What makes a great dad?
June is the month to remember our fathers since Father’s Day falls smack in the middle of it. As I sat down to write a tribute to his memory, I thought of all the qualities that had made him a great Dad—he was tough but enormously tender. He was passionate about the truth and about education. He believed staunchly in doing the right thing, and in being fair in his assessment of what was the right thing.
But above all, he was engaged with his children and concerned about their welfare and choices in life. Like all good fathers everywhere, his engagement was demonstrated by his presence, and by tons of unsolicited advice.
However, my dad also allowed us to argue back, which was unusual in the era when children were required to listen quietly and obey – long before TV sitcoms and blaming parents for everything became fashionable. Arguments were encouraged and plentiful and our opinions were listened to thoughtfully. This made us feel like our family was like a modern functioning democracy, where our voice, though sometimes overruled, was always heard.
Who was this man, my father?
My dad had a tremendously positive impact on our lives, his children, and his grandchildren, but I had never really paid attention to the other lives he had touched in his lifetime.
One seldom thinks of one’s parents as belonging to anyone else but oneself, until they are gone.
However, after writing about his qualities as I experienced them, I began to think about how little I knew of who he was before he became a father. I looked over old albums, faded now and yellowed around the edges, and I found a few photographs of my father as a young man, before the responsibilities of his offspring weighed him down.
He looks handsome and carefree, a cigarette in one hand, an eyebrow raised cockily at the camera, confident in his presence in the frame. Looking at his ease in the spotlight I suddenly realized he could have been an actor, or a politician if his opportunities in the 1940s had been wider and if he hadn’t been raised in the era before the Second World War when a pragmatic, paying job like an engineer was essential to survival.
My father, the young man
As I flipped over the album, I began to remember the stories Dad had told me about his life as a young man. He narrated them incidentally when his memory was sporadically jogged. Through these stories, I could see how his goodness had touched and transformed other people’s lives. The impact he made continues to echo, silently and invisibly, down the generations, long after he has gone.
One anecdote in particular, relayed over the dinner table on a rainy evening, stands out.
Ghost trains of the Partition
Six months after my mother and father were married, the Partition happened. My father was a Junior Officer in the Indian Railways at the time, posted in Ferozepur, the most critical point of transfer for refugees on the Indian side of the newly demarcated border.
When the full fury of the Partition hit, my dad found he was one of the few officers who showed up to work. Many took leave, unsettled by the sheer horror of what they were dealing with. Trains full of slaughtered refugees would roll in from the Pakistan side of the border—the so-called ghost trains—and would have to be unloaded, and the dead bodies would be lined up on the platform.
The carriages, which were drenched in blood and human remains, had to be hosed and scrubbed. On the Indian side of the border, trains packed with terrified Muslim refugees had to be escorted safely, and religious terrorists bent on annihilating the train had to be beaten off until the refugees reached deep inside Pakistan. Like a macabre mirroring, the same scenario was being played out on the Pakistan side of the border.
The ‘wrong’ religion
My father was approached many times by bands of vengeful goons who tried to cajole, bribe, and threaten him into abandoning security for the trains to Pakistan so that they could massacre the refugees of the ‘wrong’ religion. He recalled one occasion when a band of men armed with fierce-looking scythes and knives pushed their way into the station office. They were tall, burly, and completely respectful, while their weapons flashed menacingly.
“Sahib,” their leader said, “We just need you to turn your head for five minutes. What we have to do takes no longer than that. We have lassi for you to drink while you do that.”
A tall, frothing glass of creamy lassi was promptly produced.
Of course, my father was outraged. He told the men to get out of his office or he would arrest every one of them. He faced them down and they melted away, but he knew they would be back. He radioed for help and a Gurkha guard was sent to protect the train. My father rode in the front of the refugee train carrying its frightened load of humanity; simple peasants from India trying to get to Pakistan, bureaucrats and shopkeepers and teachers and craftsmen, and ordinary folk squashed together who had been blindsided by a random boundary, thrown down at the last minute by a retreating colonial power. The train was shot at several times and almost derailed, but it made it beyond the point where the attackers no longer had any control.
“I made sure every one of my trains reached safely,” he said, and there was a thoughtful sadness in his statement.
Doing the right thing
When I think of all the lives he saved, strangers each one of them, who would never know the man who believed in doing the right thing and fulfilling his duty, and who protected their lives at the risk of harm to himself, I am filled with awe.
The families who reached Pakistan on the trains my father shielded would have sprouted many generational branches by now— over 75 years later there would be children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Those generations will never know the man who was the reason for their existence, his hand of protection over their forebears, like an earthly expression of God’s grace.
In this month where we celebrate our fathers, let’s also remember their impact and legacy outside their immediate families, which was often as significant and transformational as the one we, their loved ones, experienced.
Do share your stories about your Fathers, with a special emphasis on the other lives they touched, with their presence and care.
This series was made possible in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program.