Old Spice, Caravelas, and my Father Saturday, June 18, 2011 at 10:51pm

 Old Spice, Caravelas, and my Father

by Mustafah Dhada on Saturday, June 18, 2011, at 10:51pm ·

 

Last year I wrote about my father - “And the Drums Kept Up The Beat” essentializing his sense of dignity and purpose while cuffed to a set of damning circumstances – see the note section here for a quick review. He survived these assaults somewhat damaged but not destroyed. Soon thereafter, I left home for schooling. I was nine then. I saw him again 12 years later. I had just turned 21. He looked darker. His skin was denser from exposure to the sun, firmer to the touch, and taut. It shrink-wrapped the muscles on his arms and legs like limpets terrified to let his inner mojo go wild and free. Over the years, his eyes had traveled deeper into his sockets. His beaked nose chiseled the air with purpose and direction. He was much thinner, somber, and appeared to feel things at a much deeper level now. He had not lost his gritty distaste for ambiguity, however, nor his warmth steeped in generosity. I remembered him as a comforter of souls.

 

A year has come and gone since my last essay on him during which time I have thought of him quite often. Before my departure from home at age nine, my father was a care-worn presence in and out of the house. He struggled on all fronts to be good, responsible, conventional, and on the straight and narrow; but he could not. People who knew him before my untimely arrival told me he was unfathomably joyous, witty, a fabulous storyteller, a reasonable cook, with a lust for life and hunting – until one day something snapped. I still do not know what that something was.

 

My mother always ragged on him for his lack of faith and enlisted the local imam, Mr. Teladia. He corralled my father into the Islamic pen which lay heavily mined on all foundational sides with the five pillars of faith. Who knows perhaps Teladia’s promises of many virgins in the afterlife may well have helped my father’s road to putative redemption. Teladia, a spindly feral Spartan, trained in the Taymmiyah school of theology, (the equivalent to an Opus Dei Jesuit priest with a doctorate in eschatology) managed what many others had tried but failed – tame the Dhada In Dawood. He severed my father’s mortal and ever so secular coil and tethered it to the local mosque’s mimbar. Thereafter he never recovered. To the end of his life, he prayed daily. I would see him bopping up and down like a bamboo at a water fountain. He sprung up and down like a smooth self-propelled yoyo without a string.

 

However, I suspect there was always something deeper than just rituals and rhythms in his daily prayers that kept him bent this way, body double. I think I now know what it was – an alone time, a space in which to inhabit within, sink deeper and away from the cares of the world. Here he could pray and play, heal and get ready to fight another day.

 

With this conversion in play, my father had turned to filtering life and living through a set of etched prisms. He changed his after shave to a non-alcohol-based scent. The potent mixture of Old Spice and Caravela cigarettes disappeared. The smell of sandalwood drowned in Syrian Latakia replaced it. Happiness thereafter came delivered with divinely attached strings.