Recently is Father’s Day, so I guess this is a good time to remember my late father from whose loins I emanated when I decided to incarnate upon this earth almost five decades ago. He passed away fourteen years ago, but his leaving this world did not mean much to me really. For a start he is still present in my bedtime prayers, as if he is still around. Moreover, I left home when I went to university, so being separated from my parents was a normal state of being for me. 

The other thing is, as I get older I seem to resemble him more and more. Not just in physical resemblance, but also in mannerism and in the things that I like and dislike. In a good way of course. But then I always remember my dear Papa with great fondness and invariably with a little chuckle, for he was a genuinely nice man. A bit quirky, yet again he was a professor.

My father laughed a lot. He had a loud and infectious laughter. He was seldom angry. At least not with his daughters. That’s the thing about fathers and daughters I suppose. They don’t have the heart to shout at them. In any case, I would always come up with some kind of cheeky comments to which he could not reply. And I would say cruel things like ‘you’re a bad teacher. You can’t even teach me. I know a lot more than you.’

Which was not true of course. My father was very well loved by his students who, until this day, speak highly of him. And it’s not because he was a good teacher. He was a kind and inspiring teacher who respected his students and expected them to do well. Most of all they thought well of him because he was a humble man. ‘A student should one day be better than the teacher,’ he would say. ‘If not, then the teacher has failed.’ 

May be that’s why his greatest delight was when I told him things or came up with words that he himself did not know. In this sense he had no ego. Only the desire that knowledge should grow with each passing generation. If the teacher is always right and the student forever inferior to the master then knowledge would shrink until what is left is stupidity. My father’s greatest fear is stupidity.

That was why even though he was a teacher and professor he was a constant student himself. He was always reading new books and learning new things. Entering his sixties he decided to learn Japanese. It is a very difficult language as you could imagine, with so many characters to learn. But it didn’t daunt him. On the contrary he would spend hours trying to master the kanji characters, writing them down in his notebook and consulting his Japanese friend and student.

I must confess, this is probably his characteristic that got passed down to me. (Or it could be the reason why I chose to be born to this man in the first place.) He was every bit the autodidact. I imagined getting a good education in his days was not easy and the opportunities were rare. However, my father was able, through learning how to master the English language by teaching himself, to get scholarships to pursue graduate and post-graduate studies at good universities such as The University of Edinburgh and East-West Center in Hawaii.

He was obsessed with good grammar and good pronunciation, which in a way, is the true essence of the English language. He would make sure that I could tell the difference between an English word ending with a ‘t’ and a ‘d’ and knew how to pronounce it correctly. His English pronunciation itself is flawless, however when it got to a stage when my English was a native-speaker level, he would boast to his Indonesian colleagues that if they wanted to hear how English was spoken, they should listen to me.

On the practical side, his interests in studying, teaching, reading and all things related to the pursuit of knowledge, at times made him a frustrating person to have around. We used to tease him for being a pedant. His deep learning actually made him ingenuous when it came to worldly matters. He was, in many ways, the typical professor. A man well-versed in philosophy and literature but unhelpful when it came to doing simple things like fixing the electric switch, painting the walls and doing the shopping.

At times his simplicity in material things could be maddening. If he liked a particular shirt, he would buy exactly the same shirt every time the need arose for new shirts. His meagre wardrobe consisted of a few identical shirts. Once he wore a brand new pair of shoes – a rare occurrence - travelled all over the place in them and came back home a week later, still with the price attached to them. It was a good thing that he was beyond embarrassment even when his teenage daughters were not. 

But one thing that stood out from my upbringing was that my father gave me plenty of room to be my own person, pursue my interests and carve out my life destiny without interference or judgment. Instead, it was as if he was content to watch me from a safe distance to see what I would do and come up with. As if he himself could learn from me as I had learned from him: someone who also preferred to be left to his devices, doing the things that he enjoyed.

Yes, I used to tease him a lot. Probably said some unkind things and treated him with less than the respect he deserved. But looking back, it is safe to say I have never met anyone as sincere, good-hearted and morally upright as he was. Someone who truly knew how to make the most out of a good life.