Book review: 'Dad’s The Word '

Book: Dad’s The Word
Soumya Bhattacharya
Westland
212 pages
Rs225

“You don’t know suffering until you have children. You don’t know joy. You don’t know boredom, you don’t know — period,” says Philip Roth in The Anatomy Lesson. Soumya Bhattacharya’s book, Dad’s The Word: The Perils And Pleasures Of Fatherhood, not only quotes Roth but is rooted in the belief that becoming a father changes you forever.

Dad’s The Word does not profess to be a book on parenting, a treatise about fathering or any sort of go-to guide. It is simply a languorous unravelling of Bhattacharya’s most intensely private thoughts, fears and observations about being a father and more specifically, an entirely personal recounting of being his daughter’s father.

This pleasant, breezy read is a compilation of his columns for a newspaper and is as much a self-reflective inner journey of the flowering of a parent as it is a non-linear chronicle of his daughter’s journey from birth to her early teens.

It astutely strips the many-layered experience of parenting — from the grave anxieties about the welfare and well-being of one’s child to the more erudite but flip concerns of passing on his obsession with grammar (especially apostrophes) to his daughter Oishi.
From wanting her to learn to read and write her mother tongue Bengali, so she, like him, can delight in a universe that is familiar to her parents, to instilling in her his passion for football and tennis.

His secret delight is clear and abundant when Argentina’s abysmal performance at the World Cup sends 10-year-old Oishi into a bottomless pit of despair, mirroring his own reaction. His pride that she, like him, is a voracious reader, writes short stories and has literary heroes is equally evident. It reminds us of the very natural, visceral desire of every parent to mould a likeness of oneself.

His columns are at once amusing, touching, painfully narcissistic, elitist and endearing. Slowly but surely, you find yourself steeped
in his little world.

What is truly enjoyable about the book are the personalities of the father and daughter, and their relationship, especially as you see how dearly they love and respect one another and how open and real their friendship is.

It gives you insight into the mind of a sensitive father — perennially observant, concerned and celebratory — but with all the attendant angst of watching his young daughter reach the cusp between childhood and adolescence, and his fear that with the onset of puberty, she may cease to be as free and natural with him.

While Bhattacharya is self-deprecating about his ability to discipline or do too many useful, productive things with her (“Sudoku, chess or pottery”), it is his childlike joy in entering her world rather than insisting she be part of his that gives us pause.
Whether it is pretending they are in the middle of a snow blitz by crumpling up paper and throwing it at each other or patiently spending the afternoon stapling the pages of the comic strip she is drawing, Bhattacharya’s book is a gentle reminder that there are many parts to parenting; the most important being to truly immerse yourself in the experience and simply enjoy it.