Did he know that I was there by his bedside? They say that your hearing is the last sense to go so I kept talking, just in case, but he didn’t answer and then, when we’d all stepped out, deliberating whether to switch off the machines keeping him there, he went. In his own time. He would have liked that.
We had been celebrating the last hurrah of the summer holidays at Parc Astérix and were just pausing to decide on the last ride when my phone rang. The connection was iffy but my cousin’s wife was on the line from London and she sounded serious. Come home. Your dad’s in hospital and things don’t look good.
Driving home around the Périphérique I tried to keep my cool not wanting to alarm the children or convey my sense of trepidation. Dad had rung me the previous week to tell me he was going into hospital. I was listening with one ear, my mind on a dozen other things. We didn’t speak about anything personal in our family. Did he have a premonition? I didn’t know what to think but people don’t make that sort of call unless it’s serious.
John managed to book the last Eurostar and I threw some things into a suitcase, just about making the 8.30 pm departure from Gare du Nord. I tried to focus on my vast history book and in the main succeeded. It had been a minor procedure and wouldn't he have gone home days ago?
I picked up my mum in my taxi and we went to the hospital. His eyes were closed. Was he asleep? Unconscious as his organs steadily failed? A hospital infection. Nothing they could do. When he died and I sat for a while all I could remember was the furious, hurtful arguments of the last few years. In his mind he was a family patriarch. In mine he was a slightly doddery and dependent old man who didn’t really understand how we did things these days, with whom it was impossible to debate anything because any discord ended in “It’s because I’m blind.” His death certificate said he was 74 but there was debate about even that.
I don't think I cried once, taking charge of the arrangement, of my disorientated, angry mum. Afterwards I wondered at my lack of grief. Was I really that cold? A funeral that did not thankfully descend into a lecture in Hinduism - I put my foot down, finally, but probably too late - and life continued as normal.
Over the years, I’ve had sudden moments of missing my dad and regretting how things were between us in the end, but unlike my mum, whose creative use of English I invoke almost daily, he’d not been at the front of my mind until this year.
Then, in May, I was elected a ward councillor and as we relaxed at home after a couple of post-count drinks, John told me, almost tearfully, “You know, your dad would have been so proud of you.” I hope so. It's not something that was ever said.
My Dad was an intelligent man who left his Pune university degree course to come and join his brother in the Mother Country. Expecting to finish his degree here, he lived precariously in digs that could ditch him at any time with no notice, once even on Christmas Day. He worked at first on a building site by day and discovered that somehow he didn’t meet the requirements to continue his degree in London. (I discovered only yesterday that he arrived here the year before George Michael’s dad.)
His interest in politics and current affairs was avid. Before long he was going on CND’s Aldermaston marches and soon joined the Labour Party. I was delivering Labour Party leaflets in my local area by the age of 7 and it was about then that, finding a stray tin of South African fruit cocktail in our house, he told me all about the injustices of apartheid. In our house “I don’t care,” was about the worst thing I could ever say, and would bring a tirade of indignant fury.
He was right, though. And I think about that all the time these days. We have to care. If people don’t care, there’s no community, no society. His words inspire and support my worldview.
So, dad, you shaped me. A passionate voyager and polyglot, who did not judge people and believed fervently in justice and that everything would work out. You, who were thrown aside by Thatcherism and redundancy and weakening faculties and daily racial abuse from teenagers not fit to share the bus with you. I wonder what you'd make of all of this.
Twenty years after you left us, I think of you and what you'd do. You shaped me. Thank you. I hope you'd be pleased
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