“You must be so proud of your dad”, the lady in the dazzling white sari said at the award ceremony. “He is a very smart man. Are you as smart as he is?” she asked me. “I am.” I answered without missing a beat, I was 9 years old. This evoked laughter among the adults around me. “She is your daughter indeed, Srivastav”, the lady said to my father with a chuckle. My father smiled benevolently at me, neither acknowledging nor refuting my statement. Maybe he thought I was as smart as he was. Or maybe not. Maybe he was just too busy doing the smart things he did. In his young life, he had accomplished a lot. A self-made man, he came from a poor family in a small village in India; his life was a shining example of being a family record-breaker. The first one to go to college, the first one to become an engineer, he got a job in All India Radio; India’s equivalent of the BBC, establishing the first computer department there. He traveled abroad – Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, UK, US. He presented papers at international conferences on Radio technology. At home, we were the first family in our neighborhood to have a color TV, the first to buy a car, the first to have two cars. He was obviously the smarter, cooler person in most rooms he inhabited, a cut above the rest. When he spoke, people listened. And he spoke – a lot. He had a lot to say of course. He was so smart.
And he was my father. And I was like him. I was smart too. So he was proud of me. Maybe. Or maybe not.
I definitely wanted to be like my father. I was what the west calls a “daddy’s girl”. In the India of 1980s, this was most unusual. It was unusual that he expected me and my sister to have careers of our own; he wanted us to study, study, study, to ace everything we did, to come top of our class. He wanted us to be smart. And not stupid. Definitely not stupid. I didn’t want to be stupid. It was very clear that my father didn’t like stupid.
I spent most of my childhood working hard and studying hard. I liked studying and I was very ambitious. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say “India Gandhi”. For those who do not know, Indira Gandhi was the prime minister in the early 1980s; the first female prime minister of India, we had a female head of state in 1967 people!
When Aunties and other female elders asked me if I knew any of the “girl crafts” like cooking, I would turn up my nose and tell them what my father taught me – my job in life was to do great things; such as becoming an engineer or a doctor or a political leader, I could leave simple things like cooking or other accouterments of home-making and house-keeping to the less educated, less smart people around me.
I wonder what my mother thought about me saying those things. After all she was fairly well educated lady; a great cook, an extremely efficient home-keeper, a sitar-player, a brilliant hostess who could throw a get-together of some 50-odd people on her own. A devoted wife and mother, she was adept at all those things that women of her generation neither got paid nor got thanked for – the delicious home-made meals infused with love, the prim and proper home ready to receive guests at the drop of a hat, the caretaking of older family members, the constant & stable presence for kids to come home to & share their hearts with. My mother was also a talented tailor and knitter who made my sister & me dresses for all the special occasions of our life and knitted her husband his sweaters, saving precious money for our family. My mother was like the anchor to our sails, the ground to all our flights. She made our house a home.
But she wasn’t an engineer or a doctor or a political leader. Being a house-wife she didn’t earn actual money. This meant she wasn’t smart. At least not in my father’s eyes. So he criticized her, ridiculed her, dismissed her. He called her stupid and ignorant. He told her she wasn’t worthy of him.
I wonder what she thought about that.
Back to the award ceremony; the annual gala of the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting union, where my father was going to receive his 5th consecutive award for a paper he had written & presented as a radio-engineer. Surrounded with people who admired & idolized him, he seemed entirely at home. He was a self-made man who had pulled himself by his boot straps. It was clear to the sighted that he was proud of himself.
The ceremony began. My mother and I were sitting next to each other. My father was backstage. The welcome speech was followed by a classical dance performance; I could see my mother enjoying it from the vantage of someone who has insider knowledge of a craft. Under the burden and busyness of her domestic life & obligations, her own sitar was languishing somewhere in the house, her own writing journal forgotten in the closet.
Next came the awards. Person No.1, Person No.2, Person No. 3 – my father’s name was called, the name of his paper was mentioned, it was announced that he was representing India at the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union awards. I saw my father emerge and go up the steps to receive his award. I excitedly turned to my mother to point out I had seen my dad but the words remain unsaid in my mouth. I saw my mother’s face – awash with tears, her eyes looking at the man ascending the steps of recognition and glory, the man whose life & home she had anchored through her own life-force, the man whose ambitions were underpinned by the sacrifice of her own dreams, the man she loved.
The man she was proud of.
Swati Srivastava is an immigrant and a multi award-winning writer, director, and voiceover artist. A filmmaker & storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also an environmentalist and lives in a Net Zero Energy home with her life-partner. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com