I watched Zakir Khan’s Papa Yaar on Netflix recently, and what stayed with me was not so much the comedy as the strange familiarity of it. I have followed Zakir for years, from the days when his comedy appeared in all sorts of places, including the exuberant AIB-era world of Indian stand-up. His comedy then had an electrical quality to it. The swear words came thick and fast, sometimes with such enthusiasm that I did not even understand half of them, but somehow enjoyed hearing them.
Perhaps that was part of the attraction.
I came from a conservative family where a girl’s speech had many watchers. There were words one simply did not say, not in public and certainly not in private. So listening to a comedian fling them about freely had a peculiar satisfaction. It was not necessarily the meaning of the words. It was the freedom of saying what I had been trained not to say.
But Papa Yaar was different.
The sakht launda was still somewhere in the room, but the armour seemed thinner. Zakir was telling stories about growing up, about his father and mother, about being five, thirteen, twenty-one and then a grown man living away from home. There was affection, embarrassment, irritation and memory. At times he moved into philosophical territory, and those moments did not always catch me as comedy. Once you move the audience from a comic register into a philosophical one, it becomes harder to throw the net back into the water and catch the laughs again.
But as storytelling, I thought he did something rather beautiful.
He allowed a life to unfold through incidents.
At five, there are rules about how a child behaves when visiting somebody else’s house. There are biscuits, little obsessions and the strange logic of childhood. At thirteen, there is the great adventure of going out with friends on a borrowed bike to clear one’s head, only for the small excursion to turn into a 200-kilometre journey. Then there are the parents waiting at home and the explanation that has to be invented. Somewhere along the way, a bridge has apparently fallen.
That kind of story made me smile because children everywhere seem to possess the same extraordinary confidence that their parents will accept an explanation which would collapse under the slightest examination.
Years later, the same kind of reasoning returns in another form, and suddenly the earlier incident becomes part of the larger story.
That is when I realised I wasn’t really watching Zakir’s father.
I was remembering mine.
If Zakir had his Bourbon biscuits, I had my razor blades.
I was a child when my sister asked me to steal my father’s packet of razor blades. She liked playing with blades. I was apparently the useful junior member of the operation. I stole them, was caught, and my father hit me on the thigh while I was sitting in padmaasan.
My sister was not punished.
I was.
There are few things as absolute as a child’s sense of injustice. I knew precisely where the fault lay. I had done the stealing, but the idea had not originated in my mind. My sister had sent me.
And yet, before the day was over, my father was leaving for Iraq. At some point he discovered the truth and tried to pacify me.
I forgave him.
It took perhaps two hours.
That is one of the mysteries of childhood. We are capable of being completely outraged with our parents and then completely forgiving them without ever requiring a formal apology, a tribunal or a written settlement. We do not maintain a ledger of parental offences. We get angry, we sulk, we cry, and then we go back.
Perhaps that is because the relationship is larger than the incident.
I think about another incident from around thirteen. I wanted to change schools because I wanted to take a course that included Mathematics even though I disliked it. My father categorically refused. His answer was essentially that I should continue with whatever had been offered by the school.
Today, it is easy to look at that and say that a parent should have encouraged a child’s interests. But my father belonged to a different understanding of education. You were given an education; you worked hard; you made something of it. There was not necessarily a conversation about designing an educational experience around your individual passion.
I wanted to explore.
He wanted me to continue.
The disagreement was not really about Mathematics. It was about two different ideas of what life was supposed to be.
At twenty-one, the same disagreement appeared again, this time around work. I left my first job after three months. My father gave me the lecture to stay in a job, work hard and rise higher.
His philosophy was straightforward. Stay. Work. Gain experience. Rise.
Mine was becoming something else.
I wanted to explore. I wanted to find out what my passion was. I wanted to know what made me feel connected to the work I was doing.
I was not necessarily looking for an easier life or even a better job. I was looking for a connection between myself and the work.
My father had a map.
I was beginning to realise I needed to draw my own.
Neither of us was necessarily wrong. He was giving me the wisdom available to him. I was trying to discover what was available to me.
And perhaps that is one of the quiet tensions between parents and children everywhere. Parents give us the map they know. Children eventually discover that they must travel a landscape the parent has never seen.
Yet all these stories about fathers inevitably bring mothers into the picture.
Indian mothers have a particular talent for being both our refuge and our betrayal.
We can tell our mother something in confidence, receive sympathy and reassurance, and then discover that the information has somehow travelled directly to our father.
We have been sold.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And somehow we forgive them every time.
The remarkable thing is that we forget. Not literally, perhaps. We remember perfectly well that Amma has sold us before. But the next time we need someone to listen to us, we go back to Amma.
Perhaps this too has less to do with betrayal than with the peculiar structure of the traditional household. The mother may be emotionally closer to the child, but she may also see maintaining the father’s authority as part of her role. The idea of the pativrata wife carries a whole cultural expectation around loyalty and duty to the husband.
From the child’s point of view, however, the arrangement is wonderfully confusing.
Amma is the person who understands you.
Amma is also the person who can hand you over to Appa.
And yet we love her.
We forgive her.
We return.
Perhaps families everywhere are built from precisely these contradictions.
We talk about Hindu families, Muslim families, Christian families, Sikh families. We talk about customs, food, prayer, language, clothing and festivals. We imagine that religion creates fundamentally different worlds.
It certainly creates different traditions.
But put a child inside the house and something rather remarkable happens.
The child still gets told to study.
The child still wants something the parents don’t want to give.
The child still comes home late.
The mother still complains about the father.
The father still complains about the child.
The child still believes the explanation for being late is perfectly convincing.
Someone still says, “When I was your age…”
Someone still says, “But why can’t I?”
Someone still says, “Because I said so.”
And somebody eventually eats something in the kitchen after everyone has gone to bed.
Religion be damned.
The human comedy remains remarkably consistent.
My own father was never particularly my favourite-maker. My sister was his favourite. He was, for much of my childhood, exasperated with me. And yet I looked up to him.
I also understood something about him that perhaps I could not have articulated then. He seemed to live by a sense of duty. His marriage, too, seemed to me less like a story of romantic declarations and more like two people carrying out the obligations of a life together.
My mother had her own running commentary on this.
“If not for me, no woman could live with your father.”
I suspect that sentence has been spoken in households across India, irrespective of what deity sits in the prayer room.
My parents were not perfect people.
They were human.
They had their temperaments, their prejudices, their limitations, their ideas about what children should do and how life should be lived. They sometimes misunderstood me. I sometimes misunderstood them.
But they never made me feel that I was a threat to their authority.
That is something I appreciate more as I grow older.
I could disagree with them without having to overthrow them.
And I loved them.
I rarely told them.
I preferred to let my actions speak.
Perhaps that was our language.
There was another kind of understanding much later, after my divorce. My father never discussed my divorce. He did not turn it into family conversation. When my mother had an outburst about my marriage, he contained it.
There was no great speech.
No dramatic declaration.
Just restraint.
Looking back, I think that, may have been one of the quietest forms of love he gave me.
The father who had once hit me for stealing razor blades, who had refused to let me change schools, who had lectured me about staying in my first job, eventually knew when not to interfere.
And perhaps that is the strange journey between a parent and a child.
At five, the parent knows what happened.
At thirteen, the parent knows what you should study.
At twenty-one, the parent knows what you should do with your working life.
And eventually the parent learns that your life is yours.
The relationship changes without anyone announcing that it has changed.
That is what I think I recognised in Zakir Khan’s stories.
I did not see my father in his father.
I saw my own family in the spaces between the stories.
The affection.
The irritation.
The absurd explanations.
The parental authority.
The child who wants to escape it.
The child who returns anyway.
The mother who will sell you to the father and then feed you dinner.
The father who can be distant and still be the person you look up to.
The grown child who discovers that love does not always need to be spoken.
Perhaps this is why I miss my parents.
Not because they gave me some perfect childhood. They didn’t.
I miss the ordinary moments.
The everyday presence.
The irritating things.
The funny things.
The conversations that seemed unimportant at the time and have somehow survived longer than the people who spoke them.
We often imagine that what connects human beings must be something grand—religion, philosophy, culture, nationality.
Perhaps sometimes it is something much smaller.
A child caught stealing.
A father saying no.
A mother selling you out.
A ridiculous excuse for coming home late.
A lecture about work.
A parent choosing silence when silence is kinder.
A child who never says “I love you” but keeps showing up.
We may pray differently.
We may eat differently.
We may call our parents by different names.
But inside the home, we are still learning the same difficult, funny, tender lesson:
how to love people who are imperfect, how to be loved by people who do not always understand us, and how to grow up without completely leaving the child we once were.
Religion be damned.
Life, when lived inside a family, is often just the same everywhere.
Credit: In Convo with Goosey (AI Powered ChatGPT)
