father and son

Before reaching the age of ten, most boys want to grow up and be like their father. Struggling through the myriad small complications that come up during their everyday lives they wish for time to pass quickly so that they can be big and strong like father, able to do what they want, able to drive, to shave everyday, to tell stories about their days at school and college, or at least that’s what I wanted when I was a little boy.
As I waited for my father to return from work, for the piercing whistle that would ring out as soon as he entered the house, I would think of things to tell him and would plan the couple of hours when he would be free to play any game I asked him to play.
Playing chess – that is one of the first things that my father taught me. Although I don’t play it anymore, the evenings when I sat with my father and tried to understand the nuances of this odd looking game are some of my favourite childhood memories.
“The demon-king of Sri Lanka was a very good chess player. He was one of the first people in the world to play it,” my father told me one day.
“But he was evil so why do we also play it?”
“He was evil but very intelligent and hard-working and also religious. He was one of the smartest men in the world.”
That lead us into discussions about good and evil and God and religion and the supernatural. The things we talked about I cannot remember anymore but I remember talking about them and those evenings were a few of the last times when my father and I really spoke, our respective quiet natures not allowing us to connect once the innocence and enthusiasm of childhood left me.
As of today if I had to choose a way to spend time with my father it would be over that intriguing chequered, black and white board, where tiny figures take up enormous dimensions, where kings are killed and wars won or lost because of one knight’s bravery, those tiny paths that I walked along when my father was twice as tall as I and from where I would look up and try to understand what it means to be big.