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    Fathers and Sons: Essays, Letters, Memories
    Fathers and Sons: Essays, Letters, Memories
    Fathers and Sons: Essays, Letters, Memories
    Ebook72 pages1 hour

    Fathers and Sons: Essays, Letters, Memories

    By Richard Crasta

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    About this ebook

    How a son's eyes were opened to his father's greatness, and how this son (now a father) realized what fatherhood does to a man. Variegated stories that dive deep into the emotions, experiences and exhilaration that defines fatherhood.

    A quote from a passionate letter in this short book: "In principle, I would want every father to be reunited with his sons: [It] would result in more happiness, more peace throughout the world, fewer enmities, less hatred, fewer violent acts, fewer suicides. [For] we are all either fathers, or the children of fathers."

    About how children become a part of your flesh and blood, making separation, whether at the Mexican border or elsewhere, traumatic, a preview of books to come, and a book that may fit Kafka's ideal of being "an axe for the frozen sea inside us."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInvisible Man Press
    Release dateJun 14, 2018
    ISBN9781386207504
    Fathers and Sons: Essays, Letters, Memories
    Author

    Richard Crasta

    Richard Crasta is the India-born, long-time New York-resident author of "The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel" and 12 other books, with at least 12 more conceived or in progress. "The Revised Kama Sutra," a novel about a young man growing up and making sense of the world and of sex, was described by Kurt Vonnegut as "very funny," and has been published in ten countries and in seven languages.Richard's books include fiction, nonfiction, essays, autobiography, humor, and satire with a political edge: anti-censorship, non-pc, pro-laughter, pro-food, pro-beer, and against fanaticism of any kind. His books have been described as "going where no Indian writer has gone before," and attempt to present an unedited, uncensored voice (James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth are among the novelists who have inspired him.).Richard was born and grew up in India, joined the Indian Administrative Service, then moved to America to become a writer, and has traveled widely. Though technically still a New York resident, he spends most of his time in Asia working on his books in progress and part-time as a freelance book editor.

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      Book preview

      Fathers and Sons - Richard Crasta

      Fathers and Sons

      Essays, Letters, Memories

      Richard Crasta

      Copyright © 2018 Richard Crasta

      All rights reserved.

      Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

      Twitter: @richardcrasta

      Table of Contents

      Copyright Page

      Dedication

      Invisible Beginnings: A Short Early History of John Baptist Crasta

      Fathers and Sons: A Tale of Literature, Reinvention, and Redemption

      My Father’s Second Torture, and My Eulogy

      How to Face the Execution of Your Children

      Rohit, Dev, and James

      Of a Father Being Reunited With His Son

      About the Author

      To the Reader

      Praise for the Author’s Other Books

      Other Books by Richard Crasta

      Dedication

      For my sons, James , Dev, and Rohit, who have given me so much happiness and delight in their own different ways at different points in my life, and who awe me with their differing but admirable humanity, and make me proud to be their father.

      Invisible Beginnings: A Short Early History of John Baptist Crasta

      [S ome of the later parts of this short biography of my father’s early years are from a speech delivered by me when the first edition of my father’s book, Eaten by the Japanese: The Memoir of an Unknown Indian Prisoner of War,  was launched on December 30, 1997, which happened to be the day of my parents’ 50 th wedding anniversary.]

      But we mustn’t go too far back, must we, we mustn’t go too far back in anybody’s life. Particularly when they’re poor. — Martin Amis, London Fields.

      But I must, Martin, I must. I must go back, especially because my father was what some of his relatives might have called poor. And because he was my father, and because the story of his pain, his hard life, and his survival is all the more heroic to me precisely because of those facets that some writers would shrink from. And also because his old age prevents him from speaking for himself.

      Besides, the account that follows is the gripping, sad, and yet life-affirming tale of a simple soldier caught in the middle of a war he did not choose to be in; besides which, it is somewhat short on biographical or atmospheric details which might enhance our understanding of its protagonist, his background, and his point of view. Let that be my opportunity, though I make no apologies for my utter subjectivity.

      John Baptist Crasta (Prabhu was the ancestral family name, which he did not use in official records), whose son I claim to be in more ways than one, was born on 31 March 1910, in Kinnigoli, India — a remarkable achievement, because nothing has, does, or ever will happen in Kinnigoli. Luckily for it, the village has a road connecting it to the larger port-town of Mangalore, in the monsoon-drenched Southwestern pocket of India where little of earth-shaking importance has happened since the beginning of time, and where, during the first half of the 20th Century, tigers still roamed the surrounding villages and occasionally strayed into town, snacking on domestic animals and people, and biting off the fingers of a man preoccupied with answering the call of nature in the Great Outdoors at night. 

      My father was the firstborn of eight children, the others being Lucy, Antony, Aloysius or Louis, Ignatius, Bonaventure or Bonu, Margaret, and Gerald. Make that eight thin children. We came from a family of thin people, said Uncle Louis, himself pretty thin despite ascending in mid-career to the world of medium-fat cats.

      The Crasta children may have been thin in body, but their lives were thick with rosaries. No rosary, no rice, was their Mater’s domestic diktat: her homespun inversion of No taxation without representation. Religious piety was a staple among these Konkani-speaking descendants of converted Catholics, refugees from the Portuguese Inquisition in late seventeenth century Goa, and survivors of Tipu Sultan’s persecutions more than a century later.  And here, in a province long used to paternalistic British rule, in this verdant corner of a country where life was nasty, brutish, and often cut short by snake bites and other arbitrary interventions of nature, Catholic priests exercised awesome power over their flocks, threatening sinners and moral stutterers with hell and eternal damnation. The priests were dictators! declared the town’s unofficial philosopher, raconteur, and freelance social analyst Dennis Britto.

      My father’s own father, Alex Dominic Crasta, was often absent from his life, working and living an inaccessible seventy miles from Kinnigoli in the mountainous jungles of the Western Ghats. At one time, he owned four or five gadangs [toddy shops], Uncle Louis remembers, adding the juicy detail that his father was a teetotaler. In my father’s fuzzier memory, it is his mother who is awarded the credit for shaping his childhood. My mother, my saviour, he characterized her recently in a quavering voice while gazing at her photograph, tears welling up his eyes.

      Her name was Nathalia, and she was

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