de-deification

My father happened to be my first love. not an extraordinary or 'scandalous' story there, especially ever since Freud(actually Jung) made it bearable for middle-class morality by garbing it in the now-(in)famous palliative of a theory called the Electra complex.
pah! oops, did i just say pah?!?!? Freudian slip, that, even if onomatopoeic!!!
Right then...to come back to my first love-my father...i grew up loving the tall, dark and (to me) handsome person that my father was...the clothes he wore, the cigarettes he smoked, the music he listened to, the books he read-all began to shape the image of my ideal man, in my father's exact form.
Gradually,as i grew up, the image of the man of my (day) dreams began to emerge in clearer contours, coming to resemble my father in more ways than one. Naturally therefore he came to inhabit a time that i was physically not a part of. It was as if, the more i moved forward in the time-scale, the more he remained fixed in his, thereby increasing the distance between the two me's-one stuck with the man i loved somewhere in the 80's and the other moving on straight ahead.
"When i grew up, and fell in love"-i expected him to be that man-belonging to a time that i could,and did, effortlessly go back to every now and then, my haven, my refuge; in other words, the man who had it in him to be my father incarnate! Alas! he turned out to be everything my father was NOT! Absolutely NOT!!!
If my father was resolute, he was malleable; if my father was possessive, he could let go easily;if years of unsheltered student/hostel life had hardened my father into a severely opinionated individual, he was immensely impressionable as a person. What was more- he was not into Tagore AT ALL! was not into Bismillah Khan or Ritwik Ghatak. He was into a certain Syd Barrett, my father couldn't have recognised even if his life depended on it!!!
And yet, i was hopelessly in love with this man. why, i knew not then, i know not now. he knew some of the lanes i walked in my mind when i strolled down the 70's, knew some of the tram routes, could name some of the books, could recognise some of the clothes, some hairstyles, could identify some music and could relate to some, only some of the isms of that time. others he made an effort to grapple; and gave up, if he had to squint to hard.
And it was in these moments of fleeting recognition, that i began to see that he was, after all, not much removed from the man of the 80's, not much removed from my father. and yet it was precisely at that moment that i began to realise how different he WAS infact from my father...if my father was impatient,intolerant and unforgiving, he was understanding, forgiving and loved unconditionally, forgiving without questioning; if my father was resolute to the point of being ruthlessly stubborn, he was malleable to the extent of being flexible, open to individual opinion, providing room for arguments, and encouraging me, for the first time to question received wisdom. .and i did.
And as i spread my wings slowly, cautiously,to fly higher with every flap, my deity began his descent downward-much to my own shock, agony and years of denial. this man, my father, my idol, my hero, my god, was after all human, all-too human. i came to see the myopia of his vision, the narrowness of his horizons, the fixity of his beliefs and values, so that what i once worshipped as resolution to be aspired for, began to irk, irritate and then anger me as nothing more than cruel obstinacy. as the initial rush of de-deification set in however, i felt less angry with him and more compassionate; crying for hours on end thinking how i had let the old man down, how i had turned a blind eye to the circumstances, the times that had compelled him to become the hardened man he had become; for blaming him for things beyond his control, blaming him for no fault of his own. if anyone, it was i who was to blame. nobody had asked me to put him on that pedestal, deify him and infuse him with qualities that were a mere figment of my own imagination, and had perhaps nothing to do with the real man at all...
Today a much older, and none the wiser woman, i am still in love with the man of the 80's, hoping against hope that i am actually rip van winkle who will wake up to be beside the man she loves...not knowing what shape he will take...certain only of the fact that he will be no god-but rather, "just a slob like one of us"...