By Nimisha Kantharia
The sun moved west in the summer sky, and the late afternoon light slanted into the bedroom.
The girl, eight, kneeled on the floor, tongue between her teeth, concentrating. She carefully glued
paper on cardboard, then laboriously drew faint lines across it with a pencil and ruler. Without
the lines to guide her, her writing had a tendency to slant upwards. She copied the poem she had
found, ‘Foot-prints in the Sand,’ trying her best to write neatly and evenly. Still, she got the
spacing wrong on some lines, and had to cramp up the words at the very end of those sentences.
She cut four strips of red ribbon and stuck them around the edge of the paper, framing the poem.
She finished just in time, for her father would soon be home from work and this was his birthday
gift. As she erased those initial guiding lines, she surveyed the result with a critical eye. Despite
her efforts, globs of glue dotted the paper, the ribbon ends were frayed and her handwriting could
have been neater. The hollowness of sheer disappointment throbbed in her chest. She so much
wanted to give her father something beautiful, to make him a gift with her own hands. She
consoles herself; at least the poem she had chosen was lovely.
Have you read it? It is a conversation between God and a man who is looking back at the course
of his life. God points to two sets of foot-prints in the sand, proof that He had always been
present in the man’s life. But the man counters it by saying that during his hardest days, in his
lowest moments, there was only one set of foot-prints. That’s when God replies,
“Those were the times I carried you, my child.”
Something about this poem, especially that last line, tugs at the little girl and makes her want to
give those words to her father. Even though he doesn’t believe in God, she just knows he needs
to hear these words. She knows it because like so many children she can slip easily under her
father’s skin, wandering unseen among those secret childhood places of wounded-ness. Then,
merging with him, she senses all the pain he has ever felt, wordlessly.
The poem is the important bit; it doesn’t matter if I haven’t been all that neat, she tells herself.
Then, her father is home, and there is no time to fret anymore. Her heart on her sleeve, she hands
him the framed poem, saying shyly,
“Happy birthday! I made this for you.”
He glances at his child’s handiwork, and something flashes across his face so quickly that even
his daughter, so practiced at reading his moods, can’t quite decipher it. But the brusqueness of
his thanks, the speed with which he exits the room and the fact that she never sees her gift again,
all add up to imbue that fleeting expression with a dire meaning. My gift was terrible, dad didn’t
like it. And the disappointment that had flared within her, then flickered in the wake of her
breezy self-consolation, flared once again and melted a little deeper into her bones.
Years later that child grew into the teenage me, and I realized that fathers, perhaps especially
Indian fathers, don’t find it easy to accept gifts from their children, perhaps especially from their
daughters. That flash across his face must have been embarrassment, I concluded. Based on this
conclusion, I didn’t gift my father anything for the next three decades.
Then thirty years after that first gift, and a parent myself, I felt the pull to buy my father a
weighted blanket for his birthday. I had heard about them from parenting groups on Facebook.
After that, in that sneaky subliminal way that the internet has of reading one’s mind,
advertisements for weighted blankets flooded my social media feed. I try to resist being
manipulated, so I fought the impulse to buy one. But the inner directive was compelling, the urge
too strong to fight. I surrendered and ordered one, blue, lined with linen, weighing seven
kilograms.
As a mother, I spent many hours of my child’s life carrying her around, baby-wearing her,
holding her for naps. In the first nine months of the infant’s life, the fourth trimester, the parent is
literally a physical container for their child. But as the child grows, the immature prefrontal
cortex in her brain makes her prone to impulsiveness and meltdowns. Now, the parent has to
provide a psychological container that can ‘hold’ the force of her emotions and not fall apart.
My choices (if I can call them that, for they were not clear-headed decisions, more intuitive
imperatives!) of ‘gifts’ to my father, my angry aggressive father, with his uncontrollable
explosions of rage and even violence, make sense in this context. As a child, I had given him a
poem about being carried, being held by God; now all these years later, the gift was a weighted
blanket, a personal ‘holding device’ of sorts. Did I imagine the blanket would help contain his
life-time of anger and grief?
When the blanket arrived at my parent’s home, they were bewildered. They didn’t know what it
was, or what to do with it. My mother nagged at me for buying such an expensive quilt. I
mumbled something about sales and discounts, lying.
“And it’s not a quilt, mum! It’s a blanket for sound sleep.”
This was not a lie. That is, in fact, one of its purported uses.
My brother was doubtful.
“Isn’t it too heavy? Isn’t Bombay too hot for a blanket like this?”
I shrugged. How can you answer common sense questions with whimsies arising from the
subconscious? Instead, I described the ‘breathable’ fabric, delivering a mini-lecture on the
mechanics of a weighted blanket.
My father’s response was the same brusque thanks. The blanket lay unopened until I visited their
house and unpacked it. As I lay beneath it, luxuriating in its softness and heft, my mother tried to
convince me to take it for myself, assuring me that my father would never end up using it. Again,
I lied, saying I already had one.
But I didn’t want to deceive my mother for too long, so I bought myself one soon after. Tucked
beneath its velvety heaviness, I lay cocooned, feeling safe. This was the crux of the matter,
wasn’t it? The gift was not so much the actual blanket itself, but the experience of being held.
A few months later, my parents came for a holiday to my home in another city. No sooner had
my father entered the house than he announced he was tired after the long journey and wanted to
sleep. Post-retirement, with his vision rapidly deteriorating, he spent large swathes of the day in
bed, ostensibly sleeping, but often I suspect mulling over the un-change-ables of his life. As he
headed to the bedroom, he mumbled something to my mother, and she came to me with a request
for my ‘stone blanket.’ When I looked confused, she was impatient.
“He calls that heavy blanket you bought him the stone blanket! You have one, no? He can’t sleep
without it anymore but it was too heavy for us to carry.”
My heart was singing as I handed it to her; it continued humming a content tune the whole
fortnight that he stayed with me. He actually used the blanket! So what if it took thirty years for
him to accept a gift from me, to accept, even if tacitly, that he needed to be held? While the
‘success’ of gifting the weighted blanket soothed the disappointment I had felt as a child, that
other impulse remained unfulfilled, to create something beautiful for him with my own hands.
That year, I began an art practice. I tried to sketch daily, observing those around me, scribbling
their features free-hand. When what I sketched looked nothing like the person it was supposed to
be, I learned a more accurate technique, the grid method. One works from a photograph of the
subject, etching a grid on the reference image. With a similar grid on the drawing paper, it is
easier to achieve accuracy by filling in one square at a time.
I had just the photograph I wanted to draw of my father, one that I had clicked myself; his head
bent forwards, mouth open mid-speech, mid-meal. Using a ruler and pencil, I made a perfect grid
in my sketch-book, then spent hours filling the grid in, copying the outline of his face, drawing in
each wrinkle on his furrowed brow and the hangdog appearance of his down-turned lips. His
expression in that moment was earnest, innocent, strangely vulnerable for such a volatile man.
To trace every line of a person’s face like this felt like an intimate thing to do. My pencil peeled
back the years; I could see the bewildered boy, punished daily for childish misdemeanours; the
eldest of four children but the only one subjected to unquestioned physical abuse. I could see the
bright young man at his first job, devoted to work, the very epitome of sincerity and then, as the
years passed and the success he deserved passed him by, the disappointment leaching in. I could
see the hopeful, joyous tears in his eyes when he surveyed my newborn face, a fresh start that did
not materialize. To draw so closely is to see truly.
I sent a photograph of the portrait to my husband, my mother, my brother, to my nearly blind
father. My mother, the artist in the family, pronounced it a fair likeness. My brother concurred,
and he’s honest, so I believed him. But I dearly wanted to hear what my father himself thought of
it.
“I can’t see.” he claimed. This was true, but only partly. At this point on the road to legal
blindness, he could sometimes suddenly see quite well.
“Just glance at it!” I wheedled. “You may get an impression, and that would be enough for me.”
I pushed my agenda as an adult in a way I never would have dared to as a child. Was it cruel of
me to nag at an almost blind man to see? Perhaps it was. In my meagre defense, it didn’t feel that
way in the context of that moment in our lifetime as father and daughter.
He never glanced at it. But the sum of all the expressions that chanced upon his features in these
interactions, combined with my experience in tracing every groove of his face on a piece of
paper, served me well. I finally knew what that un-nameable look was, the look that had flashed
across his face when I was a child. It was not disappointment in a wrong gift, nor was it mere
embarrassment.
It was the deep discomfort of being seen. Hadn’t I experienced this myself in therapy when,
defenses stripped, I looked into my therapist’s eyes and saw myself reflected there, naked and
vulnerable? This, despite her kindness, the unconditional positivity of her regard! How
uncomfortable it must have been for my father to be seen in this way by me, his eight-year-old
daughter; to realize that his child sensed his emotional needs; needs that were unseen by his own
care-givers; needs that, growing up, he had wrapped away in layers of anger and aggression,
hostile defenses that kept them even from his own gaze? To look at my portrait of him, would be
to see his own face through my eyes. It would perhaps have been too vulnerable to acknowledge
that what I had sensed as a child was the truth.
Still, as my father’s daughter, I can’t help wondering, wistfully, how different our lives would
have been if only my father had, as a child, been held as much as he needed, as much as he
should have been.
Nimisha Kantharia is a surgeon and writer from India. Her essay The Girl with the Turquoise Eye-Shadow was published in Lunch Ticket, and awarded the Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She has a forthcoming publication in addastories run by the Commonwealth Foundation. She writes fiction under the pen name Faye Coutinho and can be found at www.fayecoutinho.com.
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