Tears of a DNA Carrier

Krishna Sharma

Dad passed away. He was 74.

I am not going to sugarcoat him here now that he is gone and tell a lie that he was the best dad. Everyone around us knew he was not that good of a dad. He was just my dad, an ordinary and an imperfect man. He fathered me and two sisters. It's his DNA I am carrying. And I am fighting a battle to keep his good characters and dispossess the bad ones. I hear former president Barack Obama has been doing the same thing. And that is what most people do. And I encourage you to dispossess the bad DNA that may have passed onto you from your dad and keep the good ones that he possessed. This is how humans evolve -- physically and intellectually. 

No matter how uncaring he was to us all, he was our dad. The good news is he did not hurt us like some other bad dads have done to their children. It’s true that he did leave us when we needed him the most. Yes, there were some wounds that were created in his absence. But I am sure, at the core, he did not mean to create them for us. He was rather a good dad in the sense that he helped us realize how it feels to live without a dad and become mature from very early on.

It is one thing that I never got a chance to walk beside him or listen to stories from him or play with him or go to bazaar with him while he paid for the stuff and I carried them. He had left us on our own when I was barely 12. He was alcoholic. He was hell of a good rum runner. Sadly, He never tried enough to gallantly fight and defeat the demon named alcoholism.

Before alcohol consumed him, he was a dutiful son, a bright student, a famous school headmaster, a social reformer and an activist. While I was religiously mourning his death at a house he had built and raised us, his friends would visit to express their condolences and say “he never said ‘no’ whenever anyone he knew would ask him for any favor that was within his reach”.

Life is not easy. It takes a lot of sacrifice and dedication to get what one wishes. He consumed everything we had and when there was nothing left he left. He returned home in Nepal after 26 years of self-imposed exile.

He traveled from the light to the darkness and emerged from the darkness to the light again like Washington Irving’s symbolic character ‘Rip Van Winkle’. But by the time he emerged to the light, his vision had failed to be guided by the light and connect the dots that he had missed.

We brought him to the US in 2010, a year after he had returned home. Enrolled him to the rehab at Falls Church in VA. He used to nod his head like a child when I had to act like his father and remind him why it was not good to smoke or drink every day at that age. Trust me, it is painful to be a guardian of one's own father. It often pained and my heart felt like it was bleeding when I had to tell him all those things instead of listening to his good lectures that he was very capable of delivering. He could not improve. He smoked and he drank and he failed to keep the promises and failed to make the house tobacco-smoke-free. And he said he loved to be at a place where he could do what he wanted and returned home to Nepal in 2011 to ruin what we had gathered.

He loved to hurt himself to the flames of spirit but he hurt none by any means. He may not have shown the love an average father shows to his kids but I was and am proud to be his son. Love is not about getting. It's about giving. It is his good DNA that I am getting and keeping.

I am sure he has gone to heaven for his goodness. May his humble soul Dwell in Peace.

Krishna Sharma with his Dad in front of Washington Post, Washington DC, where Mr. Sharma worked for a couple of years. His dad had also worked as a journalist for Aaj, a Hindi vernacular, under the pen-name of Hiranya Birahi in his early days.