There was one scar that was my favourite. It was on his shin and shaped like a small sunflower. It marked the spot where, for 26 months, a bullet had remained lodged.
My older brother and I would sit fixated as our father told us the stories behind the scars – remembering the day he’d been severely wounded in a six-hour gunfight with Indian troops at the tail end of the 1971 war between Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the many months he’d spent as a prisoner of war after that.
There was one that looked like a dimple on his left cheek. A piece of shrapnel had hit him in the face, leaving a hole through which food would sometimes fall. The wound had healed, but the scar remained, and I’d often watch it at dinnertime, just in case a speck of food could still make its way out. How I wished that I, too, had a hole through which unwanted food could be disposed.
Then there was his crooked left thumb. A mortar shell had grazed it, snapping a tendon so that it resembled a stout old man struggling to stop his hat from blowing away in the wind. We’d try to wrestle it straight – but it never worked.
He wore his scars like a badge of honour – and in our eyes, he was virtually a superhero.
Of course, what we didn’t know then was that there were many other scars we couldn’t see – far more serious scars, hinting at far more ominous wounds.
Slowly, they started to make themselves known. There were just subtle changes in his behaviour at first. But they gradually grew more noticeable.
Two years later, he was hospitalised – kept in a lock-up with drug addicts and the mentally ill. My mother would visit him there, taking our baby brother but leaving me and my older brother in the car. It wasn’t the type of place she wanted us to see. So we played, oblivious to what was going on behind the hospital walls.
My father was diagnosed with paranoid traits.
There was a stigma attached to mental illness in Pakistan then. There still is. And my mother knew that people wouldn’t understand. She worried that my father would lose the respect of his family and friends. She stopped socialising with people.
It was a year before she told anybody what had gone on. She confided in her father.
But this was just the beginning – hospital visits would become routine, his seizures or ‘episodes’ a normal part of our lives, his epileptic fits frequent.
But there was also joy. Birthdays, anniversaries, random achievements at school were all reasons to celebrate. There would be cake and laughter, and my dad would be at the centre of it all.
As a two-year-old, I hijacked my brother’s fourth birthday party – insisting upon cutting his cake. The celebrations had to be paused until my dad could bring me a cake of my own.
But all of this had changed by the time my eighth birthday approached. My mother was on bedrest ahead of the birth of her fourth child and my father was in and out of hospital.
So I took it upon myself to plan my own birthday party – drawing up the menu and guest list with the help of my brother. We pulled it off, but I realised for the first time that I was losing my dad.
Not long after that, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
He was prescribed medication that soothed his nerves. But he wouldn’t always take it as he was supposed to and was reluctant to attend his medical appointments. My parents would argue. I’d pray for them to stop, for my dad to take us for ice cream, for him to remember to accompany me to the party I’d looked forward to all week.
I didn’t realise how difficult it was for him – fighting his illness just to be able to function, fighting to keep his job, fighting family and financial pressures.
I’d wonder at how simple logic seemed to fail him. But when your brain isn’t working as it’s supposed to, there is little sense to be found in even the most accepted of behaviours – taking a shower or changing your clothes.
That’s the problem with mental illness – you can’t see or touch it, and yet it touches us. And, of course, we don’t make the same allowances that we might for those who are physically incapacitated.
I know I didn’t always make allowances for him. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just pull himself together and stop being so stubborn. I questioned why he had to embarrass me in front of my friends, with his slurred speech and frail demeanour. I couldn’t possibly explain to them that he walked with those funny, shuffling baby steps because he was no longer in control of his movements.
By then, he’d been diagnosed with dementia and alzheimer’s. He didn’t resemble my friends’ forty-something-year-old fathers.
He was a shadow of his former superhero self.
He had, it emerged, thousands of pieces of mortar shell embedded in his brain.
Still, we believed in miracles. We always had hope. Until the day we didn’t.
He had been in a coma for 10 weeks, and we finally had a correct diagnosis for what had been afflicting him – cerebral atrophy, a shrinkage of the brain caused by the shrapnel.
I was sat by his bedside when he stirred and squeezed my hand. And then he died
This article was first published on Al Jazeera English.