Troika: Part 1

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“Feelings are enigmatic creatures”, my father used to say. “They are an amalgamation of the visceral and the intellectual, glorious in our inability to comprehend them. The moment we think we might have unravelled a bit of the mystery, another strand shows up and throws all our understanding into a disarray. We may be defined in flesh by finite lines, but within us there lies a gaping infinity. Infinite cells, infinite thoughts, infinite feelings ... think … think about that, sweet heart. Think of the unfathomable depths of various criss-crossing thoughts as mysterious and ancient as the universe that we carry within us. And herein lies the human conundrum, a deeper awareness of this infinity makes us aware of how little we know about ourselves. What we see and what we know is only the tip of the iceberg … and it is very easy to drown in the ocean that hosts the iceberg.”

My father did eventually drown in the cerulean ocean of his thoughts. I was eighteen. He left a note saying that he could not continue living in a world he did not comprehend, in a world of perceptions and reflections. His quest for an objective reality, a set of rules by which the world operated had failed. I remember feeling guilty and confused at his death. Guilty because his death did not evoke in me deep and personal grief. I was sad and sorry in a disconnected way. It was the way in which I was sad when my childhood friend and neighbour lost her mother. And therefore, I was confused. I had loved my father deeply. His death did leave a vacuum in my life that could not be replaced by anyone else. Why then was I not devastated? I began to question the nature of my love for him, and the nature of love in general. Does love for a person not translate to a primal need of interactions, of sharing jokes and laidback dinners and conversations with the person? Could you love a person as central in your life as a parent in the abstract – like a concept or a character in a novel? Could you love the character that they essay in your life, but not the actor who plays the character? Like my father, I started retreating into the recesses of my mind. I started looking for answers and not finding them, I started diving deeper in my search for answers.

My mother started getting worried. “Read less”, she would say. “Go out more, meet people. Meet boys of your age. Don’t keep your nose buried in a book all the time.” She needn’t have worried. For in me there were always two conflicting strains, they repelled each other but co-existed, like two protons tightly held nuclear force. On the one hand was this instinctual retreat into the mind, on the other hand was the need to reach out to people, to forge connections, to feel deeply wanted.


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