Aliya Naseer Farooq
Abu, papa, pops, dad, daddy, baba these are all names of love. The love you have and feel for your father. Your first hero, role model, mentor and guide. He is the one who goes out there into the big mysterious puzzle that is the outside world. He comes home in the evening laden with goodies; fruits and cookies and fun stuff for us kids and cooking oil, rice, tea, bread and other boring stuff for mummy. He brings joy and laughter and a sense of peace and serenity. A silent prayer of thankfulness and gratitude that spreads through the air. Gentle evening breeze willowing through the house with his entrance. Your hero has returned. Another battle fought and won. Another day is over. Abu is home and all is well with the world.
How easy it is for me to say all these things now. How difficult it was, nay, impossible. Abu loved us in a way that only a father can. Unconditional, no holds barred, frank and honest. He could hug us, lie down with us to tell us stories. Stories that he would make up as we went along. We were allowed to ask for characters and animals to enter into the story at our whims and fancies. My brother wanted a lion, a lion would appear from behind the big rock. My younger brother thought the story was getting too rough and wild so he ordered a prince and Danish, the prince would be conjured up in the midst of the jungle with the lion. Of course, there would appear a palatial castle hidden from view by the big rock!
Danish is the middle name my little brother ‘adopted’ for himself after repeated majestic entries of the prince and he has lived up to his fantastical name – full of deep wisdom and so level headed. For me, abu, just lying there surrounded by the three of us was a moment of bliss. His clear voice, his handsome face and the most beautiful eyes in the world. It was enough. That moment, that love, that story – it is enough.
He made me the person I am. His honesty, his grace, his integrity and broad mindedness is what made him my ultimate role model. His poetry and paintings, his grasp on Mathematical formulae and Physics boggled my mind and added to my reverence for the amazing mind in that beautiful personality. I know now, what back then was taken for granted.
I mean, I was ‘me’ his only daughter and obviously that was how I was supposed to be treated. With an open love, a ready smile, magnanimity and generosity. Why? What else?… I was usually asked this question in my teens, ‘How does it feel to be an only daughter?’ or ‘How does it feel to be so doted upon?’ I would smile and say, ‘Well, I love it!’ and think what does he/she even mean – matlab – isn’t that the norm ? Abus love their betis. Period.
I embraced the sweet, kind, benevolent universe that my father had presented to me through his stories and his smiles. Stories that were made to order and customised to our preferences, smiles that lit up his eyes. A universe, of which I was the centre. Well, of course! What’s so strange about it? Huh ? Apparently, everything!
Abu’s love was and is always there. It was too high to be touched by the hands of time. Too pure to be blemished by the passing of years. Too ethereal to be marred. His eyes still hold me in their loving gaze and the spreading of gentle light at dusk still reminds me of his noble forehead.
I slipped from his hands, fell upon the thorns of life and bled. Tears that fell into the heart for the eyes were not trained. I had no practice, you see. I was so stupid. I had never been told to tell lies. I would always smile at one and all, never knowing that your smiles must be jealously guarded and disbursed only to a chosen few. It was only a matter of time before I learnt. I learnt that my whole being was an invisible microscopic amoebic dot in this big bad world. I would have to be trampled upon, razed to the lowest levels and made to kiss the ground, in order to learn my place in the scheme of things.
You see, the world had to teach me its ways as Abu had never allowed it access to me before. So it took the sweetness and pride and joy that little girls are made of and put it through the drill. To be tumbled and wrung and thrashed around like laundry to shake off all the softness, sweetness and gentleness. Then hung out on the line for the sun to shine hard upon our stark whiteness. Till we are crisp and dry. Now, at least, we can be presented as the ‘new us’ to the ‘new world’.
Thank you Abu for saving me from the new world for as long as you did. I have been quite hard to break. Your love was too much for them to comprehend. So I saved it in the deepest strongholds of my soul. My heart was occupied. My husband, my sons, my daughter filled it up. You, with you larger than life personality, could never be huddled. You needed vast space. Larger than the whole new world. I knew that for I knew you. I found that place. In my soul is that vast lush green meadow filled with buttery daffodils, creamy pink lilies, huge sunflowers and your favourite neon bright yellow amaltas. That is where you are and always will be.
P.S Abu, I love you.
Aliya Naseer Farooq, holds a Master’s degree in English Literature from Kinnaird College Lahore. She has written columns for English dailies such as ‘The Nation’ and ‘The Frontier Post – Lahore’.
