The Inheritance of Love

A man finds it harder, somehow, to forgive his father for his mistakes than his mother for hers. Perhaps, we all see the holy virgin Mary in our mothers, her entire existence centred on her baby. If selflessness were a vice, she would stand condemned as well, as is sometimes the case when daughters, still new to womanhood, measure their mothers and find them wanting, punishing them for not being the kind of women they dreamed they’d become. But the lot of fathers— theirs is a sorrow doubled, for they are called to account by both their sons and daughters. And perhaps it is true that we ask too much of fathers—far more than we ask of mothers.

I consider myself lucky, in that way, to have been able to "rescue" my father, at least in my own heart. I have seen great strength in the man. Great strength that once looked to me like great weakness. There are strange men in this strange world who carry their weaknesses as though they were shields. He was one of them. I loved my father all my life, but the man I met only after he was gone. Youth has a tendency to demand that everything true must also be grave, weighty, wrapped in solemnity. The virtue of mirth comes much later. And for some unfortunate ones, it never does.

My father’s greatness was greatest in service to my mother in times of sickness. Like so many “stronger” people, he never protected himself from his own love. He was one of those rare men who never shielded himself from the sheer might of love, who did not wrap it in ritual or stifle it with dignity or hide behind the notion that its open expression is indecent. In the last months before my mother passed away, he worked like a man possessed. He stayed up through long, endless nights, holding her hand while she writhed in pain. He hunted for medicines, arranged for blood, and made sure there was always home-cooked food. He straightened her pillow before she even had to ask. 

In a moment of anguish, he once burst out and accused me of “leading her to her death.” For years, I carried the sting of those words, blaming him for the wound they left. But now, I feel a strange pride. I saw a man who would fight the whole world for the woman he loved, a man who placed her above all else. In his rage, in his grief, he showed me the face of a love so fierce it consumes. That man was my father.

My mother’s death just about finished him. We have our rages, and we build them up little by little. Only rarely do we unbuild them. I raged at him for dying like he had raged at a god whom he believed took away his wife from him. But in the end, rage only circles back on itself, leaving nothing but silence and the ache of things unsaid. In time, I came to understand his grief, and with it, my own. Somewhere, tangled in the knots of sorrow and anger, there was love—quiet, stubborn, and unspoken, but love all the same. It’s what remained after the rage had burned itself out. 

To me, he was the bravest man in the world—a man who chose to let his love undo him, rather than cling to ideas that might have lessened its intensity and allowed him to go on living. As a child, I learned a thousand lessons from him, but the lessons I took from the man he became were the ones that truly shaped me. The gift of love—fierce, unflinching, and selfless—is the greatest inheritance he passed on to me.

“इश्क़ का रोग तो विर्से में मिला था मुझको
दिल धड़कता हुआ सीने में मिला था मुझ को।”

“The disease of love was inherited in my bloodline,
It was a beating heart that I found within my chest.”

- Bharat Bhushan Pant.