My usually silent father would enthusiastically speak up and name every village we would pass by on our way to his hometown. He would give us information like which village was the biggest, the most populated or whose grapes or apricots were the most delicious. My younger sister and I were not really interested in these sorts of information. We, like any children, would look out of the bus window at seemingly endless fields, herds of cows and buffaloes and toiling farmers, and ask our parents impatiently when we would arrive.
My father's talkative moments were rare. Only in his last years, when he was approaching ninety years old and almost lost vision and hearing ability, he started to reveal faraway memories and stories from his childhood and teenager years. It was his last resort to feel communicative with the world around him.
In the last year of his life I was back home and living with him and mum. We developed an unprecedented bond of communication. I read the newspaper for him every morning, and in the evenings he would talk with solid memory about incidents and situations happened dozens of years ago. Given his very old age, some of these memories dated back to the early 30s of last century, and that was in itself quite impressive.
A whole new side of his life opened up. It was then I knew he once ran away from his family's house because he was so afraid of his father who found out he had written a love letter to the daughter of their neighbors. The parents of the girl complained. He ran away and stayed few days lost in the prairie. It was common in the countryside back then to hire someone to travel from one village to another and search for the lost/runaway kids. The person who was named The Caller would walk the streets, call up the lost names and mention their physical characteristics. My father was found and taken back home. No mention from his parents was ever made about the letter.
In high school he moved to live in the big city with his cousin. He once urged other students to riot against the administration of the school and consequently was suspended. He became very distressed and scared he might get permanently expelled. In a strange coincidence, while he was helplessly wandering the streets, he ran into a friend of his father sitting in a café, and upon hearing papa's story, the friend offered to pull some strings to settle the matter with the school. When I asked about the reason for the riot, he mentioned something concerning the favorable treatment given to the foreign students. He added he was young and fool.
Papa talked fondly about his favorite youngest brother who passed away prematurely after a battle with cancer. Papa devoted his time to accompany him in the hospital where he usually stayed overnight. It happened many times he arrived late at the school in which he worked as a teacher. The relation with the director became very tense. Papa later quit the job and changed his career. As ironic as life sometimes gets, the same angry director became, few years later, his father-in-law.
The well-built, strong and courageous man I, the introvert son, knew as my father in his prime time, and the frail skinny almost blind old man I, the grown up nomad son, knew as my father in his final year seemed as different as dawn and dusk, although at a certain moment in their rising and falling journeys, dawn and dusk look too similar to tell apart.
