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Yesterday was International Men’s Day, and it made me think about the men—or rather, the absence of men—in my own growing-up years.
My parents separated when I was four or five. My father took my elder brother to Patna and raised him there; I stayed with my mother (and later my aunt) in another city. The two women shaped almost everything I became.
My father and I met once every few years—brief, formal visits when either he came to Pune (where I moved at ten) or I went to Patna.
One visit stands out. In 1977 he stopped in Pune on his way to Delhi for the Janata Party swearing-in. As a founder-member of the old Socialist Party, and an editor of a newspaper, he believed the new government would finally give him a role. It didn’t. His comrades—Raj Narain, Chandrashekhar—were now the elite.
He was elbowed off the stage and, in the melee, lost one of his slippers. He returned to Patna quieter, smaller, a disillusioned man.
When I joined a newspaper as a copy editor in 1985, he asked when I would become a News Editor. I shook my head. Every rare meeting after that, he asked the same question, right until he died in 1994.
Nearly twenty years later, in 2004, the editor of Hindustan Times Lucknow, Sunita Aron, called me into her cabin and handed me my letter of promotion as News Editor.
I sat down, read the two words, and suddenly couldn’t breathe properly. Tears came without warning.
Sunita looked alarmed. “Are you all right?”
I managed to say between sobs, “My father used to ask me, every time we met, when I would become News Editor.. I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop myself.”
I don’t know if I was crying for the little boy who barely knew his father, or for the question that had travelled all those years to find me in that cabin.
So yes, on Men’s Day, I remembered a man too—the one who wasn’t there most days, but whose dreams still reached me when it mattered most.
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