I belong to a generation and, perhaps more importantly, a social milieu in which we didn’t talk to our fathers. We were more intimate with mothers; our relations with our fathers were formal. We also don’t talk much about death. We have a superstition that it would court bad luck. But our greater reticence, I feel, is about love. It is not that love is hidden—the stoic father who gives money to the son going away to college asking if he has eaten or if he has kept the railway ticket safely is showing love—but it is seldom expressed in language. I became a writer to point out what was left unsaid, not so much to say it as much as to gesture toward it. I wrote this poem after my recent visit to my father in Patna. I was accompanied by my 13-year-old son, Rahul.
Amitava Kumar is an author, most recently, of the novel A Time Outside This Time. Born and raised in Bihar, he now teaches English at Vassar College, New York.
