Smashed Toes, Burnt Skin: My Father's Secret Work Life

PROLOGUE

Recently, digital entrepreneur Alok Kejriwal took to LinkedIn to rant about parents:

"98% of parents I know who try and meddle in their kids (sic) lives, education, careers, social activities and love interests have no qualifications to do so. They have personally failed in all or most aspects themselves. Sorry for being hurtful but truthful...".

His outburst drew some support ("yes, many parents treat their children like property"), but most commenters were angry at his sweeping generalisations ("this is total CRAP").

A couple of days before Kejriwal’s post, I had stumbled upon a completely different sentiment about parenthood. Nicholas Thompson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired, had shared this statement by George Kennan (1904-2005), an American diplomat and critic of Western materialism:

"If you change the lives of people so rapidly that the experience of the father, the wisdom of the father, becomes irrelevant to the needs of the son, you have done something very dangerous—you have broken the organic bond of the family.”

Kenner's warning hit home with many. "This is profound! Sad... but very true," said one commenter. "Speaks to one of the core unravellings of todays (sic) society.”

Together, Msrs Kejriwal and Kennan got me thinking. Was Kejriwal completely off the mark, as his critics seemed to believe? Or would his take-down of meddlesome parents have found greater sympathy if, I don’t know, LinkedIn was populated by more antsy teenagers?

On the other hand, was Kennan’s brand of filial devotion relevant in 2017? Or was it a relic meant only to soothe bleary-eyed elders?

Here’s the thing: none of those questions matter. What does matter is that Kejriwal and Kennan (the latter, via Thompson) unlocked an area of our lives that seldom finds space on professional platforms like LinkedIn: our pasts - so much of which is shaped by our parents.

The norm on LinkedIn is to burnish our present and secure our future. As megatrends go, “the future of work” is all the rage. But what of the past? Beyond our resumes, the past remains buried, unacknowledged, erased.

This makes no sense. If the ideal in the modern world of work is to be real - not a phony - we must make more room for the past. Look at the world’s most admired companies. Each of them has a creation myth that memorialises the past and gives it an anchor to hold its own amid ever-shifting economic cycles. Personal histories play the same role. They remind us of our True North. When we are hit by turbulence, they prevent us from losing ourselves.

If 500 million people - the membership base of LinkedIn - were to come together to chronicle their personal histories, not merely narrow “professional” triumphs, we could create a powerful, shared anchor that might help a little in holding together our world imploding with divisive impulses. I am not suggesting we lay bare every cranny of our lives. But surely, we can reveal more than airbrushed bullet points?

So today, I am dusting off a piece of my past that’s never been on my resume. I want to introduce you to my father.

There are a few reasons I am doing this. I have come far enough in life to objectively question whether the lessons handed down by my father have been an asset or a nuisance - like Kejriwal believes. I am an immigrant in my own country, as is my father, and it is only by understanding our shared struggles as human beings and as professionals, separated as we are by decades and vastly different worldviews, that I can hope to be closer to the truth about myself. 

This is a long story. If you reach the end, thank you. And if you feel setting the past free is important, I hope you will share your story too.

PS: I have used the male pronoun in the story, because I cannot presume to understand the female immigrant's struggles. Perhaps one day I will tell my mother's story.

I: KURLA

There isn't a more appropriate entry point into Mumbai than the Kurla railway station. Every day, thousands of Indians seek out the City of Dreams, floating in a bubble, adrenaline pumping, ready to sprint towards the fabulous life that lies in wait. Kurla's crushing chaos jolts them awake. By slowing their sprint to an insect-like crawl, Kurla tells them what to expect.

Haters see in Kurla a trailer of the suffocation and squalor of Mumbai. I see in it the perfect antidote to the heartbreak that is many a naive immigrant's fate.

On a sweaty morning in 2007, my father and I descended from a second-class coach of the Jnaneshwari Super Deluxe at Kurla's Lokmanya Tilak Terminus. We had been on the train for over a day. I couldn't wait for the ride to end. My father wasn't so keen. He didn't like Mumbai. He didn't know much about the city, except this was the place every kid came to when they ran away from home.

I was one of those kids.

II: COOKING RICE AT 1250 °

If you are Indian, you don't have to leave the country to become an immigrant. Unlike America, the centre of the modern world’s immigrant mythology, where even the farthest states are connected by language (and bacon), in India you become an immigrant if you move only a few miles from home. This is how it has always been. And yet, the Indian immigrant has changed.

Sometime in the 1970s, my father left his ancestral home, a clay house in a village called Chhakur Danga in Bengal's Bankura district where a little less than half the population lives below the poverty line. My grandfather was a pious Brahmin. He travelled from village to village offering indoctrination to non-Brahmin disciples who wanted to move up the spiritual ladder. The payment for his services was in agricultural produce, and sometimes, in cash. This was my grandfather's chief source of income, on which depended the sustenance of his two daughters (one born with disabilities), four sons, and wife.

My grandmother, married off when she was still a child, tells us how my grandfather would collect an army of beggars on his walk back home after a tour, feeling rich with his haul of pumpkin and rice and potato. He would demand that grandma cook food for all of them. This infuriated grandma, who had little left to feed her children by the end of the month.

Chhakur Danga still does not exist on Google Maps, and it got electricity just a few years ago. Until recently, you had to walk 15 minutes to the riverbank if you needed to relieve yourself. I visited Chhakur Danga a handful of times as a child and have mostly fond memories of frolicking with my cousins, probably because I knew the visits weren't permanent.

Durgapur, my father's new home after leaving the village, was no farther than a 90-minute bus ride away, but it might well have been a different planet. Even a few decades ago, Durgapur was an obscure settlement surrounded by dense jungles. Its most famous landmark was the cave of Devi Chaudhurani, a fearsome bandit queen. But by the 70s, Durgapur had been transformed into a planned town built around a steel plant, a shining icon of Nehruvian economic policies, delivered with help from the British.

Durgapur was still not a city, but for thousands like my father, it was the beacon of a life less difficult. If you somehow got yourself to Durgapur, your children wouldn't have to cross rivers to go to school.

Here my father lived with his elder sister and brother-in-law, who was a plant worker, and a litter of other relatives, in a crammed two-room house. He finished college and finally landed a job in the plant himself.

Somewhere along the way, he met my mother, a neighbour, and they got married. There was no money to hire caterers, so my father took it upon himself to fry the fish for the wedding feast. He nearly lost an eye when a big blob of hot oil landed on his face.

My mother too had moved to Durgapur from her village and worked as a nurse in the plant hospital. My mother's father was a tailor and postal-services man and raised my mother and her four brothers in similar penury as my father's family. Maa often didn't have shoes to wear to school. She would tie banyan leaves around her feet to save them from the melting roads in peak summer.

For a couple of years after I was born, we lived with my father's elder brother and his wife and daughter. Then, we moved into our own two-room quarters, where we lived for the next 15-odd years before shifting to our current home.

My abiding memory of our first house is of a great profusion of things stacked miraculously on every available flat surface. “When you take out something from somewhere, you must put it back in the exact same place,” was one of the earliest life lessons I was taught. You couldn’t be cavalier with space if you wanted to fit in.

MY FATHER'S STORY WASN'T UNIQUE. He was one among hordes of young people hoping to make a living off the labour-guzzling manufacturing sector. It would be a life of hard toil, but the move from clay houses to brick ones made it worthwhile. Besides, what other options did India of the 70s have?

He did not start with hard toil, though. His first assignment was in the plant telephone exchange. It was a comfortable job, but it didn’t last long. A couple of years after he joined, the management announced a massive hiring drive for the plant’s captive power-generation unit. My father was sent on a six-month training programme, at the end of which he was to be absorbed in the power plant on a higher pay grade than his telephone-exchange job.

But when the training ended, the management flipped. A different department within the plant had become a bigger priority. He could either head there or go back to his old job. He tried to return but failed. You can come back, he was told, but you can’t have your old job. Start over at the juniormost level and work your way back up. The trade union he belonged to fought for him but lost. I suppose it was retribution for his ambition.

So my father ended up taking the offer from the new department: Coke Ovens Battery. He spent his entire working life there, until his retirement two years ago. All those years, I was never allowed to see his workplace. Every time I brought up the subject, my mother would block the conversation. Whenever I did something wrong, she would scold me with the exact same words. "You know you can’t do anything that will upset your father," she would say. "He can’t be distracted at work."

It was all very sinister.

The sight of my father getting down from the 5.30 pm plant bus, walking slowly home, lunch carrier in hand, and the jangle of the gate latch opening, meant all was well with the world. On the odd day when he broke this routine, my mother and I would run to his colleagues' homes, panicking. I don’t know why I was so scared since I had no concrete idea of what his work was really like. There were a few clues: the soiled, soaked-through vest and dusting cloth he discarded the first thing after getting home, the occasional burn and smashed toe, the frequent red eye. But I guess I never really wanted to dig deeper.

My father finally took me for a plant visit well after I had started working. I don’t remember the details of steel making, but here's one image that has stayed with me. My father and his colleagues worked atop giant towers - ovens - inside which was burning coal. Every few meters there were openings through which fresh coal was poured from time to time. The workers carried uncooked rice from home in aluminium containers. Near lunch time, they filled the containers with water and placed them on the lids covering the openings. In moments, the rice was cooked.

When he retired, his seniors asked him to come back and help them from time to time. "Goswami Da, you will get bored sitting at home," they said. He politely declined. He loved his job, respected what the plant had done for him and his family. He is not bitter. But perhaps he feels he has paid his dues. There is no “second career” for people like my father.

Now, he spends his time gardening in a little patch of land in our front yard, doing household chores, and looking after his ageing kin. I have never seen a man so happy to retire. But then, what do I know about walking on burning coal for a living?

II: WORK WILL SET YOU FREE

Nothing defines us quite like our taboos. For a soldier, the biggest taboo is abandoning the field of war. For a doctor, it is giving up on a patient before the slightest hope is extinguished. For a lover, it is secretly checking their partners' phones at the dead of night.

For people who leave home in search of a better life, the biggest taboo is to stop working.

"Work will set you free" (Arbeit Macht Frei), the commandment inscribed on the gates of Nazi concentration camps, is a horror to be banished for the rest of the world, but the immigrant is denied that right. The life of an immigrant has one goal: upward mobility. It is only by surrendering himself at the altar of Work that the immigrant can justify his place in the world. Only Work can earn him dignity at having fulfilled his pre-ordained role: leaving a better world for his progeny. When this impulse dies, that’s when the immigrant finally retires.

The immigrant isn't a creature of passion. His primal urge is to push on. "Why hire foreigners?" asks this report in The Telegraph. "They just work harder," it answers matter-of-factly.

Last year, when I decided to take a break from working full-time for the first time in 11 years, I broke this immigrant taboo. I was thirtysomething. This is the age when the hardy immigrant's productivity is at its peak. It’s the age when my father was beginning his career atop the glowering oven. But it wasn’t to be my story.

When I started on my “sabbatical”, my self-image was more of a hamster on a wheel than Hercules. Sure, I had good reasons to step away at a time when my career was peaking. But deep inside, I was worried I had sabotaged my chances of ending up in the Immigrant Hall of Fame.

I had insulted Work. What price would I have to pay?

III: THE PAST IS THE ENEMY

During World War II, armies would show their soldiers propaganda films about the enemy (there is one on Netflix efficiently titled Know Your Enemy). The goal was to project the enemy as monsters, so that the soldier's bayonet wouldn't waver before enemy flesh. War is fought on the promise of a better future. But how do you sell the idea of "better" compellingly enough to make an entire nation embrace the absurdity of war? You find an enemy who can take the fall for all that is wrong with the present, and in whose destruction lies the only hope for a safer future.

The immigrant's relentless, frequently inhuman struggles are also in the name of securing the future. In his case, the enemy is the past. The past is a code that contains grave clues about how his life might unfold. The immigrant's job is to intercept it, learn from it, and burn it.

The immigrant lives his life fearing history. He never forgets history. But he cannot afford the warm glow of nostalgia. Love for the past will soften the immigrant, fill his mind with doubts, distract him from the single-minded devotion to the future. He must shun the past and everything it contains.

Heroes who venerate their pasts only do so once they have fulfilled their quest, secure in the knowledge that they are not going back. I have never believed a man who says, "I owe a lot to my past," while he is still busy running away from it. It’s just not human.

GROWING UP, I WAS SCARED OF MY FATHER. He had a temper and, though by all accounts I was a well-behaved boy, he brought me up "by hand". But there was something else I feared. It was his insistence that I land far from the tree. If to ensure that he had to be the mean, forbidding father, he didn't mind. He couldn't allow me, his only child, to end up in Coke Ovens Battery.

That’s where our rupture began.

In school, Math gave me nightmares, and words made my heart sing. I wanted to be a writer. But this was pre-liberalisation India, where a decent career still meant two things: engineering or medicine. My father, a humanities student himself with a flair for History, was terrified I was heading down his path. He wouldn't let me buy storybooks, forcing me to invest in “general knowledge” instead. As a cautionary tale, he told me how my grandfather once caught him reading a novel and gave him a sound thrashing. Sometimes, he would make surprise visits to my little study and catch me red handed with a Bangla teen magazine hidden behind a textbook.

"You want to end up like me?" he would scream in his angriest moments. "You can’t. You don’t have it in you."

He started filling me with loathing for the past, his past. He did a good job. As I grew older, the need to defy the past dictated everything I did.

My first act of defiance was resisting my father's dictum that I take up science in high school. I enrolled in the only school in Durgapur that offered humanities to boys (yes, every other school either didn't have humanities at all or only offered it to girls), despite its somewhat grey reputation. I had had enough of my father's tyranny.

For the next two years, apart from paying my school fees, my father took little interest in me. I have never worked harder than those two years, determined to prove him wrong. And prove him wrong I did.

IV: I FINALLY FALL FAR FROM THE TREE

When my high-school results were announced, I became something of a celebrity overnight. I was among the toppers in the state. Nobody in our entire family had ever done nearly as well. A television crew came to interview me. Younger cousins started looking at me with awe. After two years, my father started talking to me again with something resembling normality.

Then, he changed the course of my life.

The typical Durgapur lad's ambition was to somehow make it to Kolkata, the state capital, and get admission into Presidency or Jadavpur, Bengal's two higher-education bellwethers for the liberal-arts inclined. With my marks, I would be a shoo-in at either of those places. But my father had different plans. He decided I was going to Delhi. I had taken the first step towards escaping the past by acing the exams. But it wasn't enough. I had to be sent farther away.

I tried my best to sabotage my father's plans. For starters, I hid the application form for a seat to study English Literature at St Stephen's College - a mythical place that routinely topped college rankings, the playground of India's rich and powerful. When I was younger, I had seen photos of its magnificent red-brick building. "I want to go here someday," I might have said in a wishful moment, not realising the implications. Apparently, my father remembered what I had said. Now that I wasn't heading to engineering or medical school, he decided no place but St Stephen's College was good enough for me.

The thought of being exiled so far away from home drove me crazy with fear. "Delhi" existed in my mind only in theory. It wasn't a real place. It wasn't a place for people like us. How I regretted my silly childhood fantasy.

So I told my father I had filled the application form and mailed it to the college, while in reality, I hid it under my study table, quietly waiting for the deadline to lapse. That was the only form I had obtained from a college outside Bengal. If I could scuttle this, I would be safe.

Three or four days before the deadline, my mother found out what I had done during one of her housekeeping rounds. By then, it was too late to mail the form. I was afraid of my father’s reaction, but secretly I was delighted.

My father didn’t say a word to me when he discovered my treachery. He left on his scooter and came back a couple of hours later. He had two tickets for a train to Delhi in his hand.

My application wouldn’t make it to Delhi on time via post. So we were going there to submit it in person.

V: CERTAINTIES DISAPPEAR

One of the respondents to Kennan’s statement about the father’s wisdom becoming irrelevant for the son said that’s what we call “revolution”. True. Revolutions begin when our fathers’ values become our dogmas.

In Delhi, finally ensconced in the world of stories that my father had denied me, my process of becoming a revolutionary started in earnest.

I learnt that the first condition for becoming a revolutionary is tearing up the rule book which your parents used to teach you “good” and “bad”. Literature’s great heroes showed me there was no good or bad. In fact bad was frequently better than good. Back home, goodness was in simple virtues: obedience, sociability, sacrifice, shunning drinking and smoking, long hair and ear studs. Above all else, you had to be responsible. It wasn’t as if I followed all the rules all the time, but so effective was my conditioning that I could never break them without feeling a pang of guilt.

In college, I learnt that this was all part of a great conspiracy to tame my sense of “self”. To be a good man - an interesting man, because in literature you are no good if you aren’t interesting - I had to be the exact opposite of what my parents trained me to be. I learnt that you could be great even if you committed murder or ran away with someone else’s wife - so long as you did it to uphold the sovereignty of the self.

If you have a child who studies literature and you notice a sudden disappearance of scruples and decency in him, here’s a word of advice. Don’t dismiss his behaviour by telling yourself, “This is what all college kids do. It’ll pass.” You may be dealing with a psychotic in the making.

THE INDIA OF 2017 is in love with small towns. Businesses love them because they hold vast reserves of untapped demand. The government loves them because they are eager buyers of hope. Filmmakers love them because they produce compelling heroes.

Equally, thanks first to Big Bazaar and now to Flipkart and Amazon and Netflix, today’s small-towner is more assured than ever about his place in the world. The access to glossy experiences and the consumption gap that separated big cities from small towns is fast disappearing. When my father brought me to Delhi for the first time, aboard a sleeper compartment of the Poorva Express over a journey that lasted more than a day, securing long-distance train tickets at short notice was an arcane skill practised by a resourceful few. Now, Durgapur has an airport with daily flights to Delhi. With a few clicks, you can buy a seat on a gleaming Bombardier CRJ 200 and make the journey in two hours. A whole generation is growing up not knowing what it means to woo godlike middlemen or climb upper berths. 

In 2001, the two cyber cafes in Durgapur charged 100 rupees for an hour’s dial-up browsing. No one had cell phones. I couldn’t Google Delhi before boarding that train. Now, when I travel to Lisbon or Barcelona, my cousin who has never set foot outside sends me restaurant recommendations on Facebook Messenger.

MY FIRST YEAR away from home was confusing. The surfeit of strange attires, the concept of eating out on a whim, people my age driving cars to college and living their lives over SMS I could deal with, mostly by learning not to gawk bumpkin-like at them. I owed some of it to my upbringing: avoiding temptation was key to being good. But what of the slipping away of certainties, the constant war between right and wrong (Save my meagre monthly allowance? Or spend it on momos and movies?), self and family, women’s duties and women’s rights? My father had not dealt with any of these puzzles, and consequently I had no rules to refer to.

So I turned to different teachers: my new friends.

One of the great comforts of growing up in a small town is the homogeneity of experiences. My school friends came from similar families: they were the descendants of industrial immigrants, lived in homes with similar layouts, wore similar clothes, and ate similar food. Even though we went to “English-medium” schools, we barely used English, even in the English class. We were in love with Bollywood and Bangla pop. The Beatles or Bob Dylan meant nothing to us.

College ended this comfort. I was surrounded by people from Nagaland and Bihar and Kashmir and Maharashtra and Czech Republic and Uganda. There were children of ministers and bureaucrats, businessmen and former kings, refugees and expats. They spoke Khasi and Tulu and Marathi and Bhojpuri and Odiya and Afrikaans. Skirts and pajamas, tracks and tees, shorts and frilly dresses were all kosher. The college mess served seven different cuisines seven days of the week.

The only thing that made us a functional community was English. The college festival had one day reserved for Bollywood dance numbers, but the other 364 days of the year, English reigned supreme. My roommate, a Tamil boy from Mumbai, introduced me to Simon and Garfunkel and Terry Pratchett. My closest friend from college taught me how to fill greeting cards with pithy good wishes. The coolest kids were to be found in the Shakespeare Society and the Debating Society. The annual rock show was a Stephanian landmark.

I hid away my Bangla cassettes and Bangla books, and learnt to head bump. I learnt to go to the “loo”. I learnt to eat mince and cutlet. I learnt to chill.

THE SECRET to peace is not knowing what you don’t have. At home, I did not know we did not have a lot money. I did not miss privacy or independence or a voice. I did not know I could keep secrets. I did not know depression, though I knew sadness. Now, I knew everything.

From my second year in the college hostel (“Residence” they called it, serviced by “gyps”), I had a room to myself. A bed, a cupboard, two chairs, a table, and my holdall occupied all the space in which my parents fitted half their lives’ possessions. I put up dark curtains and relished how anyone had to knock before entering my room. Sometimes I would pretend I was not there, picturing in mind that I was turning away not a hostel mate but that nosy neighbour in Durgapur who always found her way straight into our bedroom.

The only landline telephone in the hostel meant I had the licence to limit my conversation to five-minute calls on Sundays. Even when my parents got me a mobile phone – a brick-sized Motorola rejected by an uncle – prohibitive incoming call charges meant I could get away mouthing nothing of consequence.

The time that I thus freed up I filled with fantasies of the future. They did not include buying a house or buying insurance or getting a stable job, like my father wanted me to. Instead, I fantasised about seeing the world, becoming someone important, making a dent.

The new fantasies brought a new kind of guilt. I was now the absentee son. Instead of labour, my father’s contribution to the economy, I chose a life of the intellect. My father had kept his work hidden from me, fearing it will frighten me. Soon, I would not be able to talk to my father about my work, because I did not know how to. My father’s occupational hazards included heat stroke, cuts, and burns. I suffer from carpal tunnel, insomnia, and impostor syndrome.

VI: TECH DEBT

Before he died, my grandfather lived with us in Durgapur for several years. The family had already abandoned the Chhakur Danga home; my grandfather, an uncle, and my disabled aunt were resettled in a new home in a different village - this one with electricity and a spot on the map, and a 30-minute scooter ride from Durgapur.

The proximity to his ageing parents meant a great deal to my father. It was not merely a sentimental matter. It made a lot of practical sense too: My father did not have to rely on the telephone for information, or worry about taking leave from work when someone needed to be cared for. It also meant by grandparents could carry on living normal lives without the threat of having to “adjust” according to their son’s convenience.

I was thinking about this the other day while trying to decide what to do with my father’s Facebook friend request. My father is a voracious user of social networks. He is obsessed with WhatsApp and fits right into the stereotype of the one-inspirational-quote-and-one-funny video-a-day parent. He sends me gifts via Amazon and habitually researches train and air fares to Delhi, where I live with my wife. After his computer, his most treasured possession is a basic Samsung smartphone I gifted him. He only takes it out for his morning WhatsApp broadcast. For all other uses, he has a separate phone.

While I was grappling with its disruptive influence on my career, my father taught himself the Internet. Somehow, he managed to tame its intimidating language, the strange sensation of small plastic keys on his fingertips after a lifetime of giant steel implements. All this work led up to his big moment: Will I accept his friend request?

Parents learning technology is the source of endless funny memes. Most of them revolve around the same storyline: a pesky old man or woman trying to navigate the Internet or the smartphone – pay bills online or book a cab perhaps – and badgering their son or daughter to teach them how to. And once they learn that, the floodgates open. Who has not cringed at the relentless forwards and pokes?

Why are parents so embarrassingly eager to adopt the Net’s novelties? What else can they do, knowing that’s where there children live their lives these days? 5000 km from them, but only a Skype chat or WhatsApp video call away, and that's worth risking a bit of embarrassment for. But by the time they have made this journey, we are somewhere else. Our digital detox begins with rebuffing our parents' overtures on Facebook.

WORK IS CHANGING US, making us difficult to relate to. In a 50-year career, one might go through a dozen reincarnations and learn a hundred different mystifying tools. Forget about coaching parents, we are all breathless training ourselves. Still, my father has coped. I think of my unborn child's world - a haze of intrigue and intimidating possibilities - and I wonder if I ever will.

In her latest essay for The New Yorker, Toni Morrison differentiates the children of her generation from those who came later:

“In those days, the forties, children were not just loved or liked; they were needed. They could earn money; they could care for children younger than themselves; they could work the farm, take care of the herd, run errands, and much more. I suspect that children aren’t needed in that way now. They are loved, doted on, protected, and helped. Fine, and yet . . .”

You are wrong, Ms Morrison. Children may not tend to the farm and the cattle any more, but the demands technology makes of parents means they are more "needed" than ever before.

We just don't have the time.

EPILOGUE:

THE LOST YEARS AND BUILDING BRIDGES: MUMBAI-BANGALORE-GURGAON-MUMBAI-DELHI, VIA TOKYO, HIROSHIMA, OSLO, STOCKHOLM, HELSINKI, DUBLIN, BELFAST, LISBON, MADRID, BARCELONA

Like many people of my generation, my first job was in a call centre in the outskirts of Delhi. I worked for AoL, and my brief was to placate angry customers and stop them from cancelling their AoL subscriptions. I was given a new name: Tate, and a new accent. I would leave home at 3 in the morning and created some elaborate fiction to keep my parents off the scent (call-centre jobs were thought to be good for people who had no other prospects, not Stephanians with first-class English (Hons.) degrees.) You wouldn’t find this job on my resume because it lasted all of two months – I was out as soon as I had saved up enough money to buy a stereo I had been eyeing.

My first real job was in Mumbai, in a company that sold editing services to academic researchers in non-English-speaking countries, chiefly Japan. As with my first trip to Delhi, my father was with me. He did not say much, but I could sense that he was suspicious about the whole thing. What did that job description even mean? Was I making up the whole thing? And what kind of hell did the Kurla station portend? He looked a bit relieved when he saw my office – a real place with real desks and real people – but we never again spoke about what I actually did.

I spent the next 11 years in equally fantastic jobs. I worked in a KPO, a bank, a publishing house, a magazine, a data-intelligence startup. I taught, wrote, talked before TV cameras, and hobnobbed with important people for a living. I made (rented) homes in four cities in India, travelled to a dozen around the world. I was busy. I was making a dent. I kept my father informed about the highlights – my awards, my book deal – but the small stories – how I came to love editing, why I work better at night – fell through the cracks.

In those lost years, I built a mental image of my father. He is a man who likes living on the surface. His default mode is reacting to events, not analysing them. He is an emotional man, but the way he expresses his emotions is by yelling when he’s mad or sending cakes with your photo on them when he’s overcome by love. Not for him nuanced conversations and quiet hugs.

When I got my passport made, I was restless and unhappy till I managed to get the first visa stamped on it, and now that I have a few, I am restless and unhappy every day of my life at the thought of every place in the world that I have not seen. My father’s passport is locked up in a drawer, visa-less years after he got it, and even though he has earned it, none of his WhatsApp forwards convey a craving for unseen sights.

Last year, my industry, the media, went through an apocalyptic period. Hundreds of people lost their jobs, six months after I had started my break from journalism. Agitated, I put out a tweetstorm that went viral. For days, my phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. A leading newspaper covered my exploits. It was a mini triumph of my convictions as a professional. But I couldn’t share the moment with my father. He probably wouldn’t have the patience to understand the media’s byzantine woes, I thought. Worse, he might ask me to teach him Twitter.

YEARS AFTER he dropped me off at college, my father told me how he had to face oblique comments from family and friends about his decision. “You are sending him all the way to Delhi … to study English?!” It was a dumb decision. My father was spending way beyond his means. He was sponsoring my education in a subject with terrible returns on investment. He shouldn’t have given in to my juvenile wish. He would regret his profligacy.

I asked him how we felt about the taunts. "Well, I tell them if nothing else works out, he can always come back to Durgapur and give tuitions," he said. "People will pay a lot to hire a Delhi-educated English tutor."

I don’t know if he thinks I have fallen sufficiently far from the tree. But this much I know: He no longer doubts my choices, even if he cannot quite comprehend them. Even when, unthinkably, I stopped going to work last year, he did not freak out. “I am sure you know what you are doing,” he said. Perhaps his own retirement had taught him that I would be okay.

Now, my father and I have long WhatsApp conversations every morning. He sends me pictures of his garden patch accompanied with captions in Bangla. I tell him about my friendship with the eunuchs who meet me every day at the traffic light near my home when I drive to pick up my wife from her workplace, using Bangla words but English letters. I ask him about his day. He obliges with meticulous details about watering his plants, mopping the house because the maid did not turn up, cooking, washing clothes, and ordering things off the Internet. We are all about the small stories now.

Sometimes I call my father at 11 in the morning or 4 in the afternoon, simply because I can. I don’t have to hang up in a hushed tone when he calls at odd hours. For this I have my break from work to thank. The Hall of Fame can wait.

I am wary of romanticising this phase. I don't believe it will scrub away all the differences that have grown moss-like between us over the years. But then, the goal is to make peace with the differences and understand whence they arose. I only hope I don't run out of time.

I AM NOW READY, excited, to get back to work, but this time, it is for different reasons. I have seen a version of myself that is strong and proud and peaceful without the constant urge to whip myself into action. I know that the work I decide to do next would be worthier of my love - not merely dedication, but love - than anything I have done so far.

As to my father, I will try to find the language to talk about work with him, because in this past year he has shown me he is ready to listen.

Or perhaps he always was, but I never picked up the hint. I am reminded of a conversation we had when I was in Tokyo. It was an expensive phone call, so my plan was to quickly tell my parents I had reached safely. My father picked up the phone, and after a swift exchange of essential news, as I prepared to hang up, he asked me: “So … these Japanese folks. What is their main industry?”

He wanted to talk about what these alien people from a faraway country did for a living. He wanted me to tell him a story about work.