My father was my first love. It wasn’t a romantic love, of course, but all the ache of love was in it. He was handsome, charming and dangerous. It was more than just a minor crush – it was a fatal, all-consuming yearning for his affection that engulfed me like a slow, devastating bushfire. Heartbreak was inevitable.
Dad shared his birthday with Jesus. “Look! Everyone celebrates my birthday,” he’d exclaim, pointing at the houses lit up like Harrods on our street, the joke never getting old. He was a bon vivant – nothing made him happier than a festive table creaking under the weight of calorific delights. On Christmas Day 2010, we turned a blind eye to him scarfing a third helping of birthday cake – and I am glad we did. It was his 70th and his last.
By his sixth decade, Dad’s maladies had multiplied, but he remained full of bravado even as he was collapsing. After major heart surgery, he groggily went back to business, ignoring medical advice to maintain his proud, immigrant work ethic. When he got cancer, it shook us. Alight with rage, I watched him, always young for his years, being looted by old age and sickness. Seeing him in hospital hooked up to the usual medical paraphernalia seemed surreal, but the illness brought out a curious vulnerability from a man who had always ruled our family with inflexible patriarchal authority.
Over the next two years I witnessed a changed man. He was famously thrifty, but suddenly he was spending and accumulating; a fancy car, fat gold watches, domestic gadgets – irons, juicers, toasters, steamers – and enough jewellery to deck my mother out like a Christmas tree. At night I’d often tiptoe downstairs to find him dozing, his jaw slack, face lit by the Technicolor blare of the shopping channels – telephone and credit card grasped firmly in his hand. I suppose it was a coping mechanism – a strange sort of logic – the body withers, but a diamond necklace is forever.
I was also surprised by his sudden interest in my fledgling career in food. I was the fourth daughter born to parents who fervently prayed for a son. His wish for a miniature version of himself was finally granted a few years after me. Dad adored my brother, but reserved a special kind of contempt and inferior treatment for XX chromosomes. He had been conditioned by a rigid misogynist culture that hailed boys as assets and wrote off girls as burdens. He was reluctant to invest time or money in us, likening educating us to planting seeds in your neighbour’s garden.
My refusal to consider arranged marriage proposals as my elder sisters had dutifully done, and instead pursue my education, was a cause of great despair to him. Years of standoffs, storms and slammed doors followed. I tried and failed to be the apple of his eye, mainly because I couldn’t even look him in the eye. Even on good days, we barely muttered at each other, neither of us remotely comfortable with the other. Still, I hung out like a damp sheet waiting for a speck of his approval. And then finally it came.
Dad had trained as an aeronautical engineer before leaving his airline job to invest in property and business. He started encouraging me to open a place of my own. A bricks-and-mortar restaurant seemed like a steady investment to him, even though it wasn’t part of my life plan. But one night, when I cooked at my first pop-up at a packed-out restaurant, I was elated and could barely wait to call him and fill him in. It wasn’t to be. In the early hours I was woken by the shrill sound of the telephone. I have no recollection of how I got to A&E, where I held his hand as he slipped into unconsciousness. When he was released from intensive care on to a ward, we hoped this was the beginning of his recuperation. But it was just the beginning of the end.
In the final weeks of his life, Dad’s mind seemed to loiter elsewhere. I looked into his eyes trying to feel my way into their blank darkness. Mostly he looked like a frightened old man in a hospital smock lingering anxiously in the anteroom between this world and the next. Late one night, as he pleaded with me to let him go home for the umpteenth time, he gestured a cradle with his arms and said, “You don’t understand. I have little children at home I have to take care of.” I calmed him, promising to get him out in the morning before bawling angrily in the corridor. There were phantasmal moments, too. Some days he seemed to be rigorously washing his hands, opening an invisible tap or looking desperately for lost keys. Once, he announced to my alarmed grandmother that her late husband, his father, was sitting at his bedside.
When he died in May, a few days after my birthday, I felt spurned. I missed his passing by mere minutes. It is etched on my mind like it is happening all over again. I stand next to him bellowing and yowling, my heart exploding. I hold him for a long time. My sister lifts his arms and puts them around me. His mouth is open, his spirit flown out of it. His hospital gown is wet with our tears and all I want to do is fall asleep right there, next to him, in the middle of the morning.
I was doomed to unrequited love from the very beginning, not only because I could never possess him wholly (I shared him with four other siblings), but also because he was an imperfect man. He was far from a monster, but he was distant, self-absorbed and reckless in the years that mattered most. He was selfish, too, compartmentalising his life so he could do as he pleased without palpable guilt, leaving me with a clumsy sense of inadequacy I still find it difficult to balance. There were some cheerful moments in my pursuit of him, but he always let me down with elegant agility. It was this uncertain dynamic that made my love for him enduring.
At home, I assumed my role as a kettle-swinging lunatic. Making tea for the mourners was the only way I could cope. The next morning I went to my flat to pack a bag. It was a beautiful late-spring morning and I considered the things that my father’s death had stolen from me. There would be no one to give me away at my wedding, no one’s approval to seek, no one to protect me, even from my own mistakes. My father was here. Now he is no longer here. I tried to tune into the memory of his voice, but my own scrambled thoughts and white noise took over. I couldn’t resurrect the sound.
I was frightened I was forgetting all the things I had taken for granted – the set of his eyes, the breathy stuttered Muttley-esque laughter, the roll of his voice that rang out from every room in our house. I tried to piece bits of him together, but it was like a jigsaw that I just couldn’t get right. I feared that the loss of him was permanent, a loss beyond recovery.
As painful as it was, I began to speak to my mother about him as well as to his friends and other relatives – . And as I joined the fragments of him together, I began to understand why it seemed that for a lot of my life my father had confiscated himself from us. He, too, had faced an emotional ice age growing up with a mother who dominated her clan with cold, steely control. He had been left unable to thaw until his final years when he was fighting cancer and with it his demons. In finding out the truth about his private past and struggles, I found peace. I held up his photo to my face, kissed it and forgave him. Although he was unable to voice it, he loved the very idea of his children, even before we were born.
Circumstances may have exiled my father from the emotional landscape of my life, but I now understand that our connection does not depend on physical or intimate proximity. Genetics has wilfully rubber-stamped him on to my every cell. He glints at me from my mirror, his language invades my speech and his loony scattiness and bloody-mindedness are my inheritance. Our bond is one that transcends the world, universe, and even death, because although he is gone, my father lives stubbornly in me. So this Christmas, as every year, I will bake a birthday cake for him. I may not have been a daddy’s girl, but I am very much my father’s daughter.
Jikoni: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes from an Immigrant Kitchen by Ravinder Bhogal (Bloomsbury, £26). Buy it for £22.62 at guardianbookshop.com
