Hello Dad-Story

Hello Dad

By

Tipu Salman Makhdoom

The dumb lying in this grave was my only father. I don’t know if it was because of some kind of hormonal imbalance or what, but he had an abnormal godly passion for creation. I mean he had assumed himself to be a small-scale competitor of God. Used his manly tricks with Mom to produce me. Kept filling his liver with liquor to produce cancer. And did a lot of circus trying to produce wealth and Fame.

Well, to be honest, I am not disrespectful of my father. Its only that he died at 55 and I am now 85 years old. My sons are now older than my father.

My father was an honest, hardworking gentleman. Only that he was not achieving his goals in life. His goals? Simple, normal, popular! Pretty wife and rich in-laws; top-level job; big mansion; foreign qualified son, etc., etc. And he had been working real hard to achieve these goals. But life kept him failing. Wife was pretty but in-laws were not rich. Job was good but not of the top-level. He did build a house but it was no mansion.

He was born in a lower-middle class family. So, in order to study higher, he had to do job during studies. Degree was not finished so the best job he could grab was of lower-middle cadre. This cadre job could not land him into rich in-laws. Rich family kids complete their degrees and join management level jobs in their mid-twenties. My father reached there at forty. And he could never bridge this fifteen years’ gap.

Landing on top management level was a new horizon. Applicable currency here was connections. And people who had reached here fifteen years prior had already made a strong mesh of connections. Dad had no way breaking into it. Accepting this reality turned him from a workaholic to alcoholic. He never understood that a man’s travel to success starts from his birth-place.

We chose my university and his hospital almost simultaneously.

It was in those hospital days that he started talking about his life. He told me that he had dreams too. He wanted to sing and dance and travel around the world but the goals, plans and targets never let him. He had not forgot them though. He could not. He had only delayed them till his retirement.

Listening to the drowning babbles of a dying man, I realized that his life had to start in old-age. He was dying before my eyes --- yet unborn!

Just a few days before dying he made me promise him that I would achieve his unfinished goals. Good job, big mansion, etc. That night I went to the hospital’s roof and cried out loud.

Whenever I fulfill one of my dreams, I come to his grave. First time I came after marrying the love of my life. Second time when I went to Africa. Third time when I left a lucrative job and chose a much less paying job of my liking. And it kept on.

Like my father I am dying too. But unlike him, I will not die unborn.