bogeyandruby

My father would have been 95 yesterday, at least on paper, his biological age being a year older.

To clarify, one’s age is something that is easily tampered with in his birth country of India, sometimes for reasons of pride (for example, being an unmarried female past her socially-accepted due date) or of convenience (as when needing to repeat a school year because it took eight months of travel by cart and bullock and mahout-led elephants through rough terrain and monsoons to return to the mother land).

In any case, he had no birth certificate to prove otherwise.

Lucky me, I was also born in India but have three birth certificates, all with incorrect variations of my birthdate and vague versions of my parents’ names. I remember handing all three certificates to the attorney handling my divorce suggesting she pick the best one out of the lot. “Who are these people?”, she asked, pointing to the line that listed BPS Cheema and JB Cheema as my birth parents. This was the certificate she ended up using out of the three and thankfully, even though it listed the wrong birthdate, I am happily divorced and even more happily remarried today.

The day before my dad’s birthday, I stopped by the cemetery to put some flowers on his grave, partly out of duty because I missed Father’s Day this year and the anniversary of his death in July, but mostly because, like many people who experience the periodic grief that accompanies significant calendar dates, I find performing some kind of ritual helps ease what I would describe as a restlessness, the feeling that I should be memorializing as the day approaches.

My father loved a party and though he never expected a fuss and indeed would chide us for wasting our money on presents, he sure loved attention, especially when it involved a gathering of people and food. Someone I know, who lost her daughter in a tragic accident, packs a picnic lunch and a beer when visiting her daughter’s grave. If I tried that where my father is buried, I would likely end up sitting in goose poop or worse, on someone else’s grave. Instead, I bring flowers, always the same colour scheme, pinks and purples interspersed with white, though I keep intending to go with yellows and oranges (my favourite colours). It may have something to do with the shirt he is wearing in the photo we used for his death notice or because it reminds me of the pink turban of his that I found in a box under his bed when clearing out his room.

Truthfully, apart from his name on the plaque marking his grave, I have no sense of my father in the cemetery where he is buried, not even an inkling. After all, only half of his physical remains are buried there, the remainder of the ashes being stored in a travel-ready receptacle at my brother’s house awaiting transport to the Kartarpur Corridor, a religious pathway that connects two Sikh gurdwaras, one in India and the other in Pakistan. The plan is to one day release those remains into the Ravi River on the Pakistani side of the divide. Though he didn’t specifically ask us to do this, he referenced this holy site repeatedly just before he died, recounting how when he was twelve, he and his mother travelled from their village in Northern Pakistan to Kartarpur to release his father’s remains into the river. Death, despite its morbid awfulness, brings its own romantic notions and at the time, I interpreted this to be an unconscious desire on his part to return once again to the motherland, this time by plane, train and automobile.