A Father’s Letter To Daughter: A short story

Alyosha dearmost,

I had a very peculiar experience. I was in S's and at the receiving end of at least five letters addressed to five different persons in a particularly familiar handwriting. Now all these letters in exquisite handmade recycled paper had a strange ONLY written on all of them. And, by a splendid turn of fate, every of those letter receivers showed me their respective letters. But, in another happy somersault of fate, none of them got to read a certain letter addressed to a certain Papa Only.

That was just to remind you that as per the wishes your royal kidness I have safely tucked away my only letter from you in my empty wallet. By the way, how did you guess it would be empty. Back to business, I was very happy seeing you write to so many people. I noticed, in all those letters your resolution to be happy. I also did not miss your tormenting loneliness. My heart went out to you, while my chest puffed out in pride. Who but my Alyosha would ever take so much of pain in the belief that it is the only bridge across forever.

I also read a letter you had written to H. Ahem, a very Senior 3 M Executive’s letter. Also a very mature elder sister’s letter to a younger one. I was very fascinated by the letter. It was so very no-nonsense advice letter. Somehow, it sounded too much like some high profile corporate head honcho sharing secrets of individual success. It made me very proud of my baby. I am also very happy that the recipient of that letter is H, a girl I alternate between admiration and sympathy. Admiration because I see so much in her at her ages that similar girls of similar age never seem to have.

A head on their shoulders, that is both intelligent and sensitive. I have often wondered why is it that I alone among all of mankind I know of kill myself with an anxiety of stunted fulfillment. I think it is a recent phenomenon. I have been incoherent to those who listen to me. That includes hell lot of people.

I wonder if you have read or started reading Picasso. Babyjaan, I am at a very significant point in my life. This much I know. What that means is amazing if I tell you the sheer amount of different experiences that I have been through in recent times. I do not know, but presume I have told you that I had the first real fight with my mother last time I was in Jabalpur, I had disappointed H then, I had fought with Aunty, I had withdrawn into a kind of impregnable shell. I alternate between extremes. I am full of love and forgivance for the world, and simultaneously, I am full of an inexplicable battle royale with the world. Somehow, I seem to want to fight out for the perceived rights of this individual called P.

I want to fight out with L publicly and privately in a savage battle, and with only one rule; may the best win. Not only that ----- the desire for the battle to be essentially savage is something extremely powerful. I want to fight with no rules, right or wrong, I feel I need a bloodsport. Drawing blood and killing alone will satiate me. And here I do not mean L, I mean I am all prepared to die a savage death, even tortuous death at the hands of a friend I always thought of as the closest I had.

I feel so frustrated that it is unimaginable for you, my dear Alyosha. I am in a weird way full of remorse and bile and feel an urgency to drop all the values I had ever cherished. I feel I am in a dreamworld, where I am at the edge of a vast creamtorium, where the bodies that have been burnt for centuries have suddenly come to semi-life. That is to say, they are not alive but from ashes they have turned into a kind of coaservates, bones and skeletons that do not have human forms, do not speak but move all the same. Not like humans, but they kind of slide noiselessly on the ground almost as if to scare me. I am not scared, but I am filled with a vague fighter instinct that is like the primal scream.

It is a chilling voiceless deafening scream of a man who is maniacally fighting his last battle. He is thrilled at the sheer insurmountability of the task. Fighting single-handedly millions of scheming bones and skeletons. I also feel that each and every of those things in the vast cremation ground know and sense that I am no more the human being I was.

They all know that I have lost the centre of gravity of my being, not physical being but the very fulcrum of my spiritual existence. They are all mocking me. They are all laughing and launching the celebrations of their victory over me. Even though the battle has not started. But they all know, what I know; that my centre does not hold, that I have lost that brahmastra, that I am now the trapped Abhimanyu.

They are all moving in for the kill, not because they think I am easy meat, they all know individually they still cannot match me, but the army of skeletons are a mindless army. They are celebrating because they know that now I merely have my physical prowess, which is vulnerable to numbers. They know that Abhimanyu will still kill a few tens of soldiers in single combat, but

they are unconcerned.

They advance willing to sacrifice hundreds to my sword, in the certainty that I will have to sooner than later fall to their combined might. It is the laughter of an army of skeletons that has me entirely cornered, with no place for rules, dignity, or law.

This is what I hear and see whenever I close my eyes nowadays. I am not dramatising, God knows that I am saying the truth.

I do not know, but in all my life I have never felt Karna’s pain so immediately. Or so immensely. Cheated out of his kavach kundala, out of his rightful family name, out of the side of dharma despite being the best qualified to lead the armies on the side of dharma, cursed by his own guru, cursed by the brahmin who did not understand the wrath of a kshatriya, and finally betrayed even by mother earth.

Babyjaan, Alyosha, Munni, after having lead life in so careless of consequences of my deeds and sure in the ultimate judgement of Gods, I see myself abandoned by the values I cherished in a vast measureless crematorium ground, surrounded my menacing skeletons, I have been overtaken by paranoia.

I do not know if you even understand what I am writing, but I am not writing in the hope of communication, or even intelligibilty, understanding is far far off. I am writing this only as a final act that would place my babyjaan as the one important thing in my life.

If it was in any way a significant life, I want you to get the credit for being such a part of it. But I know babyjaan my life is wasted. Wasted beyond everything else chasing and cherishing illusions, idealistic and romantic illusions of justice, of value, honour. You know babyjaan, I think I shall personify life’s options into five friends I have. L. Y. Q. S. And R.

L: That blithe sparrow. The romantic opportunist, who is blessed with the glorious conviction every moment. While willing to die for his V, while willing to live for his art, he had that great other option, that life is a ball game of opportunities. That he believes in nothing being predictable, and always being the man who believed that it was practice that made a man perfect. The

man who always believed that if he practiced a craft hard enough, he would sooner than later be called an artist. Every new form of literature he came in contact with, he has a short story in that genre.

You: Blessed with elemental energy to channelise. You had merely to learn to channelise. But then again, there was another balancing gift for your elemental energy, that is by nature amoral. It can be as intense in its positivity as in its negativity, and that was the ability to convert experience into lessons, and a memory that never had to make two mistakes to learn one lesson. You too seem equipped to handle life, like J, because you two have the ability to be a sympathetic listener to any cause, but know how to abstain from voting, because you know your vote is valuable, and would not waste it. You have the moral courage to tell the man that look, I see what you mean, I also am sympathetic to your cause, but believe in something else more intensely. I shall therefore not vote for you. Where you two are admirable is in your moral courage to displease somebody you love.

Q: Again, a woman of great conviction. Deeply conservative.Traditional, if seemingly anachronistic set of values. But has life in a neat grid. The advantage is that of a neat software package. It does the checking and cross checking on its own. Therefore would not allow for mistakes to enter your autobiography, because of the ready availability of fixed values. Within this framework, however, there is enough possibilities for radicalism. Will marry a Muslim if in love, or imagines herself to be in love. Again, there is also the other great advantage of a person settled in life, that is a support system that disallows certain branches of questioning. And can easily live life in luxury and peace, with little need for non-existent memory.

S: A woman in many ways close to me in nature. Mental. A soul that has constantly updated its value system. Capable of an admirable democracy in judgement of others. Has to constantly grapple with her id. Too developed a superego usually means on one hand a dreamfull sleep in the night, and a day full of analysing those dreams. She will never stake her reputation on any

one of the interpretations being better or more credible than the other. Again, in her case if born to a decently well equipped family, one can afford a career in speculation. Importantly, in her case, she does see the futility of her existence, but is too seduced by its obvious rewards to let it go.

R: The inheritor of the earth. He is the healer of the world. Not because he is a great doctor, but because he has the inexhaustible ability to suffer boring torture till all passion exhausted, the man collapses into a restful slumber. When he wakes up, he will find R attending to him, and needlessly give him the credit for saving his life. His other great gift is what he shares with Y, a rubric of inviolable values, unquestionable and unquestioned. He is also somewhat like S and you because he will question several things in life, and like you in that he too will live a life with a success, though a trifle less than J and you.

That finishes a very long list of types. I wonder if you noticed that my type does not make it to the list. I share and contradict all these types. And what it means is that whichever clan rules the earth, I shall always be the outsider.

I do not know what all I have written to you so far. But there are several things I need to tell you. Actually, if you talk to me for several hours at one go, you will realise that I am not as controlled as I was. Nor am I comprehensive. Nor comprehensible.

Nor detailed. Nor pithy. Not sure of what I am saying. I am no more what your papa used to be. I am coming apart. I talk randomly. I think fleetingly, and constantly I vacillate between self-sympathy and self-deprecation. I have also lost all control over myself and my action. I have done something you would never believe I could do. I do not believe I have done it. I want to be punished as severely as I deserve to be for that single shameful conduct of mine.

But truthfully, babyjaan, I am contemplating ending life. It is something you did not think I would ever think of. But like I said, I have sensed a great upheaval in me. I have cut myself out of many happenings, sought and got my solitude, and managed to bounce back.

But this time it is something that is not merely recharging batteries. It is something much more. If I survive this phase, and I have the last four months, I sense a most important happening. I know like I have never before that I am on the threshold of my destiny. I may be stoned to death like Angulimala, I may

renounce the world like Siddhartha, I might go on a killing spree like a psychopath, or I might became a drug addict seeking his momentary moksha, or I may be the late Mr …..

Do not now how to end. And, that babyjaan is interrogation. Remember your figures of speech in poetry.

Love Papa