My Father and Me

It's Fathers' Day today and we had our usual prayer for dads during church service. But instead of the usual blessing by the pastor, today a dad was invited to pray for the fathers. 

His prayer touched me, because it gave me an insight into fatherhood - which, I admit, I had never spent any time thinking about. I have only ever thought about what it means to mother children, the joys and challenges of motherhood and what kind of a mother I was being to my daughters. But before today, I had not tried to look through the eyes of a father. And I realise, fatherhood is no less challenging.

I remember my own father fondly. Lately, I have also begun to wonder if my sister and I had lionised him, but nevertheless, I know my father was a bigger influence on me than my mother was. 

Interestingly, when I think about my father, the first values and pictures that come to mind are all to do with money. From him, I learnt the importance of thrift and hard work. I remember he gave me a tiny notebook when I started school and in it he taught me to write down every cent I spent from the 50 cent allowance he gave me. My first set of accounts! My dad was an accounts clerk so I suppose he was teaching me the most important life skill he knew... 

At the start of the week, my father would give me a 50 cent coin. He never gave me any combination of coins to make up 50. It was always one big 50 cent coin and I remember feeling really reluctant to part with the coin and receiving many small coins in return after a purchase. Somehow it had the feeling of breaking things up :) At the end of the week, I would have to show my father my little notebook in which I had written down every purchase I had made. 

I remember the first time I broke the one rule my father had about money - never borrow. Never. My downfall was chocolate milk. One adventurous and greedy recess, I bought a whole bottle of chocolate milk to drink. To my horror, I got no change back after giving my 50 cent to the drink vendor! I was terrified because I now had no money for the week and worse, I would have to record one big purchase in my notebook! My dad would know! 

In my desperation, I asked my friend Maheswari (oh how well I remember her name and her face to this day) to lend me 50 cents. And she did. The week passed uneventfully, the purchases were recorded, the notebook was inspected, no chocolate milk was mentioned anywhere...

But my day of reckoning came. Because the next week, my personal Shylock asked me for her money back. Many years later when I read the line "O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive...", this was the incident that came immediately to mind. Because that was when my dance of deceit and counter-deceit began.

I couldn't return Maheswary her money because every cent I spent needed to be recorded and even if I gave her back 10 cents at a time, what was I going to put in my book? It amazes me now to think back and realise the strange adherence to truth - I couldn't bring myself to lie to my father by inventing reasons that could have covered up the cents that could have been trickled back to Maheswary. Yet, I had broken the cardinal rule my father had set for me. Just one rule - and I had broken it. [Yes, this is the account of my personal Fall. The symbolism didn't escape me :)]

The final crunch came 2 weeks later, when tired of my evasive behaviour, Maheswary brought out her secret weapon - if you don't return my money, she said, I will tell my father. The terror that created in the heart of an 8-year old, I cannot describe to you. Maheswary's father had a black moustache and he rode a motorbike. My father was 58 and drove the car very slowly...

I was rescued from being thrown into the debtors' prison at the age of 8 because I sidled up to my mother that night and simply said, "Amma can I have 50 cents?" And my mother said "Go take it from my handbag." That was it. The end of my weeks of misery, my weeks of falsifying accounts, my weeks of terror at the sound of a motorbike. 

To this day, I have an aversion to debts. I agonise when I see J's telephone bill lying on the table. I can't wait for the day the mortgage on my flat will be fully paid. And for 6 months now I have been putting off starting on renovation plans for the flat because I can't bring myself to take out a renovation loan. 

I wonder if my father ever knew about this incident. But he taught me a life skill that has helped me a great deal, as a student, as a young adult in my first job, as a wife and and a mother raising a family. I have progressed today from notebooks to an Excel spreadsheet, but budgetting has helped me keep my head above waters all my life.

And as I think back on this Father's Day about my dad, I also wonder what I would have done if my mother had not given me the money. I don't quite know why she did that. Maybe she was distracted by the television show she was watching. Maybe she didn't quite hear what I said. Or maybe she too had been given a notebook and she knew the folly of  the misspent 50 cents. :)