Essay: My Father’s Sweater

Lina Krishnan shares a moving essay on memories and the tender grief of missing a loved one.

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(As the Editor’s Pick, this piece will be available for free reading this week)

I have just returned from a visit to my mother’s. While there, I found an old sweater belonging to my father, which I told her I would like, and brought it away with me. It is January, a little nippy in the mornings even in this tropical spot, and I thought a lightweight sweater with sleeves would be just right. And so, it is. It’s around six a.m. now, and I am wakeful as I have been over the past week. Anxiety over my mother’s increasing vulnerability makes me feel like Charlie Brown lying in bed with that checkered blanket over him, staring at the ceiling and his stomach knotted with worry. The sweater is a sort of comfort; it feels like I am in consultation with my late father about this person we both cared for and were exasperated by. Only he could fully understand a life lived in close proximity to obstinacy.

I wish I could have found that unique Appa smell, but years after his passing, the scent of the detergent used in my mother’s machine has taken over. When my father died, his older sister advised my mother to give away all his clothes. “Seeing them will only add to your grief,” she said with all the authority of a long-standing widow. “I used to cry every time I opened your uncle’s cupboard,”she added.

When this advice was given, when accepted without discussion, I don’t know. But by my next visit, I could not find as much as a shirt to hold close. His formal suits were packed away, but everything else had been cast away on the Styx. All I could salvage were a few ties, and two watches. One I kept, the other I gave to his oldest nephew who had been more like a younger brother, given their nearness in age. I don’t blame my aunt or my mother. They did what they had to according to their lights.

All their lives together, my father had been the hoarder and my mother the careless discarder of trifles. At times, not trifles. A good part of my comic collection was missing one day when I got home from school. She had taken a rare day off from work to sort and pack for our next house move. An indifferent kabariwallah was now the new possessor of my precious Phantoms and Mandrakes, collected painstakingly over years. “But why do you need them now, you’re almost fifteen,” was the only reply to my ravings. Letters, cards, photographs, she jettisoned them all with an insouciance we could only admire or rage against.

My father, perhaps like most men of his generation, would refuse to give up his old trousers, and coats he had outgrown as he became thinner. Or those blazers he had worn in the Delhi winter, but that were of no use to him when he moved to Kerala. My mother and grandmother and I despaired of ever being able to clear up his cupboards in the face of his grudging disapproval. Now the empty shelves mocked me. I felt a different kind of despair as I searched in vain for some fragments that would tell me that here had lived a man, not long ago, in full possession of his will despite debilitating illnesses.

Perhaps that is why, finding this overlooked bit of wool feels so precious and very much mine. As I write this, I am wearing it and remembering it on him in bygone days, as he sat in the verandah reading his paper, occasionally being greeted by passing neighbours. His glasses halfway down his nose.

I still have those glasses, by the way. Objects at times have a way of holding life within them.

Author’s Bio

Lina Krishnan is a poet, abstract artist and writer in India. Small Places, Open Spaces is her chapbook of nature verse, with the Blank Rune Press, Melbourne. Her work can also be seen in seventeen anthologies, among them the Black Bough Poetry Winter Anthology, Witness, The Red River Press Book of Poetry of Dissent, and three editions of the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English.