Not my father, mind you. The father in question lived in a Madras slum, one that students from my undergraduate college visited regularly. We would help the children with their lessons, teach some adults to read and take down the letters they wrote to their folks, back home in the villages. This fellow's daughter, a seventeen-year old, was in school, preparing for her exams.
The student who was assigned to her, we shall call P-. P- took one look at this girl, dark and blossoming, wearing a hand-me-down blouse about two sizes too small and decided that he needed moral support. He made me move my class of rambuctious five-year-olds over to her yard, where he sat demurely across from her and corrected her mistakes in soft, comforting tones while a bunch of kids kept climbing on his back. Of course, the fact that I laughed at the kids' antics meant that they kept repeating it long after they had tired of it, just to impress me.
There must be something about a man who remains calm and kind even when kids are pulling at his hair. As the days went by, the girl was getting more and more ga-ga over P-. She looked at him coyly and invented stuff to brush off his shoulders. Her mother would keep forcing coffee on the two of us even though the two rupees which she paid for it must have been a significant drain on her family's income.
P- didn't notice anything. He was already committed. He had taken to following, with a hangdog expression, another student who did social work in the slums and who, with the peculiar density of middle-class Indian girls, ignored his amorousness completely. Even otherwise, a slum girl had no chance with someone of P-'s education and background, all of P-'s socialist beliefs not withstanding. Any one could have told her that.
Having no stake in any of this, I was content merely to watch how the situation would play out. The girl's father, who did have a stake, soon cottoned on to what was happening. I have no idea whether he talked to his wife and daughter or the results of any such conversation.
What I do know is that one Tuesday evening, P- and I went over to the girl's house where we regularly gave lessons. The father, drunk to the hilt, was waiting for us. "Why do you want to teach my daughter?," he wanted to know, "What is she going to achieve by being educated?".
P- gave the standard spiel, about education, about women's rights, about careers and life's choices. The father, who had obviously gotten drunk on a weekday with hard-to-find money just so he would have the strength for this confrontation, wouldn't give up. P- and he went back and forth for about a half-hour, P- being totally oblivious to the bitter undercurrent.
Finally, the father forbade us from ever coming that way again. I merely moved the location of where the kids met. P- shook his head sadly, wondering why the father was so much against his daughter getting educated. I didn't have the heart to tell him that that wasn't the point. The poor father was protecting his daughter the only way he knew how.
