My father never lived only for himself.
I think that is one of the things I struggled with most while growing up.
He believed that if someone needed help, and if he had the ability to help, then he should.
It did not matter whether that person was family, a friend, or a neighbour.
If someone came to him with a problem, he would try to help.
His responsibilities did not stop with his wife and daughters.
He thought about my mother.
He thought about the three of us.
He thought about my mother’s parents.
He thought about his own parents.
He thought about my mother’s brother.
He thought about his siblings.
And whenever any of them needed help, he was there.
Sometimes I felt that he was carrying too much.
There was only one of him.
But he seemed to believe that he had to be available to everyone.
If someone needed money, he tried to help.
If someone needed support, he tried to help.
If someone needed guidance, he tried to help.
If someone needed something done, somehow my father would become involved.
And it did not end with relatives.
Friends knew they could approach him.
Neighbours knew they could approach him.
People around him knew that he was the kind of person who would not easily turn them away.
I sometimes wondered how he could carry so many people in his mind.
How could he remember everyone’s needs?
How could he continue worrying about everyone while also managing his own family?
Even now, I do not know how he did it.
Perhaps he did not know how to live any other way.
Perhaps helping people had become part of who he was.
My father wanted to provide.
That was one of the strongest things inside him.
He wanted my mother to be secure.
He wanted his daughters to be educated.
He wanted us to have good lives.
And he wanted to leave something behind for each of us.
A house.
Property.
Financial security.
Something that would remain even after he was gone.
That was his dream.
I understood the dream.
But I did not always agree with the way he pursued it.
He was always trying to make sure that his children would never experience the same fear.
To him, money was not necessarily about luxury.
It was protection.
It was security.
It was the ability to say,
If something happens, my family will be okay.
I sometimes wished he would stop.
I wished he would rest.
I wished he would think about himself.
I would look at everything he had already done and think:
Appa, isn’t this enough?
He had given us good education.
Not just an ordinary education.
He had given us opportunities that had completely changed the direction of our lives.
All three of his daughters were able to build lives of our own.
We had families.
We had education.
We had independence.
We had the ability to stand on our own feet.
What more could a parent give?
To me, that was already more than enough.
But my father continued to think about what else he could do.
He would still speak about buying me a car.
He would talk about buying tickets so I could visit more often.
He would think about how he could make life easier for us.
Even when he had already done more than most people could ever do, he continued to believe that he had not done enough.
That was my father.
He measured his life through what he could provide for others.
And sometimes, I think, he forgot that he was also a person who deserved to be cared for.
A man who had come from almost nothing had built a life where all three of his daughters could live decent, respectable lives.
His wife was secure.
His children were educated.
His family had moved forward.
From a struggling phase of life to a father whose children had travelled far beyond the world he had been born into.
That, to me, was an extraordinary achievement.
But my father did not always see it that way.
He was still looking at what remained to be done.
Still thinking about the next responsibility.
The next person who needed help.
The next thing he could provide.
I think that was where our conflicts began.
I saw life as something to be lived.
He saw life as something to be secured.
I wanted him to enjoy what he had already built.
He wanted to build more.
I wanted him to rest.
He wanted to provide more.
I wanted him to take care of himself.
He wanted to take care of everyone else.
And yet, despite all our disagreements, I could never doubt his intention.
He was not trying to build a life for himself alone.
He was trying to leave behind a safety net for everyone he loved.
Sometimes I thought he was carrying responsibilities that were not his to carry.
Sometimes I thought he was trying to save everyone.
And sometimes I became angry because I felt he was sacrificing himself too much.
But today, when I look back, I understand something.
He had lived a life where he had to fight for every step forward.
So perhaps he wanted to make the path easier for everyone who came after him.
He wanted his children to start from where he had struggled to reach.
That was his greatest gift to us.
He did not simply give us money.
He gave us a foundation.
He gave us education.
He gave us confidence.
He gave us the chance to build our own lives.
And perhaps education was the greatest property he ever left behind.
Because property can be lost.
Money can disappear.
Assets can change hands.
But what a person learns stays within them.
My father gave us the ability to stand.
And even when life took things away from us, we still had the ability to begin again.
That is something I understand more clearly now.
My father wanted to leave us houses and property.
He wanted to leave us security.
But perhaps the greatest security he gave us was not something that could be registered in our names.
It was the strength to survive without him.
The ability to think.
The ability to work.
The ability to care for our families.
The ability to stand up again when life became difficult.
He may have wanted to give us everything.
But in the end, he had already given us the most important thing.
He gave us a beginning far better than the one he had been given.
And perhaps that is what every generation is meant to do.
To take the life they received—
and leave the next generation standing a little further ahead.