Remembering our Fathers
To my five-year-old eyes, it felt like a strange dance. First, we packed the bedroll (Indian version of a sleeping bag) for my father and collected his favorite books. We waited and waited for the police to arrive. After a few days, we decided they must have forgotten about him and unpacked his bedroll. That very night, there was a knock on the door and the local policemen, who normally accompanied their wives to my mother’s clinic, sheepishly arrived to pick him up. They waited aside while he repacked his bags and took him away.
I did not know how to explain to my friends that my father was a political prisoner. In 1962 when Indo-China hostilities had broken out, as a life-long member of Indian Communist Party, my father was a suspect and was rounded up with all other Party members and taken to jail. Kids in the neighborhood told me stories of brutality against prisoners and I kept worrying about his safety.
Two months later my mother packed Papa’s favorite foods and I and my eight-month-old baby sister accompanied her to visit my father in a jail about two hours away from our tiny town in Gujarat. When I arrived, the visiting hall was full of people I had known throughout my life. Vajukaka did his magic trick of pulling out candy from my ears. Batuk Vora gave me ice halwa from Mumbai. Papa tried to convince me he was living royally in jail and could eat anything he wanted. He could prove it by producing anything I asked for. He somehow manipulated me in into asking for kheer (rice pudding) that he magically produced by mixing rice, milk and sugar.
He returned home in six months but he had no answer to my questions as to why Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru thought it necessary to arrest him and other good people I knew. Until the day my father was arrested, Nehru was an iconic figure in my mind. Only a few months ago, my father had taken me to listen to him a few hours away from our hometown. Thousands of people patiently waited for Nehru’s arrival in the pouring rain. Perched on my father’s shoulders, I held up an umbrella over him, waiting with owe for the Prime Minister’s arrival. Why would the same Pandit Nehru think my father would be a danger to India and arrest him?
To me, political imprisonment has always been a blot on civil rights. To my father, it was a way of life. He was arrested by the British government during the Indian Independence movement; he was arrested by Morarji Desai’s government for seeking a separate Gujarat state from Maharashtra; he was arrested by Pandit Nehru’s government for simply belonging to CPI. The only sign of eight years of his life behind bars during a 30-year career as an activist and another 30 years as a political journalist was his dislike of spinach. Spinach to him was synonymous with jail, and we only ate spinach when he was not around.
I stopped agreeing with my father’s politics a long time ago. He himself became disillusioned with his politics by the end of his life. However, he never stopped caring about the world around him and, most importantly, empathizing with the marginalized. As the world goes crazy around us, India-China tensions flare up again, and cries of “I can’t breathe” from another father, George Floyd, flood the airwaves, I think of the sacrifices my father and his generation made so that the world can be a better place.
My world is a better place than the one in which my parents were born. Unlike my mother’s fight to attend medical school, no one ever expected me to drop out of college. I was born in an Independent India, and my children live in a world where the US Supreme Court honors the equality of LGBTQ community. There is a long way to go, but today is the time to honor my father and all the fathers (and mothers) who made this day possible.
