My Father, My Strength

 

[My father, who died in 1998, would have been 93 years this month. This piece written five years after his death is being republished here.] 

Twenty-three years ago, soon after I landed in New York to continue my research career, I visited the resident audiologist in the hospital affiliated to the college I had just started to work in.  I was looking for a better hearing aid that would improve my hearing.  The revelation of the baffled audiologist still rings in my ears - if I grew up in the US as a boy, with the degree of hearing loss that I had suffered, I would have been put in a special school for the hearing impaired (sign language school).  I explained to the audiologist, and to other hearing professionals who examined me since, as well as to some inquisitive parents of hearing-impaired children, that I had achieved my level of communication due to the efforts of one person – my father.

Back in India in the early sixties, an antibiotic overdose reduced my hearing to marginal levels during my fourth grade - I felt luckier, later listening to horror stories of young children turning blind due to medical drug reactions, in remote parts of India.  My father, a committed social worker without a high school degree, took up the daunting task of bringing me back to the mainstream.  He decided to challenge nature and society to make his younger son hear or, at the very least, make him understand speech.  He would spend one hour every day giving me dictation, and would read a paragraph from a newspaper or a book and try to make me, sitting across the room, comprehend.  In a one-hour exercise, I could decipher a single sentence or just ten words, seldom a paragraph. Notwithstanding the contrition of other family members, and pain of the participants, the dictation sessions were to continue for many years.  It was another three to four years before that I had a chance to try my first hearing aid, a very crude device at that time, and its routine use had to wait another five.

 

My father, tasting some measure of success, continued his forays into my textbooks and during my school years, he would tutor me, for several hours, in all my school subjects.  He would visit my school (and later my college and university), introduce himself to every teacher and plead with them, so his son received a little special attention, within the framework of the regular school. All through my schooling, he would request the teacher that I be given a seat in the first row, practically, at earshot of the speaker. Nothing short of a career in scientific research, he would argue proudly, would do justice to his son’s talent.  He shepherded me through graduate school, and after finishing he encouraged me to pursue a research career in science abroad.  So here I was in New York in 1980.

 

A bit prolific, as I was in my career for sixteen years, I was to learn many new things reading on my own. As the appetite for science was being replaced by the one for technology, I could prepare myself for a career change into computers. I was aided, in my pursuit, by a new generation of digital aids but in most part by the traits instituted and nurtured in me by my father - drive, devotion and, hard work.  A couple of years into my new career in IT, I was planning to visit India and demonstrate to him my newly found skills and success.  Unfortunately, due to some last minute emergencies, my wife and kids had to fly, without me.  The satisfaction, joy and excitement of seeing his beloved grandchildren, was perhaps too much for him, and within 18 hours of meeting my family, my father, maintaining a relatively good health, died of sudden cardiac failure.  This was five years ago.  I still feel he decided to let go, having seen his task completed, successfully.  While living, he was my strength and, in his death, his legacy continues to be my strength.  Being a father myself, this is what I would wish to be.