My father as a person

I had never thought to question what it meant to be a daughter. In the way that roles settle around us before we are old enough to name them, mine was inherited. I learned very early to step into my mother's shoes when she was not there to fill them herself. In a South Asian household, familial duties are not so much assigned as observed, I believe.

With that "doing something unquestioningly", I forgot to observe my father as a person.

I was the one to learn to serve the men of the house. My mother is a wise woman, always managing work and her home in ways I see as exploitative, but I believed in anatomy is destiny as a girl groomed by the status quo. One does not need to quote Marx, Engels, or Fromm because these are felt when you have little to leverage on. Theories came much later in life, but 15-year-old me could understand the jargon quite easily thanks to my role as a "good daughter".

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Even though the two are often conflated in our part of the world, I quickly understood the difference between being a good father and a good husband. This comes as no surprise when my father always focused on putting food on the table, even though my mother put the same amount of food on the same table, but also had the duty of being a good homemaker. She, just like me, never questioned it, nor did my father, because why would he? He occupied the sweet spot of modern manhood—progressive enough to "allow" his wife to work, traditional enough to expect warm meals waiting for him at the end of the day. It was a winning arrangement, at least for one of them.

See, it is incredibly tricky writing about a man who is both loved and implicated. My father is not malicious; he is kind, generous with affection, and funny. He surprises me with things I love to eat, he makes me tea some days, he makes jokes when I am bummed but when I observe him as a person who is a husband to my mother, I have to see him from a different light. The tenderness he shows me does not undo the comfort he has enjoyed for years in a marriage that has asked more of one than the other. It is a strange, dissonant thing to hold someone close and still see the ways they benefit from a system that has kept another you love in its debt.

I ask my mother what she likes about her husband, but she lists things he does as a father. The reliability of fatherhood is mistaken for the affections of a spouse. I suppose this is how it is for many of our mothers: they marry men and stay for the fathers.

When I was little, my mother never said a word about my father. But my adulthood opened something in her, and now the sorrow comes in drips, like a leaking tap that has stood the test of time. Little shards of memory, not loud, not angry, just quiet things like the burden of never being appreciated for the things she brings to the table, sometimes as a working woman, and sometimes as a homemaker. Grief in teaspoons, not tumults. A woman's sadness, served gently.

But little does she know that I noticed her sadness well before she held out her little hands to me.

My father sees my mother's labour as breath, as weather, as something that arrives without asking and will never leave. He does not name it, does not thank it—why thank the sun for rising? The hours she works outside the house and then inside it crumble into one long, invisible shift. He believes himself a good man—better than most—because once, he cleared the table, and once, he cooked rice and left the kitchen glowing with his own virtue. But he forgets: these were choices he made, little gestures seeking applause. For my mother, there were no choices.

My friend, whose mother is a homemaker, told me this story about his parents that still makes me sad because much of it resonates with my life. So, his dad, freshly retired and full of what I can only call "breakfast ambitions", casually announces he'd like fresh parathas every morning from now on. Now, here's the kicker: everyone knows his mom has to be out the door early for work, and making fresh parathas is no quick microwave fix.

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Our Relationships With Our Fathers

My friend found the whole request, frankly, a bit absurd. Who asks for something so time-consuming without thinking about the logistics? He told his father this, protesting on his mother's behalf, but you could see it—the poor guy was genuinely bummed. Like, breakfast without the perfect flaky paratha just wasn't going to cut it. The funny thing is, his mother still got up early to make parathas for breakfast, unthanked.

So, yes, my father is not malicious. But he is inconsiderate in ways that chip away slowly and wear a person down without ever raising his voice. He does not thank her because it does not occur to him that thanks are needed. He thinks he is a good husband because he ate the food he did not enjoy, because he sometimes does the smidgen and expects it to count for more. But he forgot what it means to be a partner. His wife, my mother, bore it all in silence, her love turned into labour, her days a long line of things he did not notice.

It used to be very difficult to see him as a product of patriarchy because he spoke the language of my discontent. Maybe he is a funny person because he did not have to worry about dinner, never had to rush home with a mind already full of tomorrow. Seeing my father as a person truly revealed my fear of becoming like my mother as a wife (should I choose to be one someday). So instead of being an agreeable daughter who has to fill in my mother's shoes, I choose to throw the shoes away because they give me the same blisters they gave my mother.