky on the Karachi retreat, to Bali’s haunting voice that keeps singing, over all of my life and yours. He is with us as well.

Abu didn’t realize I was going to be Bali for him, when I grew up. He didn’t see it coming, but friends like metamorphosis on Greek nymphs, can take place anywhere. We are to be friends, I just know it.