Sooner or later, we all become our fathers

Last week, I was at a friend's home. As we sat down for dinner, he turned to the domestic worker and said, "Go fetch Boro Baba," summoning his eldest son while the younger one and the two girls had already gathered around the table.

A few days before that, I had been at his office, sharing lunch with him and his father. As the food arrived, he looked towards the old gentleman and said, "Baba, you start first."

“Baba”.

I address mine by that as well. When I was a little boy, my father used to call me by the very same word.

The symmetry of it struck me only later.

In our part of the world, the word often performs a curious migration. It belongs first to the father, then to the son. It is both title and endearment, authority and affection.

One generation lends it to another as though entrusting a family heirloom.

We spend our lives moving towards our fathers, even when we imagine ourselves travelling away from them.

That journey is seldom deliberate.

It occurs in increments too subtle to notice. A gesture borrowed unconsciously. A phrase repeated involuntarily. A preference inherited without consent.

And then one day a son catches his reflection in a mirror and discovers a familiar stranger staring back.

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What is compartmentalisation in a world full of noise?

My father is a man of few words. At almost 80, he remains sparing with speech. There are, however, a handful of stories he tells.

One concerns the death of his own father. The old man was out on a morning walk when a truck hit him. Its heavy wheels crushed his head. My father, then the same age as my elder brother is today, went to the site and gathered fragments of his father's brain from the road into a polythene bag.

When he narrates the incident there is no melodrama. No self-pity. No theatrics.

A stark recital of horror delivered with the composure of a man who long ago accepted that grief, like weather arrives whether one is prepared for it or not.

Two days ago, one of the reports I was subediting concerned a similar incident: a person crushed under the wheels of a truck.

The account was not identical to my father's story, yet it echoed it with unnerving fidelity across the decades.

Every son receives an estate invisible to the eye.

Some inherit land. Others inherit debt. Most inherit stories.

But beneath all those lie deeper bequests. Temperaments. Instincts. Wounds. Survival.

We inherit courage and cowardice alike, virtues and vices, valour and vulnerability, convictions and contradictions.

Sometimes we inherit a father's strengths, sometimes we inherit the scars produced by those strengths.

The transmission is rarely voluntary. But there is something faintly tragic about succession -- becoming oneself is, in part, to become someone else.

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The children Mother’s Day leaves behind

Despite its setting, Mario Puzo’s novel and its movie adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola -- The Godfather, is inherently a family drama that entails that story of a man becoming his father’s son.

Michael inherits not merely power but perspective from his father Vito. Not merely capabilities but also constraints. Not merely a family name but also its nature.

Most fathers and sons, thankfully, inhabit less dramatic worlds. Yet the principle remains.

The son who vows never to become his father often discovers, years later, that he laughs like him. The son who rebels against paternal authority frequently finds himself repeating paternal advice. The son who spends decades constructing a separate identity eventually notices familiar foundations beneath the structure.

We inherit imperfections as faithfully as we inherit virtues. No father is without flaws. Yet there is also grace in this continuity.

And so, on this Father's Day, I find myself thinking not only of the father I have known, but of the son he once was.

Fathers, like rivers, leave traces wherever they pass. And sons, whether willingly or otherwise, become the landscapes through which those rivers continue to flow.