Chip of the old block

It came as quite a surprise when I found that I had to look seven years into my past to find someone who is of some influence in my life. In the event of such an exercise one expects to find some larger than life image from the past looming over your present with every intention of being there in your future. But the face I came up with was that of my father, a person to whom I hadn’t given much thought recently.
He was a hard man (I am letting the past tense deal with matters of life, death and timelines), with the remnants of a harder father ingrained in him. He drove a hard bargain with life by bringing up four children when he couldn’t afford one. He pushed his children in positively draconian ways which left deep scars in the form of ‘Dr’ tags and voracious reading habits.
He was born in a small village near kottayam in kerala called Aymanam (The life and times of which better minds than me have described). From there the family of eight migrated to the coastal town of Alappuzha where I believe the Conrad in him was born. His father was boiler engineer in a British coir factory who came home with the remaining steam and vented it on three teenage boys. One ran away and joined the navy, one joined the Naxal movement and one started reading T.S.Eliot.
Ironically he was also a professor of English. I say ironic because hardness doesn’t fit in with the traditional notions of an English Professor. But here was a man who was both, with either of these characters appearing at various times and in various shades with no sense of occasion. He literature was orthodox, that is to say he was a modern in a post-modern age. He used to read out to me poems he wrote which had me thinking of inconsequentialities before I learnt to spell that word. It was only after I read Wasteland that I began to see definite parallels.
I remember one instance when he took his youngest, a boy of thirteen, to see his first James Bond movie. The combination of Walther PPK’s and semi naked white women sent the first drops of testosterone coursing through the adolescent veins and on the late night walk back home anything was possible, all the villains of this world could be thrashed and all the beautiful women won. He said something to that effect to his father and the English professor with a very existential tone asked “so?.” I have been very critical of Mr. Bond ever since and went on to take an MA in English Literature.